skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Still waiting an explanation about web API's not being a proper API.

It's not that they're not APIs (you can call anything you want an API -- copyright law doesn't care what it's called), but because they don't have a fixed form. In order to copyright something you need it to be a particular fixed text (or image, or recording). There is no such text for web APIs. You can come up with multiple texts (or images) all describing the exact same API. That is not the case for "plain" APIs. Plain APIs -- like all code -- do have a fixed form. But no fixed form means no copyright.

The very beginning of the definition of US copyright says[1]: "Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device" (emphasis mine). There are other requirements, but without a fixed form no copyright may apply[2].

The bits of text comprising the names of JSON fields, while fixed, are too short (and lack the necessary structure) to be considered "a work" for copyright purposes.

> So anyone is on danger of being sued by a copyright holder of an API.

That has always been the case (because it had never been settled that code APIs are not copyrightable). A different ruling may have removed that particular threat, but it didn't. It certainly didn't add new legal threats.

But let me give you this advice: If you're a big company with deep pockets and you're coming after the income of another big company with deep pockets using something that may be law-related -- expect to be sued. In fact, I don't need to give you this advice because if you're a big company with deep pockets you probably know this, as you're already in the habit of suing and/or being sued all the time.

[1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102

[2]: The law also says: "In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work", which is the source of Google's argument that copyright doesn't even apply to actual APIs, but that's a whole other discussion, and is far from simple. E.g. a book's table of contents could also be argued to be a procedure or a concept, yet it is certainly copyrighted. Oracle said that an API is like a table of contents. There are good arguments for arguing either way. But again, not having fixed form stops the discussion in its tracks.
It may be incorrect to reject that email, but it's good to reject that email.
> 2/3) You're right. A fine isn't a tax. Now assume you are a nation state and some foreign entity is making a shit ton of money off your population.

Still waiting a proof that it is because an American company

> 5) Ask some lawyer friends for the opinion on Nintendo vs Galoob. They almost certainly discussed it in school. Opinions will vary. More than a few will likely agree that if Nintendo were an American company the outcome would have been different. That's the most famous case I know of.

Some USA case doesn't make any argument for your accusation about EU.

You can believe what you want, but reality is what it is
The job would really need to be worth it to work against pushback from above.
Bringing up police brutality in a thread about someone who died in no way linked to the police is even more tired and lame.
I respectfully disagree, at least partially, with your statement.

I've been a hiring manager for over a decade in Silicon Valley and my experience is that the market is very competitive now. Most candidates I've spoken with are talking to multiple companies and many have offers pending. Compensation seems to be steadily rising.

That said, I have heard anecdotally from a number of people that some of the larger contracting companies game the H1B lottery system with lots of applications to get people here and pay them below market wages (they add a pretty big markup on what they charge their clients).

I've seen a lot of articles recently with a similar narrative: that there is no shortage in tech and it is all a ploy. It makes for a compelling story with a clear villain, but I believe the reality (as with most things) is more complex.
Exactly the problem. When you make failure unacceptable, people will stil fail anyway, they will just try their damndest to hide it. If you punish people for giving you bad news, they will simply stop giving it to you, even when bad things do happen, and they always do.
To clarify, The Register is citing this as reason given by police, but without presenting it as fact or corraborated information.
That's an awfully cynical view of it. An alternate narrative is that public school bureaucracies, perverse incentives for teachers unions, and political meddling from government created a system that was failing to offer students a good education. Mix that in with a very American belief in the power of free choice and free markets, as well as a belief that ability to pay should be no barrier to an education, and charter schools are the solution that has emerged.

I think there's problems with that narrative too. The impact that good teachers can have on kids from very troubled homes is probably overstated, and teachers unions have often been fighting against performance rating systems that unfairly ignore that. But in defense of charters, a performance rating system that doesn't work won't survive very long in the private sector.

Edit: Perhaps a better question, that avoids the nasty politics of the current situation, is: what does the ideal system look like? My inclination is that it would look more like charter schools than like public schools.
A social media platform targeted towards sharing travel
It is wrong to assume corruption. It might just be that China prefers seeing local companies run the Chinese market, and engages in a form of protectionism. That is perfectly justified and not corrupt.
Would active MITM be possible with key login? I would think it should be impossible.

If the symmetric session key is chosen by the server and encrypted with the client's public key, the attacker won't know it and cannot mess with the session.

The only thing the attacker can do is completely impersonate the server. But the attacker cannot communicate with the actual server at all.
Yep. I'd have to dig for examples, but many cancer drugs have different efficacies on differing ethnic populations. My father researches genetic markers vs. success rates in different treatments for the same types of cancer. He sees it constantly (Dinner conversation; his big data vs my big data). It's easy enough to assume they do given the different rates of diseases among ethnic groups. From my viewpoint, I would be more shocked if they did actually have the same efficacy.
This is definitely a neat question, especially as growth is sometimes hard to identify as it happens in front of you. I think there were a couple of really significant things that came about this year.

1. Gene editing in embryos

2. Orbital rocket makes a successful return and landing.

3. Self driving car technology becomes more commonplace, and becomes more feasible for people.

I think the hard thing about your question is, "have we built new tools to build a cooler future in 2016?" and that can only be seen when tools today are actually building the future tomorrow. The other thing is that something like 2 or 3, have had people working on them for years prior, so it's not that anything become suddenly practical in 2015 -it's just that all the work now bared its fruit.

Sources:

[1]: http://www.nature.com/news/chinese-scientists-genetically-mo...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_Flight_20

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9k5c_P-y-k
> Witcher 1 had some bugs related to the health bar not being visible at some point.

That was fixed a while ago. The only bug that I still encounter there is this one: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/773623/linux/charac...
My main concern with Free Basics is that it's literally a reinvention of AOL, using a different shade of blue.

Moreover, I find it extremely hypocritical of Mark Zuckerberg to push a system that would have prevent his own company from becoming as big as it has. Put another way, he would be screaming bloody murder if it was Google offering Free Basics, and forcing everybody to access the web through Google+.
The biggest difference moving to a flat tax system can make is that you can shift income tax collection from the payee to the payer.

Under a progressive system, Company A paying you $10,000 and Company B paying you $10,000 results in a different tax rate so neither company knows how much tax you owe. Under flat tax, Company A can just take $1500 out of your earnings before it gets to you, regardless of any arrangements you have with other payers. Since there are far fewer companies than employees, this makes tax enforcement significantly easier and evasion much less likely. Ordinary citizens now no longer have to deal with the IRS and tax is handled transparently.

Every flat tax proposal also tends to come with a negative income tax component to make up for the regressivity. The NIT essentially becomes a basic income like social safety net to make up for the loss of progressivity. And since it involves the govt giving you money rather than you giving the govt money, compliance will naturally be much higher.
Life: Each Month Is a Box
Most people that work for a living pollute the planet while doing so.
To answer your last question, no, this comment doesn't break the guidelines, and I believe you that your intent was positive.

The problem is that intent doesn't hop across the gap the way that words do. When the subject is emotional, careless words always seem laden with bad intent, whether or not they really were. You're responsible (we all are) for dealing with that when you post comments here, so your comments don't degrade the discourse.
Microsoft Will Warn Users About Suspected Attacks by Government Hackers
I really liked the discussion of the Chamley-Judd model, especially in parable form.

Question though: I worry that some individuals have the ability to recharacterize their earnings as either income or gains by shifting their contracts and methods of compensation.[0] If so, then you end up with odd results. Scenario 2 (a 50% tax on wages) turns into Scenario 1 (no taxes) for that subset of the population.

Looks like a well studied topic, so I'm sure someone tackles this?

[0] Say I build machines that make widgets, and your new widget factory wants such a machine. You could hire me as an machine-building employee, I could own my own business and you could buy the machine from me, or you could give me shares of ownership in your factory. Each of these could result in the same actions and changes in wealth for all parties, but would be taxed under completely different systems. CEO compensation packages are the most transparent real world example of compensation structuring I can think of. On the other hand, Jon Ronson interviewed a woman making 1.5-3 million per year who claimed she paid 35%, that she wasn't rich enough to restructure to avoid income taxes. This was in a piece on income inequality, maybe for GQ. So maybe this is non-trivial until you start getting near the top...
Putting aside this particular argument, I'm fascinated by what appears to be Zuckerberg's philosophy of creating profitable business models to provide public goods that are traditionally the realm of governments or charity. When successful, and I don't think they always can be, such solutions seem fundamentally more robust. They don't require continual interest from the donor class or the use of government coercion. And the resulting businesses would have a stronger incentive to spend their money wisely.
thats not really the implication. it doesn't require squeezing... the implication is that even if paid and treated the same foreign workers are more productive, and this is very easy to believe.

i'm not 100% defending the companies here, but there are two sides to this, and we all should be experienced enough to know that mass organised bullying of immigrant workers isn't a thing that you can sneak under the radar these days... its always individuals overstepping their bounds - not big organised conspiracies.

it just wouldn't be anywhere near the same kind of problem if the workforce was more motivated and more competitive...
The more interesting line from the article, for me, was this:

As the funding environment cools, a lot of companies with unsustainable
business models are going to go under.

I wonder how long it'll be before Groupon declares Chapter 11. They've been bumping along at near zero growth and profits for some time now, and investor patience is going to start running out once other sectors of the economy start generating meaningful returns.
We changed the outrageous title to something that more neutrally expresses the substance of the article. If anyone can suggest a more accurate neutral title, we can change it again.
Yes, please! I don't understand why it hasn't happened yet.
I want to setup my life in order to make it stimulant and balanced. You know, to deal with healthy lifestyle, job, social, contribution on OSS projects and self-learning.
Unfortunately, tax codes cannot simply be streamlined to be more algorithmic because every company has different facts and circumstances, which ultimately require judgment calls.
If you tried to build an algorithm that accounted for all of the complexities, you'd just send the problem upstream (who writes the algorithm?).

You mention Apple's Ireland operations, and you allude to the "earnings stripping" that is commonly achieved through such foreign companies. In some cases, the subsidiary is a pure tax play. But in other cases, it's simply a matter of having foreign operations that perform services that are charged out to affiliates in various countries. Deciding how much to mark up these services is a classic facts-and-circumstances inquiry. There's no one-size-fits-all rule that can adequately capture the spectrum of activities.

Compounding the problem is the fact that there are multiple taxing authorities involved, and if one gets greedy then others are affected (through foreign tax credits, for example). Sometimes a company just ends up getting stuck in the middle of a turf war between tax agencies in two countries.

Lastly, Tim Cook does have a "moral responsibility" with regard to taxation: maximize shareholder value. Granted, he could reasonably decide to take actions that do not minimize tax liability in the near term, on the grounds that he would generate goodwill with consumers and increase sales. But if he announced that he was going to dismantle Apple's foreign subsidiary structure so that Apple could pay more taxes, you can bet he'd face shareholder lawsuits in no time flat.
Looking into it, it seems it was more specialized uses that people were using them for, not just generic hardware - I remembered that point wrong. The fact that they foot the bill for a lot of the hardware is still true though.

Being able to easily copy and run games is an entirely fair point, but I felt it was separate from what I (And who I responded to) was getting at. An open-hardware machine running steam still has DRM on the games - And it's a bit of a given that most devs probably wouldn't want their games on platforms that didn't at-least try to have this (Though there are notable exceptions). Having open hardware, and having open software are really two different things, and it's a distinction that's only really come apparent in the later gen systems.

In the past, game systems were fairly close to being basically embedded systems, with the games running on the bare metal, so generally speaking having open-hardware in such a situation makes piracy much easier, because the only protections are in the hardware itself. Current gen systems actually have full OS's and a kernel-mode user-mode split, like a regular PC. Even if the hardware was open, without access to kernel-mode while the OS is running piracy isn't possible. I will concede that opening the hardware possibly creates an attack vector for the kernel though, so from that perspective it really isn't something that they want to have to deal with - And they don't gain anything from allowing it.

That said, if you look at Steam, AFAIK they have no real big issues with piracy. Why that's the case is debatable, but you can obviously make it work without having to lock-down the hardware.
The comments on the pull request for the fix [1] say it does not [2]:

> The new way/API is unfortunately not working for Windows 7 due to a bug in the Windows HID Class Driver

[1]: https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/3245
[2]: https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/3245#issuecommen...
I don't get it. You can completely ignore using Facebook.com, and just use the free access to Wikipedia, among other useful local services.

When I first got a Kindle, it had unlimited free access to Wikipedia. I thought this was the coolest thing ever, and didn't think about net neutrality, just a cool bonus that came with the device.
If you respond by making the test suite run faster; creating better mocks;
writing docs; making the test results more visible; teaching others how to
write (better) tests... that's a different story.

The trouble with that is that you only have a limited amount of time. If you're spending time writing tests (even if those tests save time in the long run), it's going to eat up time in the short run, which cements your reputation as a "troublemaker". Namely, your boss is going to wonder why you're taking extra time to write tests and create mocks when your peers are cranking ahead with features.

Yes, in theory, you get to say, "I told you so," when your peers' features are found to be bug-ridden pieces of crap that have to be reworked two or three times before they can be deployed. In practice, a boss whom you can say, "I told you so," to is a boss who'd have listened to you in the first place, making the whole exercise moot.
The concept is nice, but their numbers are horribly, unforgivably wrong.

8 random upper/lower/digit/symbol characters are equal to 9 random mixed-case letters. Not 16.

Their cutoffs for different mixes are 8, 12, 16, 20. Realistic cutoffs would look more like 10, 11, 11, 14.

Even worse, they encourage counting the individual letters in words. Never do that. Random words are only as good as two random characters.
Why reject a perfectly valid email? Why do you get to thumb your nose at that particular one?
the idea that there is large scale organised bullying of migrant workers is so fantastic - i struggle to understand how people can realistically believe these things if they have much real world experience.

i'm sure it happens, but its not the common case... its certainly not organised on the scale that people make out. it would be very difficult to make that sort of thing happen whilst making it in the best interest of everyone involved to not expose it for their own gain... it would tear itself apart from the inside or get caught out very quickly.
Illogical Captain .. http://www.laweekly.com/news/what-went-wrong-at-porter-ranch...

'Southern California Gas .. tended to be conservative, and to do things rigorously and by the book' .. 'Asked about the safety valve' .. "We removed that valve in 1979," he said.'
Any comments/suggestions would be appreciated
Android is a wasteland.
With Facebook's permission of course..

There's the facebook platform and all sorts of startups that have been excluded for competing with Whatsapp or Facebook or being a threat to facebook.
Interesting trick, I've always done it the xxd way. I'll have to keep this in mind next time I plan on putting a blob in C/C++ code!
Thanks for the clarification. I presume the really dense blob is the reactor and the less dense blobs are the air-filled crew compartments?
This "$8.5 trillion stolen by the pentagon" meme keeps on getting touted about, but that story is about the pentagon not submitting properly audited spending trails for this money. It's not like $8.5 trillion went into private citizen's pockets (though I wouldn't be surprised if, say, 1% did).
Yes, and if Zuck is that much interested to provide free internet to Indians, he can get in talks with the govt. of India and start providing free Wi-Fi to Indians. He may make a norm to have an FB account to get access to the Wi-Fi, for that matter. This could be a way more better option.

He may not violate netneutrality plus can expand his user base also.

But he may not go with this solution. It is less cost effective. But as it is a charity, cost shouldn't be a point.

Zuck is masking his for-profit venture with charity.
Indeed if you look at the Wikipedia link I posted you'll find a section on "Avoidance of tax arbitrage between capital and labor incomes" which is exactly the problem you describe.

Incidentally, when people talk about "tax shelters" and "complicated schemes the rich use to avoid paying taxes"(1) they're mostly talking about this. Though often they don't make that as clear as they should.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/business/economy/for-the-w...
i'm not racist as such, unless americans became a race recently... but i do have a relatively strong dislike of many american cultural aspects and i don't try and hide it at all.

i've met plenty of fine individual americans, but they are vastly outnumbered by people that leave me gobsmacked by various of stupidity, laziness and poor ethics.
So the cop empties your pocket and you get arrested. Same result as far as I can tell.
Indian politics has trained people well to see through Zuck's strategy and his TOI article only exposes his immaturity about what works/doesn't work in India.

It's not difficult for people to understand this initiative violates net neutrality and is an attempt to create a "separate internet" where budding entrepreneurs/content providers have no choice but to pay Zuck to be onboarded. This is akin to license raj (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_Raj) that was demolished way back in the 90s.
According to this http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/28/15-of-americ... , only 19% of those without internet (2.8% of the total population) cited cost as a factor. EDIT: I looked further into those numbers (http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/09/25/whos-not-online-and-wh...) and only 6% (not even 1% of the US population) said "too expensive" when asked why they didn't have internet. The other 13% is from those who answered "don't have a computer". So in short, this isn't a problem in the US.
> That's how they ended up with $200bn offshore and only $10bn or so in the US.

Wrong. They initiated a capital return program a few years ago and ran down their US cash holdings while taking on debt "against" part of their overseas holdings. Once you account for the debt issues, their net cash holdings are a lot lower (though still substantial). Please don't make wild accusations if you don't know what you are talking about.
Making an iPhone App – Know the Basics
tarantool.org is an open-source project which is supported by my.com and many other commercial customers. my.com is an independent U.S. company that choose products
on competitive basis.

Anyway, the benchmark is fully open. If in doubt, you can always download disk images and re-run benchmark.

// Disclaimer: http://tarantool.org/ developer
China is actually threatened by terrorism and also the world! That terrorist is called the U.S.
if its so big that its unwieldy as a byte array in a source file, does it really need embedding in the executable?

what about the case when you want n blobs of data instead of one?

good to know, but edge case useful...
Is this using the previous firmware Webkit exploit or is it running on the latest firmware? Either way, awesome work!