skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"At O'Reilly, we had a narrow escape a few years ago. "Head First Java" starts each chapter with an image taken from an old movie for which the copyright had expired, placing the movie in the public domain. Someone collected several of those movies into DVDs and copyrighted the DVD. Luckily, we discovered it (and were able to find new images) before we published the book and ended up with a court summons."

I don't think that's how it works. You can take anything you want out of the public domain, make minimal changes to it meeting a certain standard, and copyright the result, but that only gives you a copyright to the result. You don't suddenly own the thing in the public domain, which would be utterly absurd.

They may have been concerned about getting sued by someone claiming they took it from their resulting copyright work rather than the original public domain work, but even that would have been very easy to defend against and a lawsuit in bad faith to boot. (And those are just a constant threat, regardless.)

I'll copy to only being a very interested layman and not a lawyer, but I've never heard of individuals being able to just reach out and grab things out of public domain at will and fully own them. If that were possible then there would simply be no such thing as public domain, and that's not the case.
Yonatan Zunger (who works on Google+) posted this in a comment:

"Our name check is therefore looking, not for things that don’t look like “your” name, but for things which don’t look like names, period. In fact, we do not give a damn whether the name posted is “your” name or not: we will not challenge you on this basis, nor is there any mechanism for other users to cause you to be challenged for this."
I love the idea, and if you default it to those I agree it will be better. I had the same thoughts of 'i can't focus, nothing looks good to me'.
Three things that make skill-free games like Tiny Tower so much fun
Graphics card drivers: a lesson in software engineering
Agreed completely. It seems crazy that the author is flaunting it too, as I'm sure that will make it more likely that he'll catch legal flak.
A strategy that will work much better for spammers (and I guarantee that you'll see it in action) is temporary identity theft:

1) spammer picks someone popular, signs-up with
similar name + similar picture
2) spammer starts following the same people and
some of those people will follow back
3) spammer starts spamming
4) Google notices and bans account after some time
5) repeat from step 1

Also, there are plenty of spammers on G+ already. Twitter is much more aggressive in dealing with spammers.
I think Patrick's point is that this is B.S., but it's B.S. that the interviewer can use to rationalize giving up the $4,000. It's exactly the same as the Free Food At Google argument.
And they don't even have to try hard. It would take effort to track down this information manually from blogs and such; Facebook just has it. Don't underestimate what a difference convenience makes.
I think this just may be an old page.
I guess it's more about how people are now actually using the technology to full effect, than about nifty graphics.
your new studio will not disrupt Hollywood if it runs out of money. that is my point. your new studio has to be able to compete with the existing studios. You have to compete with Dark Knight Rising, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Twilight, Pirates of the Carribean, Spiderman, etc. and you have to do it every week, every month, every year for as long as you can.
Yes, near the Longhua plant ;)
Eh... there are things in here that bother me. Did Salvatore review this? (I'm prepared to be wrong about all of this, and intend this comment constructively). Did you get a take from the Redis mailing list about it? Some quick hits:

* Lists, sets, zsets and hashes are all means of constructing queries that act on data (or metadata) as well as key names; it's misleading to suggest that "keys are everything" in Redis.

* Sets aren't simply a way of storing things for which you don't want duplicates; they are the idiom in which flexible queries are constructed in Redis, period. redis sets : SQL joins :: register-operand instructions : C code.

* In the same vein: since probably the most important idiom in Redis is storing things indirected through keys (often incr ID keys) --- such that for instance you can index and query data through set math operations --- you might want to spend a chapter very early on explaining this idiom. It's not a weird hack to store "bob_friends=set(jack,jill,jim) bob=hash(name: bob, role: admin) &c" --- it's how you're intended to use Redis.

The very idea that one might need to store the same JSON blob in two keys so that users could be indexed both by name and ID suggests that the author hasn't really metabolized this idea. Nobody who works in Redis regularly would ever make that mistake; they'd give users an opaque incr id, and then index those ids by username in a separate key.

The idea that one might be worried about how much space those indexes consume is weird, since any other database would consume even more space to do its (much more heavyweight) indexing.

One might worry that readers new to Redis would get the impression that Redis is much more narrowly targeted than it in fact is.
For pete's sake, Google, if I have to reveal my real name to you at any point, then the policy equals fail.
It would be nice if clicking a thumbnail went straight to the live preview. Or, if each thumbnail had two links visible, one for the info page and one for the live preview. I guess this might not work as well with your referral code though.

If you switched to a 1-column grid, the rest of the screen could be a frame that displayed the live preview inline. E.g. Alien Blue for iPad's UI.
So why can't we come up with something that makes these works more affordable and accessible to everyone on the planet? This debate is an opportunity to start exploring other such possibilities.

I agree, but that's also why I don't want to lump the ACM and IEEE in with Elsevier. That is, the ACM and IEEE are professional organizations. Their main purpose is to represent the interests of the community of professionals in computing. If they stop charging for articles, they can still exist as an organization. Their members just need to elevate the issue to the point that the larger organization changes its policy.

Elsevier, on the other hand, will cease to exist if they stop charging. Their main purpose - their business model - is to charge for access to their journals. This business model is no longer necessary, and these companies will eventually die.
Ghosts of Unix Past: a historical search for design patterns (1 of 4)
From their website: "Carpathia Government Solutions™ (CGS™) is the leading provider of federally-compliant managed hosting services for government agencies" -- MegaUpload chose the wrong hosting provider for their type of business.
"CheapViagra DotCom has added you to her circles"

...if you suspect this is a spam account, click here to ban them from following you and report them to Google.

Well that's how it works on Twitter anyway, and seems fairly effective.
I'm in jail. I don't feel like doing a new video -- pain in the ass. pointless
>At best, company policy will prevent those terms from being negotiated because they're standardized.

Those policies are there for people that don't choose to negotiate those terms.
I believe Facebook's position on use of competing technologies in Facebook apps is relevant: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2291336 (Google Adsense banned from Apps)

And less seriously: http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/15/google-ad-on-facebook-is-ba... (Google+ Ad banned)
> Especially these days, you're more marketable if you're currently working. And especially at your presumed age; you don't want a bunch of questions/suspicion about why the last job didn't work out. Or, as I see now with respect to hobby projects, a job end followed by a bunch of idle time.

I know you wrote a disclaimer, but as a general sentiment, this bugs me a lot. Avoiding possible shallow HR issues in the future is not worth constraining your one and only youth.
Congrats Garry and Aaron!
Garry and Aaron are awesome and great additions to YC!
PG or Aaron: Could you de-identify YC applications data and make it publicly available for others to analyze?

[EDIT:] Or maybe you could make a prediction challenge using the YC application data? You could host the challenge on http://www.kaggle.com/ or http://tunedit.org

Note to self: There is actually a very sparse body of literature that talks about data driven approach to VC, e.g., http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4621..., this one seems interesting (predicting exits): http://www.springerlink.com/content/w024ku34221u3258/
People tend to think Google is just its frontend. They see pictures of people and some blog-like comments and say, "I could have written that over the weekend!" Then, since they don't know how to solve the spam problem, they think that Google doesn't know how to solve the spam problem either. As it turns out, Google does have some spam-fighting ideas. Some things slip through the cracks, of course, but the algorithms are always getting better.
Seems hardly worth it for ~1K a month too.
That's refreshing to know, however I feel that it should be clearly mentioned in their names policy.

Also, I take away from this quote that an account such as Fake Steve Jobs would not be allowed, right? Daniel Lyons, the editor behind the Fake Steve identity, revealed himself after 14 months and his anonymity was pretty cool.

http://www.fakesteve.net/

https://twitter.com/#!/FSJ
Did theirs?
Can real numbers be shown of the money that was generated by piracy with this service vs money that was not?

My guess is from this point we will never know the real unbiased numbers, not matter who wins.

Edit: to clarify tone.
Is it bad for them to stop supporting IE6? If they created a patch for this and distributed it, why not just give the users the most recent version of IE that runs on their respective operating systems?
Reserve your name on Wander, a magical startup launching soon
The ideas in the rules cannot be copyrighted, but the specific text of the rules can be (see http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html). Also, game mechanics can be patented.
You Might Make a Great UX Designer If...
I use Komodo IDE. Both their IDE version and the free Komodo Edit have near-realtime syntax checking for JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, and one or two other languages. You get red squiggly underlines for syntax errors, green squigglies for warnings. It's quite nice to know that my code is at least free of syntax errors before I even save the file.

I recommend the 7.0 release candidate:

http://downloads.activestate.com/Komodo/releases/

More info:

http://www.activestate.com/komodo-ide
http://www.activestate.com/komodo-edit
Hm. You may have a point. This was back when I lived in America, and seeing an endocrinologist would have required winning the lottery or something. Now that I'm living in a more civilised country, perhaps I'll give it a try...
> What about the rest of the engineering team that worked on that change, reviewed it, pushed it to production?

"I worked as part of a team that $x. My role on the team was $y."
Who are the BI thought leaders?
Nice. Quick off-topic question: assuming you have experience with TextMate, do you find SublimeText 2 to be slightly better than TextMate or significantly better?
In fact VMG's HBS link, which generally encourages making the first offer, includes this caveat:

> There is one situation in which making the first offer is not to your advantage: when the other side has much more information than you do about the item to be negotiated or about the relevant market or industry. For example, recruiters and employers typically have more information than job candidates do...

If I can get to the point where I understand the market as well or better than the potential hirer, I'll try to make an anchoring first offer. Usually I can't.
The 2012 State of the Union: Ask the White House Your Questions on Quora
The "Fast Open Cookies" are designed to protect against the DDoS attacks. These are acquired by the client on the first TFO connection. Subsequent SYN packets reuse the cookie. The number of outstanding TFO cookies is limited. The paper on TCP Fast Open explains this in more detail than the RFC (http://research.google.com/pubs/pub37517.html)
A "real name system" is ripe for abuse. One can imagine everything from states starting demand people use them, corporations surveiling those who use them and people squatting and abusing the "real name" accounts of others.
System native executables: Win32, OS X, Linux, etc. This is a language for (among other things) prototyping browsers themselves, not running stuff inside browsers.
Tips for Writing Better Bug Reports
Just wondering, do you earn anything out of this? Does Themeforest have an affiliation model, if so, is it per click or purchase?
So because a spammer could use a data field as a method of communication, we should screen every possible entry in that data field? Perhaps G+ should substitute all comment boxes with dropdown menus... Seriously, this has nothing to do with spam and everything to do with preserving real identities, which have more value to Google's expected future revenue model.

Unverified usernames do not inevitably result in a site that is overrun by spam. Time-tested methods of downvoting, flagging, reporting, and semi-automated filtering can quickly dispatch such shell accounts. You only need to look to reddit for proof of this--a site where users sometimes employ their username as the punchline to the joke. That's right, a username can be an avenue of communication in itself that carries positive, non-spammy (and dare I say fun?) results. Another example: would @shitmydadsays have caught on fire the way it did if the account was named +Justin Halpern instead? I doubt it. The final obvious example: HN, which thankfully does not require "verified" identities.

When I read discourses from Google like the OP's it reminds me how right moot is when he says that creativity is only preserved in a culture that values privacy and anonymity. When everybody is permanently attached to every action, nobody bothers to test the norms, and all that's left is consumption of "safe" content from centralized producers. Of course that's what Google and Facebook, being glorified advertising networks, actually want. Your anonymous account has no money to buy anything, no predictable real-world holdings or credit score or behavior, and therefore no value to an advertiser.
It's basically a planned replacement for C++ as the language used to program the Mozilla apps themselves (and native add-ons). It wouldn't make sense as a scripting language that runs on Mozilla.
Samsung shamelessly rips off Apple icons (sometimes without changes in promotional materials), makes billions: Apple's the big bad for suing them.

This developer blatantly rips off Apple's icons, makes $1k in a month: Apple should sue this guy!
Why I'm Writing in CoffeeScript Next
Sorry but as soon as I see "prescreened" I think "censorship" and "avoiding criticism". What a bore that will be. That's my problem with politics, with republicans and democrats, everything is so sugar coated. They always have answers to easy questions. I want to see how someone responds when asked difficult questions. That's when you find out who they really are.
> But since when did the U.S. see themselves the official justice department for the entire world?

I'm still confused on why you're confused. MU was distributing copyrighted material around the globe.

The US gathered evidence, presented that evidence to its partners, partners made the arrest.

It's a global network, there are various treaties, and there is cooperation.
I don't have access to this doc somehow.
Long time reader, first time submission. Feedback is appreciated!
From the same comment (no way to link to it directly):

"The other case is people such as +trench coat, who are so well-known under this handle that it would be bizarre not to let them onto the system under this name. For this case, we allow appeals based on being well-known under the name: thus the ability to prove the 'established pseudonym.'"
So let's say that you release 2 DVDs with 3 movies each. Then a book, such as Head First Java has pictures in it from all 6 movies and no other. Clearly the selection of pictures in this case was inspired by the selection done for those 2 DVDs, is it not?
Maybe I'm crazy but it seems like a lot of these recent new languages are missing the mark. If you're designing a language from the ground up why wouldn't you build unit testing as a first class citizen, for example? As well as profilling and instrumentation. How about a modular compiler that can round-trip back and forth between raw source and commented parse trees so you can do much smarter merging in source control?

So many languages seem to be aiming at targets that are pretty far away from the major pain points for the normal developer.
Generally, if a car salesman isn't pissed off at you following the sale, you are getting ripped off.

Yep, they are usually pretty pissed at my Dad.

Ideally, he takes a loss on the car he sells me

He is not really taking a loss if he's meeting a target that net makes him a profit(in some manner). You seem to argue that you can't extract such information. I'm arguing that you can.
'Don't Be Evil' Tool for Google Search, by Facebook, Twitter Devs
I have worked with Aaron a bunch on Etherpad and he is a top bloke! Glad he joined YC
Not sure I buy that arguement.

You wouldn't accept that if we said: Well not everyone has a "natural ability" to read, so we'll only teach the people that are show some "talent".

(Quotes because I don't actually believe those things exist, you can be taught everything, and be good at everything).
Fog Creek Interview Questions
As a die-hard C guy, Rust is the first "new systems programming language" since Cyclone and D that I didn't immediately dislike. A lot of really interesting ideas in here. I'd love to know what Mozilla uses this for internally.

That said, it's hard to imagine anything displacing C for me. Almost any systems code I write these days is something I'll eventually want to be able to expose to a high-level language (Lua, Python, Ruby, etc). To do that you need code that can integrate into another language's runtime, no matter what memory management or concurrency model it uses. When you're trying to do that, having lots of rich concepts and semantics in your systems language (closures, concurrency primitives, garbage collection) just gets in the way, because you have to find out how to map between the two. C's lack of features is actually a strength in this regard.

I do really like Rust's expressiveness though. The pattern matching is particularly nice, and that is an example of a features that wouldn't "get in the way" if you're trying to bind to higher-level languages.
Is MySQL usage really declining?
tl;dr: Changes Google's "search plus your world" to include other social networks (Facebook & Twitter being biggest). Released as open source code.
11 Easy Ways to Get Hundreds of Great Blog Post Ideas
Probably a few dozen. All very well packed and with excellent tie-ins to officials.

Welcome to the new democracy.

Not to defend MU here. Just don't think all that many people felt the harm for what they were doing.
And if you ask artists, they will probably point you in different direction.
Proof of seo success
Just glancing over your website's seo results on yahoo + google backlinks, one can only conclude that your approach indeed has results:
http://domof.com/ycombinator.com.html
Also the other search engines seem to be fond of your content. Keep up the good work.
It's more about those messages being used as the spam in themselves.
Unit testing is a first-class citizen in Rust. You can annotate functions with #[test] and they become unit tests. You can then run tests with the built-in test harness on a module-by-module basis.

Profiling and instrumentation are possible using the standard tools (xperf, Instruments/DTrace, perf/oprofile). Rust works just fine with those.

Not sure what you mean by "round-trip back and forth between compiled code and commented parse trees", but Rust contains a pretty-printer which preserves comments.
You don't even need to pick somebody popular, although I suppose it might make certain things easier. If you pick a plausible name and an attractive-looking profile picture, after a few hundred requests to people in the same location, you will have plenty of followers. Perhaps bootstrap with relationships amongst your bots so your profile doesn't look conspicuously vacant. It's not only spammers that do this... guess what, law enforcement does it too. Social networks have not changed how gullible the average internet user is.
Queens? I just found an iPhone a few days ago, and I'm in Astoria. Dunno if it's yours.
Also the kid in that discussion was from the Netherlands, where COPPA doesn't apply.
Amount you spent might also be useful, if you can prove you spent it wisely.
Government Access To Cell Phone Records & Location Data
Ask HN: Forms as a service
I created a tiny static site and I want to add a contact form and signup button. What service would you recommend to quickly add these forms without a single line of server side code?

Edit: Sorry if this is a silly question; I'm a backend developer and my instinct is to throw Django or Rails at this. That can't be the simplest solution.

Edit2: I'm really just looking for an API. I have nice CSS forms already and I want to save the data somewhere.
TCP fast open (TFO) effectively fires data in the blind in the establishment phase and then handles the timeout gracefully. That sounds like vanilla UDP (or your favorite best-effort protocol) to me.
Theoretically, yes, I can earn some money. ThemeForest's affiliate model kinda sucks though. Users have to click through and then A) sign up for a new account and B) deposit money into their account.
It's actually there on for example box-shadow, one of the worse offenders
Google is a single company, and just finds it easier to ban you completely from their entire network than to let you have access in piecemeal to certain services.
I believe the point he was trying to make here is that who owns the copyright doesn't matter. If the company is willing to sue you and into bankruptcy and you don't have the money to fight back, you're screwed. "Justice" doesn't matter.
Seo analysis for : Travellers' Times Online - Gypsy, Romany, Traveller
I recently make a new google+ account with a handle name (obviously wasn't a real name), got a huge number of +1's with a public post and then google stepped in and said they'd remove my account if I didn't use a real name. So, I used a random name, and then "approved it". How is a fake name better than a handle of some sort? It isn't. Google's position is just dumb.
Flagged. Please don't submit empty launch pages like this.