skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not a lawyer, either, but a good friend of mine is. I showed him your post and this thread, and his advice is fairly similar to the above. Basically, reply to the C&D letter with a written letter of your own (make sure you get proof of delivery on the postage; keep a copy for your files; etc.). Your letter should be as polite and as brief as possible, because any extraneous language can and will be used against you. If you write something that can be misinterpreted, it's a safe bet that it will be.

Basically, your letter should: a) acknowledge receipt of their letter, b) state your non-affiliation with and non-operation of the offending service. And that's it. Just the facts. No editorialization. No defensiveness. No snide remarks. No theories about how or why they came to think you were involved, and how they are mistaken, etc. And avoid the temptation to get cute or cheeky. Don't poke the bear.

IF they reply to your reply -- which they very well may not -- then you should lawyer up. If you want to be super cautious, you can consult a lawyer, and probably pay a fair bit of coin in so doing, to draft your initial reply letter.
>And to this day, two-way contact sync is still not a solved problem.

Can anyone explain in simple terms why this is so?
Same here, flickering goes from noticeable to disturbing.

I'm also far too sensitive about this kind of details, solarization of plasma panels, dithering of 6bit lcd..
IOS 6 Maps Leaked?
Stamen’s gorgeous Watercolor tiles for OpenStreetMap (CC BY 3.0), and if this were to be the map generated by iOS 6, then it would certainly get the attention of Google’s executives.
I meant that I won't willfully do the wrong thing.

Doing unskillful things is part of being human.
Taking this back in time a bit, the idea that you would monitor everybody's letters and where they go would never be allowed.

Because the monitoring is out of site, and cheap in terms of man power, now it's allowed.

I really find it amazing.
You make it sound like a bad thing. :p
VMware tackles enterprise personal cloud
Just like forcing them to learn how to read is a sure way to make them hate reading? Forcing them to learn history is a sure way to make them hate history?

Would forcing them to learn how to drive be a sure way to make them hate driving?
pair.com has very generous limits on how many addresses you can have per account.
So government is speding on high-tech start-ups, to (hopefully) create jobs presumably for foreign educated workers, since school budgets are cut savagely.
Don't get me wrong, I am all for small government, I just believe they are forgetting their primary objectives in particular the educaton of children.
Whenever an article about App Engine comes through here, I find myself having a strange reaction. It's a mix of surprise and curiosity. Surprise to find that AppEngine is still something that Google's putting effort into, and Curiosity as to who is actually using it anymore.

I would have thought that by now AppEngine would have already cycled through all the developers who were ever curious about it and sent them down the Official AppEngine Cycle: Curiosity, Enjoyment, Frustration, Understanding, Enjoyment, Frustration, Disbelief, Anger, Regret, Searching, Toil, then Relief (with the last few steps being part of the migration off of AppEngine and finally the knowledge that you're finally done with it for good.)

In short, I thought we'd all been burned by it already. I honestly can't imagine where they hope to find the next crop of developers from.
Unless he has high-tech stoves, it is pretty polluting. Smoke contains many toxic chemicals.

http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/is-burning-wood-f...
JCPenney New Branding is....Awesome
Free sms
Looks like they ran out of money or are just looking to pocket some free money, considering they announced the project last year :
http://www.egmnow.com/articles/exclusive-leisure-suit-larry-...
So it's a bit cargocultish, really. But the source, as I understand it, is that actual lawyers who are not your lawyer, has to make it clear that they're not giving you legal advice for liability reasons. If a lawyer who is actually your lawyer gives you bad advise and you lose out because of it, you can sue him (and his insurance). But the insurance only covers actual clients, not strangers on the internet.

It's a little funny how this applies to legal advice, and not, say, medical advise. People on HN will happily report on experiments with Ritalin, mushrooms and sleeping patterns, they will encourage you to quit your job and do a start-up - but "You should write a courteous, factual reply and talk to a lawyer" has to come with a long disclaimer :)
Did anyone find an explanation for why they opted for brackets in favor of whitespace or a ruby-like syntax?
My guess (and it's only a guess) would be that they've been tasked with shutting that site down but they have no idea who to lean on to accomplish that. If that hypothesis is true, logic won't work on them, they'll just keep leaning on you because they have no better options.

So I would spend a few hundred dollars or whatever having your lawyer draft them a letter or call them on the phone or whatever to explain that this isn't going to buy them anything legally. And even if you don't want to do that, at least quit talking to them or writing about it lest you get yourself in trouble by saying something innocent that sounds wrong. Lawyers are very good at taking advantage of situations where the other side isn't represented, so don't give them those kinds of opportunities.

In short, I'm saying to get proper legal advice. Merely being innocent isn't always good enough. If anything, the innocent tend to get into more trouble than they should because they tend to avoid legal advice, believing that their innocence is enough. And even though you know you're innocent, how do you prove that you have no control over a particular website?
Creative Commons gives 18-year-old's photos wide exposure
Barfee (2012) Hindi Movie Story | News |  Release date
This reminds me of the angst that came when Windows shifted from ".ini" files with clear name=value lines to the "registry", which paid many the bills of consultants, utility programmers, and "fixit-guys" via the fun that is Regedit.

+1 for more simple text files... and hey, devs: if you don't need a nested object format, perhaps even leave out the JSON or XML and just make a simple file...
Setting aside tobacco ('cos, let's be honest, no-one smokes tobacco with a bong, regardless of what head-shops say), there's also "legal highs" - synthetic cannabis analogues (K2/Spice/etc) and Salvia, for instance.

A lot of bongs are re-purposed chemistry apparatus, too. Not that having chemistry apparatus in your student flat is gonna look much better to a prospective employer than a bong. :P
Of course you can use the two together. The article is aimed to beginners that have to decide how to build their website, using a CMS or a framework? The point is that it seems to be a trend to use only HTML 5 and no CMS. That is interesting.
Stephen Fry on the History of the Smartphone
Mike, any chance for a remote (Europe) employment?
Marijn Haverbeke, a freelancer hired by Mozilla to work on it mentioned that they plan on using it for their browser development to replace C++: http://lisp-univ-etc.blogspot.com/2012/04/lisp-hackers-marij...

"Rust is a programming language that's supposed to fit the C++ niche, without the insanity of actual C++. If the project works out, and it's going swimmingly so far, Mozilla will try to apply it to writing a next-generation browser, without the constant danger of buffer overrun exploits and threading bugs that comes with C++. True to Mozilla's spirit, all development on Rust is happening in the open, on github."
Dropbox is still my favourite: http://dropbox.com/404.html
Take note that the author has designed two Wordpress themes. The point of the article is not to advocate for frameworks against CMS, but to observe a trend among webmasters. It this trend real? What is the cause? The article tries to answer to the latter, but you may disagree.
The link to the demo (that you name linkspam) has been removed. Apparently it was misunderstood.
I like this one by Nosh: http://www.nosh.com/404
Maybe I'm way off the mark here, but calling a function that's iterating towards a target string doesn't really feel like a genetic algorithm. If you know the exact output already, you aren't really testing 'fitness' in any meaningful sense - you're testing closeness. Why not just use A* to path-find your way to it?

Genetic algorithms are surely meant for iterating towards a goal you can't define, other than fitness towards a certain set of criteria - if you know what the target looks like, what's the point in iterating towards it, rather than just going at it?
Am I the only one that would like to see some kind of locking support in the API? So if you have multiple clients working against the same file it could take out a lock for x minutes and the other client could query to see if a file is locked. Useful for synchronization between clients..
Surely this opens the police open for discrimination law suits. http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-hereby-resign
Anne Frank, Risk Assessment, and Israel's Foreign Policy
MIT’s “Self-Assembling Sand” Builds Objects Instantly
I would also advise writing to your local MP (find them here http://www.theyworkforyou.com/). It's easier to ignore 4,000 digital signatures than 4,000 physical letters. It wouldn't hurt to call them either.
You can file a bogus tax return for someone in the US just as easily. I'd be surprised if that weren't the case in most countries. I believe there have been occasional incidents of people doing so to collect other peoples' tax refunds, but I don't hear about it very often.
I've thought about this a lot and I can't really come to any alternative solutions.

Three months ago you found out you're pregnant. Finally! you'd been trying for almost a year! Today you walk into work and find out the company is bankrupt, clean out your desk.

What are you supposed to to? Not look for a job for 6-7 months? Tell every prospective employer you're happy to start now, but in a few weeks you'll be out on prolonged leave?

The only possible thing that they can do with that information is discriminate.
And not just that. Not only are they paying developers to work on these projects, but that in turn contributes directly back to the projects both code and attention.

To continue with the homeless analogy, Red Hat helped a bunch of "homeless" people, and continue to do so today, but are not going the extra step of helping other people help homeless people.
I think what I'm trying to say is: if your fitness function contains the solution, then your problem is entirely contrived, and not a good illustration of genetic algorithms - you're just using a very round-about way of calculating something you already knew, inefficiently.
Hotspot is the most commonly used JVM impl I was referring to. Last I looked into it (probably a year ago), some of the graphics libraries it includes weren't open source - but everything important (including the JIT) is.

The patent issues are regarding Dalvik AFAIK, so I don't see how it's relevant to this discussion ... (although, from what I've heard, it seems like Oracle's being a jerk ...)

If you think that a general purpose language has to be able perform as well as C without calling native code (JNI, FFI, etc), I guess I'd have to agree Java isn't 'general purpose' . But I'd contend neither are Python, Ruby, Erlang, Javascript, etc under that definition. Therefore, that's probably not the right definition, since it excludes most general purpose languages ;-)

Being able to synchronize on any object is actually really efficiently implemented (8 bytes of Object overhead total, neat optimizations like biased locking, etc). And, if you don't want to share state between threads, Java can do pretty clean actors/message passing (http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.0/java/untyped-actors.html) or transactional variables (AtomicRefs are built in). Java concurrency does give you the ability to shoot yourself in the foot if you use it wrong, but so will any sufficiently powerful tool.

Re the JVMs support for FP:

- JVM7 added an InvokeDynamic instruction which I believe addresses your polymorphism concerns.

- It sucks that there isn't a bytecode instruction to allow TCO. But, in practice, many JVM languages will convert recursion to iteration at compile time with constructs like http://clojure.org/special_forms#Special%20Forms--(recur%20e...

- What do you mean by 'fast object allocation'? I'm not familiar with the term ... Creating objects is fairly fast in Java though. A quick test suggests I can alloc around 200 million objects per second on the heap once the code path is JIT'd on my laptop. Incidentally, it's surprisingly tricky to fool the JVMs escape analysis and force a heap (not stack) allocation, without introducing too much extra work in a microbenchmark ;-).

- AFAIK, you're right that closures require an object allocation - but how else would you do it? When I was writing Common Lisp, we had to avoid creating closures in tight loops for the same reason
Isn't that equal to always optimizing locally, as in a greedy algorithm, and therefore ending up at an suboptimal destination? Why isn't a short-term productivity loss acceptable if it improves things in the long-term?

I think it boils down to the difference between idealists and realists. Realists are always optimizing locally whereas long-term change is always brought by the persisting efforts of the idealists.

I also sense that you speak to FOSS as in "us vs them". You want to wait till their products become better than anything else while they are looking for comrades in their campaign to reach there.
شاهد بالفيديو شاب فلبينى يسلم وينطق بالشهادة على يد الشيخ خالد الراشد
Put into context, the initial drive to go off grid and build something like this was due to his employer bringing in fluorescent lighting and not permitting employees to use their own lights. He quit his job over this. So clearly lighting is a big deal to him and I wouldn't doubt that this environment feels much more peaceful than a cubicle with fluorescent lights. He also claims that he can see flicker in fluorescents as well as incandescents.
Same with Opera.
Table Manners : 5 Helpful tips...
Seán Sherlock takes on critics in live SOPA Ireland debate
It doesn't work at all? Well if you use another browser and take a look at it you might understand why. I would probably do the same.
"I was willing to go along with things and see how they panned out." - so much for the sincerity of your supposed indignation. at the end, all that drove you out is the fear of exposure of your own ass due to anti-discrimination laws. and even now, after leaving, you do not have the nerve to directly express any kind of stand regarding the invasion of privacy your COO requested you do. from your ambivalent "style" it is just as easily possible to conclude that you are "speaking out" against anti-discrimination laws. but, in the end, you are saying absolutely nothing. pathetic.
Meta-comment: It's interesting how the default way changes with time... around 10 years ago it would be "why does ruby use the weird syntax instead of just brackets like c/java/js/...?"
Drainage Design
We have the expertise to consult and design on all aspects of Land Drainage, Pipeline Projects and Amenity Drainage. With all Land Drainage design schemes we have the ability to carry out site Survey, take existing working schemes, troubleshoot existing schemes, design full Land Drainage scheme, produce final record plans and liase with relevant authorities.
Just signed it, this really is disturbing.

I find myself thinking "I don't want to live on this planet anymore" more and more often these days. Not sure if I'm just getting older, or the world really is going to shit.
the best way to describe it is an extra level of silence or 11 level of silence..
MPAA: If Megaupload Gets Data Back They’ll Relaunch
Hungry Part 3: Forcing Myself to Face A Mirror
Whatever its merits (and it does have a few), it hasn't exactly been a popular choice outside of building fighter airplanes.
Those three words are neutral. The "sound" was supplied by you. :P
My disagreement came from how to think about valuations and investing:

I know for me, and a lot of people, the concrete value that was determined because someone actually paid it holds a higher weight than the valuations speculative investors have given the lastest hot startups.

When an early stage professional investor, invests in a startup at a particular valuation, they are just as qualified as someone in a later round. Yes, for the entrepreneur they do not have an "exit", but you do not know the other terms of the deal. In many cases entrepreneurs cash out at many rounds so a big valuation in an early round can in fact make them wealthy.

The line of thinking that professional investors at early stages are "speculative" is true, but not as much once you consider they are making more than 1 investment.

-I work at a post IPO investment fund, but I respect those that make tough decisions earlier in the lifecycle of a business and respect entrepreneurs that get that far.
Anyone know whether go can compile to NaCl binaries? I'm finding contradictory claims about this, and no detailed instructions about how to do it.
Big Cat Jump
Being someone that has only ever programmed in languages that use brackets, I really, really don't get this white space thing .. it appears, to me at least to make reading code very difficult. With brackets I can scan a page of code and see the blocks of related code.

What are the advantages to using white space?
I don't know about your place, but in a typical home dust buildup shouldn't be a problem for a long time.
Rebuilding RIM
No, this was always accepted in times of war. The notion we have to fight is that of perpetually being at war (terrorists! child pornographers! pirates!).
How do all those European data retention laws apply to US companies? Do US companies (with offices in Europe, but servers in the US) need to adhere to those data retention laws, or is it safe to use US-based services?
Due to this comment, I have implemented the comment-folding feature as a Firefox+GreaseMonkey script (which also seems to work in Google Chrome as a Chrome Extension for me).

It lives at: https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/130027
Openjdk contains hotspot, and is now the reference implementation of the Java SE Platform. There are proprietary JVMs as well, but if you want to use an open source implementation you can and it is the reference, so compatible with the standard.
Totally agree. I think the word "design" has almost lost all meeting as it can mean so many different things depending on who you speak with.

Yes I agree Dribbble is a problematic site. I cannot believe graphic design has been reduced to fractions of the work with no brief.
Not to spam, but I took your suggestion and implemented it at: https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/130027
In what sense?
Linux has a number of ways of accessing the audio device, from the simple Open Sound System (OSS), to Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA), and Jack Audio Connection Kit (JACK).

JACK has become the most popular framework for nontrivial sound applications, but there is good support for the other interfaces as well.
There is also no major shortage of applications for either sound generation or analysis.
Compared to the applications listed, baudline provides a much more through analysis for instance.
the translation would go like this:

CC: State Attorney/State Bar Association

Dear Ill-informed Lawyer:

Well have started a disbarment complaint against you for your instance in threatening others with your own lawyer mistakes. Heed the warning.
Maybe offer people a choice between GoDaddy and/or Namecheap. If you offered Namecheap I would buy domains through your site all the time :)
> Also, a lack of warrants is concerning.

It's right there in the bit you quoted:

> the Department for Work and Pensions, should have to apply to a court before access was granted
Let's hear it for 1970s technology. May we ever be stuck with Unix mediocrity!
Well it's a personal preference of course but in my opinion it actually makes code much more readable. It forces everyone to use the same conventions for indentation and it gets the 'clutter (brackets)' out of the way so you can focus on what's important, the code.

Blocks easily identified by their indentation. It might take a little getting used to but I find it very pleasant.
Ideologies are pragmatic in the long term.
Wii sales where always profitable, because Nintendo did not subsidize the Wii. More importantly, sales late in a consoles life cycle are worth a lot less because the company's get a cut of game and accessory sales and someone that has a console for longer probably buys more games or at least more new games. People who buy late have a lot of great cheap games to keep them entertained, where someone who had the console from the beginning probably already played those games and is therefore interested in new titles.

Which is why the subsidy decreases over time.
It's been in Steam for years, I bought it long ago.

And while it's a great game I don't think this brings anything to the discussion (at least unless you elaborate).
Because it's not enough that you can't give the user the page they asked for, you have to disturb the quiet in the office without warning as well.

(Please, add to the title that there's sound.)
While tangential to the issue discussed here, one example of siphoning tax refunds http://www.cringely.com/2012/03/the-30-billion-hack/ (i think that was linked on HN last week)

VAT statements in Germany are a bit riskier though: If you give the Revenue Service permission to withdraw money and I file a VAT statement for you which shows a large income they'll just go and collect 20%. It's a bit an edge case but that's the reason I manually send the VAT collected each month. I'd feel much safer if the interface was authenticated in some way.
ECHELON is pretty old and is much worse than current suggested laws. ECHELON looked at content, not just destination.
Yes, historical average for that road and for that 15 minute time slice. If you want more current data you might consider the live models that use cellular data connections to download more accurate data. (But you have to pay yearly subscriptions - there may be a lifetime model, I'm not sure.)

The traffic receiver will get you current conditions for the larger roads. It's pretty much only the roads that you'll hear mentioned during traffic segments on news radio. So if you have traffic on your local radio you'll probably have traffic from the receiver as well (you must also have a large FM station in your area since it piggybacks on that). It also includes all construction issues and lane restrictions/closures, even those not mentioned on the radio (I assume they get it from the municipality).

If you are far from cities I can't image you have much traffic - where it really shines is when you travel to a city. It will tell you "In 5 miles on the road you are on there is a slowdown to 20 mph lasting for 2 miles."

Due to bandwidth restrictions it's not super accurate on exactly where on the road the slowdown starts/ends but it's pretty good. The GPS unit will automatically recalculate your route to avoid the traffic if it can find a better way. Or you can have it avoid the traffic no matter if it thinks the alternate route is slower.
"Actually only 528 so far at this time."

Sorry the total is 4,384. For some reason the site only shows you the latest number after signing.

(Edit: Correcting previous assertion.)
And the learning curve of Sisyphus goes on and on....