skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not as simple as that. Trademark isn't as clear-cut as copyright. In some cases, you have to have a famous mark (like Facebook, Starbucks, eBay, and Victoria's Secret). Sometimes, you have to be able to present evidence of confusion; in other cases, you have to be able to demonstrate that the infringing use is directly tarnishing your own brand.

It is simply not the case that any Internet squatter can decide "I'm going to own the word Bedsheet, because nobody's thought to trademark it yet!" and then go troll anyone who uses a bedding image in their name. You have to actually build a valuable brand first.
I guess Flash isn't reasonable...
A trademark grants you exclusive use of your mark as well as protection from competitors marks that are confusingly similar.

Also trademarks can be lost if not defended, unlike patents and copyright.

The dispute between teachbook and facebook likely revolves around being confusingly similar, and could also be in part because they need to actively defend the trademark in order for it to be valid.
I haven't had any device-specific error reports for the few Android apps that I have worked on, but they are pretty vanilla.

There are occasionally comments in the android-developers group about issues specific to particular phones. Seems like the Droid is often mentioned, and the thread I recall was with the camera.

I imagine it would be frustrating to get a crash report, not be able to duplicate it, and have your app work fine on the dev phone in your possession.

edit: here's the thread: http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/browse_thr...
Funny, this URL is exactly the same as the one posted yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1630579
Pascal's Triangle in Perl 6
> There needs to be a Godwin-esque term for "takes one data point and extrapolates it to the entire world".

"Cum hoc ergo propter hoc" is not very Godwin-esque, but I think it'll work here.
Ask HN: Sources of books in digital format
Greetings,

I am trying to find vendor(s) of technology (mainly) books that are offered in digital format. My preference is PDF.

I have used Packt Publishing and Manning in the past.

Any suggestions are more than appreciated.
WebSockets everywhere with Socket.IO
Something tells me you do not have a family.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162965

(How did this even get posted?)

It's a really good post though.
Trying to categorize all DDoS together is nonsense. The scale and type of the attack depend on the attacker's means and motivations. How would unixy.net have blocked the following attack?
http://www.csoonline.com/article/220336/how-a-bookmaker-and-...

DDoS attacks make the most sense for the attacker when they are an extortion attempt. The economics works in favor of the attacker. It costs the site dearly to be down, and they set a price that makes sense based on your site. Unfortunately, you may not hear about a lot of these attacks, and the attacker is never found or can't be arrested.

unixy.net sells DDoS insurance. You never know if the insurance policy was worth the monthly payments until an attack happens.

Note: I've never used unixy.net and can't speak to their effectiveness, but I don't like how they grossly oversimplify a complex problem
Thinking of BCC in context of Facebook (and Farmville), maybe a better than usual (pages/sharing) approach would be to create a Facebook game of bingo (eg. one person "creates" the cards, invites friends, and they all play online somehow ..), which you could then tie in with the real BCC ("wanna play with your friends IRL?"). Especially if many of your target users are of the type that's probably using Facebook for casual gaming ala Farmville. OTOH, building this is quite an upfront cost.

Maybe you've already considered approach like this (and decided it wouldn't work for some reason). But in general, I've a feeling that grabbing people's attention on Facebook is via some other interaction (e.g. tie-in games/apps) that just pages/groups/link sharing.

Hopefully that would also be measurable (how many people tried the game/app on FB, vs. how many people actually clicked on the real thing and bought it afterwards). It'd be interesting to find out if someone has already done something similar on Facebook.
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse.
Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov.
Android allows you to install apps from any source; people in other countries can sell apps through other channels. Can't do that on the iPhone.
"He's not crazy about writing in the programming language Apple prefers, either. Basically, it looks like there's no pleasing this guy."

Well, medical doctors are not crazy about McDonalds or Burger King, guess there is no pleasing them divas, eh?
Agree with everyone else! Couldn't have happened to a better group of guys! Well done!

Now go and kick Motorola into shape!!
I think as Android becomes more established as the standard smartphone OS, Google will be able to exert more influence on carriers and manufacturers by withholding the Google apps and Market when certain conditions are not met. I hope that Google uses this influence to encourage the production of devices that are easy to get software updates for, and lacking customizations that the user can't remove or turn off.

As for Java, it is my impression that most JVM languages can be used on Android, though dynamic languages suffer a bit on startup time. Scala seems like a good option here.
The veil of choice is sufficient, better to focus on what actually matters.
VirusTotal -- Free web/API-based virus scanning tool
Me, I'd worry about the person whose most loyal employees were bad. It would mean they don't provide the kind of workplace where good employees stick around. The number one reason people leave jobs: they don't like their boss.

There are a lot of technically brilliant people who aren't looking to move for a 10% pay rise (unless they are grossly underpaid - sheesh, don't underpay your people). Great people will stay for a good boss (see above), a happy environment, a degree of creative freedom, opportunity to work independently, the chance to extend their skills, etc etc.

It's true that bad employees generally don't quit, though.

[Edit: Don't believe me? Ask Pixar what their staff turnover rate is. Is Pixar full of bad employees? Methinks not.]
I had to install the plugin first by going to gmail.com/call, then after restarting my browser, the call phone line appeared in my google chat panel.
Oops, yeah, I don't know. Thanks for the pointer.
Wolf, Boy, Crying, etc.
my guess: they preferred to have their own blank slate for those kinda things... plus the title contains a lot of crappy and unusable data (on quite a few pages) - I would wanna clean that on my side.
I bet that most startups don't fail miserably, they probably just fizzle out. We've all had those light bulb moments where a great idea hits us and we think it would make a great business. You get a couple coders together and hack something together only to realize it's too hard, or you don't have enough time, or a number of other excuses. You go back to work and soon your startup is forgotten.

I'm not sure whether the total number of startups (of which maybe 10% succeed) includes the ones I described, because they're so hard to track.
Just because a lawsuit is successful doesn't make it less frivolous.

This is not like a company called "AppleSoft" being sued by "Apple". It's more like a company called "AppleSoft" being sued by "Microsoft". It's unfortunate the laws are so ambiguously written to allow abuse of this nature.
What's the draw for an engineer to work at Google these days? Seems like you'd be a small toad in a gigantic pond where your ripples make little impact. Kind of like working at Oracle or IBM or Microsoft or <Big Software Company>. Except there are those dumb bikes all around the campus. Yet still there seems to be this perception there is something 'special' about working at Google that sets it apart from any of the other places, isn't there? The emperor has no clothes? It's not like you're going to get any wealthier from options there than you would at any other relatively same sized company.
But what's not added is -- it doesn't work that well.

Human beings have always sent multiple messages to multiple people to keep an equilibrium between multiple types of social connections.

But the problem is that this approach doesn't scale. The more groups you are in, the harder it is to send multiple messages simultaneously and effectively.
it depends on how (and how well) you structure it. If the company has no debt, you can fold it and walk, obviously. Often you can find someone else willing to buy it off you for a pittance, if you want someone to keep providing for the customers you have.

If the corp has debt you haven't countersigned personally, you can still usually walk, though if it's a lot of debt the creditors can try to 'pierce the veil' and come after you personally. depending on how well you separated business and personal accounts, this may or may not be possible.

If you have debt you countersigned personally, well, you've gotta pay that off or declare personal bankruptcy.

The worst 'baggage for the rest of time' case I've seen is tax related. If you make a lot of revenue and you fuck up your taxes badly, you can be on the hook for those taxes forever. Bankruptcy doesn't get you out of your tax debts. I know two people who will likely be in debt for the rest of their lives because of tax mistakes. If you run a business, /always/ spend the money on someone who knows about taxes.

anyhow, that's just the debt problem. My experience has been that employers, when you tell them that you are looking for a job because your startup in a related field failed can only be described as eager. Especially if the startup got some publicity, a failed startup looks pretty good on the resume.

edit: s/debit/debt/
Having now developed apps for both iPhone and Android, the one thing I feel Android really lacks is a good equivalent to Apple's Interface Builder.

Interface Builder makes it pretty easy to lay out a decent-looking app GUI on iOS and not have to think about it a lot, so you can focus on the code and functionality of your app. It takes more effort while writing that XML on Android to end up with an attractively designed interface, and short of running it in several different emulators it's tough to get an idea of what it'll look like on different devices in terms of display resolution and dimensions.
FB improves chat’s stability&speed, kills support for IE6
Digg Version 4
With WikiLeaks you get the original documents. Please show me _any_ news organization that provides original source documents for inspection by the public.

Wikileaks deserves some critical commentary, granted. But comparing it to "news organizations" like boingboing just makes it seem like it's falling out of favor with the "internet intelligentsia".
Ask HN: How to prepare for Programming Interview?
A few of my friends and myself are preparing for job interviews. So we have been crawling the internet for the best way to prepare for Programming interviews.

So we wanted to know what fellow HNers were doing?
Ask HN: how do you manage your operational procedures?
I'm working in a fairly large IT shop that was relatively recently setup but already needs to manage around 200 servers with various operating systems and applications. I've been tasked with with taking over the IT engineering and operations teams that actually run the infrastructure. The engineering team is tasked with developing the systems, doing the more high level stuff related to IT and documenting procedures. On the other hand the operations group does more of the mundane and repetitive tasks but only in line with the standard operational procedures defined by the engineering team. Much to my amazement no real documentation has been written until now, what has been written is outdated and as a conclusion procedures are rarely followed.

It looks like much of the problem lies in the fact that there is no easy to use method to create that documentation, store it and update it (for the engineering team) and (for the operations team) there is no central repository to find procedures related to a specific task or device (a certain process or server might have several procedures attached) and no easy method to submit feedback on these procedures and their outcome.

Sharepoint is available in the company but it doesn't quite cut it since it's slow and cumbersome to use. A wiki system sounds more suited but I'm afraid that references between documents could become difficult to manage manually. Is there any dedicated software or framework that can solve the above problem in an elegant way? Surely somebody must have hit this issue before...
I've always thought that our conception of "free will" is flawed. In the case of the article you list, I don't see that as evidence against free will. There's no homunculus in your subconscious making decisions for you that you don't have access to. It's all your brain and its functions making decisions. Just because we've labelled the very top of the iceberg free will or consciousness doesn't mean that the rest of the iceberg under the water isn't connected.

There are a lot of studies about things like, for example, people saying they like someone more if the subject is exposed to warmth than if they're exposed to cold. Your brain still made that determination using all your experiences and patterns from your life, nothing "fooled" you or overrode your choice. We need to re-conceptualize our ideas of free will to include our whole brain, not just the magical separate part we've previously called our consciousness.

In the same vein, it's looking a lot like we're going to have to figure out how to fit "partly sentient" animals into our model of free will and consciousness as well. There are too many animals exhibiting behaviors we previously thought of as human only. I think both of these things will be big revolutions in thinking in the coming years.
I was really lucky in that I got a Gizmo5 account shortly before they were acquired by google. They created an Android app called Guava that did just that (limited to 3 minutes at a time unless you pay). It comes in handy when I'm traveling internationally as I can make free 3 minute phone calls to the US.

Since Google owns Gizmo5 now and I'm assuming that this new browser calling feature is a result of the acquisition I wouldn't be surprised if an Android app is going to be out soon.
What CA ISO does when Power Usage is way over Forecast
Make sure you know fizz-buzz and OOP
I think you're looking at this situation as if most people had your level of engagement with the software industry; clearly, anyone can tell the difference between Facebook and Teachbook!

Once again, no. PerfumeBay was forced to admit under oath that it had fielded support calls from people thinking they were part of eBay. It is not even remotely unlikely that, after spending more than $200 on web design, teachers might become confused about whether Teachbook was a subsidiary effort of Facebook.

All this aside, can anyone say with a straight face that "Teachbook", the networking site for teachers, didn't know that they were coattailing off Facebook with that name? Give me a break. If Facebook loses, that'll be interesting, and maybe even a good thing, but don't ask us to feel sorry for these people.
On my laptops, I've used Ubuntu since Badger (2005). I went to Ubuntu from Debian, because everything on the laptop suddenly worked. No more kernel compiles or weirdy-beardy deep hackery.

Linux on the desktop has arrived, I thought. But I'll wait one more iteration before recommending it to my clients.

Dapper (2006) came and broke lots of things. Months later, all is well, mostly.

Once bitten, I didn't upgrade until Heron (2008) was released, and when I upgraded I did so one version behind, to Gutsy (2007); thinking that it should be stable.

Many things worked, but some, like video drivers and wireless networking, didn't. They'd been working fine since Badger.

By Jaunty (start 2009) everything was working. I still have this machine on Jaunty and no way am I upgrading it. It has some weird video behaviours, but Ubuntu has never bedded these down; it's always a bit of a lottery.

2010, I bought a new laptop (Sony Vaio). I loaded Lucid (2010 Long term support version) and I can't tell you issues it has. There is a dedicated group for resolving the issues. When I plug in the USB soundcard I use on the aforementioned machine -- it's playing now -- a card that has worked since Badger, the machine locks solid; it needs a power-down to restart it.

This is not an uncommmon story when dealing with Ubuntu. This and the vagaries of Shuttleworth. As he says, "This is not a democracy".

Ubuntu, like all things, is great when it works, but is constant shifting sand under your feet. And stability -- on the same machine, same OS -- is fundamental, imo. Ubuntu doesn't have this, and history has shown me that it is unlikely too. I've chosen to move away because of this.
I can see how you could tell that most of the people she told you to hire ended up as non-assholes, but how do you know that the people she tells you not to hire would actually have been assholes?
Tangent, but it may amuse you to know “Applesoft BASIC was supplied by Microsoft and its name is derived from the names of both Apple and Microsoft.” -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applesoft_BASIC
Which YC company was supposed to be the PageRank for People?
tuxychandru has it right.

From the article: "Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates."

And: "If you’re not a U.S. based user—or if you’re using Google Apps for your school or business—then you won’t see it quite yet."

Also, you might want to check out the rates (they do seem pretty cheap for international calls, but I'm not an American so I don't know the standard): https://www.google.com/voice/rates,
As video starts straight off with describing features of using "threads", I am left wondering: what is a "thread"? You are introducing new terminology without defining what it is.

Give me a one liner at least. What problems does a "thread" solve? Don't list features, let me know what makes this different over email.
I hope so for several reasons. One being that I don't normally have gmail open (I prefer thunderbird/IMAP + an XMPP app for IM), but my Nexus One is always on.
Just ordered my phone yesterday so I guess I'll find out for myself soon!
Nate Silver on how ignoring math skews political journalism
Didn't a recent article on Varnish vs. Squid show that letting the kernel handle paging was a better method? Or is this not related?
Are you going to use a service that is worse and/or more expensive then? If their international rates are competitive, there's nothing wrong with that. Not all services are profit centers. Some need to be subsidized. Others should be subsidized for strategic/marketing reasons (which is likely what we see here).
-The UI designer is no good, but the other tools are great. Eclipse works great and if you don't like it you're free to build your own environment (as they are all separate and documented)

- "[Droid X is] not THAT good. Stick with your iPhone." Quoth The Dude: "That's just, like, your opinion, man"

- Don't like java? Don't use it. Use Scala or whatever you like. No one's gonna sit over your shoulder and tell you which tools to use.
Obviously we as consumers should demand that video game manufacturers stick with their analogy better. Instead of working perfectly until first say, the game should gradually decay, even for the original owner. That way if I want to play a 10 year old game that I haven't maintained, I would have a far worse experience than I went and bought a new copy.
There are a lot of things about Android that are annoying. Sadly, Java is far from the most annoying thing for me. Besides, if you want to write in something besides Java, you have more hope on Android than iOS at this point [1].

The most annoying thing to me is the lack of a really good equivalent to Interface Builder. Building UI's in XML is tedious and error-prone.

Along those lines, there seems to be a problem with doing the XML layouts in Eclipse. There have been reports suggesting that the layout tool is creating a memory leak which eventually leads to the 20-seconds-to-switch-tabs problem.

There are things I definitely prefer about Android versus iOS, like the Activity/Intent framework. I feel that it encourages a much more modular design.

The code signing and deployment process is also much easier on Android.

I also like XmlPullParser slightly better than NSXMLParser (though the performance might be worse), but that's just a personal preference. And if you really want a SAX parser, you have that in Android too.

IMO, on both platforms you'll be pulling a bit of hair out

[1] Mark Murphy's commonsware site has a 0.4 version of a book called Android Beyond Java with an incomplete chapter on writing apps in Scala. I've never tried writing an Android app in Scala, so caveat emptor. I am also aware of some efforts to get Clojure on Dalvik, but I understand that it is very slow out of the box due to reflection.
why only "for sale"? why not as an investor / partner?
Ask HN: How to compensate employees when there's little or no cash?
If you're starting up with little or no budget for salaries, in which ways could you compensate someone that you would like to bring on board?
a failed startup looks pretty good on the resume.

I would say this is true in US, especially in the entrepreneurial regions (here in SV/SF and also the NY/Boston/DC triangle).

Probably less so in Europe and the UK. I'd like to think that is changing but we're still a cynical lot back home (in the UK).
The second-to-last guide? What's the last one?
hey! who is this? I haven't been in the bay area, that's why :).
Just wanted to point out that while "Android" does in fact let you install apps from any source, many Android phones (for example virtually all of the ones offered by ATT) do not actually allow installing non-market apps. And as this is something that any carrier or vendor can implement, I wouldn't be surprised to see more of it in the future. (Much like how even though 2.2 supports tethering, so far handset manufacturers/carriers have been disabling that support on their 2.2 rollouts)

People always seem to ignore this.
Cool. I didn't mean to criticize, just wondered what the use was.
In 2.2 and higher there is an integrated crash reporter into the system. For 2.1 and lower I have a crude catch all error handler that sends the cause of the crash, app and os versions, handset model and carrier, etc. Using this method, some custom ROMs and two phones I can fix roughly 95% of the errors without actually having the device or user with me to debug.
the important thing to remember here is that any technical person with experience is going to have an initial reaction of suspicion when approached by a business person with some wacky new idea. If you avoid everyone who initially reacts with suspicion, you will be limiting yourself to people who have not been approached by business people before.

That said, I agree that your co-founder and you have to agree the product is worthwhile. I'm just saying; don't expect this enthusiasm right off the bat; that is really only going to happen if your technical co-founder has never listened to a well-pitched bullshit idea.
Sure, so that makes it possible to tell when their link-bait headlines are "not backed by evidence" (aka full of shit). However, these are confidential sources that nobody has access to and may or may not be confirmed in public. That moves the problem one level of indirection. How do we know if/when wikileaks decides to make things up out of whole cloth? How do we know if/when wikileaks' sources decide to make things up?

The point I think I'm trying to make is this: what value does wikileaks bring to the table that, say, pastebin or dropbox doesn't? Increasingly it's looking like that value is actually negative. Which is important to make note of, and disconcerting.