skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Without Stalin at the helm, would they have entered into the Hitler-Stalin pact? That is, without the Soviet Union's support for Nazi Germany, would the war have happened as it did? Somewhat unlikely.

The pact was just about gaining time, for both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Both sides knew war was inevitable, they just didn't know exactly when.

The war wouldn't have happened "as it did" -- that's a tautology: "if you changed something, things would have been different". But if your question is "would war have happened at all?" then the answer is "yes". The Nazi political system required war, couldn't function without it, and it was spelled out in Hitler's writings from way before the war. Lebensraum, reparations/vengeance for WWI, extermination of inferior races, all of that requires war. And given the conditions of the world at that time, almost inevitably a highly destructive war.
Have you ever applied for your dream job and never even received a reply back? Then this short web game is for you.

A Rejection Story by Faezeh Khomeyrani and Arghavan Khaefi
Not allowing a single digit to be 0 is a 10% reduction though, is it not?
Yep. I agree OpSec is truly important. But you know we (university) wont teach you that :)
> copying for Java’s beauty rather than being purely functional

How would "beauty" be defined here. In the context of copyright, it would seem to apply to aesthetic beauty, but I'm not sure that applies to code (despite all sorts of engineers using the metaphor for theirs or others work).
You are surely trying hard to rewrite history..
Who had reusable first stages 30 years ago?
> the concept of "fair use" was specifically intended as an "extension point"

Yes, but to a textualist how the law was intended doesn't matter! (I'm mostly joking, I agree with what you meant to say here, I think.)
Same. As tempting as it is to try and make code/documentation clear for others (which I do), I do it as much for 6-months-from-now me. This practice has saved me hours if not days over the last couple of years, and hopefully inspires other devs in my company to do the same.
It's still silly. Imagine if you needed to purchase a license for the shape of plug that fits inside a standard plug socket - to build any appliance.
The US spends $2B USD/day on the military, but can't pay a few hundred people to do this on a regular basis and put the results on a public webpage for everyone to see.

The priorities are all out of whack. Government-provided water should be government-monitored water (all data for such should be publicly available and accessible immediately).
Tom Bombadil was in the Fellowship of the Ring, not the Hobbit.

The thing about Tom Bombadil is that he was an enigma. He wore the ring and did not vanish. Instead, he made the ring vanish. It had no power over him. He was just completely orthogonal to this struggle, which detracts from its urgency. He was neither in the Ralph Bakshi film nor Jackson's, in part because it detracts from the dangerous atmosphere.
It's amazing what people can be made to believe. The non-religious, too, carry faith in all sorts of popular memes for which there's little/no evidence, just stories.
> Waymo is by far the furthest ahead, and they are basically at a good level 4, and that’s with cars with a suite of sensors that would make any Tesla blush.

You're absolutely correct, but there are far more people who want to make the argument that Tesla's ahead because they're "beta" on roads and "don't need LIDAR".

There's optimism, and there's reality-distortion field. I think a lot of people bought into the latter.
That may be true, I remember there was quite a bit of surprise when the Court of Appeals overrode the fair use jury finding (not so much because they decided differently, but rather the fact that they set aside the jury's finding at all).
Time for Oracle to pull out the Sun patent portfolio and start over.
An API design is also a creative and highly stylistic work. Anyone who has ever designed a large API, or suffered a poorly designed one, can attest to that. A bad design can work just as well as a good design.

Also, you are distorting the argument by making it about one method signature instead of thousands of interconnected types and methods that work together to present an ergonomic interface for the developer.
Well, it sounds like it's still the same test; it's just deciding that fair use cases must be decided by judges, not by juries. Which, as you say, seems like a good decision.
Yep. Logically any piece of code is X lines away from any other for sufficiently large values of X.
We’re so pissed at Google Tag Manager being included in a page of a website in error, that we’ll move our backups to a google service (that with certainty will track analytics at google indefinitely).
>Websites have no reason to use JavaScript

Put another way: "websites have no reason to execute code". Is a document with an embedded form a website or a webapp? what if one of the inputs is custom and requires some custom validation logic is the expectation from your train of thought that this logic must only execute on the backend?

Websites are interactive documents and they have been since the inception of the hyperlink. I struggle to draw a line where a website becomes a web app outside of the obvious examples at far ends of the spectrum.
That's totally awesome. Everyone always just jumped to JavaScript for that kind of thing with jQuery.
What about improved battery tech, Weight distribution, Software updates, Safety equipment, internal computers, in car entertainment, in-wheel motors, drive-train connections to electronic towing, theft deterrence ?
Can somebody more experienced than me chime in and say whether Bizen [1] could be worked to be a viable alernative to CMOS at least in some niches? While CMOS has accumulated decades of improvement, much of it wrt. lithography would be transferred.

[1] https://www.wafertrain.com/index.php/theprocess/what-is-bize...
However we are not covering the basic needs of the poor. People are still dying of hunger, exposure and disease.

We have more than enough collective wealth and resources to solve those issues, by securing housing, food and healthcare for everyone. Yet we choose not to, because it isn't profitable enough for those who already have plenty.

The "not even medieval lords had access to HVAC" argument ignores that the baseline changes as society evolves. And a lot of people in first world countries still don't have access to the things you mentioned. That is an absolute travesty.
Why should it have been evaluated first?

I understand the intuition you're getting at: logically, the first question could make the second irrelevant. But if the second question resolves the issue even when the first is construed in favor of the other party, what's the rationale for demanding the court focus on the first question?
> If you do copy an API because of it’s beauty and not for either interoperability with developers then it seems that you would run afoul of copyright.

So don't do that?

Why would you copy an API save to be inoperable?

If it's just to duplicate someone else's design, I think I'm okay with that potentially being a copyright violation.

What downside am I missing?
Neither your cookings or your websites have no pressure from business side, right?
When you get down to it, copyright is a whole bunch of contradictory rules. Courts decide every time there is a new kind of work, whether it is copyrightable or not. Trying to divine whether something is copyrightable by analogy to other kinds of works is a hopeless endeavour.
That... somehow seems fair? If what you are copying is the artistic expression and not the functionality, that seems like exactly the sort of thing copyright is supposed to be about.
'It had to be slightly weird': how we made GamesMaster
TFA:

> Despite mounting evidence of widespread contamination and health risks, the EPA has still not set an enforceable legal limit for PFAS in drinking water.
s/patent trolls/copyright trolls/

This case involved copyright, not patents. Copyrights are separate from patents.
The rich do not achieve anything on their own. They do so by employing a lot of labour and natural resources. And we know for a fact that the rich have disproportionate influence on regulation of labour practices and resources, skewing it drastically in their favour.

If we all worked together to make the world better, why should only a few benefit so much?
The actual engineering professions have professional certifications that you have to attain to be allowed to do much of the (especially safety-critical) work of the profession [0] without supervision.

[0] https://www.nspe.org/resources/licensure/what-pe
Good, now can we get a ruling that prevents Google, RedHat, Microsoft and others from wrecking FLOSS projects with their stifling influence?

Or prevent them from eradicating competing or even original projects by doing hostile rewrites or forks?
I was disappointed in the post -- a lot of the comments are complaining that the whole article could have been summed up as "they're non-profit -- donations, silly"; I agree[0].

And the answer was a bit of a non-answer. How do they make money[1]? Easy answer -- since the organization behind it is non-profit, it doesn't (which is even more confusing since the author seems to think their "stock" went up 1,100%?!). For me, however, the question isn't "How do they make money", it's "Are they able to make enough money that they will continue to be around for me to rely on?"[2].

If I were a Signal user, that last part would be the only reason I'd be interested in clicking, and the article didn't really answer that.

[0] Not knocking the author -- perhaps it's not a great post for the HN crowd because the summary version wouldn't have been news to any of us, but may have been news to people outside of our industry

[1] I've always loved that statement -- "Make" Money -- but I would have chosen something more precise; I read it as "How is Signal Profitable", hence my taking issue with the answer, but I equally recognize that I'm being pedantic.

[2] Which, itself, is simply a variant of "When I need it, will it work?" -- important, because (knowing nothing about Signal other than the name and its relation to WhatsApp) if the product can survive without the company (i.e. software that operates without server hardware managed/funded by a company -- Bitcoin)
"It is the research of hundreds of historians who have carefully assembled thousands of quantitative estimates that inform us about us about people’s living conditions that give us this global perspective on the history of poverty.
In public discussions of the history of poverty the extent of this careful work is often overlooked. Such a deceptively simple chart on the global decline of poverty may then be easily dismissed as being based on little evidence."

Similar to how the plots themselves contain and compress a multitude of information, and we've all learned some generally shared ways to process that information (what an upward sloping means, what diverging lines mean, and others), is there a way to add information such that we have a similar shared way to process the _source_ of the data? I know that listing of sources themselves are intended for this, but unless it's your actual job to process that type of information it seems unreasonable to ask a normal person trying to live their life to track down that final information.
Ok, so what is Oracle's next move then?
Loving FastAPI + Postgres for the (small) amount of backend work I do at the moment.
When and How to Start Content Marketing for Your Startup
Look at this part at the end:

> The future use of these features without supervision is dependent on achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers as demonstrated by billions of miles of experience...

Many people would interpret that as "we are going to ship these features when they are going to be reliable, and we are going to keep on working on them until they are" but it actually means "if we manage to make them reliable, then they'll be usable without supervision, but we might not do so, so you might have to supervise the thing forever."

It has the hardware that is needed for full self driving (but that might require active supervision). It is designed to not require action by the person in the driver's seat (but is supervision really an action?).

People don't talk this way with one another, but that's how corporations talk. Comcast may say "200 megabits* (*where technology allows)" which means that one might get 200 megabits, or one might not and they have enough fine print to make sure that they can get away with it. Some VP might say "we'll never sell your personal information" and then a few years later it turns out that they do sell your personal information, because it's allowed in the fine print, the VP isn't with them anymore, the product has been renamed from Foo to Foo+, and clearly the VP was referring to Foo, not Foo+. Assume positive intent with people; for corporations, assume the shrewdest intent that the legal team will argue for if they were to be in court.

Now back to Tesla, maybe they will ship FSD, with no supervision required, and people will be able to watch Netflix while commuting to work. Maybe they won't. It'd be pretty cool if they did ship it. They have enough wiggle room in the feature description to not have to ship it, that's all.
God, flipping through those magazines brings a tear of nostalgia to my eye. Those were such different days.
Imagine if a guy stole your $500 TV, did $500 worth of damage to your window to get it, then sold it for $100. After he was caught, instead of going to jail his insurance was ordered to pay you $200.
That analysis is addressing an argument that the Supreme Court could not overturn the finding that it was not fair use. That argument was based on the Seventh Amendment's reexamination clause. The Supreme Court held that the reexamination clause did not prevent it from addressing this issue, because the question is a mixed question of law and fact, i.e., it's a legal conclusion based on evidentiary facts. The Supreme Court cannot re-examine the "underlying facts," but the Seventh Amendment does not preclude it from deciding, as a matter of law, whether those underlying facts constitute fair use.
I have been kinda interested on how old a civilisation with human like technology could be. That is at what point is there planets with sufficient amounts of heavier elements like Iron and stuff needed for semi-conductors. As with search for radio signals somehow those need to be generated. Further leads to question when such planets cooled enough to have reasonable atmospheres that are not too hot. After all these are some constraints.

On other hand good question is how much faster evolution of more "complex" life could have been.
Sandboxing in Linux with zero lines of code (2020)
Lol. When i hear "blackwater" i think sewage, ie the blackwater holding tanks on ships. This is really bluewater diving at night.
If they had provided good benefits and working condition, the workers will not be incentivized to form unions, right? Why are they not doing that?
Now? I've personally heard quantities of code measured in "lines of code" (or, thousands of lines of code-- "K-LOCs") going back to the mid-90's. An acquaintance who worked for IBM in the 70's said it dates back at least that far (measuring developer productivity in the "K-LOCs" they produce).
Which Rust templating tools are you using for server side HTML rendering?
I have around 25 years of web development experience and I'd also put some of the blame on PMs and growth hackers who want to build rich UI experiences where often a simple site would suffice. Add UX people with limited knowledge of HTML and CSS, or backend engineers who only want to build APIs. All the trackers and auto playing videos do not help either. Ah well...
Test Flight for Sunlight-Blocking Research Is Canceled
The interesting question is how broad this fair use ruling is. According to the Supreme Court's other fair use cases, fair use is highly fact-specific and therefore case-specific.

What kinds of actions and motivations by Google could have led to a determination that the use was not fair?

Or is Embrace/Extend/Extinguish as practiced by the big tech companies now always protected by fair use?
You can FaceTime call a person using their email as identifier, or use voice call button in whatever IM they're using. If all these internet communications were interconnected, we would not need phone numbers anymore.
uBlock origin has a convenient font blocker, for what is worth. Saves many kilobytes, and readability.
I am not a lawyer, but I don't see why not.

Have you ever used code generation as part of software you have built?

Is there any reason why generated code could not be copyrighted as part of a larger system?

For example, suppose I define a data model for a public-facing API and then generate SDKs in various popular programming languages to interact with the public-facing API.

If I were a major corporation that owned such a public-facing API, then I would expect that the generated SDKs would carry the major corporation's copyright.

edit: Another example of generated code would be the code generated by lexer analyzer generator and parser generator tools such as lex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_(software)), flex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flex_(lexical_analyser_generat...), YACC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Yacc), and bison (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Bison).

If you create commercial software that includes YACC-generated code, wouldn't the generated code be copyrightable?
Recently I got into a web app idea, which does not require any search engine indexing (mostly admin-heavy stuff), and I gave Flutter Web a try (note: I was using Dart on the server side for a long while, and occasionally as compiled to JS too).

No regrets so far: it is productive and handles complex state really well.
In the same way as for passwords.
Could the first problem be prevented at a legal level? The app company itself files some sort of legal document preventing itself from falling prey to that sort of corruption (although, really, the first time they did that the company would go under because nobody would use it ever again)

The second problem is harder... maybe the tech could be designed such that nobody, including the makers of the app, could see the list until/unless a quorum is reached? I can't believe I'm saying this, but could the blockchain be useful here?
Why? It wasn’t about whether APIs are under copyright (they are), but whether this particular case constitutes fair use. I think the effect of this decision was way overblown.
Designing an API is a creative work not unlike that of an architect, I see the merit in the dissent pointing out, e.g "there may have been only one way for Google to copy the
lines of declaring code, but there were innumerable ways
for Oracle to write them. Certainly, Apple and Microsoft
managed to create their own declaring code."
It's rather easy for connected people extract money out of the military budget than from the water one.
Those people are just thieves, but they also got an entire force that could otherwise investigate this type of fraud busy fighting the "war on drugs".
Life as we know it on earth came about very, very late in the age of the universe. That’s not just fascinating (as facts about the universe generally are), but also highly surprising. That we’re here now seems to be a big fluke. Considering how much humans have evolved in understanding things around us and having the capacity as a species to create larger and coordinated changes, the daily news we see is generally such a huge disappointment. “Squandering” doesn’t even cover what we’re doing to the only planet we can inhabit for now.

> But life’s signatures will not last forever. The prospects for life in the distant future are gloomy. The dark and frigid conditions that will result from the accelerated expansion of the universe by dark energy will likely extinguish all forms of life 10 trillion years from now. Until then, we could cherish the temporary gifts that nature had blessed us with. Our actions will be a source of pride for our descendants if they sustain a civilization intelligent enough to endure for trillions of years.

Let’s hope we’re able to give the gift of wonder and awe to many more generations to come.
This isn't an opinion, this is a proven fact given that Reddit blocks many subreddits from being accessed from the browser when using the default UI, redirecting to their app, for no reason other than moving users to the app. They do not even pretend for there to be any other reason for they have never given any explanation as to why they do this. It's some of the most user-hostile behaviour I've seen, even the usual suspects don't block basic access.
Suing over the same question wouldn't get very far. The best approach would be suing over a closely related question. See coomoo728's analogy to Roe v. Wade: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26699621
I hope you’re this insulting sometimes in person because it would be great if you got the kind of consequences that come of that kind of language.
I will really enjoy seen LG pushing some drivers code upstream.

Postmarketos and the Linux community can benefit a lot from it.
Yes, I interpreted that to be the point, considering a lot of the UI elements of Windows today first debuted with 95. It's a lot more difficult to convince young users to spend time to learn a console environment when a "modern" GUI is already available -- kids in early 90s did not have that choice.

FWIW, my first ever computer had Win95 installed, so I grew up believing that the start menu was always a given, and I thought DOS was just part of the computer start-up procedure.
It's really the people writing the requirements who are driving a lot of these things. Customers are used to Gmail, FB etc. and want similar experiences.
we really should do away with tax-advantaging corporations. those regulations have done the work they were designed to do, which is not, strictly speaking, to 'encourage investment', but rather to juice the american economy into global competitiveness. now what we need is to more widely disperse capital to again encourage competitiveness, an edge we're losing rapidly as capital stagnates in the west (as opposed to the vibrancy of the east and global emerging markets).
This reminds me of the work of Dr. Adrian Thompson, University of Sussex in the 1990s on artificial evolution in reconfigurable hardware.
He programmed FPGAs with genetic algorithms.

Some of them were so effective, they contained pins that had no contact with other pins via traces, but still proved necessary for the functionality of the system.
The clue was, they were connected via the electromagnetic field of the circuit, or better influenced it in a necessary way.
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.50....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolvable_hardware
Evolvable Hardware was a shortlived thing in the mid to end 90s.
Perhaps some day it will get a second life so to say.
I am building a tool to construct internal apps quickly: https://www.jigdev.com

The idea is that developers who know business problems are usually bad at frontend. This is a tool to help them build web apps without much html knowledge.
You're reading too much into that. The user in this case is the programmer using the API, or even the code that uses the API. It's doesn't generalize to end user interfaces.
There's a couple of problems with it:

- In many of the most important areas, e.g. home ownership and choice of career, the poor in America have gotten poorer.

- Due to America's lack of campaign finance reform, extreme wealth allows the rich to buy off the government.

- Even if the poor get somewhat richer, that doesn't mean they got as much richer as they would in a more equitable system.

- Inequality becomes a problem if the rich control so much of a resource (e.g. housing) that there is not enough available for the poor.

- Inequality creates a power imbalance which can allow the rich to abuse the poor and/or make them unaccountable to society.