skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These are my comments from an earlier thread on this story:

IANAL, but arbitration clauses are standard in contracts[1] at least in the United States. Arbitration is generally seen as preferred because suing people in court is actually very expensive for the plaintiff, the defendant, and the court system.

In Sony's favor, Sony excluded small claims. So for pretty much everyone this arbitration clause is meaningless. The limit for small claims is in the thousands of dollars depending on state [2]. The circumstances where Sony would be liable for more than a few thousand to a single consumer would have to be pretty extraordinary. And yes, this includes losses due to identity theft. Although the expenses due to fraud can be high, the out of pocket damages to the individual are generally very low. As of 2006 the average out of pocket expenses were about $422 and on a downward trend [3]. Keep in mind that the federal government limits liability for credit card fraud to only $50 in the United States [4]. And most credit card companies actually limit the liability to $0. The actual costs of fraud end up getting absorbed by businesses as the financial institutions try to unwind the transactions as best it can.

Also in Sony's favor, Sony did not choose to use the arbitration clause to set an onerous jurisdiction. Sony could have said all arbitration needed to take place in a specific city in the middle of nowhere. Sony didn't even pick the location of its headquarters; you can pick any jurisdiction. Most arbitration clauses I've seen set a jurisdiction that favors the contract writer, so I'd say this puts Sony in a decent light for not doing the same.

Likewise, Sony does not cap damages awarded through arbitration. It could have easily set the maximum damages to some amount that would make arbitration a non-starter compared to small claims.

If you really wanted to find fault with Sony's particular arbitration clause, it would be that neither side can appeal the decision of the arbitration panel to a higher court. But keep in mind this cuts both ways, and it really isn't unusual. It is even endorsed in the United States.

I should also note that arbitration clauses can be voided if the panel can be proven to be biased. So this isn't necessarily a license for Sony to circumvent the law, at least against a well funded opponent. And anyone with the balls to sue Sony for any serious amount of money would be a well funded opponent.

NB. I understand arbitration clauses such as this may not be legal in some countries such as Germany. Whether that is good or bad I can't say. I'm sure the Germans thought it was good, though.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitration_clause

[2] http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/small-claims-suits-ho...

[3] http://www.bbbonline.org/idtheft/safetyquiz.asp

[4] http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/credit/cre04.shtm
Short of some form of becoming a lawyer, what percentage of the general population, or even just those following HN, have ever read a nontrivial amount of actual law? any laws at all?

(Took me years to comprehend just NY weapons laws.)

Ignorance of the law is the norm. When the laws one is subject to can be measured in cubic yards, something is awry. Contrast with the entire US Constitution fitting on one piece of paper.
I can't answer your question directly, but if you choose ruby, this book may be helpful:

http://www.amazon.com/Service-Oriented-Design-Rails-Addison-...
How do you deal with documenting the way the code gets mapped on to the GPU architecture? I've found that small tweaks in how things are laid out can cause huge performance gains (or losses) and if you've managed to automate that it would be really great.
No, there is more to it than that. It has to perform an aliasing analysis to prove that nothing that s points to changes. Consider this code:

unsigned sum(const unsigned char *s, char *t) {
unsigned result = 0;
for (size_t i=0; i < strlen(s); i++) {
result += s[i];
*t = 'x';
}
return result;
}

gcc can't hoist strlen() in this case, because *t = 'x' could potentially overwrite the null termination of s.
They should make this required viewing in high school civics classes. do they even have those any more?
Thank you for making this as simple as it should be.
The government, and its agents, are exempt from most laws.
What are you interested in? How in depth are you willing to study? I'm basically in the same boat and recently out of the blue developed a passion for math. I found there are plenty of free books available online. Right now I'm studying combinatorics, but every so often I take a couple of Khan Academy classes on trig. You might also want to check out Project Euler that offers the chance to combine math and programming.
Sure. Before the thoughts. Consider skimming through this book. It has a lot of helpful thoughts and practices when dealing with web design and layout. http://designingfortheweb.co.uk/book/

- I'm going to disregard your overall design on the site. I'll just say it could use the help of a professional designer rather than go down a laundry list. It's not HORRIBLE, but a lot could be done here to improve readability and visual navigation on the homepage. Consider it seriously before any large-scale launch.

- HOLY RUN-ON SENTENCES! Try to craft more succinct sentences. Get the the point so I can understand it and move on. Your front page suffers from this as well. Don't make me guess what you're doing, sending me through tours and about pages is sure to lose conversions. Never underestimate the power of copy.

- Feature a screenshot or a walk-through of your service in SIMPLE steps on your homepage. People need to get it in 5-6 seconds, or you've already lost.

- I think the videos are a good idea, but you have them buried in the footer of your page. WHY?! Maybe you thought that was where they made the most sense, but don't position them as tutorial videos. They are advertisements. Dub some music/voiceover on it and use it (appropriately) on the home page "below the fold".

- There's no reason why all of your "How it works" couldn't just be on the homepage. Use a slider or a fun interaction to invite users to switch between "Gifter" and "Giftee" steps.

- Get rid of the huge login box. Or at least make it smaller. You could use that real estate for something better.
Parallels. Sure, I can Boot Camp into Windows, but I prefer OS X for my day-to-day tasks and only use Windows for Visual Studio.
Request HN : Quora Invites, anyone?
Hello,

I will be really grateful if someone could give me an invite for joining Quora. None of the people I know have one. Email id = f2008342 AT bits-pilani DOT ac DOT in

Thanks.
> EDIT: Downvote HERE! For mentioning downvoting?

Yes, probably.

Don't complain about downvoting.

No, it doesn't matter how justified your complaint is. (And, absent any proof that you can read minds, you don't know why folks are downvoting.)
I don't understand why Yahoo still exists (or at least why it still gets so much coverage). At this point it's just a cheap knockoff of everything google does. Has anyone ever used Yahoo mail? It's a POS, it's bloated, slow, prone to failure - and it doesn't even work on linux. Same thing for yahoo maps, news, search, etc. I just don't get it.
That is because playbook requires a swipe up from the bottom bezel to bring up app list where you can close it. This is due to the ingenious functioning bezel it has, which removes the need for that lingering bottom bar as in android.
So in tablets, they're going to be in the same position as Windows Phone 7 - a great OS with a distinct app disadvantage and little consumer awareness. This only further raises the question of how much appetite device makers will have for a $75 (ballpark) software license, especially as these devices start to average closer to $400.
> Since you have nothing to hide, is it safe to talk?

Since you typically have nothing to gain by talking to law enforcement, why would you? It's all downside.
A sinking ship still has momentum.
Thanks. It's good to know you thought of them as ads. Maybe others will think the same, probably because that's the standard layout on most sites. Will moving the results to the left make it more intuitive?
My guess is that for ARM devices they'll use a different licensing scheme with a price tag closer to windows phone 7 of $5-10.
Latakoo helps TechCrunch send video fast
Perhaps because they write the laws?
66560 is a webkit issue. Webkit is an open source project. Webkit vulnerabilities are not disclosed until all the other consumers like Safari are updated.
Exercises That Will Help You Grow Taller
I noticed that too, but in fairness, it's worsened by the poverty of the medium (online forum discussion) which doesn't provide for emotional calibration. Our brains tend immediately to snap into a binary formation in response to what's presented. Since what I said on this (pretty charged) subject was provocative, it must mean that I oppose nurturing children and favor abusing them. Rationally that's absurd, but emotionally it's quite logical.

But in person, it wouldn't as likely come to that, because we could use many tools to calibrate - tone of voice, personal warmth, listening, etc. - and mitigate the extremes. Or we'd efficiently detect that a discussion can't get anywhere right now and save ourselves the trouble.

Anybody who figures out a technical solution to this problem is in a position to make a major contribution. Unfortunately, it may not be possible short of teleportation. We are wired for physical proximity.

p.s. For what it's worth, I have found every bit of effort toward becoming aware of this binary dynamic in oneself to pay off a thousandfold.
AlgoCompSynth Reading List (Updated 2011-09-15)
Well, since a lot of Windows software runs on .net framework's CLR (VM with a bytecode interpreter not unlike the Java VM), a lot of legacy apps actually should run just fine on ARM.
Nithya Menen in ‘Chattakari’ remake? - MalayalamBoxOffice.in - MBO
The sense of entitlement that people get when tax dollars are even remotely involved is astonishing. While I agree with the idea of open-access journals, I find this vigilantism crude and a bit naive.

If you think about it, the people also pay the salaries of corporate employees. You buy the product, it's your dollar at work. Yet nobody has the same sense of I paid you thus I deserve all your ip and time that they do when tax dollars are at work. I suppose it must have something to do with having a choice to pay: with taxes, you have none.

I can't shake the feeling that all of this has much less to do with people wanting to learn and much more to do with people wanting to take it to the man.
There is a legitimate benefit to developing sound recognition capabilities in machines. Sound is a very real part of the world around us. Most lifeforms capable of communication do so through sound. The sense of sound is a very important way of interacting with the environment. For these reasons, among others, robots will probably need sound-processing capabilities to successfully and fully navigate the world around them.

As for whether they need sound-based languages, that's a good question. Presumably the folks developing AI would like to keep that AI at least somewhat anthropomorphized, so that we will always have a sense for what the robots are doing. It's much easier to interact with, and teach, a robot when we're capable of communicating with it on a common ground.
Well, you know, MIT's introductory EECS course is now Python programming of robots, so as soon as those students start graduating ^_^....

Thanks for calling me on this rather mixed metaphor I've been using for a long time in a most amusing way. You're brightened my end of the week.
This law is broader than I'd prefer but I don't see how it's clearly unjust. Do you feel the same way about perjury? If not, what's the dividing line between the two?
You're not allowed to submit extensions/apps that use the experimental APIs.
Thanks. If this helps anyone else, the realisation I was missing was that the compiler must treat any write based off a pointer as a write to the thing pointed at. Which is conservative if there is no aliasing.
> What I mean is, that airplane example consists entirely of gamblers.

No, it doesn't. Either that, or everyone is a gambler.

Everything involves risk. The amount of risk tolerance is very context dependent and varies. For example, I'm much more willing to make an (inflation-adjusted) $10k "bet" now than I was 20 years ago. In another 20 years, I'll be less likely than I am now.
Note that C99 has added "restrict" for such cases, which essentially promises that the restricted pointer (and any pointers derived from it) is the only pointer to that chunk of memory.
> Websites before java? Yeah, that’s just like guitar before Eddie.

What
I don't get why investment banks exists. I don't get why casinos exist. I don't get why cigarette companies exist. I don't get why Fannie Mae exists.
wpengine sounds really expensive. $49/month for just 50k pageviews. My $39/month Linode setup handles a million page views with no sweat.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=todo+list
An officer is trying to gather evidence against someone, whom they have strong reason to believe is guilty. If the most expedient means for this is to threaten to fuck you over, they will do it.
Wouldn't it be wiser to wait until you see if you get fired, so you get the severance package? And if you don't, then get out?
New Chrome Blurs The Line Between Web and Native Apps
App yourself - build publish & share
bit.ly/mmYstA
Joel - I'm just wondering. With your reputation and clout, how would your product launch have compared if you'd just announced it via your blog / twitter / SO ? I wont be surprised if you'd have gotten a pretty good response via that method as well.
I think launching @ conf is even more important to others who dont enjoy the same reputation / following as you do.
In terms of usage, Hotmail is #1, Yahoo! Mail is #2, and Gmail is #3.
You can give it a try @ bit.ly/mmYstA
Commenting from a throw away account: I recently got an offer from Yahoo! I am pretty much new to this industry, stories like this makes me nervous :-(
or @ www.yabb.me
Interesting. I don't see /dev/random blocking on Mac OS X (13" MacBook Pro). I wonder what the source is?
Windows To Go: Windows 8 on a USB stick... every IT admin's dream?
Texas undergrad physics programs in peril because of low enrollment
Ways to improve on first impression...

- Screenshots are good. But I'm not really sure what I'm looking at. You're only cycling through two shots here, so maybe sit them side by side (or stagger them) with bullets which identify specific ways this interface makes Test Plan Management easier. (Ideally, your "Features" page would be covered here.) Take some time going around and checking out other people's landing pages. Read case studies. Take notes.

- Your primary call-to-action should be sign ups. Make that button the only thing the user sees when they land. Give them NO other distractions other than going toward the action you want them to take. The tour button should be a less visible link. If the user wants more information, they can scroll down to get your Pricing, Contact, etc. The only exception to this might be your login.

- I think your pricing page is a little complicated. The only metric which changes from plan to plan is the number of users. Eliminate this WHOLE THING. Here's how your flow should work: Signup starts a personal account. They can add users if they want and make sure they are aware of the price for the number of users they want. If they add more than 5 plans, then tell them you have to charge at this point. Trial plans, different tiers, etc ALL confuse the user and don't help your conversions at all.

- As mentioned, the name could use work. It doesn't have to be flashy. But it SHOULD be memorable.
Not really. This was just someone who "seemed" to not want to listen at all. No eye contact, distracted, no bites on open ended statements, nothing. A meeting with no pulse and just a couple of statements. 2 minutes in, I noticed he wanted to get back to his email, which he did, and then returned to fidgeting with something on the table and no eye contact. By then I just wanted to leave since it seemed like a mutual waste of time.
What would Yahoo have to do for you for it to get your business?

http://everything.yahoo.com/

Take a look at all the services yahoo offers.

Has anyone ever sent you a "Yahoo Video" link? I didn't even know it existed until just now. And the prominent video on the main page is "Jazz for Cows" which I can't get a direct link for to paste here. Yahoo only offers me the option to embed it. It's fun enough I want to send it to my friend who plays in a local orchestra, but Yahoo is not concerned with the organic spread of links. http://video.yahoo.com/

It isn't just youtube Yahoo competes poorly with. Craigslist, Gmail, ESPN, every news site on the internet.

Just take a look at their "security" offering http://security.yahoo.com/

Paragraphs of copywriting but no product to download or install. Click "Protect your PC" it's just more words. Lots of words. Someone at Yahoo took the time to create this page for what purpose? There is no direction whatsoever.

Their primary search function is powered by Bing now too. About the only near-market leader Yahoo controls is Flickr and that's only because pros like it over Facebook.

Yahoo! became the bitbucket to store second rate implementations of every idea the internet has ever had, and they aren't cutting the cruft loose, or differentiating on the products that are quality.

In fact, take a look at their mobile offering.
http://m.yahoo.com/w/sports/ncaaf/teams/ncaaf.i-a.2?.ts=1316...

That's the Big East Team list for College Football. It's not standings. It doesn't show records. Some project manager at Yahoo accessed the mobile sports site and either didn't care enough to say "Why can't I see the standings?" or didn't know enough about sports to care about standings. Why does Yahoo! have someone like that in charge of the mobile sports division (If they even have someone in a leadership position anywhere close to such a segment). Someone thought displaying 8 teams in alphabetical order was good usability.
ACTRESSES WITH BREAST ENHANCEMENTS
Well, we've managed to automate some of it -- things like the memory allocation/transferring we've got down fairly well and the new API we'll be releasing soon will take care of any edge cases.

For some things, like how your structs are organized/laid out, we haven't automatically optimized that yet -- but one advantage of using .NET (vs. native code like CUDA or OpenCL) is that the CLR specs allows a lot of freedom in implementation; so in the future, we could pretty easily implement some code to analyze your data layout / access patterns and reorganize things under the hood for better performance. All without you needing to rewrite your code, of course ;)

As time goes by though, and solidify the rest of our codebase, we'll be able to spend more time adding optimizations to the JIT compilers to get your code running as fast as the hardware allows, as often as possible.
In the US and Canada, at least, they usually are open to the public.
I think it's a wholly legitimate thing to do, and it requires no apology. I do it all the time. Pretty much every time I come across a new link here, I rapidly and subconsciously run a few checks on it before clicking it open:

1) Is the title relevant to my interests?
2) How many upvotes has it received?
3) How many comments has it received?
4) (Upon scanning comments) Are the comments interesting?

The only problem with this method is that it can tempt you to reply to comments without actually having read the article in question. That's bad form, of course.
As interesting as this article may be, it does not belong on HN.
Some reference style posts are not intended to be read in full. I've done a few of these on my blog such as comparing the 5 major browsers, how good the iPod touch is for reading many different sorts of reading material, best aa batteries which describes the different battery technologies and includes a buying guide, etc. I organize the material so that people can read the specific sections that are of interest to them, and skip the rest. Google Analytics (a crude measure, I know) tells me that average time spent reading per page on these reference posts range from 4 minutes (the browser post) to 14 minutes (the battery post). So pretty sizable chunks of the posts are being read (by those who continue on to a second page, at least).

Then again - these being reference posts - the vast majority of readers come in through Google search looking for answers or advice, which is obviously much more targeted than a community news site. The times are far lower on days where a bunch of people come in due to a listing at Hacker News or Reddit.
"THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM..."? :-D

(Great movie, watch it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177/ )
It's not the officer personally, but there is a massive impersonal system of wheels and gears turning to result in him contacting you. It's easy for an innocent person to get sucked in and crushed by such machinery.
> The point is that Sony is disclaiming responsibility for anything it does wrong.

nope. you can still go to arbitration or small claims.
Pravilana.com
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Atleast they should reduce the time after which a journal/research paper becomes out-of-copyright. As is with the patents. And then they can searched freely.
Here's What You Get With a Tea Party Victory
Other folks in this thread have gone into more detail, but the courts have indicated that EULAs with arbitration clauses are typically considered legal.
You can also leave a comment in our blog:
http://pravilana.wordpress.com/
If vultures are descending, I would think it would be better to wait. The bidding war will temporarily bump up your stock price & options, giving you a better time to sell them. Then the vultures will offer buy-outs to encourage employees to leave. I doubt the vultures will be overly generous in their buy-outs but it can still amount to a substantial amount of cash if you've been there a while.
What reason is there to assume any differently?

For that matter, what advantage is there for you to assume any differently? (tip: there is none.)
Well said. It's not like you get brownie points or cash if you talk to them, give them helpful information, or prove your innocence.
Notice there is no iOS/OSX fat binary - because the only approved apps for iOS are all from the App Store.
Conway's Game of Life using canvas
Yet another Javascript implementation of Conway's Game of Life using canvas.
I'd have gone with derailing train.
This article is based on a false premise. The effect of LBOs on job creation is ambiguous:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1034178

Silver Lake, in particular, is more of a growth equity firm that happens to use debt.

(I work at, but by no means speak for, Yahoo.
Also, if you say something inconsistent, no matter how trivial, whether it has anything to do with the alleged crime or not, even if you are completely innocent, it will likely destroy your credibility in front of the jury and thus they will believe whatever paranoid fantasy the prosecution makes up. It could be something as trivial as you came back from your trip two months ago in the afternoon not in the evening as you had claimed, for example.