skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, hopefully this HN thread won't be filled the comments like "you can't trademark dictionary words" (you can) and "do I infringe if I use the words scrolls in this posting?" (no). But just in case, in an effort to get some facts in:

1) The aim of a trademark is to protect the consumer.

2) The infringement standard is "likelihood of confusion" i.e. might consumers perceive Scrolls to be related to The Elder Scrolls? (IMHO I think that's a valid question)

3) Trademark owners MUST -- in order to preserve their mark -- defend against cases of infringement. In other words, Bethesda and their lawyers aren't just "being jerks." They have no choice but to act if they think there might be consumer confusion that dilutes their mark. (IMHO there is, and thus they are doing what they have to do).
Lesson #1 if you have an international product: don't use euphemisms. Either be straight (no pun intended), or don't ask the question.

The problem is of course that in some cultures, speaking in euphemisms is so deeply ingrained that the speakers are no longer aware of it.
I already use Ethernet over household wiring to get data from the uverse router to my wife's office. I think it's 200 Mbs, but whatever, it's completely transparent to use. It may be the only completely foolproof piece of hardware in the house.
Callcatcher: collect functions/methods defined and subtract called/referenced
I've seen two conventions for conflicting flags: complain and bail out, or "last one wins" so in your example, -x.
Tellingly, the article almost completely ignores the apparently sizable number of US ISPs that return something very different from NXDOMAIN ("not found") when you ask for a nonexistent domain name.

A working DNS server is a good thing.
> It is only valid to someone who already believes patents are terribly immoral.

It doesn't assume you believe patents are as immoral as slavery; I already made that specific disclaimer. It assumes that, yes, you do take strong moral exception to software patents.

I work for a small company that is vehemently anti-patent even though we do enough novel work that we could file hundreds of patents each year that would fall in the top percentile of innovation among patents. The company has been around for a long time and some of our products are in very patent-encumbered areas like video and audio codecs. We do license patents from others where necessary; for example, every Miles license we sell includes licenses for Thompson's MP3-related patents.
I'm kind of wondering what would happen to an entrepreneur who started selling these kinds of devices direct to soldiers, through the mail.
So Rockstar should have sued the makers of Thief because it's awfully close to "Theft" in GTA? If someone came out with a game called "Auto" then they should be sued, too?

This is just silly. Nobody's going to confuse a game put out by Mojang for anything in the TES series. I'm all for protecting trademarks when they're legitimately threatened (see Notch's example of the iOS Minecraft clone), but this is stupid.
The book Wired for War is also good.
social networks don't have real informative comment

I beg to differ. I mostly use facebook to keep in touch with my extended family. Most of it is updates on our children. While that is probably of little significance to anyone outside my extended family, it is important to us.

Others though use social networks to find jobs, talk about their most recent artistic project, discuss research, and keep in touch with business contacts. And those are within my social circles. If we step further out, they have been used as a tool with major political consequences in many places.
uh, what? I think your math is wrong. The game retails for 15 euros, that's 10,000 * 15 per day. The total revenue for the game is about 40 million euros.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system) for some background on this idea.
It is not entirely clear that patents would help much in that.

If it is not possible to keep something secret, patents would only help if people otherwise really would keep inventions secret. But there are ways to gain even without secrecy -- first-mover advantage, etc. -- and inventors would be attracted to those rather than nothing at all.

If it is possible to keep something secret, then those motivated by the gains from patents would choose secrecy in preference, since secrecy is an even stronger monopoly.
I think it's a bit of a stretch to confuse the two, especially since the Elder Scrolls series games are known more by their subtitles (Skyrim in this instance). "Elder Scrolls V" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. Sure, the trademark contains the word "scrolls", but by this logic no one could ever use the word scroll in a game title as long as the trademark is in effect.

On the other hand it seems like it could be a good defensive maneuver, as a trademark by Mojang on the name "Scrolls" by itself could be a bigger issue down the road.
Too bad that site takes ages to load up an iPad specific theme which makes the site slower and harder to use. This is getting to be a real irritation when trying to read sites on an iPad.

I'm hoping Erica Sadun can be persuaded to extend her sites of shame to include this.
Notch is playing the PR game here very well by publicly outing the case. Even if Bethesda has a valid claim (which is debatable) Notch has public opinion on his side. Someone at Bethesda should pull the plug on this suit before the Internet turns on them.
Well, that’s obviously separate. The issue at hand is whether you can trademark a single word in your trademark and, without using it anywhere on its own, keep it as a trademark (ignoring, for the moment, whether or not there can be confusion).

It’s a bit off-topic, really, since there only seems to be a trademark for “The Elder Scrolls”, not “Scrolls”. This is all about the possibility of confusion.
Take your jack ... and shove it ...
Success has a thousand fathers. All successful projects are retrospectively "agile" (or so the agilists claim). There are no agile projects that fail (including the original Chrysler project whose sponsors shut down the program and threw the team (consisting of the agile founding fathers) out. In that case you just redefine failure.

If you can show that Mojang does TDD, 'story' card walls, velocity tracking or kanban pipelines or any of the concrete "developing practices" (to use your term) pushed by the agile consultant folks (vs some motherhood "values" that can be retrospectively applied to any successful project try say Google+ instead of MineCraft and you could call it an "agile" success story too) then you'd have more of a case.[1]

Otherwise you could label any successful project anywhere "agile".

[1] I am not saying Mojang doesn't do "agile". Maybe he does - in which case a comment that explained which concrete practices he found useful would be great. I am just tired of agilists latching on to any and all successful projects and calling them "agile" to the point where "agile" becomes a synonym for "successful".
I got one too many, thus the post :)
No one is required to live in <country of residence>. If you don't agree with their policies, then vote with your feet. </sarcasm>
Is what you are writing there also applicable in Sweden? I think that’s kinda important, especially with regards to 3).
That may be true in other fields, but that argument makes some assumptions about invention and production that don't hold true for software.

First, the notion that production is so expensive that a lone developer cannot realize their idea. This isn't true. Any developer can build and market a product single-handedly, in the majority of niches of the software market.

Secondly, the idea that a patentable idea is born first, and then a product is built based on it. That happens now and then, but it's rare (e.g. RSA patent). The common case is that a developer sets out to build a better mousetrap, delivers a piece of working software, and only afterwards realizes they've had a patentable idea. By that time they also have a marketable product.
he did: "[suggest] that it was the judge's age that caused him to make an error"

he didnt: "[use] the judge's age in support of the first argument"

forgive me; perhaps you could clarify the difference?
It annoys me that I'm in the process of starting a user group in the "remote" Northern Michigan. In the beginning I emailed a personal invitation to the larger tech companies in the area just to come and hang out. Mingle with developers, and eat free food that I was sponsoring. I even chose "softer" topics so it didn't come off as 100% geek. I didn't receive a single response.

In fact, a couple developers from one of the companies attended frequently, and it was a few months into it that they found out I sent an email to their company. They found out about the group from different channels. Whoever received the email didn't even forward it on.

A month ago, I received a call from a recruiter asking if I knew anyone in the group with a specific skill set. They were hiring for another company that also ignored my email.

I'm only sponsoring the group because there aren't any running up here, and I enjoy helping grow a software community. When companies want to hire people, but don't take the initiative to meet potential candidates who are obviously interested in their work, they are neglecting a very obvious talent pool.
I think it's still open to interpretation. The world theft is much more common than "Scrolls" and it's all about the possibility of confusion.
> We do license patents from others where necessary

Why is this level of complicity ok with you, but obtaining a patent for defensive purposes is not?
Prof. Haas talked about using this technology in smartphones, but he didn't explain what would happen when my phone is in my (dark) pocket.
To clarify, you hire some (really expensive) people who start by prying the computer apart and making a copy of the hard drive(s). They then go through it, looking for interesting stuff in files (Word documents can contain previous versions, for instance), in the browser history, in unused parts of the drive (i.e. for deleted files), etc. There is no "operating the computer" in the conventional sense involved: using the computer would destroy evidence (i.e. overwrite deleted files).

In cases like this, I'd imagine one would have an obligation to respect the owner's privacy (except where relevant to the case) - dragging all his/her porn into court is not exactly classy.
Honestly,I would be offended. Good work is demonstrated by output. Having the feeling of someone looking over your shoulder is a statement of a lack of trust and confidence. I can't speak for you or your situation, but I would openly communicate this and try to find a solution that is mutually beneficial. Maybe your manager is concerned about the level of output, which can be measured in different less intrusive ways.
Try to identify his motivation and find a solution that works for both parties.
Aren't you paying attention? That should be obvious from the title of the discussion.

They want to be able to use 'fake' names.
Right, showing how it's in beta.

I guess my main point is that 3 million users might not be the best for a beta game. It might work in the end, but I think Minecraft might get bogged down with 3 million users making suggestions to a non-complete game.
My understanding is HTTPS only encrypts the content of the page, not the actual URL request.

(And it's worth noting that proxies can unwrap HTTPS).
Why is the patent a mark of notability of a developer's work? I hold respect for developers that share their knowledge in plain sight and plain language, not for developers that cooperate in creating some impossible-to-read legal document that I will never derive any useful knowledge from.

Or put more succinctly: if you want my respect, don't patent your idea, blog your idea.
To be fair, this is a good way to make money if you don't plan on gambling often.. like once every 5 years. The probability of losing all your money with such a small number of occurrences is low.
So one of the interesting perspectives I ran across recently said basically that "industrialization destroyed a whole class of jobs leaving millions of workers with no further economic role ever. But those workers were horses."
GazeHawk intern here -- I wrote the article.

I have to disagree. The entire argument of the article is that people learn a specific pattern for looking at websites that they don't use in other contexts; putting a blank screen in front of them wouldn't trigger this pattern.

The test subjects were looking at a large variety of websites. Some used the top-left logo design and some didn't, but this didn't seem to make a difference -- almost everyone looked up and left with their second fixation. I might update the post to make this more clear.
They changed it since this hit the top of Hacker News, I'm REALLY impressed with the speed of rolling something like that out on the fly.
More complete information seems to be available here: http://bolinfest.com/coffee/features.html
Rumor: S&P Will Downgrade US Credit Rating After Markets Close
Dead cars
LAN-connected washing machine lets you know when your clothes are done
This is why I use Google's DNS servers (8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4).

I was surprised by this rather recently, when my girlfriend and I moved in with her brother to conserve finances (both his and ours, since their other brother had just moved out leaving him with larger-than-payable bills). I mistyped a URL and it came back with an ISP-provided search page, which infuriated/surprised me. As it turns out, I only had the wireless connection set to use GDNS, but I was temporarily using a wired connection until I could buy a new wireless router (the previous one was a modem/router combo from the ISP, despite the fact that when I returned it the woman at the desk "corrected" me when I told her I was returning the router, saying that they don't deal with routers. I just smiled, did my business, and left.)
That toy truck cost 300 fucking dollars??
Oh, you mean small or huge among indie developers. I'm not sure that's an important distinction. My understanding is the universe of discourse is all game developers, and that small and indie were independent qualifications.
Plenty of others have predicted the rise of unemployment in proportion to increased automation, and they've been wrong before. Maybe this time they'll be right. I don't know; I'm not economist nor do I possess a crystal ball.

What I do know is that this whole situation is terribly discouraging for young people fresh out of school. My partner, for instance, recently graduated with a degree in civil engineering from a very challenging private school. He's been unable to find work as a starting engineer after a six month search, and I'm frankly out of ideas on how to keep him optimistic. Add to all this that his dad, a senior electrical engineer, just got laid off, and any encouraging words I say start to sound very hollow indeed.

I fear that this high unemployment rate, temporary or not, is going to create a generation of career setbacks and failures to launch. A lot of people out there have it much worse, I know, but I still don't know what to say when this hard working young man can't even get responses back for internships and unpaid work.
but it's become so ubiquitous that having a Facebook profile has become necessary to participate fully in online life.

I must not be participating fully in an 'online life' then. When I look at my non-tech friends I do much more participating online than any of them do and they all have FB accounts and I do not.
"There is no reason sharing actions, etc., should not be handled by the user agent."

Wait, why stop there? Aren't there all kinds of actions that should be handled by the user-agent? There are N verbs that we could get excited about wiring up, across M potential service providers. Woo hoo!

Of course, once the enthusiasm for the shiny wears off, we don't really want to have to experience the web this way. Do we?
I didn't say that you had to believe that patents are as immoral as slavery. But you already have to believe that patents are intrinsically terribly immoral before your metaphor makes sense.

And as I said, just because something is sometimes or even often used for immoral purposes does not mean it is intrinsically immoral.
The only evidence you have to assert that the judge isn't "web-savvy" is his age. Creepy! A comment this dumb is evidence for how toxic the whole thread is, so let's all stop debating what is and isn't "ad hominem" and move on.
You Can Talk or You Can Do It
My ISP (Windstream DSL) started redirecting nxdomain responses years ago. I noticed when I mistyped a host alias I had set up for ssh and got back `connection refused` when it was not even a fully-qualified name.

Thankfully VeriSign did this to .com once with their SiteFinder service, so FOSS DNS servers generally have good support for assigning a particular IP address as "this is really NXDOMAIN". (Nowadays, I'm running Unbound locally anyway for DNSSEC.)

EDIT: the opening paragraph used to read "My ISP started doing this," but a closer look at TFA indicates this issue is about intercepting DNS queries to existing, legitimate search providers in order to substitute paid results.
Did AOL just out-Flipboard Flipboard?
forcing people? who the actual f-- is forcing anyone to use g+?

you would have far better luck arguing that you are forced to use your real name on facebook (as it seems "everyone is on facebook", and thus "you must be also" is a valid sentiment), but even there it's a biiig stretch..

and i don't ever remember the controversy of real names on facebook..
He's not posing as an objective third party.
It's "every man for himself" in the patent world today, as Google is discovering much to its dismay with Android. The flood of junk that today besets the system didn't used to flow through in this way. The combination of an under-funded, inadequately staffed, and not-properly-trained USPTO, antiquated standards of patentability that don't apply to a rapidly changing world of software innovations, judges who shrug their shoulders in passive reactive mode as lawyers push large numbers of ill-conceived cases through their courts, and a Congress that has little or no accountability to anyone beyond the self-interested parties who largely shape its agenda - all these and more have led to a crisis in the patent world that no one seems either willing or able to solve.

I personally don't think the answer lies in abolishing patents because I don't think there is or likely ever will be sufficient impetus behind such an effort to make it happen. There is more hope someday of doing away with software patents but this will take many years given the recent Bilski ruling and Congressional inertia.

I don't pretend to have an answer to this. I suspect that, long term, there needs to be a severe curtailment of software patents, if not an outright abolition, in order to bring the system in line with what it used to be 20+ years ago. I have represented innovators for decades. In the past, I used to tell them: don't copy someone else's code unless you have a right to, watch out about misusing a former employer's IP, etc. and you will be fine. Today, I can't do that. Anyone can wind up infringing all sorts of nebulous patents at any time simply by doing completely independent and innovative work using nothing but one's own skills, knowledge, and talents. That is a very sorry place to be, and it has to change but how and when - that is what is so very frustrating. The author of this piece has the right sense of things but he, like me, winds up at the end basically howling at the moon in frustration over the utterly dispiriting short-term course of events.
Or skip to 12:40, to get right to the interviewers first question and Eric's subsequent response.
I'm in the middle here. I don't think this piece holds much weight because he's connecting two unrelated phenomenon (a downturn caused by overuse of credit and automation). Note the retailers he cites (Circuit City, Sharper Image, KB Toys) were generally killed off by other local retailers (most notably Walmart but also Best Buy, Toys R Us, etc...)

That said I do believe automation will begin to eat away at jobs when we get to the point where robotics can duplicate the functions performed by low end labor. What I mean by that is up until now computers have largely replaced more cerebral occupations. That allowed the people in those occupations to move on to higher level thinking.

Think of the growth in economic theory since the computer was invented. That had a lot to do with the fact that we can now test economic models in minutes instead of months because a computer can do the calculation.

So in those cases the computer didn't replace the job it just enhanced it. But dock workers doing heavy lifting aren't going to to turn into robotics engineers. Meaning the change coming with robotics will be different from previous technology shifts. So in that sense I think he's correct.
Out of curiosity, was this particular quote taken from HN, a more formal interview, or a blog posting that you wrote?
Interested in the answer too.

But i don't think there is.
FocusWriter is a simple, distraction-free writing environment
I disagree. Mojang is a small indie development team with a small game, and a huge fanbase. Being popular does not make them big. It makes their market big.
This isn't just a translation issue, it's also a cultural-attitudes issue as well. Why do we even put sexual preference as one of the primary line-items on your profile? For the US (or at least US college undergrads), this makes sense: it's relevant information that you want to share. But when you take it international, it may not be relevant, or may not be something you want to share. There are a few countries where homosexuality still carries the death penalty, quite a few where it's far more taboo than the US, and plenty of other ones that practice arranged marriages instead of open dating. A social networking site created in countries like those would never consider putting dating preference in their profiles at all, much less how to phrase them. Even if the phrase were translated appropriately, it wouldn't make sense to ask it.

Considering that, it's probably better to leave it open to local interpretation.
Okla. Woman Claims Famed Hijacker Is Her Uncle
An Oklahoma City woman says she’s certain her uncle is DB Cooper, the man who the FBI says

hijacked a plane in 1971 and parachuted away over the Pacific Northwest with $200000 ransom
Next, Game Designer's Workshop suing Blizzard for using the word "war".

(Never mind that I bet that GDW has to have some agreement / settlement with Blizzard, known or unknown…)
That sucks. I graduated in 2009 with a degree in Biochemistry, I fought for 7 months to get a job-- and when I did, I was laid off pretty quickly.

I wish that I had watched this when I first started job hunting: http://tedxcmu.com/videos/charlie-hoehn

I think his plan is good. The job hunt is dumb, demoralizing, and at the end of the day you aren't really making anything. Your partner should learn something! (Maybe learn programming? There's lots of jobs in that-- that's what I switched to.) At the very least he should continue doing civil engineering projects on his own. Boost his portfolio.

(oh, also, my dad is an economist and he has a crystal ball. Best gag gift for an economist!)
For some reason I imagine this story would end in court with a multimillion dollar lawsuit. Does anyone have the knowledge to spek to Estra's question, or know of an example of this? If it's legal I'm sure people are already doing it.
If you're asking me personally, it's because in the first case you're adding to the ever-burgeoning sea of patents and thereby increasing drag on innovation and curtailing programmer freedom. I don't think the kind of sublicensing we do with Thompson is totally without negative consequences in terms of complicity, but it's of much lesser concern to me.
Google Closure: How Not to Write Javascript

http://www.sitepoint.com/google-closure-how-not-to-write-jav...