skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Will I really lose my trademark if I don't use it as an adjective?
Bad flashbacks to grade school grammar class: today my lawyer informed me that we risk losing our trademark if we use it as a noun rather than as an adjective on our marketing site.

For those familiar with this issue, your thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

A bit of backstory: we’re a tiny, two-person bootstrapped startup about to launch a SaaS product. We’ve done everything ourselves, except a couple things that seemed legally intimidating and we got a lawyer’s assistance with: (1) the ToS/PP for our site, and (2) a trademark application for our product/service.

We recently had a soft launch of our product, and I sent our site’s URL to the lawyer so he could prepare a Statement of Use (a required submission to the USPTO to demonstrate that we are using the mark in commerce).

Well, I got a call-back from the lawyer saying that, unfortunately, there was nothing on our website he could submit for the Statement of Use, because nowhere on the site do we use the trademark as an adjective.

I was really puzzled by this — Google calls itself “Google” on its website, not “Google search engine.” “Spanx” calls itself “Spanx,” not “Spanx absurdly restrictive undergarments.” Why don’t they have to awkwardly adjecti-fy their marks?

He said legal precedent has shown companies who fail to use their marks as adjectives (aspirin, for example) risk losing the rights to their marks altogether.

Yet, I feel as though I rarely see this kind of adjective-style usage on tech sites. And frankly, it would be extremely clunky to try to implement it throughout our own site.

Any wise, informed, practical, helpful, empirical, amusing, or elucidating advice for this adjective-fatigued co-founder?

Many thanks!
What I most enjoy about learning languages are the insights that make me say "Whoa! I had no idea that you could do that!" One particular example was when I came to really understand the distinction between the preterite and imperfect in Spanish; another came when I got to grips with Latin's ablative case.
What's Next for Egg Freezing
I don't understand why (maybe because it is the NYT) but this article and even the title makes me rage. Maybe because it feels really disingenuous - really inauthentic, almost nonsensical.
'Proton' Mac trojan has Apple code-signing signatures, sold for $50K
Monte carlo method can be used to provide software project estimates. The examples I've seen using it are about the same as planning poker
Of those two? That depends on whether your language is German or Swedish.
I have a lot of initial samsung hardware (android tablets and phones) and I never see software updates to any one of them. That is why a year ago I decided to stop buying samsung products completely.
I really dislike this term 'virtue signaling'. Although I do not deny the phenomenon, I think that it often functions to shut down debate (kind of like an anti-PC device)

To add more substance to my original comment, however (I admit, I should have done so at the start) I was surprised and disapointed to find dozens of comments discussing the virtues (and the odd minor criticism/update) of Chekhov's 'conditions' without any mention (however historically situated) of the clear prejudice, with it which excludes over half of humanity from a 'cultured' existence.
The broader point here is that something most people in the developed world do not realize at first is that a writing system is not an important part of how many (I'd wager most) people use their language. In other words, the spoken language is all that matters or practically exists for most people in the world.

For almost all of history most languages were unwritten. While it's true that today, owing to the efforts of indigenous leaders[1], missionaries[2], and linguists[3], many languages have gained writing systems, they often are of marginal, if any, relevance in the average speaker's daily life.

E.g., Wu Chinese, at 80M speakers, lacks a robust writing system. Many Indo-Aryan languages (i.e. those related to Hindi) in Northern India lack a standard written form. Maay Maay, a language spoken in Somalia with 2M speakers, does not have a writing system.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

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

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coorgi%E2%80%93Cox_alphabet
Yeah it took me a while to figure out that this wasn't a plugin in Sketch.
There is pdflatex, luatex,...

Nobody stops you from translating the Ruby or whatever into your favorite language.
Age of Triumph: Bungie Wants Destiny Fans to Take a Throwback
The page in question asks for all sorts of personal info in order to read the book. Not cool, man.
"Being yourself", authenticity, and direct/brutal honesty are roughly orthogonal; you can (or not be) one without affecting the others. They are not the same thing.

Being not yourself takes energy and focus. Being yourself is free. It's also multiplicative: the amount of effort you put into something that's in alignment with yourself goes much further than effort put into something not in alignment. It's also restorative: doing things in alignment with yourself can restore energy and focus.

You don't need to determine the magic single identity that is yourself, or the magic single principle that defines yourself. Those don't exist; you just need to go "fuck it, I don't need to spend the effort to be somebody else; myself works just fine."
This is great. I just published my first post. Its been about 15 minutes. So far haven't seen it coming through. Is there a process that kicks every sometime?
Interestingly, this method is the primary example on the Dart homepage: https://www.dartlang.org/.
The JCC Bomb Threats – The Telephony Challange
> asm.js

But then you're no longer using the language. The performance-hostile semantics are still there, you're just not using that part of the language, and thus losing out on all their benefits.
The ADA already reconciles these viewpoints, by allowing for people who would otherwise be in violation to claim exemption because complying would cause an undue burden. So we shouldn't expect a random person on the internet to pay for captioning 20,000 videos, because that would be (presumably) ridiculously outside their means. On the other hand, it's reasonable to assume that a university that could recently afford a $400 million dollar renovation to their athletics stadium could afford to caption 20,000 videos.
Maybe the solution is to use exemption from NN as a carrot to encourage competition. "If there are two (or 3? or 4?) or more separate providers offering parity level of service to a property, all providers to that property are exempt from NN requirements for service to that property". If you combined that with allowing new entrant providers to not cover an entire geographic market, but just cherry pick the high density/high profit segments, you might get both broad NN and competition.
I can't begin to tell you how awful editors were, long before the internet showed up. 'Twas all about selling ads, even then.
Right, GP is leaving out A. necessary skills, and B. the size of the labor pool (multiplied by the labor force participation rate).

For any given skill there is a labor pool with some participation rate, of people who currently have that skill, such that it is accurate to say that the market has a shortage.

Answers to the shortage must solve for either the size of the labor pool, the rate of participation, or the amount of people who have that skill.

Those answers vacillate between importing labor to solve the problem now, or forcing the market to educate people by blocking imported labor.

The problem with importing labor is that it reduces market incentives to educate people. The problem with not importing people is that it means you'll have a labor shortage until the market adjusts and people re-educate.

Easy answers, on either side, are snake oil.
Would this be a good time to mention that a few years ago I wrote an experimental Java AOT compiler which worked by converting bytecode into C++?

http://cowlark.com/cowjac

I used Apache Harmony as the standard library, and binaries were about 2MB, which back in 2012 I considered unacceptably large; benchmarks were adequate only. I never got round to implementing a garbage collector but the hooks were in place for a simple mark/sweep stop-the-world collector. The hard part would be to actually make all threads of the program stop so they could be collected; I had a plan, but no implementation.

Interested parties may also be interested in my experimental Java JIT which worked by converting bytecode into Lua and then running it with LuaJIT:

http://cowlark.com/luje

It actually beat OpenJDK Server for some unrepresentative microbenchmarks. It's very unfinished, and generates fairly pathological Lua code which LuaJIT has trouble with, but the biggest problem is that Lua and LuaJIT can't do shared-memory threading, so most Java code won't work on it.

(JVMs are surprisingly easy to write. If you're interested in interpreters or code generation, I encourage you to try it.)

(Man, I completely forgot I wrote these until now!)
It's an open question. It is believed, but not proven, that pi is a normal number. Normal numbers have every possible sequence somewhere, in every base.
Building a Website Layout with Bootstrap 4
[edited out my comment to reduce the noise -- see comments below]
2007-11-24-san francisco wmwhi
Ask HN: How many of you are writers and what are you writing?
Following the comments on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13850693 made me realise that, like me, a lot of you HNers are writers too. I'm an unpublished novelist writing fiction, speculative and otherwise, and I'm curious to know what the rest of you are writing.

Fiction or Non-Fiction? Poetry or Prose? Blog entries or Encyclopaedias? Have any of you been published?
Hyperlinks. You need self-discipline to stay on one page.
I wrote "a trusted binary of a previous release" not just "a trusted binary". There is obviously a difference between having a small set of trusted binaries to bootstrap and having a bootstrap binary for every language or build system.

There are several compiler implementations that enable bootstrapping from alternative implementations, which shifts the problem to a simpler language, which may already have a bootstrap path.

See also http://bootstrappable.org/best-practises.html
Thanks for brining Canonical JSON up. There's an issue to investigate it here: https://github.com/seagreen/Son/issues/7

It doesn't appear that Canonical JSON does anything about redundant escape sequences in JSON. I'm still looking into it to be sure. This is a big part of the motivation behind the Son spec, and represents about half the EBNF: https://github.com/seagreen/Son/blob/master/son.ebnf#L19

For anyone else who knows of more JSON subsets, if you report them here: https://housejeffries.com/page/7 it would be really appreciated. I definitely don't want to do duplicate work.
Yes, I did spend large parts of my java developer looking at class loaders and class loading delegations in servlet containers etc.

I think it's a bit too hard to get it right.

Like, suddenly some third party library starts pulling in log4j and your whole logging setup goes wrong in subtle yet very bad ways.

Or you screwed up with that one reference to a ResultSet and even though it is closed, that reference keeps an entire class tree of Connection, PreparedStatement etc alive.
Many countries use YYYY-MM-DD, where today is 2017-03-14...
Swedish kids to learn computer coding and how to spot fake news
Doxycyclin is a first-line treatment for acne, it's a chronic bacterial infection, after all. But there's simply no good reason to continue first-line treatment that isn't working, hippocratic oafs are everywhere, one would guess.
> time and again, the research has shown that the poor make good investment choices when given the opportunity.

I find this interesting. Does anyone know what research the author is talking about?
We've banned this account for posting primarily unsubstantively after we've asked several times for you to stop.
Thiel was attacked nonstop and people were organizing to stop using PayPal which he is only tangentially affiliated with.

Uber CEO had to stop his collaboration as Lyft started catching up for the first time in a long time.

Elon also faced a lot of heat and had to qualify his statements. Negative reactions towards him were counteracted by his accomplishments and clean energy contributions.

I think people should collaborate but in a clandestine fashion.

Inviting Trump to Bay area would unleash all the rage against Trump towards the startup community. I'm just afraid it would be a bigger "throw stones at Google buses"
> How is one to vote when neither major party candidate was pro-privacy?

That's the heart of the matter. The major parties have a virtual monopoly; we're as trapped as voters as consumers are in a market monopoly.

I think the way we fix this is weaken the monopoly of the major parties, possibly with things like ranked voting: http://www.fairvote.org/

Which Maine is trying to institute: https://ballotpedia.org/Maine_Ranked_Choice_Voting_Initiativ...

Perhaps we should try to institute laws that break up parties if they get too big the same way we can break up corporations that are too big? Monopolies being bad an all.
On platforms that support it, depending on how big the GC stalls are (extrapolation isn't magic) and it's not really something you should be triggering regularly by design. Async reprojection was invented to mitigate the fact that a variable frame rate makes you sick in VR so really it's evidence to support the parents case. If you're regularly dipping into async reprojection due to the GC then a trade off between visual accuracy/artifacts and the GC is being made.
Natural indeed; VR games made with Unity are also defined as declarative trees of objects in a similar fashion. In fact, if you added a "behaviors" prop to all of the React components in this system you would essentially have a basis for porting Unity-like scenes pretty directly (maybe even automatically).
It's also super easy to embed graphql-up into your own docs & tutorials. Simply add the graphql-up badge as a link and you're tutorial basically comes with a free hosted server.
I prefer Bill Cosby having no access to any drugs.

Him being an asshole would be a lot better than what his real self turned out to be.
It's not possible to write a BNF for Markdown. At least not an unambiguous, useful BNF.

http://roopc.net/posts/2014/markdown-cfg/
I haven't yet made up my mind on net neutrality. But Sam says: "I believe access should be a basic right".

My question is: How can something be a human right if you need to pay for it? Because as of today you still need to pay an ISP for internet access.
Couldn't you solve that by sorting by the underlying byte order? Since it is required to be UTF-8 that should be fast and unambiguous.
10⁴⁶⁷⁷
What if family doctors charged $10,000 / hour? Wouldn't you call that a doctor shortage?

Just because a service exists at some (arbitrarily high) price point doesn't mean society isn't suffering from a shortage of that service.
The previous poster was referring to English. The statistic may not applicable to a lexically unrelated language such as Chinese. Furthermore, the stated vocabulary is intended for the speaker to get by with. A bare minimum for useful expressiveness.
Sounds great!

If you hit any issues with Clair feel free to file an issue; we have a lot of folks who have been helping maintain the project.

Some quick feedback from the post and your website. It says there is a quick command to scan my container images but I couldn't find the command. I also signed up but the confirmation URL was a 404 and from "team" with subject "Confirmation email".

In any case really happy to see more people digging into these problems and coming up with new solutions.
If something is bluetooth/wifi enabled, all I want is an API that doesn't go through their servers. I don't want to rely on their piece of crap app.
Disclaimer: I am not necessarily agreeing with UCB's decision.

Your argument can be made, but as I said elsewhere, we can only know if this is tested in court.

The counterargument to what you are saying is that leaving the door open is not done in order to benefit others in the hallway, whereas explicitly putting the videos on a web site is an active action. UCB would have trouble claiming that they're putting the videos up there, but not to benefit anyone.

Put another way, using your analogy, no one would complain if the professor decided to close the door. If people outside were listening, they have no say on the professor's decision.
I'm not sure I follow.

sum(vec) is exactly how I'd write it in Python (or pseudo-Python for that matter). It does what you think it does (provided the operation of addition is defined for vectors). I did mention using "sum" instead of "sigma" (combined with a list comprehension) in my OP, did you miss that or are you making a point I don't understand?

I recognise what you say about mathematics favouring conciseness. I feel that's what I'm addressing: mathematics have sacrificed readability in favour of conciseness to an extreme and could benefit from some decompression. It is possible to write extremely concise code but I feel most programmers today agree that's actually not a good thing to do. It's often better to write something a little longer to improve readability than to save those characters.

And like you write, every language, and we can consider mathematical notation to be a language in this context, has tradeoffs. But it's not a zero sum game. You can make an overall better language than another language. And what I like to imagine here is that perhaps mathematical notation is not the most evolved form of logical expression we have today. It's certainly not as formalised or field tested as the big programming languages.
From visitors to iterators
There's probably ethically dubious activity happening in most startups. YC in particular explicitly encourages "naughtiness"[0].

0: http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html (scroll down to part 4)
Only in extreme situations, like when it was very clear that your case had no merit, or when explicitly called for by statute, which is a small number of situations (like SLAPP suits).
You could use JSON as a host: https://github.com/cognitect/transit-format

I do like the comment about having the S-expression format for data interchange defined since 1997.
Yeah the whole reason asm.js is fast is because it strips out the performance hostile parts of js.
> Guess what happens when G runs a banner under each search or Youtube video mentioning that performance is bad because Comcast is blocking things, here's Brian Roberts's phone number?

The ISP filters the banner before it reaches the customer, and replaces it with their own message (or just advertising from someone who has paid the ISP.)
Serverless architecture – pros and cons – short recap
With a little luck, maybe Microsoft is already working on React Native support for Window's phone.
This sounded pedant
>Your interpretation of the law is incorrect, and there was no ruling, as this never went to trial. Berkeley removed the content instead of negotiating for a reasonable timeframe to update it.

Yes, I realize now that this did not go to court. However, you have not shown how my interpretation is incorrect.
Labor shortage does not mean what you think it does. If we use the logic you presented, then we can say "There is no such thing as a shortage of Cabs, try offering $100 for a cab ride and there will be people pulling their personal cars next to you to take you where you want to go". Well Duh.

A shortage of a good means that there if there can be pending buy and sell orders in a market book, then there are a lot of pending buy orders, but just not for the price at which sellers are willing to sell.

What SV is saying that there are a lot of people who would buy a lot of goods, if they can be produced cheaply (and it isn't because they're poor, it's just because the consumers don't value that good that much). If Netflix raised their fees to $90 per month then it means that a lot of people would cancel their subscription (and not all would do because at $90 they will be unable to meet their rent).
Extinguish the routing tire fire – How Backplane can help
Your links directly contradict you, and support my original point.

Note that I'm talking about money from companies (most to Republicans) not the individuals that work for them (most to Democrats).
There's some price that they couldn't pay. Comcast would try to find what price that is.
I disagree. There's a big difference between selling customer data and selling selling ads to a demographic. Also, the excuse that companies like Microsoft and Apple get a free pass just because it's not their main source of revenue is a weak one. If you have an issue with the practice then don't be selective in your criticism.
Graphene Audio is here
> There is some romanticisation of the past going on when you dismiss the Discovery channel as infotainment.

Today's Discovery Channel (and History Channel, and TLC, etc) - are vastly different than what they were when they started. All have definitely "dumbed down" to the LCD.

I understand that this is normal change for a business, especially one centered around TV entertainment. I also know that even in their prime, these channels were never as educational as, say, PBS and the like. But compared to today's programming, their earlier incarnation was vastly superior.

But that is just my (probably biased) opinion...
I was denying that it was partisan, not supporting the notion.
Nice tool, setup an alias for this...

alias ctop="docker run -ti --name ctop --rm -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock quay.io/vektorlab/ctop:latest"
And you can't specify "a collation" in a way that will be guaranteed to mean exactly the same thing next year. I don't believe there's a way to do a permanently stable sort if you also want it to reflect the current state of Unicode. (An obvious example is that an entire language might have been added to Unicode since you serialized something with those code points in it.)

NTFS, which has to build a b-tree of filenames in a permanently stable sort order, solved this by writing the collation table to the disk when it's formatted, and never changing it again. Which means the Windows shell still has to re-sort the filenames because the currently "correct" collation may be different.
Thank you, rustynails! Happy to see the post prompting thought. Great questions, and ones we will have to keep an eye on in the coming months/years.

Side note: the user who submitted this to HN is an Ars Technica co-founder!
I don't think all support of NN is extremism; some of it is. (there is also extremist anti-NN, and less extreme anti-NN)

There are some interesting ways to increase competition, including:
1) New access methods (WISPs, etc.)
2) Letting providers pick types of customers (multi-tenant buildings, for instance)
3) Dropping universal coverage requirements at some level of granularity -- maybe a provider only serves new neighborhoods, or some smaller lot size neighborhoods, or richer neighborhoods more likely to buy service.
4) Shared trenching/pole access, possibly in the form of bulk-running infrastructure a few times per year?
5) Shared physical infrastructure in some areas -- maybe local or single-purpose utility owned, like fiber in the ground going to neighborhood locations with Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory colo for provider equipment, or optical cross-connects?)
Does Sonic.net not provide service in Berkeley? Back when I lived in the Bay Area, I switched from Comcast purely because Sonic.net isn't an utterly loathsome company. Turns out with Sonic I didn't have to reboot my modem every other week either.
What a terrible article written by a self-important asshole who is obviously one of those "high-monitor" types.

If you want to make lots of money and contribute to what's wrong with society, go right on ahead and keep lying about who you are.