skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Neither did I, so I looked it up:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_symbol#Radioactive_si...

In fact, the symbol is so completely unintuitive that ISO came up with a new version:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/10/New_radiation_...

... which to me certainly does connote "these rocks shoot death rays!" as well as the sage advice "RUN!"
The law specifically says that a company cannot claim to own your private work except under very specific conditions. If you, for instance, work for Zynga and develop a game that is very much modelled after a Zynga game, then Zynga has a case. If you develop a CRM for Patent Attorneys, Zynga has no case -- unless you developed the CRM while at work at Zynga.

Under that scenario, the IP you generate does indeed belong to the company.

Only if the "IP" falls under very specific guidelines. Writing an MMORPG at home while working at Zynga? No, Zynga can't claim squat. You don't need to wait to terminate employment in order to work on projects at home.
Thank you. I found mixed answers on the internet and I will correct my other post.
Check out this book by two professors from Cambridge: http://www.amazon.com/Against-Intellectual-Monopoly-Michele-...

They've also made it available online, of course. http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm
Yeah, I think it was pretty obvious, which is why in retrospect it seems stupid that we weren't pursuing it in the beginning. But I distinctly remember that after launch we debated which direction we should go (options included becoming a live (or not live) video cdn, the live platform, or trying to spin off multiple shows that we produced ourselves).

We were talking about mass hardware production to support shows that we directly produced or contracted.

To be honest, I wish that I was able to go back and tweak our execution: if the Justin.tv show was just a stunt, I would have had a platform ready to go when we launched it instead of waiting six months to build it!!
There is a set of things A that can be done under the current system. There is a different set of things B that could be done without any IP laws. Asking how many items in A are also in B is not a valid way to determine whether A or B is larger.

That said, I haven't heard of most of the companies on that list. The ones I have heard of, would all probably do fine (or, as well as under the current system).

where there was no trade secret law and publication of company secrets was thus protected under the First Amendment

The first amendment just means the government can't censor you.
Thanks for your comment. Actually it's not specifically for marketing and agencies, although they will certainly find it useful. The main reason, why many people want to buffer their tweets atm, is because they are intersted in having a planned out timeline on twitter. They can sit down at one point, whilst they are browsing the web and then add tweets to their buffer. It just optimises twitter efforts, if you can't be around all day. Sometimes you come across more than one great article you want to share, so instead of flooding your followers, you can spread them out with Buffer. You think that would help? :)
Actually, more action is going on scientist-mode-__experimental__ branch. Code is little rusty, but workable with and possibilities of optimizations are great.

EDIT:

BTW. Any ideas how to get continous integration working with it?
Dave Cutler.

It's a bit of a shame that the world at large doesn't get to see his code in NT. It is by far the most gorgeous C code I've seen. In fact, in the beginning, there have been times when I used to look up his code just to feel inspired (think of it as 'code inspiration').

Getting to meet him and work in the same team as him for the last few years has definitely been the highlight of my Microsoft career.

Also, my wife (HN username:arithmetic) will tell you that getting a autographed copy of Showstopper was one of the best gifts I've gotten her :)
+1. This book is written by dudes at Cambridge, has tons of historical examples, and is generally just really interesting.
If the article is only referring to the compiled version of Stuxnet, then every security researcher has had that for a very long time.
... and they're gone.
Or toss the stuff just in front of a subduction zone.

It's also a product of the 1950s/1960s OMGRadiation!!1! mentality where instead of treating radioactivity scientifically, it's a boogeyman that will reach out and consume your delicious delicious brains, then increase their size 100-fold and reanimate them so they can go cruising through Manhattan shooting radiation death rays at the hapless public.

It's dangerous stuff. It isn't that dangerous.
CodeLesson — Online Technology Learning for Professionals
My answer was James Clark: he did groff, sgmls, expat, and important parts of the XML and Relax NG specs among others.
> For example, no startup could hope to survive without laws protecting trade secrets.

Existing theft and trespassing laws already outlaw unauthorized physical access to your property. As for disgruntled or opportunistic employees, you can utilize existing contract law to ensure their doing so is illegal. What exactly do trade secret laws cover that aren't covered by more reasonable and fundamental laws?

> Open source is no exception. It relies heavily on rules of copyright law and on licensing to make its system work. If everything were freely shareable without any form of restriction, one does not have open source - one has freeware.

That's why I have strong feelings that the free software movement, or at least the GPL, is insanely contradictory. Their claim is that there shouldn't be liberty restrictions placed on software, but what they really mean is there should be different liberty restrictions placed on software, specifically the ones they happen to like more. In my opinion, software isn't really free unless it's in the public domain (or, nearly equivalently, if there were no longer any intellectual property protection for software).

Most of your points are simply that removing the various forms of intellectual property protection would harm some people. The validity of your specific examples are variously debatable, but even if you're right, I don't think that's a good enough argument for keeping the laws around. I can't conceive of any legal modification that wouldn't harm someone. In my opinion, even if something might harm startups (and I'm certainly not convinced that IP laws are vital to startups), that's not a sufficient argument.
I still have a problem with a system where the government will harass you into bankruptcy on behalf of an incumbent corporation if that corporation decides they want you out of the way.

This will happen to you in any country in the world. Money runs governments. If there's an influential company (and your not) that wants you out of the game, you have a tough road ahead anywhere.
Regardless of the word used, this law does apply to copyrighted works in practice. "Invention" is used in the sense of "creations".
More than that, the diary logs show the real face of a startup, with the veil of all the glamor removed. The guy was basically trying not to get killed doing his startup.
what's to say that facebook couldn't add an administrative interface and multi-tenancy so that businesses could manage and use this without any privacy fears?
The problem in all this is not with the concept of patents or copyright but that the way it works in practice is to enable the powerful to squash small innovators who are actually doing useful stuff.

Exactly. I think very few people understand the magnitude of the risks and costs to a small innovator when faced with legal claims of any sort from a big business. Its not a level playing field.

Even if you have an essentially watertight case, the laser-eye lawyers against you will inevitably find some weakness or loophole to attack you. They will jurisdiction-shop. They will limit your ability to do business and drag out the fight over years. The huge cost of paying your lawyers will be tiny compared to the impact on your business. Don't underestimate the distraction to your founders and staff of such a fight. And of course investors will run a mile.

Most importantly, no mater how clearly you are in the right you will find that there is a substantial risk that you will lose anyway. In practice the legal system can't be relied on to give a fair result. Even when you win, they can appeal and extend the process further. With another chance you might lose.
I use this product, at times.

I think it's an example of a good intention on Microsoft's part that hasn't been executed or marketed incredibly well.

Any web developer worth salt has to preview their work on IE6-IE9. And everyone has to jump through hoops to make this work (And no, VMs are not an acceptable solution. Why should I bog down my machine with a VM when I just need an extra freaking browser?)

So there comes Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview. How did they even come up with such a name? What it does is it allows you to open several frames side-by-side, each with a version of IE. It's a great idea, it's JUST what I needed. But what it doesn't let you do is actually interact with the pages. You can only see, not click. Want to test a JavaScript behavior? Sorry.

The gimmicky name and the lack of marketing evidently obscure it further. No surprise you've never heard of it. I completely accidentally stumbled across it last year.

Edit: Link with screenshots: http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/dd565874.aspx
Glad you like it (I'm the author.)
Possibly, but I think it's more likely that Apple is trying to get publishers into its iBooks store by edging out Kindle and Sony.
Please relax a bit, geeze! For resequencing, you have to input all of the reads and this should be a significantly larger number of bytes than the number of bytes than the number of bytes in the unindexed reference. So let's look at the I/O costs of inputing the read data.

Essentially, any alignment technique that can come close enough to I/O saturating reading both the dominant factor (the reads) and the minor factor (the reference) is optimal.

When (for a slightly different kind of gapped, error-prone read) I wrote alignment software, I also beat MAQ by 10-20X, like the BWA algorithm but without using anything like the BWT hair. I contemplated how the gapping rules and error rules looked in a brute force NFA translation. I found simple ways to optimize that NFA very cheaply. I found that it paid to maximize read-data throughput by devoting all of memory to the NFA built from as many reads as possible. It was not hard, this way, to get in the ballpark (small enough constant factor) of I/O bounding read processing (where "not hard" means something like 3-6 months of staring at walls and scribbling stuff on paper until I found some solutions that were simple enough it is only bad luck I didn't find them right off the bat). Building a prefix or suffix tree or any other kind of index to the reference was the approach my boss suggested at the start and that I explicitly set out to beat (and did!). Streaming the reference is not the bottleneck if you can do it in an I/O bound way because (for resequencing, at least), the size of the read data is much larger and you can do alignment while coming within a small constant of I/O saturating the input of that read data using a simpler NFA approach.

Looking at the description of MAQ, besting its performance by any number of means is not so surprising. Reaching for the hair of using BWT does surprise me.
i think the privacy issue could be very easily taken care of by providing multi-tenancy and administrative access so a company could control everything to do with the content.

your point about social app companies trying to make money out of the companies using this is valid, however, today Salesforce.com provides software in the cloud that stores tons of information about sales deals (including dollar figures), contacts (which is priceless), user behaviors, etc. yet lots of the fortune 500 trust them to host and keep this data.
Corrected, my mistake. I even managed to get it right the first time in the paragraph below that, it must be the sleep deprivation catching up with me.
The binaries are already in torrents.
Video - U3-X Personal Mobility Prototype
Not really sure what your point is there. It's natural two people with virtually identical genes subjected to vastly different training would have different body-types. It's also natural that two people with vastly different genes would respond differently to virtually identical training.

Consider someone like this boy vs his classmates:
http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?type=article&...
> Because you don't license software from Microsoft without getting an exclusive license (or at the very least a preferable one).

Other phone makers already make WP7 phones. Nokia doesn't have an exclusive deal and Microsoft would never, ever, even think about allowing Nokia to be the only WP7 phone licensee (or even a very preferred one). Microsoft likes leverage.
If your implications are correct and your argument sound, then you're saying that tech startups are in a market that only has value due to legislation. Without that legislation, you're saying the tech startup world would have no value and wouldn't thrive or even exist.

I disagree with your claim, but even if it were true, isn't that tantamount to, say, legislation making the sale of automobiles illegal in order to preserve the viability of the horse-drawn wagon market?
Nathan Myhrvold's 2,400-page Game-Changing Cookbook
Remind HN: Etsy's free API Codelesson course starts tomorrow (Feb 14)
If you didn't read [the original post](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1857345) or somehow forgot about it (which happens to everyone all the time), here's a friendly reminder to visit [the course page](http://codelesson.com/courses/view/a-gentle-introduction-to-the-etsy-api) and sign up for what sounds like a great online course with a course outline that reads

Review of HTML and CSS
Introduction to jQuery
Creating an Etsy developer account
Using the Etsy sandbox
Querying user data
Working with JSON
Retrieving and displaying listings
Authenticating and retrieving user data
Retrieving sales data

You even get an achievement for completing it in your profile (possibly an even better one if you are in the top of your class), which wouldn't hurt to have on your resumé.
> It seems the C-level at Nokia's view of what would be best for Nokia is clouded by interaction with former Microsoft colleagues.

When I imply working for Microsoft damages people (often beyond repair), I tend to get heavily downvoted. I have friends there and those who aren't cynical took the corporate issued Kool Aid and really believe the partly line on Linux, Android, iPhone etc.

The WP7 team burial of the iPhone is a typical symptom of this disconnection with reality. Those folks really believed they built an iPhone killer.
Funny in 1998.
Result: http://hubski.com/

Creator of this site used source. Has some interesting features like the ability to create frontpage loaded only with content from users you follow (called hubs).

Friend of mine just put it together and is kind of continually working on it. Not sure what he has planned entirely, but a good example of using HN src.
I get that its the standard but see my comment above. If you can come close to I/O saturating inputing read data at only the cost of streaming the reference near I/O saturation, that's optimal -- and I don't think you need the hair of BWT to do that (and the BWT memory cost might even hurt you).

Its different for an imagined database where you are trying to align reads against a lot of personal genomes, e.g., to identify someone given a pretty complete genomic database of the usual suspects plus a few reads from the crime scene -- more around-the-corner "GATTACA" scenario than today's FBI, perhaps. There, perhaps, its economic to dedicate one server to ever N "usual suspects", loading the server with BWT of the suspect database, then stream reads out to the servers rather than loading servers with set of reads and streaming a single-human reference over that. (Of course, maybe you could just align the crime scene reads against a single human reference and then .... So even in GATTACA land use of BWT seems like dubious hair against a lightweight opponent like MAQ)
Clickable:

[the original post]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1857345

[the course page]: http://codelesson.com/courses/view/a-gentle-introduction-to-...
Well... Obviously, lots of MeeGo expertise will end up in Google and be incorporated into Android.
regarding facebook, it's just an example, it could easily be twitter, orkut, mixi, etc. what i mentioned in other threads is that there should be a standard created for the new communication method to supersede email. that way vendors could start to produce their own solutions just like email does with ms exchange, lotus notes, gmail, zimbra, sendmail, etc. different clients could also be created: mac mail, gmail, thunderbird, pine, elm, etc.

i agree that facebook is proprietary, but i disagree respectfully that facebook is centralized, they have many datacenters around the world, it's a necessary when you're getting 400M page hits a day and whatever many TB's of photos being uploaded. so do friendster, myspace, orkut, twitter, linkedin, etc.
>That doesn't sound like any of the standard copyright/patent/trademark/trade-secret categories, it sounds like it has something to do with (probably implied) contracts.

If they copy code it's copyright infringement (often even if they wrote it!, depends on the contracts). If they copy model details it can be copyright, design rights and sometimes trademark and even patents. If they copy technical working features that were patented then they would be in violation unless they were the sole rights holder. If they exploit secrets they learnt in the course of working in the company they would be breaching trade-secret laws.

And yes, most likely they'd be breaching contractual agreements in addition. But the GP's description sounds exactly like the sort of thing protected by IP law.

IANA(Patent)L but have worked previously for several years in IP.

>>one does not have open source - one has freeware.

This is actually wrong, one then has PD. Freeware is still protected by copyright law and unless an additional license is given can't normally be commercially exploited, nor could I claim authorship, etc..

>What is observed to happen when/where such laws don't exist or are generally ignored?

It's hard to tell, there are barely a handful of countries that do not have IP law. For example the Paris Convention (patents) has 173 countries signed up, the Berne Convention (copyright) has 164 (Wikipedia figures; out of 190ish countries).

I'm with the GP I find IP law vital but in desperate need of reform.
Hosni Mubarak used last 18 days in power to transfer funds abroad
Could it be the CEO has been declaring it not ready until he got his way with the Microsoft deal?
Why do you imply that Microsoft is the prime mover in this whole turn of events? I think it's clear that the board, shareholders, and much of the public (witness the hemorrhaging marketshare) had lost faith in the ability of Nokia to develop a modern smartphone operating system internally. It's likely that the board brought in Elop (and , yes, some of his former colleagues) to make a deal like this happen under the most favorable terms for Nokia.
If I got away with something like this, I'd want to brag via message boards too.
The innovations are happening despite ip restrictions. It has been historically shown that innovations increase after the ip restriction expire.

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/do-patents-encourag...
Never having seen the code, I can't say for sure that there's no Symbian OS code in the S40 series devices. I can say, however, that there's no Symbian OS access for developers in those devices. The S40 phones are semi-smart -- they allow J2ME applets to run and that's it.
If the human race has persisted steadily enough over those 10000 years to have retained knoledge of our current languages, I doubt they would have let slide the knowledge of where the nuclear waste is buried.

I think the whole idea here is that a lot can happen in ten thousand years. Whoever is trying to go in there could be human or non human, could be advanced or primitive. Symbols are the best way to communicate in any of these events.
I'm having a tough time running the IE7 executable in Windows 7. The VM popup shows up like IE6 and IE8, but the program window closes immediately.

Before I dig too far into it, is anyone else running into the same thing?
Thanks; I get to work with a wonderful/smart group of people at Google--they're doing the really hard work. Both webspam and search quality folks are crunching on linkspam and content farms, so I hope we'll have more to talk when some of the things in the pipeline make into production.
> Alliance with Microsoft seems to be the only sensible choice for Nokia at the moment. True story.

Your wisdom ends where Nokia's share price begins. Seriously, the whole market read this as a stupid move where far better, saner, alternatives were available.
>As for disgruntled or opportunistic employees, you can utilize existing contract law to ensure their doing so is illegal.

The current laws include some protections for the individual inventor/creator which would be wiped out by this sort of thing. For example (in Europe at least) fair compensation for an inventor even when their work is covered as "work for hire".
There's a pretty good piece in City Journal about how some schools are awash in money, but that isn't the core problem . teen pregnancy is:
http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_1_teen-pregnancy.html

The rate of single parent families has risen dramatically in the past few decades, with the rates climbing even higher in urban areas. Raising kids takes time and money - two things you have much less of when you are a single parent. There has been a lot written about this subject, but it's politically taboo and not much will (or can) be done about it.
I doubt that HBGary had the source to Stuxnet. Even the source is not that useful. Its infection vectors are known. It does not really use novel worm techniques. They would not be able to sign a different rootkit payload without the stolen certs. The source does not give you control of the command and control infrastructure, so they cannot use or update any of the currently infected machines (this is speculation, I do not know the specifics of Stuxnet in this regard). The PLC payload is useless and would have to be rewritten and tested for a different target. Basically, having a copy of Stuxnet and/or the source for it is useless for using it as a weapon.

The source would be great for the people looking for evidence of who wrote it and what their intentions were, but that is about it.
Are you picking random SNPs or using something like SNPedia?
Personally I think what you quoted is thoroughly self-contradictory.

> Let's take Android

An innovation that occurred in America.

> So what happened once it became a hit? Patent and copyright infringement lawsuits up the kazoo.

Which have not been resolved, and even when they are will not cause Android to cease to exist.

> And it's a drain on the economy too, because when the plaintiffs win, that money isn't a win for innovation

The antecedent does not prove the consequent. "Losses" (smaller profits) for innovation are not inherently a drain on the economy.

> That's what protection means. It means protection from innovation.

It means protection from copying. And I don't see any evidence that the US is failing to innovate technologically.
there's president. people have built 'kit cars' from plans for ages. here's what the CA DMV has to say about it:

http://www.dmv.ca.gov/vr/spcnsreg.htm

It doesn't sound easy, but it doesn't sound difficult compared to actually building the thing.