skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not at all.

Suppose you and I work for the same company. I bust open Skype through decompilation, reading memory, the network, whatever trick I want. With that, I write documentation for how Skype's protocols work.

You read my documentation, and implement it in a new program. Since we haven't talked, and you've never seen a line of Skype's code, you haven't infringed on any copyrights.

It is important to note, though, that this does not necessarily protect us against a patent suit.
"It’s very simple: for every hour of desk space shared by a company, they get one hour of time credit for any of their employees to use in any other Kodesk space."

Basically, you'd need to have office/desk space first, and the employers and other employees have to be comfortable with the idea of new people popping into their office space.

If I had a company, I'd just pay money for my employee to get desk space somewhere or work at the hotel or at the clients. It seems like a distraction to work at another company's office.
Does this law have provisions for "enablers"? Can Tennessee go after NetFlix for encouraging users to break the law (multi-user accounts)?

More importantly, if there is a dragnet investigation and a dorm room gets arrested for sharing NetFlix with each other, can they still go to jail if they abided by the TOS?
I think this is a very important thing that people don't understand. Static money supply in a world where as you point it out population increases means deflation. And increasing popluation is only one example of the need for inflation. We create wealth all the time, people in other countries are buying their first car etc... the more goods are purchases and sold the more money you need. At least that's what I understand from my couple Economics classes.
What fraction of legislation do you think that the "best" governor understands?
Reasonable?: Netflix will terminate the stolen account you're "borrowing" and you never get penalized.

chopsueyar makes a good point: how will they even prosecute the real criminals?
In other news (http://www.japanrailpass.net/eng/en008.html):

"Use of a JAPAN RAIL PASS is strictly limited to the signer (hereafter "you") only."

Surely an outrageous clause like this one can only be the product of big corporations and corrupt politicians. What about "the right to travel"?
What an a-wipe. I wish I was an attorney so I could offer Matthew my services pro bono.

But IANAL, I'm a hacker, so I guess I'll just launch a DDoS attack.

(I'm kidding. I write in PHP so I barely know how to turn on a computer; DDoS is way over my head).
> Why purchase Bitcoins in the long run unless you're laundering money or hiding from the government?

That's kind of odd to say-- couldn't you say the same thing about doing cash-only transactions?

There's also the hope that you can "hide" from corporations/bad-people and make transactions that don't require you to provide information that can be used for identity theft, marketing, etc. Just typing in a unique 1-time deposit number has a lot of appeal for stream-lining transactions and making people feel more comfortable performing electronic purchases. I'd love people to get addicted to that kind of high-privacy transaction and push more innovation for traditional currencies/startups to help with that.

In the modern world, every purchase of anything not bought at a yard sale is a privacy and identity concern-- I'm eager to see alternatives that find new ways to avoid that.
Wait, I'm sorry, are you saying teaching isn't a profession?
VBoxHeadless - VirtualBox 4.0 On A Headless Debian Squeeze Server
but but but grooveshark is okay they're "disrupting the music industry"!!!!!!!!!!!
"It gives you better frameworks for thinking."

Better frameworks than what? Real life? Trial and error? Empiricism? Sounds like he learned to generalize and impose his experiences on others.

> You cannot get out of higher education without learning multiple ways to approach, de-construct, and re-construct problems and questions.

My personal experiences would prove otherwise. I may be an exception.
This is unfortunately the rule, not the exception. If you ever have checked out any of these laws that go before a US legislature they are generally hundreds of pages long and a very dry read. Even the legislator that is sponsoring the bill likely has not read the whole thing in detail, but only the summary prepared by his team of aides, and has relied on many other people to write up his drafted law. Probably the only people that read and can understand these new laws in full are prosecutors and other lawyers.
Hum, fells like a deja vu.
And they'll pervert some standard along the way, right ?
Wouldn't be fun otherwise, would it ?
A lot of "enterprise" type situations just don't get github or similar solutions. They might have something like Visual Source Safe or no version control at all, and Windows servers setup so that the only access to them is by VPN and copying files to a Windows network share. Unfortunately it's just the way some organizations work and there isn't much you can do to change it.
If these honeypotters really did relabel the files, wouldn't that make them guilty of trademark infringement?
The Y Combinator of health? SF's Rock Health incubator unveils first startups
balls. i'd rather sink with a digital economy than a follish one. google for "stable economy". you get no useful results.
CSS Testing Tool - Lorem Ipsum Crash Test
Tracking back link after link one ends up here: http://life.globaltimes.cn/life/2011-06/661408.html

I honestly think this is bullshit. A kidney is completely useless for transplantation unless its compatibility markers match those of the receiver and there is no use in fishing kidneys randomly among Chinese apple fans.
Having been 10 years out of college I guess I can provide some insight. Just some background: I went to a top tier CS school in the Bay Area and graduated in 2000.

At 5 years out of school (2005),it was nearing the end of the dark times (bubble burst). I didn't feel unprepared for school. I felt overwhelmed by the economy (or lack of it) and the extent to which outsourcing had really threatened software development jobs in the US.

Finding good jobs wasn't about being or not being prepared. All recent grads had a hard time finding jobs in software and many decided to change directions (law school, MBA, grad school). In fact, I noticed my friends with Master degrees had much easier times getting jobs ... particularly at places like Google. So, in fact, education helped them more.

In 2010, looking back I can say that having a CS degree from a top school has opened many doors for me. I found out about a great job at a cool startup from a friend I went to _school_ with. Even when meeting new people (in a professional sense), alums from my school (and major) tend to be the most open to meeting because they recognize the value of the education we went through.
You are right, copycats are definitely a concern.

The situation in Foxconn got so bad last year was partly because at first Foxconn compensated the suicide victims' relatives rather substantial amount of money, then copycat jumpers became epidemic.

The kid sold his kidney for $3000, a MacBook Pro 17" can easily command $3000. That's dangerously close to enough incentive.
I'm high on the introversion scale (and work from home, the cafe, etc. with some regularity) but I agree with the grandparent post. I like having a space dedicated to work and the ability to collaborate with my coworkers in person.
I'm going to use this quote in the future because it's so true.

Hope you don't mind the attribution "a wise man once said [...]"
Modern (post gold standard) currencies have no intrinsic value either. Their only value is that people think they have value.
> I honestly don’t fault Frannie and Jacob for having negative opinions about me

I listened to that podcast and didn't hear any negative comments about Coulton -- at all! Even the comparison to Snuggie wasn't negative. I like Coulton (I have some of his music and have seen him in concert), but this post did come across as pretty whiney.
Ask HN: Where can I work in Boston tomorrow?
Taking a weekend trip to Boston starting tomorrow and am planning on working all day Friday to avoid missing a day at work and was wondering if any of the startups in the area would be willing to house a developer for the day or if there were any good spaces to maybe rent a cubicle or something. My backup plan is to just find a coffee shop, but it'd be great to meet some people and make a few connections on the east coast as I do have plans on moving out there some time in the near future.
Exactly. MS's bread and butter is selling $400 laptops which may or may not even have touchscreens and it remains to be seen if a touchscreen UI makes sense on traditional laptop or desktop formf actor

It definitely makes sense on a traditional laptop. Just there haven't been decent UIs for it. I wanted to get that Dell with the touchscreen that came out earlier this year, but Win7 wasn't ready for it.

Now regarding the pricepoint, it will have to go up, but not as much as you think. There are tablets today with good capacitive touchscreens selling for $150. Expect to see a 10-20% price bump, depending on screen size (although screen sizes in general will probably shrink). But I guarantee you that with this UI Costco will sell a LOT more $499 touchscreen laptops than the $400 non-touch equivalent.

Look at Microsoft's MediaCenter. It's great software and it's on every PC, but it's nothing like an industry standard because it's just not a normal PC use case.

The Media Center problem is a LOT different. The problem with the Media Center is you need a computer hooked up to your TV. Have you tried to hook one up? You need a video card with HDMI out, a quiet fan, some IR receiver for the remote (unless you put the computer in your entertainment rack), if you're using cable you need a CableCard tuner and the actual Cable Cards. I'm wore out just typing this in!

A Win8 tablet or touch laptop you buy and use. A Media Center was literally a weekend affair where you had to buy a bunch of stuff up front in preparation. I know, I used to use one with two extenders in the house.
For myself, I work from home as much as I can because the alternative is a 2 hour commute to my current client's office (I'm a consultant). It doesn't matter if paradise awaits me at the other end of that trip - I don't want to go.

That said, half the time I work from home winds up being spent in a Starbucks 5 minutes from the house, just for the change of scenery (and free coffee).
For challenging Scheme exercises, check out the sample programming assignments for SICP: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/psets/index.html

SICP itself (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/) is worth checking out, too. I doubt you would find the book itself to your taste, but there are programming exercises at the end of each section.

Also, for what it's worth, my favorite language for working Project Euler problems is Scheme, by far.
the poor die when their one remaining kidney fails because they can't afford market rates.

Yeah, but weigh up the chances of that (most people don't get kidney failure in their life) versus the extra opportunities that you get from the money. If you're dirt poor in China, $3400 might be just what you need to get yourself started in life and catapult yourself up into the middle class.

Buying an iPad still seems like dubious value, but... hopefully he did something better with the rest of it. And I guess if you don't have any other computer then an iPad just might be worth 20% of one of your kidneys if you can use it to educate yourself or start a business.
Unless there is already an extensive network in place for organ trafficking, with complicity from hospitals.
I'll be checking here throughout the day, but can be reached at john@nineteeneightd.com too.
There is attribution in the images themselves, but someone is cropping them out. Someone is going out of their way to make sure he is not attributed.
Stories like this show that such a thing would need very tight regulation.

Like what? Kids need a parent's permission to donate their kidney? I don't think you'll get much argument about that.

Also, keep in mind that someone's life was saved here. Someone about whom we can't make very many assumptions based on what we know.

That's the catch with the whole organ selling debate: however horrifying you find the seller's story, you have to compare it with the buyer's, or rather the would-be buyers who die on the waiting list.
>They're not. Professionals are liable for malpractice.

Even programmers?
Like I said, it's both the best and worst thing about geeks. They are very intelligent, but often lack tact and political savvy. They just charge right in with the right answer, which again, is both good and bad depending on who you ask.
Did you just base your rebuttal on the idea that there's no way someone could, say, buy a kidney and find the right buyer post-factum? It's not like there's no market for kidneys, sadly.
As an example of improper use, google: tenure public schools
Why to Join a Startup After Graduating
I don't mean to be a jerk, but this post was lifted wholesale from Jonathan's actual blog: http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2011/05/23/on-snuggies-and-bu...

And this is the actual link to the post named in the submission: http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2011/05/how-jonathan-coulton-...
Lol Sony Store is online , but for how much time?
as we know it is the part of welcome back procedure . but i have an itch . it wont stand for long time until they (sony) will shut it down again due to security breaches
Facebook, Zuckerberg say ownership contract forged
As a person who's worked at home for years: You have to communicate intentionally. I've done this for years with many clients I've never met face to face (some I haven't even seen their faces).

Also: I'm not introvert. That makes me assuredly talk to people perhaps more than many introverts would at home. I know some of the people I work with kids names, and we still ask how weekends, etc went.

Skype works fine for communication (along with emails). Screensharing is much more useful than video chat in my experience. I also have various other tools like that queued up for when they're better (Copilot for instance).

Also: you really have to develop your phone skills. I think lots of people have underdeveloped phone skills these days, so aren't good at working at a distance. They don't know how to do a phone call well, wether it be pacing, tough issues, agendas or any of that. They especially don't deal well with understaters or the like. Lastly, for many important calls, you MUST follow it up with a summary by email. You also need to learn basic drawing, as a quickly sketched diagram saves the bacon in the middle of some calls (which you then throw in your feed scanner that automatically turns it into a pdf).

I think a lot of people who work in offices lack the ability to express themselves well in these situations, and that's why they feel ineffective (they are a bit, but could get better with practice).

You also need to live in a reasonable place. You have to have a fast internet connection. If this means you have to live at the exurbs instead of a rural farm, well too bad. I personally have 2 different ISPs and a router which combines the connections for failover purposes. (I also live in the middle of a relatively large city, Midtown Atlanta).
One time pads strain the definition of "encryption" and are by convention a bozo filter for people talking about crypto. For instance, downthread, you have someone saying that an all-zeroes OTP key would in theory be fine.

In reality, all OTPs do is shift forward in time a relationship that must still be secured through some other means.

So, from now on, when we talk about the feasibility of breaking crypto, let's implicitly constrain "crypto" to "crypto that people can use in practice".
for one, a very, very annoying bug where, when you get a phone call, the phone app can take long enough to swap in that the caller gives up.
How do you know that you have a problem worth solving for your startup?
Posting this on an n900... Very low battery life, bad touch screen, sluggish ui. Why on earth did they cripple the default shell?
The keyboard is pretty nice. When someone is calling you, the answer and decline button jump around in the screen, and I always hit the wrong one. This is because of the orientation sensor and the slow ui rearrange.
Most browsing frustrations go away when you start using Opera as the browser.
Most of the bugs in the builtin apps could have been fixed relatively easily, but I guess they restarted with a different ui paradigm after N900.
Never used android or iphone so don't know how bad they are.
That's completely reasonable. As is Netflix putting "only one household" in their ToS.

It'd be unreasonable if there was a specific law on the books in Japan that says if you loan out your rail pass you're branded a criminal (which in the case of Japan means you're deported for life) and get jail time, instead of them just taking it away from you and saying "you broke the terms, no more rail pass for you".
Yea... Valve.
I agree, but it is still a comforting entrance sign for those who fear programming. It is common sense, yes, but the interest of it is to show that general principles also stand for software development.
Which got me thinking about how useful an offline version of google would be. Unrealistic or impossible?

What if you could download a "Google for JavaScript" where, based on lots of javascript developers query, you downloaded a cached version of the results and the websites?

I.e. It's easy to get the top 100000 queries containing javascript; you get the top20 links for every queries, you download those websites and compress that. I don't know how big that'd be. I'm sure it'd be possible to use that in a clever way and make it small enough to be easy downloadable. A couple of gigs.. what's that for today?
There are ready-made scripts for that, like slowloris.
> Sick of the same restaurants and bars? Take a weekend flight to Europe and work from there.

I love how casual you make this sound.
From the article, "To that point, Microsoft had forced handset makers to obey strict rules about how they could customize Windows Phone 7, and they wanted the same from Nokia. Not only did Nokia respond that it wanted the right to innovate freely, it asked Microsoft to commit to using Nokia technology as a foundation of the Windows Phone platform, particularly its detailed Navteq maps database."
Here is a nine page investigative piece by the New York Times on the organ trade (the opening anecdote is about a kidney). http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/world/organ-trade-global-b...

It's a little dated (2004), but this certainly isn't the first time I've heard a mainstream news source report on organ trafficking.

Do you believe the whole organ trafficking thing is fake, or just this story?
Here's more of it.

"But Google was riding so high that it essentially refused to negotiate, offering no concessions to Nokia despite its global presence. Elop later told the Salo employees that Google "acted like they'd already won. Apple and Android deserve some real competition."

Pretty much he's saying Google acted like Apple in how it views everyone below them.
SEEKING FREELANCER

Looking for someone who has experience of Contao (Typolight) CMS and is able to take PSD and make them work with the templating system in Typolight. Please only contact me if you can show me a Contao site you have done.
Remote work is fine
peteloaf [at] me.com
The fact that one kid got a macbook pro's worth of money by selling a kidney by not being cautious (he was surely not aware of the consequences on his future life) doesn't mean that there will be an epidemic of kids with the guts or lack of wisdom to do something like this. A good thing, no doubt.

I struggle to see a great incentive with I put $3k on a scale vs health issues, a major surgery, etc. I like to think kids are generally smarter than this one was.
Don't they use off-duty doctors or assistants (or even someone who just learned it from someone else) and just use available space, e.g., strip mall offices? If you're buying trafficked organs, you'll often find other ways to get them transplanted.
The problem is that teaching isn't a meritocracy. We talk about how hard it is to evaluate coder skill, but it's infinitely easier than evaluating teacher skill. Throw in institutional, cultural, union factors, and how far-reaching the implications are to every single person in the country, and you can see why it's such a clusterfuck of a problem.

That said, I think teachers are undervalued and scapegoated in society in a lot of ways that certainly harm our ability to produce great teachers.
Quite amusing but sometimes the bulldozer is just a self-entitled jerk who thinks the rules don't apply to them (eg. people who cut in front of lines, people who drive pass a long line of cars waiting to merge and wait until the very end, people who come late to synagogue who KNOW that if you come late you're supposed to wait outside).

Maybe a great example of this is AirBnb. Apparently spam is evil if everyone else does it but not if you're AirBnb. Bulldozing much?

On the other hand, I've "bulldozed" at times and have felt really guilty afterwards. For example, a few friends and I went to a busy restaurant on a Saturday night and the wait was something like 1.5 hours. It was literally a mob by the door. Names are being called out for the next table and I realize that, at times, no one is responding (because they've changed their mind and left). So I waited until a name was called and no one responded in the first 10 seconds, and claimed that name. We probably waited 10 mins total.

We were happy to disobey the rules, cut and sit early but everyone felt a tinge of guilt afterwards.
Yes, I think the main difference is that run-time changes are allowed. C++ composition and things like mixins using templates allow combining without inheriting but everything is statically typed at compile time.

Of course all this dynamic stuff and more is still possible in C++, in fact, C++ features could be used to build a better "dynamic patching" mechanism than C, so it's not really an argument against using C++ at all, I'm a big fan myself.

The interesting question remains whether C code, no matter what kind of feature is implemented, is inherently easier to maintain for a project like the Linux kernel.
"On a different note, this brings forth interesting questions about establishing free markets for human organs. Proponents say that this would be a win-win situation. Stories like this show that such a thing would need very tight regulation."

If the market was free he would get paid more, all the risks associated with getting caught, limited access to information and extra barriers to entry push up what percent the "transplant agents" and reduce what the donor gets.

Not to mention the dead weight loss that we would get after regulating when there's people willing to sell and people willing to purchase.

And I don't see why Chinese people having a different indifference curve aka consumption preferences than Americans or some other country is a bad thing. If that's what makes them happy let them spend their money the way they want to.
Note that people spending a big portion of salary on phones, designer clothes etc. is not exclusive to China, rich Asian countries like HK, Japan, Taiwan, Korea and few more have the same thing. Simply a different culture.
Seems at best this is entrapment (assuming there is indeed a civil equivalent), and at worst this is outright fraud and extortion. I honestly can't see why they would actually file a suit on these. Sending the initial letters makes sense, but actually sending it to court is insane.
Price Discrimination is All Around You