skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Copyright protects expressive works in tangible form. So, a computer language can't be protected because it is an abstraction. But the source code for any implementation of that language can. Here, Oracle is not claiming a copyright in the Java language, nor is it claiming that Google copied any source code (except very insubstantial elements). Oracle claims that the API is protected by copyright and that Google infringed various API elements by copying the structure, etc. in spite of its having done so through a clean-room development. Therefore, Oracle's ultimate copyright claims in the case all turn on its assertion that it can sue upon only a a subset (the API pieces) of the overall copyrighted work (Java) and not the whole work.

The other important piece of the analysis is as follows: copyright protection applies automatically as a work is created and takes a tangible means of expression; however, you cannot sue for infringement of a copyright work unless it is registered as a federal copyright with the Copyright Office.

The Google motion contends that Oracle registered the entire work (Java) and not any subset of that work. Oracle claims it was registered as a "collective work" and that this gives it the right to sue on a component part of the work only. In its motion, Google says that the work was not registered as a collective work and that Oracle therefore can't - as a matter of law - sue over a component piece only.

The motion turns on technical issues but they are ones that would seem to be verifiable one way or the other and thereafter tested under the legal standards just summarized. If the Java registration fails to meet the test, the Oracle loses on its copyright claims as a matter of law (meaning the judge tosses it and it doesn't even go to the jury).

This is truly a bombshell and appears to have caught the Oracle attorneys completely off stride. We will see what happens.
Some of it does make it back upstream, I know of at least one occasion where RedHat added a low-latency kernel improvement on behalf of a bank. It was a switched option that's off by default, so probably most people don't have it on.

It was something that needed to be deployed across a large number of machines and the bank in question didn't want to take all of the machines out of the support contract (by using custom built kernels) so they decided an upstream fix was the best solution. The fact it was switched probably means most of the bank's competing firms don't even realize it's there.
> I'm not sure reg NMS allows this.

This is correct. It would be extremely, unequivocally forbidden under Reg NMS to create a quote-disseminating market center with the proposed property.
That looks right. I mean, it's not too far off from YC's 6% for ~12k, but I'm curious as to whether the rights they spell out affect that in any way, particularly with dilution.
Exactly. Even more direct benefit to retail investors - low liquidity costs mean that we can invest in mutual funds and especially ETFs that have extremely low fees. Those funds have to shuffle around their holdings as investors come and go, and they'd have to charge a lot more if they were paying $0.10 to cross the spread.
This should be obvious

It should be, but it isn't. To techies, yes. We understand that Google/Dropbox/iCloud/CloudDriveX(tm) can and probably will use information accessed through these services. To others, though, it's just like saying some company can "read your hard drive and look at your stuff" which is unexpected and unsettling.

Normal users expect their files to be just that-their files.

Whether this is an invasion of privacy or just the new normal is up for debate.
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The article didn't actually give any evidence as to why Opsware was a bad purchase for HP, and according the comments in the article the product still exists and has simply been rebranded.

I suppose I was trying to imply with the $1.6bn price tag that clearly HP thought the product was immensely valuable and I thought "who is the author to say that they were so wrong without a shard of evidence?" Admittedly, I failed to actually draw this line of reasoning in the post at all and have no reason to suppose others would infer it as well.
I like the idea but don't see why YC will want to start it. Perhaps that could be done by someone else.

Add: there are already equity based crowdfunding sites - for example Symbid.com
There was a great article about a 72-year study on happiness from Harvard a while back. I submitted it to HN back then and it will probably be of interest to the readers of this paper.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/06/what-mak...
What sickens me most is that these people don't believe they're wrong. I won't generalize every individual who's ever made a stupid comment, but I can tell you anecdotally that these 'brogrammers' resent being called out for sexist remarks and turn to like-minded cliques where acceptable discourse includes long-winded rants regarding the harrowing campaign of persecution set upon them by the likes of 'liberal whiteknights' and 'feminazi bitches'.

These guys aren't actively conspiring to exclude women from tech (in fact, they tend to jump at any superficial opportunity to demonstrate the opposite), but they're angry about being called sexist and they really don't want to capitulate to the suggestion that their behavior merits serious adjustment (which is not surprising considering the correlation of ego with 'brogrammer').

The surplus of cash and minor acclaim only emboldens their resolve; there is a subconscious belief that their financial success has conferred the wisdom to authoritatively determine the appropriate bounds of sexual commentary for a professional setting and anyone who can't deal with sexist bullshit can just get the fuck outta tech because the startup is king and sensitive women (and men) just can't handle the heat of 60 hour weeks spent reclined in front of a widescreen LCD.

These chauvinistic kids really need a wake up call, but frankly, I fear the money is just too good for them to ever really care.
Still wondering when they're going to update the iPad version...
> just as the lack of female coal miners is likewise not a cruel injustice.

It is for someone who really wants to work in a coal mine. (Or, for a more germane example, someone who wants to be an infantry soldier.) Not everyone shares your priorities or ideas on what constitutes rewarding work. Some people might find a well-compensated 9-to-5 job slinging code under fluorescent lights to be just the ticket, and they should get to pursue that to the best of their ability on their own merits.

Restricting certain people from (or pushing certain people into) certain jobs based on their gender, skin color, or other irrelevant factors beyond their control is a fairness issue that transcends the particulars of the jobs that they are being restricted from.
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I'm probably misunderstanding this, but wouldn't this open the door to allowing someone to copy just portions of a copyrighted work if the work is only copyrighted as a "whole"? Would this require a company (or individual) to copyright every sub system in a larger system? I'm certain I am overlooking something as that seems an unreasonable burden.
I like the fact that PDF margins are (intentionally, or not) eReaders-optimized. PDFs with wide margins are annoying on Kindle, which does not remove unnecessary whitespace from them, thus forcing user to read pages 'on side' or zoom parts of the document.
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Is there evidence that the bid ask spreads have that substantially declined across the board, or is the decline limited to the most actively churned stocks?
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Despite their vague handwaving, I do not see what this offers over HTTP pipelining. Why layer REST on a websocket on what is an HTTP-1.1 capable server when we can just layer REST on a HTTP-1.1 server?

To the extent that you can't send multiple requests without getting answers, that's your fault for using synchronous requests, not for using not-a-websocket.

WebSockets aren't performance magic. They're slightly glorified TCP sockets. If you've already got a TCP protocol (like, say, HTTP-1.1), it may be convenient to put a WebSocket interface around it, but there's no other advantage. And this is a particularly weak case since if we support websockets in the first place we almost certainly have full HTTP1.1 pipelining support.
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But we do know the net effects of sex on developing an interest in programming, namely that there is a negative correlation between being female and having said interest.

The question is what comprises this effect and how much of it is nature as opposed to nurture.

Basically, it depends on if you approach it from a hollistic perspective (where the effect of sex is the compound of physical capability and social influences and whatever else) or a narrow perspective (how does the Y chromosome influence analytical capability).

In the wide perspective, the answer is clear - there are indeed differences in how males and females process their environment (https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:9JNbJB0PhGEJ:...).

In the narrow perspective, it may never be clear for environment influences genetic expression (http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/environmental-influ...). In other words, it's possible that the genetics expressed in a human are themselves socially influenced. Or, for a bigger picture, an individual having a Y chromosome is treated differently by their environment which in turn results in a different genetic expression and, by extension, different preferences and capabilities. Or to put it yet another way, nature influences nuture which, in turn, influences nature. It's a feedback loop.

Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_psychology#Intelligence

To summarise the above link, there is greater variation in adult men's intelligence and they are over-represented at the tail end as well as having a higher average intelligence. So we do indeed know where both Paris and London are at this point, we just don't know enough about geology to guess how they got there.
But the thing is, a company don't need 100% of the best programmers; in the extreme case of a small startup, you just need a handful of them to get off the ground. If you can make an environment that a few people love, even if most people wouldn't like it, that could be a competitive advantage in hiring. Companies like the ones that the article criticizes may actually be doing themselves a favor, even as they alienate people who find that kind of environment off-putting.

Huh. When I started writing this comment, I did not expect to come to that conclusion.
Precisely the sort of thing I was getting at before I got modded down to oblivion.
I'm not saying this is happening to you, but for the longest time, I had this idea in my head "I'm nice, women don't find me attractive, therefore women don't find nice guys attractive. Look at that guy over there, he's an jerk to everyone and women love him. WTF?" It's easy conclusion to come to, but it's a dangerous logical fallacy that can cause you to hyper-focus on the wrong thing.

Different women find different things attractive, but one thing that is almost universally unattractive is desperation and a lack of confidence.
Do you have to register it with the copyright office as soon as you create it, or could you create it, register it 10 years later, then immediately sue someone who copied it?
It's interesting that these 'sexism' articles draw huge number of comments. Usually that would mean there are two strong sides arguing. But since they are almost always one sided, I don't see the reason for this much of 'attention'. Whats the point in arguing, when there is no one to argue with...
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yep I remember my boss telling me about ip exhaustion must have been around about 20 years ago.
Oh that's really cool. Its using leveldb got me thinking, how hard would it be to create a Riak client that emulates Redis?
They can run their companies any way they choose, within the laws of the land.

The laws of the land are pretty clear about creating hostile work environments.
What exactly is being shown in the animation/slideshow? You said its iterating and maximizing the MLE, but doesn't that just mean you're maximizing a single number? How can that iteration generate an entire heatmap?
I would rather see crowdscreening of YC applications. Letting people apply for HN screening about 2-4 weeks before YC deadline, discussing application's strong/weak points, etc here on HN. You can do it here adhoc, but more formal approach with voting, might help to narrow down 3000 applications to 1000 or so.
Very appropriate. I was wondering why someone would do such an interview and put it all out there.
Am I mistaken in my understanding that WebSockets is a stateful protocol? If your problem maps well to resource oriented architecture, when would the benefits of switching to this outweigh the fact that you'd be giving up response caching and scaling on a per-connection basis?
The issue here is that Oracle can't assert copyright on the individual pieces because they didn't write them. They were contributed by others. Oracles only copyright is on the work as a whole.

To that end, you could go ahead and copy pieces of the copyrighted work, but you would still be subject to lawsuits by the people that wrote the original individual piece. You just wouldn't be subject to lawsuits by Oracle. It's still infringement, but Oracle isn't the infringed party.
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Sketchup is a market specific product in the same way that Google App Engine is. I strongly suspect that Trimble's products already interface with Sketchup either directly or through standard ESRI or Autodesk file formats.
"But isn't investment about spreading risk?"

Spreading risk is only one factor. It's like selling a car and only factoring in fuel efficiency and ignoring safety. Having a larger number of people, and this is important, with a megaphone that are like minded that can cause you trouble would be hard to control. While you could say that companies now have a large number of investors (stock owners) and they have little control, they also aren't the age group using the megaphone of the internet to amplify their voice.
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Indeed. Seems too late to change it now, so this will be my lesson for commenting when I'm really tired.
No, I don't believe jsilence missed the point at all. In fact, that point is the most important one: if all RSS feeds died tomorrow, I would still be able to re-create them on my own machine by periodically polling every single website that I care about.

Now if that sounds like a monster waste of bandwidth, it should: the publishers get something from this deal, too.
Plus they get readership, because I use RSS to remind me that there are articles on the web that I want to read.
Yes, but including a lot of unexperienced investors actually increases the risk of failure. The distraction alone (in time spent managing these investors) might be the death of any startup. Imagine trying to deal with hundreds of mini-vc's all day. Pg's right in the sense that a startup needs just a few focused, knowledgable investors early on.

Something like Kiva might work for a startup, but perhaps more in a donation bootstrap sense. Not as a serious investment.
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This hits very close to home for me as well. (I constantly witness how the race to lowest latency is a race to lowest security and lowest safety)

To be fair, a lot of exchanges mandate specific order validation pre-checks and specific firewall hardware.
er they started talking about a replacement for ipv4 in the 80's
Funding a startup is very different than something like Kiva. Startups are new untested theories put into practice. To succeed, you need not just money but quality advice. My parents might be able to provide money to a startup, but they could never provide critical advice around an inflection point and guide me in what to do.

The idea of crowdfunding a startup to "spread risk" focuses on the wrong reason for raising money. You also do not give up less ownership just because you spread the risk farther. You would give us less ownership for equal funding if your backers are more naive, maybe (this assumes that we are not talking about experienced investors calculating the right price for a round and valuing it based on competing internal theories - reasonable considering the average knowledge level of the likely crowdfunders), but that would not serve your company in the best way.
That example, however, it not solely germane to ultra-HFT. More traditional market makers have provided that level of liquidity for a long time.

Do you have an example of where sub-100 ms execution truly adds significant liquidity?

I'm open to listening, but have never heard a convincing case for why HFT below such a time threshold adds net value (i.e., enough to make up for the volatility it can cause).

Edit: Changed to "solely germane"
> Of course, it’s highly illegal to use trojans to rob retail investors and game the stock market, so this story is not particularly realistic.

But in fact that entire scenario he just described is perfectly legal. The industry calls them "flash orders", and due to industry pushback against an SEC initiative to ban them in 2009, they are still legal.

Nutshell description:

- you put in an order to buy AAPL

- your trusted exchange "flashes" the order to a company that has paid for the information, so they know you want to buy AAPL. They now have exactly .5 second (SEC rule) to act on that information before your order hits the wider market.

- said company goes and buys up the AAPL on the market, ahead of you

- your order to buy AAPL hits, executing at a slightly higher price than you expected

- said company sells AAPL at the new higher price (perhaps to you)

You've acquired AAPL at a slightly inflated price, and another company has pocketed the extra money you paid. They could buy low and sell high with a GUARANTEE of success because they knew your order was coming to the market. We used to call this front-running and call it illegal, but not in the modern U.S. stock market.

This is completely legal in the United States. It's happening now. It happened hundreds of times while you read this sentence.
The ETF concept could be interesting to look at. I was reading Tryenor's book and I thought he mentioned how entering an ETF position still nets out below an index return because of the cost of liquidity.

I wonder if ETFs would have ever grown as large as they had if HFT never existed (the time periods of the rise of ETF parallels to the rise of HFT.) Anybody have any insight here?
I love resources like this. Publicly available knowledge, especially on a topic like Math is absolutely priceless. I commend whoever took the time to put this together.
"For startups, having large numbers of investors is bad,"

Who says that it has to be large numbers. In kickstarter they are $1 pledges and $1000, $5000 pledges.

You could have thousands of people around the world hear your pitch and decide investing on you.

"and having inexperienced investors is bad"

Who says that they have to be inexperienced. Do you really believe that the people in Bay Area is the smartest and only experienced people in the world?. Maybe they are the smartest and more experienced in USA, but the world is bigger than USA.

Who says that startups could not decide who they let invest on them?. (investors also pitching their selves). And pick experienced ones?.

Crowfunding is not only about large numbers of people, but also about removing frontiers.

Even if they are inexperienced, Paul, Did you were born knowing it all? People could learn like you did.
In this context, crowdfunding is a large group of people pooling small amounts of money for an equity stake. This is relatively new and it hasn't been done yet. The OP was basically asking if there would be a new YC fund that would be open for the masses to 'micro invest' in.

This is in contrast to Kickstarter is crowdfunding where you pre-order the product.
The end of signups
So I stayed visited a friend last summer in San Jose. I decided that during that week, while he worked, that I would go out and see for myself how "dropping by" startups would work out. I was surprised by the reactions of some of the companies. Here is what happened when I did this, but remember this was not in San Francisco, but south (IE Mountain View, San Jose, etc.).

Established startups that were > 20 employees were very hard to talk to. They had recruiters working for them to find and hire people. Those recruiters were pretty much booked and didn't have any openings in their schedules. I was often referred to their website to apply and then wait to be contacted.

The smaller startups, those who had only a few cubicles / people, took my contact information and were going to pass it along. They didn't have recruiters (they are expensive) so they did their own recruiting. They also had places to apply online in which they referred me to.

In all I found it very difficult to just stop in and grab someone's attention. I will be moving out there at the end of this summer and hope to work on my startup. If that goes sour then I will definitely do things differently to find a job, more along the lines of what devs1010 suggested. I found more opportunities just talking to people with similar interests than just showing up in person to random startups.
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Are you certain about that?

I thought the whole point of HFT was to use small shreds of information to play the liquidity gap between sell and buy orders.
I don't know if you made up the "pissing in the pool" metaphor for this kind of behavior, but it's just perfect. Thank you.
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He says: "conversation which will never happen"

Which means that the investment professionals aren't loose canons and they've been around the block and understand what their role is. Publicly at least they don't operate like that.
> since humor belongs to every time in life --and especially in public gatherings and presentations

Certain types of humor, perhaps. (Although I'd still argue that there are times in life when humor is not appropriate, and that a person who can't or doesn't know when to be serious is at least as irritating as someone who never lightens up.) But there's a time and place.

A big presentation, consisting of the general public, at a high-profile conference, when you are representing your company, which is part of an industry that has a poor image and reputation for sexism already, is really not the time to break out the locker-room humor. It's not quite breaking out the dead-baby jokes in the local NICU, but it's not a great idea either.

Also, if you're going to use humor in a presentation -- especially humor that is in the least bit envelope-pushy -- have some sort of a backup plan to scale it back if and when your first joke bombs. Sometimes, the audience you think that you were going to get just isn't the audience that you have. That might not be 'Presentations 101', but it's at least covered in the 200-level class.