skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I agree it would be unwise to test this legal question in court, I think it is fair to say this is a murky legal question. The BATFE, the federal law enforcement agency responsible for enforcing US laws regarding firearms manufacture, have a history of arbitrary rulemaking in defiance of simple logic (for instance, in one famous rulemaking BATFE ruled that a shoe string would meet the legal definition of 'machine gun' if used to repeatedly fire a gun with a single pull of the trigger [1]).

Given this environment of legal uncertainty, it's not at all clear that BATFE would not pursue the 3D printer operator who produced the receiver. In this case, charges against the 3D printer operator would likely be unlawful manufacture of a firearm, possibly in addition to charges related to interstate transfer of a firearm. Given the creativity of some US attorneys, perhaps a conspiracy case would be made alleging the buyer of the printed part 'conspired' with the printer operator.

I would also suggest a lower receiver could probably be made from materials weaker than you might imagine. The lower receiver does not bear any gas pressures from the firing of the cartridge, though the holes for the roll pins which hold the hammer and trigger in place would probably start to 'egg' after a round or two. In any case, the legal question has nothing to do with how reliable the resulting firearm is; only whether it meets certain vague and broadly-interpreted legal definitions.

[1] http://www.everydaynodaysoff.com/2010/01/25/shoestring-machi...
And I can assure you that he has not committed a felony every day last week. You clearly don't understand the difference between regulatory infractions, misdemeanors, and felonies. A felony is a serious crime punishable by more than a year in prison.

A careful reading of the law will reveal that there is not, in fact, very nearly a law against everything.

Please take your trolling back to Reddit where it belongs.
Arizona Medigap Plans and Why You Need One
a lot of cgi scripts (perl 5, php 3). when the perl code was clean enough, we used mod_perl. i remember discovering fastcgi (which i still use) and being blown away by easy persistent db connections and just general performance wins.

on more serious projects, java (servlets, custom middle-tier) was common.
That, I assume, has nothing to do with all OEMs bundling Win7 with the computers they sell (and Win7 having no provision to be downgraded to XP like Vista had).

When OEMs tie their products to Win7, it's expected record hardware sales will translate precisely to "software success".

I think every PC around me (about 40 in this floor) counts as a Win7 sale. Two of them run Windows.
<3 SpiderOak. Any reason you guys don't host or mirror your code on Github? Makes it much easier for us curious tinkerers to keep your stuff organized and 'top of mind' among the many other things we fork, grok, and hack at.
In Arizona a person is not a contractor unless they can set their own times and their own pace to complete work that is assigned.

That means as a contractor you can't be forced to come into the office at 9:00 AM to work till 5:00 PM, if you are not allowed to set your own work schedule you are not considered a contractor and the company should be paying your taxes and you should be getting a W2 instead of a 1099.

They were fairly strict in that regard as well, my boss was paying me as a 1099 and I wasn't aware of this, and the business got audited by the IRS and he had to retroactively pay taxes and they talked to me and I had to redo my taxes for the two years I worked there. Was a nightmare.
http://raganwald.posterous.com/netflix-and-the-costs-of-cour...
Are Fingerprints Unique?
It wasn't botched. Everything is by design.

I hope so, but it doesn't appear that way. Netflix has alienated a large number of its customers.

I know you can't get that esoteric or new release by streaming. There's a ton of stuff that never made it to DVD that is still on VHS or Beta. I don't see you crying over that.

Those are different issues. No one probably cares much about those esoteric shows you're talking about, but they certainly do care about whether they can get mainstream movies if they're paying a monthly fee for streaming. And right now, it's a wasteland: B-movies, old movies, and some UFO documentaries. Starz sometimes added something of worth, but Netflix blew that deal -- Starz is gone.

If all this activity by Netflix is part of some intelligent design, I'd really like to understand it, because right now, it looks more like a suicide attempt.
Ask YC: Do you still use Google Wave?
Right, but it gets trickier than that because even though you give someone a fixed-length period, if you're the only job a contractor does, and you pick the days they work, here you are essentially becoming the employer. Don't know what the US employment taxes are, but it was prohibitively expensive for us as a startup. The total employee costs run about 1.4-1.6x net base salary, even if we would outsource through a temp/payrolling agency.
In civil cases, it's not actually all that high. "Preponderence of the evidence" roughly means "it is more likely than not" the case that you are guilty of the alleged offense. "Beyond a reasonable doubt" only comes into play for criminal offenses.

Minor traffic offenses are civil, not criminal, so the much lower preponderence standard applies.
Which would make sense in evolutionary terms. You want someone in your group to be awake at night as a watch. Its also very helpful to have very early morning risers, to prepare stuff for the group.
Oh the memories. I ran a Telegard BBS back in 1989-91 called "Circle of One". I still have it backed up though I would probably have to find some old hardware to run it on. It ran on a 20Mhz 286 at the time with 2 Meg RAM and a couple of MFM 40 Meg hard drives. Hail to the 16bit analog modem power!

Oi, just had a flashback of editing ANSI animated graphics. Your 'frame rate' depended on your modem speed.
these regulations are nothing new. After the crash at the beginning of the century regulations very similar to this were instituted. Even after they were lifted, no one but financial institutions could take advantage of the new lax financial regulations, all lack thereof. What's even more perplexing is the fact that after the meltdown these regulations are nowhere near as strict as the ones from the 1930s. And with small relatively minor fines levied against these huge firms there is little incentive to discontinue their dangerous although profitable behaviors.
Contradictory true statements? Is that some kind of quantum logic? Maybe I am too old fashioned for that, I admit defeat.
Jobst Medical Legwear
That the discussion is complete BS.
URDU SEX STORIES: FSC Ki Student Ki Kahani
"You could always make a gun, all you needed was a lathe, some tooling, a hacksaw a file, some steel stock and a bunch of patience.... Printing a gun is just another way to get to the goal, possibly an easier one but one with its own unique challenges."

A sufficiently large quantitative change is a qualitative change. Also the debate is ultimately not about this one thing today, but about a future in which one can download and print an open-source AK-47-equivalent with only slightly more difficulty than printing a picture.

I'd contend this isn't "printing" or the definition of "making it yourself" that you'd consider here in 2011; it's a new semantic category that very few people are prepared to grapple with, least of all the law. I'd contend the law is yet to catch up with what computer programs permit people to do, it really isn't ready for how computer programs will increasingly freely impinge upon the real world. There is simply no legal category to handle this question, and many conventional ethical ones can't handle it very well either.

The only solution is to go back to first principles, but most people can't really reason on first principles.
I find it sad that manufacturing your own firearm is seen as magical enough to warrant an article like this one. Thank you for not being caught up in forgetting that things can be made with your hands.
Great-book-reviews-clip-in-hair-extensions
I for one do. I basically use it as a Google Doc, but I also like collaborating within it and using it as a place to let discussions happen, or let multiple people post points around a question or topic. I enjoy seeing the characters update as collaborators post, though there is no unique benefit that Wave offers, that makes me decide to use it, it is simply based on habit, rather than a specific benefit.
Can you please clarify how "printing" and making by hand are different, besides one being easier?
By 1999 there was a lot of heavy java development on the sever happening. But i'd say the most common server environment was perl. A lot of applications wrote out to static html to handle scale.
The problem is that their recommendation system really isn't that big of an advantage. Content is king & people got Netflix because it provided better service at a better price compared to what they were getting elsewhere. I don't think I've heard of anyone signing up for Netflix specifically so they could use their recommendation engine to find new movies.

Netflix has to go back to providing a better service at an affordable price, something that isn't as easy as it once was when you're going against other streamlined big name contenders like Apple, Amazon or Hulu vs the old "incompetent" competition that was basically Blockbuster & Hollywood Video.
Another approach to secondary rays for diffuse inter-reflection is Instant Radiosity.
Ahh the days of Citadel, Wolf3d shareware and quite serious modem transmitted diseases inside dodgy TSRs.
you could use a 5 axis machining center

That's extremely expensive equipment that you're not going to have at home without a lot of dedication and investment.

You could always send something off to eMachineShop.com, but that's still not really comparable to the not-so-distant future where we'll all have easy access to local 3D printers.
I hope you would pay me if you expect a half day assignment. Or at least make it fun, like the Google Code Challenge.
Calling people monkeys is rather abusive, and this is specifically forbidden by the HN guidelines. Ask yourself: Is your comment just as relevant if you omit that one word? If so, consider editing it out.
Cyberspace's Most Wanted: Hacker Eludes F.B.I. Pursuit
Which subset, and why only those people?
With telecommuting, amount of time worked != amount of work completed.

Chances are, that hour they're actually working at home is getting the equivalent of 8 hours of traditional work-in-an-office work done.
مشاهدة مباراة المزاريطة وامريكا 2011- اقوى مبارة  في تاريخ الكورة الامريكية
an AK? who wants that PoS?

You can get an AR-15 lower blank for $100 or less.

You can buy the tooling to allow you to use a drill press to make the receiver M-16 ready for not much more.

http://www.cncguns.com/tooling.html

No heat-treating necessary (it's just aluminum). Yes, you'll need a drill press.
Good times, good times. I ran a BBS on my Amiga in 1994 and 1995. It was one of the more appreciated BBSs in the area due being more or less the only one with focus on the so-called demo scene, always having the latest demos and intros available. Back then, a 7mhz computer with 1mb of RAM, a 30mb hard drive and a 14k4 modem performed just fine for that task.
Same - I agree with the main thrust but the author would do well to find his own voice rather than trying to be some kind of Tim Ferriss Mountain Dew commercial.
How wide would the adoption of Mac OS X be without bundled sales? Yes, Windows as sold to consumers is largely driven by new PC purchases, but I don't think that is in any way indicative of its success or lack thereof, just of how consumers think of computers.
"A sufficiently large quantitative change is a qualitative change."

I think this is pretty clear: making something by hand is very different from having a magic button to do it for you. "You could have whittled it out of wood!" completely misses the point.

Unless you also think the creation of high level programming languages was not a qualitative change over the days of punch cards.
IANAL but I know my way around US federal firearms law. I am not aware of any law or rulemaking which would classify, for example, CAD files describing a lower receiver as an item subject to firearms regulations. There exist books sold openly and without restriction detailing how one can make improvised firearms, some of which if constructed would be illegal for possession by American civilians. I'm sure this information has by now made it to the Internet as well. Up to this point, such materials are treated as speech and thus strongly protected by the First Amendment. I see no reason why 3D printer instruction files would be treated any differently, under current law.

It's not hard to imagine a Congresscritter raising a fuss over concerns of "children printing machine guns" or some such nonsense, and thereby introducing legislation to regulate such materials, including executable scripts for 3D printing machines. It's even possible to imagine such legislation passing the House and Senate. Our current president would likely sign any such legislation he was given. However, it is very difficult to imagine the legislation surviving a Supreme Court challenge on First Amendment grounds.

Then again, I said the same thing about the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act, and SCOTUS upheld that 5-4, so what do I know.
How Netflix Lost its Glamor and its Way
From my experience, a day of working from home is about as productive as working a week at the office.
I have a tendency to agree with the kind of people that downplay panic, simply because they seem more focused on what has happened than on the worst that might possibly happen.

But that's the problem - the worst that could possibly happen is very possible. Basically what it means is you can't go to the US, because in theory you could be met at the airport and thrown into jail. The fact that you're a little fish won't matter to the IRS. They're just filling out forms.

Of course you can take your chances, but for most people the risk of getting jailed for tax evasion outweighs any possible positive outcome from a trip to the states.

Over the last decade the US Congress turned US citizens into subjects. The only reason there isn't a great hue and cry is voters in the US don't know. The federal legal code has gotten so large and arcane even the lawyers don't know it outside their own narrow specialty.
IPhone 5 Soon? 4 Online + 7 Retail Apple Stores Opening Around World This Week
Feds Call Full Tilt Poker A Massive Ponzi Scheme
AR15 lowers don't really need that much strength. The upper does, but you can buy those without a FFL transfer.
Wonder if I can convince the special lady friend a big move is needed ;)
Which should be very depressing.

That said, I'm not trying to downplay what he is doing, I think it's pretty amazing.
I would definitely have to agree with you, it was a very segregated landscape. Web was all about HTML and DHTML and writing software for servers was a small niche.
In the early 90s the first thing I ever get my hand on was Visual Basic I was young enough introduction. Then there was C++ and Perl and never got into PHP big-time but it was definitely prevalent no matter what your misgivings about it today is.
Being easier by orders of magnitude is my point. That matters. You can't just wave the problem away by declaring it's just a quantitative change, because it's a big enough quantitative change to become a qualitative change.

In fact, quantitative changes that become qualitative changes by being large enough are the entire reason we're having this discussion in the first place! It's perfectly possible to kill a person with just your hands. "All" a gun does is make it easier... but trying to dismiss all of the legal and moral questions around guns by claiming that it's only a difference of degree, not kind, isn't going to convince very many people. A big enough quantitative change is a qualitative change.
In academia, we used p values of .95 or greater. I was taught that in business, though, the rule of thumb for making decisions is more like .8, and that's typically the standard I use as well.
Daniel Kahneman: The Marvels and the Flaws of Intuitive Thinking
As far as I know vivid dreaming is not equivalent to better recollection of dreams. A dream is vivid when and only when you are aware of the fact that you're dreaming while it happens. It isn't necessarily true just because you're able to recall.
I'm an FAL guy. AKs are just cheaper to build than almost anything else. The AR/AK debate is a very silly holy war. Come join on on /r/guns.
While the article is accurate about how one can apply spacial subdivision to rasterization to cull primitives, there's a significant different in the details.

With raytracing, we always know exactly when we're done, because our outer loop iterates over each primary ray, and we trace that ray to its closest intersection.

With rasterization if we want some sort of early exit we have to keep track of what regions of the zbuffer remain unwritten. The problem is, we don't know if a "hole" in the zbuffer is going to be written to later by some primitive, or if it's just a hole to the background far plane in the scene. So a single gap can force us to rasterize all primitives in the fustrum. The natural scheme of coping with this is to subdivide into tiles and render each independently, but it remains a problem that it's difficult to know when you're "done" doing some early exit from rasterization.
Google+ Suddenly Looks Pretty Busy For A Ghost Town
Tracking Mad Cow and Doctor Who with Neo4j
Ad laden page to discuss applications that track you so that they can ultimately send you more ads.
You won't be "more right" because you don't use Windows.

Just attempting to stymie folks deciding I must be a rabid Windows fanboy.
I like the way it looks like his hands are a blur, for moving so fast.
I'll second that - it was actually a bit of a surprise seeing a recent open source project where I had to download and extract an archive rather than browsing the source code online.
Well, I haven't gotten any better at Etch-a-Sketch in the last 15-20 years, but this is very cool. Thanks for sharing, and nice work :)
Obviously pine's a bad choice. I'd be surprised if some nice walnut didn't hold up longer; with laminate, you could probably see durability on par with steel.
Hell, you could eventually be an architecture astronaut: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html
Facebook is 13+, but Google+ is currently limited to 18+.
"Stay-at-home workers also said getting dressed for the day was far too strenuous"

As someone who has spent a few years working from home (but doesn't now), that's a horrible assumption.

Sure, there were days when I'd be working in my boxers, but there were also days when I would be wearing trousers and a shirt ready to go out for a meeting. And when I wasn't properly dressed, it wasn't that it was "strenuous", or even that I was lazy, it was a case of not needing to.

If I wasn't going to see anyone for a few hours after waking up, and I didn't happen to feel like wearing much, why would I bother? Other times I did feel like it and I was fully dressed even if I wasn't going to see anyone. That has no relation to what work I did.
I believe it was Henry Ford who said "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have said "a faster horse"."

Sometimes you have to do something that customers might not "want" to get to something that they really do want. If this lets Netflix improve their streaming service without being bogged down by dvds then I'll be all for the change.
> A sufficiently large quantitative change is a qualitative change

True, but I submit this is not a sufficiently large quantitative change.

> Also the debate is ultimately not about this one thing today, but about a future in which one can download and print an open-source AK-47-equivalent with only slightly more difficulty than printing a picture.

I humbly suggest there is more to it than that, and will still be more to it than that in a future in which 3D printers can print composite materials strong enough to survive the extreme pressures of a 7.62x39mm cartridge firing a bullet down a long rifled barrel. Even if that were possible, the result of the AK-47 print job would be a whole mess of parts, including tiny pins, springs, etc. With the exception of the lower receiver, all of these parts can be bought (in the US at least) online with no government oversight or regulation. Once the parts are obtained, they must be assembled, which is not difficult for the mechanically inclined, but is considerably more difficult than printing a picture.

So, before this quantitative change:

* Obtain AK-47 spec and assembly instructions
* Obtain necessary tools for assembly
* Order AK-47 parts kit online
* Buy AK-47 lower receiver from firearms dealer, or assemble yourself from sheet metal
* Assemble AK-47

After this quantitative change:

* Obtain AK-47 spec and assembly instructions
* Obtain AK-47 3D printer files
* Obtain assembly tools printer files
* Print AK-47 parts
* Print AK-47 lower receiver
* Assemble AK-47

Hardly a revolutionary shift.

Legally I don't see any sticky issue here, and if there's an ethical dilema I don't see it. Having said that, I agree with the general proposition that the law has not kept pace with technological innovation, and that there are areas in which this lag has serious consequences.
"I wonder what Carmack uses now? Whatever it is, he could probably have several of them hooked up to a machine each running at 1920 x 1080 and still come nowhere near close to drawing 180 watts."

That's a little optimistic. The 27" and 30" TFTs which are becoming increasingly commonplace consume upwards of 100W, at least at or near full brightness so you'd only need about 2.
While I wouldn't diminish the distractions found in an office, I'm not sure if I ever ran into a case where 7 hours of my day was wasted on nonsense that wouldn't have occurred had I been at my house.

I've been telecommuting two days a week for the past 2.5 years and have found that certain things get done significantly faster at home and other things get done significantly faster at the office. I have a job where I'm coding maybe 5-10% of the time, and most of the coding is done at home where I can assure that there will be few distractions outside of my control. The same goes for any activity, done solo, and requiring prolonged concentration.