skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think the diagram in the article is anywhere close to accurate. It looks like somebody just made it up. I think most of us here know SYN-ACK is a TCP thing and has nothing to do with modems or "setting parameters".. what's a "databit number", anyway?

Most of those sounds are the modems testing the characteristics of the phone line and calibrating themselves. http://www.3amsystems.com/wireline/hmo-v34.htm has a much fancier picture that at least gives a hint of the complexity involved in just the 28.8k v.34 handshake.

I grew up on BBSes and later went into the ISP business as the 56k standards were fighting it out. I remember being in awe of how people seemed to keep inventing cleverer and cleverer ways to get more data down those crappy phone lines, from PSK to QAM to trellis coding to PCM.. that one blew my mind.. the idea that our side of the connection is digital so we can dispense with all that tedious analog modulation in one direction. The Wikipedia article on modems is actually a nice tour through its evolution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem

While I'm aware there are superbly impressive modulation schemes going on all around me in FiOS, ethernet, WiFi, etc., something about hearing that noise when the modems were connecting makes it so much more concrete. It's easier to take the new stuff for granted.
There are other places for discussing the movie as a whole: a torrent discussion should focus on the torrent IMO.
Agreed. I wonder if the people who leaked this information will be held responsible just the same as Thomas Drake & Jeffrey Sterling were/are.

For this to be included in the sudden wave of media coverage on Obama's tough stances on foreign conflicts/terrorism is pretty weighty regardless of motivation.
Could you possibly be any more vague, prescriptive or unhelpful? Repeating yourself and ignoring pleas for elaboration helps no one.
haha... I just highlighted the text that was under the black out bar and was able to copy/paste it. FAIL!
TradeMark isn't about the meaning as far as I know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark
Note: IANAL

Is there any problem with giving legal advice? I thought that anyone can give legal advice, as long as they don't practice law (without authorization).

I guess the real question is, does legal advise always constitute the practice of law? I can go to an accountant, real estate agent, government department, police station, bank, or school and get something which technically constitutes legal advice.

I think it's a gray area, and I think the laws are a little vague (and vary with state law).

I'm pretty sure an offer "Ask me legal questions, even though I'm not a lawyer" would put you in hot water. I doubt you could create a forum specifically for non-lawyers to offer people advice.

I think there is a line somewhere between coincidental legal advice, and practicing law, and while I don't think anyone (even a lawyer) knows where that line is, I've never heard of a poster on an internet forum getting charged.
Good post though I will say even without the power of hindsight consulting a lawyer should've been step one. There's enough big trademark cases to go around in the public eye to know that these things shouldn't be taken lightly.
Don't worry, he commented about 20 times with legal recommendations against giving legal recommendations and dodges any requests for information about a court case or really any elaboration beyond hand waving and spooky insinuations.
No, if it was an "almost black hole" as predicted by general relativity, they wouldn't see EM radiation, due to gravitational time dilation. The "almost black hole" might emit a single photon only once every 100 years in our time.
The fact that one of the most powerful nations in the world not only created one of the most notorious viruses in the world but lost control of it is madness. Its original purpose was to cause hardware to physically destroy itself. Imagine if, by sheer coincidence, the commands for that were the same as the commands for something like a nuclear reactor's cooling turbines?
It's incredibly improbable but not impossible. That makes this a hugely dangerous and downright stupid occurrence. America shouts at Pakistan for losing control of its nukes and then develops, with a country that has some reputation for overkill (Israeli invasion of Gaza being a prime example), a dangerous weapon in software form, then doesn't pay attention to what the thing actually does? Where's the review process? How does something like the software being modified so it can infect and spread on common consumer systems so rapidly (I'm assuming that the modifications were to the way it spread, not sure) get missed? It's crass carelessness.

International espionage is half offence and half tact. It's not espionage if everyone finds out about it.
It's not just desirable; it's absolutely required. Look at every successful dev environment and you'll see a large community of developers making it better. Those that survive in spite of this (eg Xcode) do so because something else forces their continued existence (such as being the only way onto the iPhone).
Perhaps you should read my advice to the OP a second time, which clearly says "My advice is hire counsel to advise you, educate yourself...". In what bizarre lawyer-universe is telling someone to hire counsel and educate themselves on the Internet practicing law? You must be smoking crack, my friend, and a lot of it.
We are looking for graphic designer/UX expert.

https://gist.github.com/2838122 - Our official job posting.

Small start-up bootstrapping in Santiago, Chile because we got accepted to http://startupchile.org
There's no resolution in that link. It's still an open issue. All the proposed solutions raise other serious problems, as the link info notes.
No mention of our odd restaurant tipping practices? I thought they are unusual compared to the rest of the world...
I believe the 5 day figure here is about how many days worth of inventory are stored in the warehouse -- not how long they sit in retail stores.

These warehouses ship to all the retail outlets (Apple Stores, Best buy, etc) and the online orders.
Interesting that almost all the content on the page is hosted at uts.edu.au?
This article starts with an interesting bait, but declines to listing high-functioning people and their mental quirks.

"The spectrum" includes "normal" people; they are all in a cluster at the non-Autistic end of the spectrum. Asperger's is somewhere between...
Sharethrough - http://www.sharethrough.com/engineering
San Francisco, ~Ferry Building, Full Time, Great Relo Package (we've done Canada and Australia; we're pretty good at it :)

Sharethrough is...

- A technology company fixing what's broken about video advertising (http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/12/5-ways-native-monetization-...).
- Working with brands like Old Spice, Xbox and MLB.
- On modern, great tech responsibly (Rails 3.2.5, Backbone, Hadoop, Cascading, etc.). Sorry, no MongoDB!
- Well-funded with continuous investment in engineering (training, materials, conferences, etc.!).
- One of the "2011 Best Places to Work in the Bay Area".
- Serious about bringing on great people. We'll turn around an offer in as little as 24 hours.

Give me a shout directly - rslifka@sharethrough.com

Rob
Don: I don't doubt that you had problems with you particular project, but I have issues with your article because the tone is that you want to warn everyone off of CouchDB.

Sweeping generalizations usually are wrong. Also, 20K writes a day are nothing.
An "almost black hole" also predicted by Einstein's theory predicts the same observation, as an effect of gravitational time dilation. The non-black-hole theory that fits the evidence is the tweak you replied to. As I said, it fits all the evidence.
Oh indeed. I think we tend to default to defence of the "little guy", even without enough information to make informed judgements. I certainly made the mistake of jumping to conclusions here. Personally, I have little-to-no time for either party's argument, as it's a rather banal fight anyway.
Design for developers - tips from experience
I don't see the big deal. You can make the same argument about the Blackberry when it first came out, and the Palm devices before it, and so on. People are easier to persuade when you mimic the look they want and differentiate on features. Look at clothing even.
You should take a look at an exchange between that guy and a guy with the bio: "Software development, web design ; interested in movies, animation and humor." [1]

Should they both just shut up and let the big boys handle it? Or should he take another person's input and use his head to determine it's value? People are capable of offering valuable input without expertise and full details.

As PG said, "Don't trust stuff you read on forums." He didn't say ignore it. It might even save his son's life. I'm strongly inclined to believe this can work in law as it can work with extremely rare medical conditions.

[1] http://twitter.com/mattmight/status/207529584999153664
I gave up this topic several hours ago, and you are just now commenting to scold me for it, and following me around to do so. For someone who self-describes as "not a troll," you sure work hard to look like one, based on observing you for several months. Even pg had to tell you to shut up the other day.

Go away and let this issue lie.
In the email exchanges Brian comes across as the shit bag to me. Here's a sample that makes me wonder why he has a PayPal donate button on his site and why his original post was a cry for money:

"Please do not confuse someone who would rather not waste their time and money on legal matters with someone who cannot afford a lawyer. I was born wealthy; I have an obscene trust fund. I assure you that if required, I will obtain the best legal representation for corporate litigation in the Silicon Valley." (Brian's quote from the 3rd email)
> (which I believe led to his disqualification from military service)

I read the book a while ago so I don't remember it enough to respond to the rest of your comment, but this part here I do remember.

He was disqualified from military service because he played games with them in the screening and said things like he "heard voices in his head" (because that's what thinking is). The section was all rather funny.
They were putting out ads against Romney at the beginning of the Republican nominee campaign.
Better than it is now, where none of that data is available except possibly through FOIA lawsuits.
cool, i bookmarked it and already found some new movies to watch!
Yeah but Microsoft and others tried for YEARS to make tablets work, no dice. Apple succedded on their first attempt. That does say something.
More specifically, the `defer` keyword lets you handle cleanup in the case of failure a bit more neatly.

The gotos can be replaced with stuff like this:

foo, err := bar()
if err != nil {
return err
}
defer foo.cleanup() // or what have you

Now, right before the function returns, Go will call `foo.cleanup()` and your `cleanup()` call sits right next to the initialization code. It's a lot easier to tell whether or not you are (or someone else is) doing cleanup properly.
Ask HN - How do you avoid distrations?
The distractions:

* Unimportant emails

* Facebook

* Twitter

* Analytics (I check them every few hours, do I need to? Probably not)

* YouTube

* Reddit

* HackerNews

How do you discipline yourself?
A bunch of their courses (including their algorithms courses) are in Java, which makes me skeptical of how good their taste is. It's a strong red flag that they're just licensing content without any understand of the actual content matter and the quality of what they're teaching. I could be wrong, but that's definitely the impression I get based on both the fact that they're using Java and the classes are structured like traditional university classes, since not only are most university classes really mediocre (at best), but it also shows that they aren't taking advantage of the power of the platform/medium. Again, another red flag for poor taste.
Apple doesn't have a trademark on "Camera"
What they mean is not that important. There are many trademarks out there that mean the same thing but relate to competing goods. What is important is whether a customer would confuse them.

In my opinion that is clearly not the case. People aren't that stupid.
The fill-out-the-code-flow stuff is going to be -much- harder to do for python than for clojure, I suspect.

Just because it's highly extensible doesn't mean that beating the other language's VM into doing what's needed isn't going to require a bunch of effort.
I agree, by outsourcing to test centers they are side stepping a giant problem. I hope it's a short term solution. I loath the thought of testing in a clinical setting for a stressful exam, there has to be a better way.
> To date, software engineering is still largely a collection of (fairly subjective and contextually-sensitive) best practices.

Any engineering field is a collection of best practices, so that works out well.
I was thinking that too, to me it's the big obvious elephant in the room in this HN discussion - he said he'd change the name and then didn't, or that's the impression I've gotten anyway.
"conneciton" - typo on your homepage.
And if you must put on sunglasses you found on the street, do not stare at the skull headed people, point at the signs saying 'breed', or shut down the big weird radio transmitter thingy.
I assume WhosAround, WhosThere, WhosClose, WhosComing and WhosUpMyAss are also trademark infringements?
I sincerely hope they don't block this, but this is an awesome awesome work.

1) Search is mind blowingly fast.
2) UI is clean
3) The torrents info about seed and leeches is awesome.

You should be appreciated. Beautiful, beautiful beautiful.
A slap fight over an awful trademark.
The pricing page is short on detail. It only gives prices, not features (or benefits). And the blog name in the screenshot might not be a good thing to feature.

edit: Apparently it gives you more detail if you click the plan. It's bordering on mystery meat navigation.
> seriously, "regularly" turning down offers for work at a rate of over $400/hr?

Yeah, that line stuck out like a store thumb.
Interesting. I'll have to read more about the nuances of the algorithm.
You're the one that spammed it, ran to mommy and now are calling me a troll? Yes. I have made it this far and long on HN by being a troll. You're the one going around being a hypocrite and not supporting your arguments.

Ironic that in your 'run to mommy' thread you try to invoke pg as some authority for you. (ironically his comment was trying to stop a futile argument in the bud, as you could easily have seen the other killed comment that wasn't mine while you were stalking me)?

And after you accuse me of following you, you say you've been "observing me for months" and concluded I'm a troll. You're a creep. What is your problem?
Thanks we'll fix that!
> WhosUpMyAss are also trademark infringements?

No, actually, that one is free.

Show us what you can do with it! ;-)
Interestingly, the GPL seems to come up every time there is a discussion about copyright law.

The fact that the GPL uses copyright is just an implementation detail. In a very real sense, the GPL is the opposite of normal copyright--it turns copyright law against itself. It goes further than not having any copyright (e.g. public domain/BSD/MIT): it not only ensures this particular work is free, it ensures all the works it can affect also remain free.

So the issue (from an idealist's standpoint) is not that the copyright of a GPL project is infringed but rather that additional limits are added on the project. The idea behind the GPL is to ensure that not only can everybody access the program, but they can legally and practically modify it. The people infringing are the ones who stop others from accessing the intellectual "property"--the very opposite of "pirates"!

In the open source world, the most direct analog of something like piracy is distributing a normally paid project for free, legally (e.g. CentOS vs RHEL). Not only is this legal, but it's completely reasonable--nobody's crying foul! (You are not allowed to use trademarks, but that's completely orthogonal to copyright.)

So really, the arguments against copyright and for the GPL are the same. If anything, the latter is actually more extreme: it ensures not only access but the ability to modify.

In the FSF's perfect world, copyright would not be necessary for the GPL--all software would just be free (as in speech) by default. So supporting the GPL and opposing other copyright is entirely consistent.
Yes, but they do that every Friday. Iran has been openly at war with the United States for over thirty years and loudly reminding the world of that fact at every opportunity. The only surprise in the US now committing an act of war against Iran is that the US has finally retaliated in some form other than complaining or giving Iran money and weapons in the misguided belief they might become friends.
You know what seems weird to me? the fact that at first they turned down this (alleged) offer to integrate a windows mobile version of the app into their version and then just a few years later

"Just a few weeks ago, we offered to partner with Mr. Hamachek. We offered to integrate his Windows Mobile work into WhosHere and offered a revenue share deal for $100,000, plus fees, for ongoing development"

something smells wrong.
I read the comment threads and observe patterns. You are generally an obnoxious troll, enough that I recognize your name. Like I recognize tptacek as a security expert. You, in my mind, are burned in as "obnoxious troll". Other names are burned in as permanent no-hires, never-do-business. That list grows pretty quickly. I have a good memory for obnoxious or blatantly stupid people, so you've stuck.

I didn't skim your comment history, I read the God damned thread yesterday. I should have known you'd show up and want a spoonful of this delicious troll soup, hours after the fact, while saying absolutely nothing of contributing value that other people haven't said already.

The complete irony of this is that the abuse I'm getting for "running to mommy" (I'm sure Paul Graham would really appreciate your minimization) is not what I expected for trying to help people not get in legal trouble, and that you can't see that just means: you are a troll.
How Doudou Mobile is transforming the way parents and teachers share
But the people who'd review the idea would care about that, so they might refuse to review it as "too nutty". Plate tectonics might have fit into that category, although of course it did reach general acceptance when the evidence became overwhelming.
I have tinnitus as well. The idea of a totally quiet room gives me the creeps, I know I wouldn't be able to stand it for more than a few minutes.
FYI data.gov launched in May 2009 after being announced by Obama's CIO in March 2009. This isn't a new effort, it's the continuation of ongoing efforts.

For example:
http://ideascale.com/userimages/sub-1/736312/ConOpsFinal.pdf is a document (Dec 2009) documenting the vision for Data.gov, and http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/mem... is a memoranda from 2009 that first started requiring the online sharing of major datasets.
Unfortunately, I think you're mistaken. Any dilution of a trademark invites further dilution. IANAL either, but you've made some very strong statements here, and I think they're based on a misunderstanding or lack of understanding of how trademarks work.
Thanks for the feedback. The blog name is actually my personal blog (edgy hey...)

We'll look into the pricing area and try un-hide it a little more. Believe it or not it was actually a lot more hidden before, so we'll keep working on it!
Wow. Please, slander me more and call me names and wield baseless accusations.

I would hope that pg is intelligent enough to understand that my characterization of this post isn't meant to minimize him in the least. Someone repeating the same thing over and over and flatly ignoring the same requests for an actual explanation or elaboration is bad enough. When it's followed by an immediate run to the admin for a ban seems childish to me.
You came to me, bud.

Can you edit that comment any more? I liked the fuller, more stupid one better wherein you claim I'm mad at you for something you said in a Bitcoin thread, like I'm a high school sophomore or something that holds a grudge. No, you're just ignorant, and I've noticed because I pay attention.

Oh look, a completely new paragraph kissing pg's ass! Rewrite your comment again, this is fun to watch.

> When it's followed by an immediate run to the admin for a ban seems childish to me.

Pause. Time out.

Now you're just being intentionally disingenuous, like many that have come before you. I did not come here to ask pg to ban him. I came here to ask for a guideline to be added advising against giving and receiving legal advice on Hacker News, as if you are not careful it can be disastrous. Without the guideline, it's just jackass me in a thread going "hey, that's a bad idea, don't do that," but people in general seem to pay attention to guidelines.

Since you've been around the block of Hacker News a few times, you and I both know what a guideline is. Stop acting like I'm doing something I'm not.
Being a parasite requires some sort of active harm. Since the cost of obtaining a torrent is essential nil, and the creator doesn't support it anyhow, you're not harming them in the least.

Now, you're also certainly not giving them any benefit, and perhaps you believe that they deserve some benefit, but that still doesn't make you a parasite any more than anybody who just didn't buy a movie.

Put another way: to the creator, the utility of your torrenting a movie is the same as the utility of just not buying the movie. Now, obviously the utility of your paying the creator is higher, but that still doesn't make you a parasite.

You are at worst a symbiont, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

Now, there are other arguments for copyright, but your point about being a parasite is just inaccurate.
I've always been a fan of the plan-per-column approach. It's perfect for things like this where the only difference between plans is quantity. It makes for quick comparisons.
This seems to be quite a comprehensive collection of features yet to be found in iOS while still remaining well thought out. Adding some of these features surely would be silly, but as iOS reaches a higher level of maturity, it'll certainly be interesting to see what Apple comes up with.

Windows 8 Contracts-like inter-app communication would seem to be the greatest feature users would love without even realizing its existence. It's a shame Apple (with OS X as well) loves to keep sandboxed apps so isolated. Launching Safari to open a URL for a specific app the user may not own is quite unfortunate.
Yep, because programming and computer science don't have a lot of overlap. But I bet you could have written a mean linked list after the CS degree.
I think that makes sense too, shouldn't be too hard to revise it. Thinking back its laid out how it is mainly due to some old indecisiveness around what our pricing was going to look like, and its just sort of grown. Time for a cleanup, appreciate you reminding us it needs attention!
I don't agree. It's not dilution if you give permission; the company printing "Kleenex" on kleenex boxes is not diluting the trademark. They have permission to use the trademark in the course of their business relationship.

But just so we're not arguing about the specifics of trademark law: I think you should throw away all your legal rights to a trademark if retaining those rights means you have to be a bad person.

In this case where both names are common English phrases, I think it's especially shady to be so aggressive about enforcement. I doubt either would win against the other, in fact, but I don't think it should come to that either.