skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think he's being clear. He wrote:

"So let’s set the record straight. You cannot legally sample music without clearance. It begins and ends there. If someone were to take a tiny clip of one of my songs, pitch it down to 10% speed, reverse it, and slam 8 minutes of echo on it, I could sue their pants off (not that I would, or even be able to detect such a thing)."

He's saying this under all circumstances. Note that you can create works for commercial purposes for teaching. If course, the statute states that this will be taken into consideration.

Now don't get me wrong, fair use is a nebulous thing. You'll most likely not fall under fair use provisions in most circumstances. It's not always clear what a court will decide, so I agree - if you sample, best to get permission! But making sweeping statements that something is not and will never be covered under fair use is wrong.
I once read a book about MFC (Microsoft foundation classes) programming in Windows. This book had some web programming chapters, and one of them was DTHML (dynamic HTML) how it was called then.
The author even said "Silly HTML" to it (it makes more sense in German, because silly starts with a "d" in German) and said that this is absolutely worthless, cause it will never work in more than one browser.

These were the days. Funny how some things change and "silly ideas" are all the rage.
Weirdly enough, I fear losing my hands more. Even thought it is far less likely.
Marginal cost = price only in perfectly competitive markets. For commodity content(e.g., daily news), then yes the expected long term price is zero. For content that does not have (perfect) substitutes (e.g., the latest Batman movie), the expected market price is not zero.
In a situation like this the terms of service will not affect you, your account will not be blocked and the payment service will not stop working.

People keep forgetting that the overwhelming majority of all eBay payments are done using Paypal.
You'd be better off forwarding him the actual fair use statute, and get him to tell you why he believes 3 second samples are legal under fair use.
Apple's "marvel of engineering" actually does. You can launch an app in 32-bit mode (while running in 64-bit mode) should you require interoperability with 32-bit components. All actually pretty neat. And given that most of an app isn't executable binaries (and hasnt been since forever) the size of executables isn't a big deal.

(A few years ago I had to run Safari in 32-bit mode to test unity web apps for the brief period where unity didn't offer a 64-bit plugin.)
>And he's absolutely right: that's not "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching [..], scholarship, or research", so it does not fall under fair use, and the length and nature of the sample is completely irrelevant.

That's simply untrue.

Firstly, there is a concept in copyright law called de minimis that potentially defends this kind of sampling in cases where it is so small it does not reproduce the original work in a substantial fashion (e.g. [1] in which copyrighted photos used in the background of a commercial film without permission were ruled to be de minimis and not infringing). This would not apply in every case of sampling, but would depend upon the length and substantiality of the sample used.

Secondly, such a sample could arguably be used under the parody fair use exemption. Something being released commercially does not preclude it being a parody.

[1] Sandoval v. New Line Cinema Corp., 147 F.3d 215 (2nd Cir., 1998)
> I'm trying to understand him.

You may have to simply live with not being able to. Both because of a lack of cultural connection and because you weren't there when it happened.
For those of us who are not yet even studying law, SOGA1979 is the Sales of Goods Act 1979 and UCTA1979 is the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1979. There are also several ammendments that have been made to them more recently (if anyone else had heard of Sale of Goods Act 1995).
I entirely agree with you, but then again, I don't think Mozilla has always had their priorities straight. My favorite example is the 3D view in the inspector. At the end of 2012, you still can't live edit in Markup Panel in any meaningful way, and yet you have a 3D view. I would LOVE to use the inspect bar if it was usable, but now I'm stuck with it and 8 other items in the Web Developer submenu and Firebug. Firebug's been around forever and does everything the other 9 items can and cannot do. Just bundle it into Firefox already and move on to other things geez...
Fun fact: Nashorn is the German word for a Rhinoceros and the literal translation would be "Nosehorn".

And according to Wikipedia: The word rhinoceros is derived through Latin from the Ancient Greek: ῥῑνόκερως, which is composed of ῥῑνο- (rhino-, "nose") and κέρας (keras, "horn").
Chevrolet Spark and Sonic Drive with Siri
XOR isn't insecure per se. What I'd like to know is how this "random string" is created in the first place
Using NTP is ok until your network connection is broken for hours. Think backhoe into the fibre.
So now you have two books that will be out of synch, which is worse than losing the book in the first place. And your book can still be stolen. Only this book will be totally up to date (which is fantastic for the thief) but the book in the safe probably won't be.

This is not inspiring in me further confidence in the methodology...
"It's never going to happen because it's lost on them just how hard programming is."

This. Becoming a software developer takes an enormous amount of tenacity and patience, and willingness to dive into things you'd rather not dive into.

Someone following a pre-baked tutorial is probably not confronted with arcane showstoppers which require elaborate workarounds or debugging lower levels of logic. I have seen quite some people start a programming tutorial and wishing to become a 'coder', but then hit some brick wall the moment they had to leave the path that was set out for them. Not knowing how to proceed, they eventually shrug and give up, possibly sooner than later. This tendency to give up early is less likely if you arrive to programming from the bottom-up, for example, via electronics engineering. I suspect this has something to do with the expectation that hardware should behave deterministic.
Connotation or denotation is all in the intonation, which is hard to hear in textual form.
Not sure what point you are making. This is or recording passwords and usernames. 95% of passwords will be for online services.
Visualization of Van Gogh’s Letters Rendered in Google Earth
"Why do biological processes seem to obey trig like so?"

I'm not sure I would say that biological processes obey anything - merely that we can find it useful to describe real world behaviour in terms of these abstract mathematical functions. Of course, it's interesting to speculate if there is a link between the level of maths required to usefully model the real world and the level of maths we are happy working with - i.e. if the real world was much more complex would we also have developed a much more richer natural ability for mathematics.
Perhaps a majority of people posting on HN are Serbs but only a small proportion of them declare their nationality.
By this same token, we can never really understand anybody, since we never can fully understand what it's like to be them.

Getting a little deep for me early on a Tuesday morning, jacques. If your name really is jacques (which I can't be sure of) :)
Exactly what I was after - thanks a lot!
Yeah, I saw a lib the other day that tried to offer this but was pretty hit and miss, and checking into the methods available didn't fill me with confidence. Right now I'm only considering the client offline if an attempt to hit the server fails. If they're trying to save something, queue it up to do later, if they're trying to retrieve something, check if theres a copy locally, if not let them know what's going on.

The problem with this method is ideally you'd like the client to know it's reconnected as soon as possible, and start working through the queue. I figured the most foolproof way was just periodically trying to talk to the server when you think you're offline. It'd probably be better if you had a solid method of receiving actual network related events like disconnecting and reconnecting, but the lazy 'just keep checking' method is workable.

The bonus of it is it works the same if it's a problem on the servers end.
Emissions Cuts: The Gap between Ambition & Reality 
The futility of greenhouse gas emissions cuts and the need for geoengineering.
this is a terrible comment that runs completely against the spirit of what hacking is.

he didn't say anywhere that he expects to build the next Linux, it is all about learning. in that, he has already succeeded, as you can see from his progress all that he has learned and all the little tips he has picked up from trying

i'm just shocked that on a site about hackers that somebody would call out the efforts of a hacker to learn something new as 'going to fail'.

edit: and how frikkin' arrogant are you to assume that just because this guy does PHP and Javascript work that he isn't capable of learning about operating systems. seriously, get your head out of your ass.
But that's the point - there is no such character. Given the Unicode consortium have added codepoints for every other bloody thing under the sun, I'm amazed that there isn't one for n-diaresis but there you are.

Add a small number of people who for artistic reasons decide that they want to make life hard (Rinôçérôse I'm looking at you) and you just have to accept that the length of your string might not equal the number of codepoints contained therein...
One I can think of is a marathon, family/friends could see how you're doing.
That is an odd statement when you considered that CoffeeScript is transformed to JavaScript before it runs. It sounds like saying "Let's drop the cows and just get the milk straight from the store instead"
It is, however, legal to copy a CD to your computer or download something from iTunes and re-encode it to an MP3. However, you legally cannot make a tangible duplication (burn another CD).

Is this right? I understood the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act explicitly permitted making of backups for noncommercial use & the DMCA only rescinded this where there was anti-copying mechanisms.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act#Exemp...
Okay, let's say a copy is (essentially) free. So what? There are plenty of things that people buy where marginal cost of production is << than the price.

Concretely, why is selling a DVD with a marginal cost of production of $0.50 for $15.99 ok, but selling a movie with a marginal cost of $0.001 for $15.99 "special and different from anything that came before"?
How Ordinary Chinese Are Talking, And Fighting, Back
That's probably a better idea.
I remember a guy saying the same a few years ago ... what's his name? Linus?
You might want to split up your "Python/Perl" category. While Python does have some similarities to Perl they're not quite suitable for lumping together any more than say PHP and Perl or Java and C++ for example.
New Firefox beta is much better than old (esp gmail)

Can someone get rid of the super-editorialized headline that is not even remotely referred to on the linked page?
Google launches “Defend Your Net” campaign in Germany against copyright plans
You can try to make it ridiculous but I actually was not aiming at anything 'deep' or philosophical, merely indicating that there is a problem with the method used to gain the required level of understanding.

I think you can actually understand others, but you're going to have to interact (like we do right here) with those people that you wish to understand.

Trying to understand people that have been dead for quite a while from (very terse) writings made in a stressful situation almost a century old is a very difficult undertaking. The lack of access to the subject, the distortion of social mores over time and more things like that make this from a practical point of view very hard.

At best this will give you fractional insights into aspects of their character it will never allow you to say 'x is a jerk' or anything to that effect. There would have to be significant qualification of that statement.
I've only ever heard it sarcastically here in Australia.
These guys are what, John-Ralphio and Tom from Parks and Rec?
Python is the same here, for example, any many other languages too. Making `a` a local variable here is rather ugly thing to do, but it's (somewhat) consistent with how `function` keyword (not an expression) works.

The point being: JS implements full and proper lexical scoping; implementing lexical scoping for every block is not a requirement for having lexical scoping.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Brain%20Trust
They also have the ability to hand deliver a big bag of cookies to your house. The problem is, it's expensive and doesn't scale to their 3 billion users (or whatever it is).
How Samsung Stress Tests Their Phones [Korean]
An old PC consumes about 90W of power, a Raspberry Pi consumes 2.5W. That's a 36x difference. And you would still need something to interface the PC with the rest of the electronics, just as you need something to interface the Raspberry Pi's video output with these "non-standard" CRTs.

As for the quality of TVs... these were showing video from the cars transmitted over RF, hardly high-quality. And you overestimate the quality of CRTs in arcade machines... Most of the arcades on display had not-so-good CRTs (either by design or because of years of burn-in).
Great job!

Q1: What algorithm do you use to recognize the closest shape?

Q2: Which shapes are the most difficult to recognize?
That may be true in many cases but as a counterexample, SpaceX needed rather more than 100k to reach minimum viable product.
Toy Catalog Goes "Gender Neutral" - Looks "Normal" To Me
You are overstating what an operating system is. The core of most modern operating systems were written by a single person, or two people - including Windows.

Operating systems become large because of hardware support. They are also large now because what is considered 'operating system' has changed - from including a desktop environment to including a web browser.

The reason why OS X and Windows have large teams and year-long development cycles is because they are a complete stack of applications, not just a kernel, fs etc.

To get an OS written from scratch to boot on specific hardware with some basic functionality should be an 8-12 week job for a competent C developer.

The best thing I did in my teens was to grab x86 docs and attempt to write an OS. I thoroughly recommend it to everybody as a good project to learn system and development (along with writing a compiler and writing a simple database).
The guy don't want to write a perfectly designed OS, neither he wants to design a RTOS by the way ... He didn't even specify whether his OS would be multitask. If not, no need for any scheduling at all, huh ... he just "writes his own OS". It's a fun experience, very rich and very teaching. But at least now, we all can admire the wideness of all your "unlimited knowledge" especially in terms of titles of books. Afterall, no needs for creating a new OS, if you get all your inspiration from things that already exists. You will end with Yet Another Nix ... Not sure he wants a YanOS, though.

Without talking about filesystems, drivers, memory managment or existing norms and standards (which it seems he wants to avoid ... which is not that stupid ... all having been designed 40 years ago ... who knows maybe he'll have a revolutionary idea, beginning from scratch), going from scratch with no exact idea of where you go could be a good thing. Definitely. You solve the problem only when you face them. Step by step, sequentially. Very virile, man.

I would advice the guy to start obviously with the boot loader. Having a look at the code of GRUB (v1), LILO, or better yet, on graphical ones (BURG, GAG or this good one XOSL which is completely under GUI - mouse pointer, up to 1600x1200 screens, and many supported filesystems, written in ASM ... it could actually be a hacking basis for a basic OS on itself) could be a great source of inspiration, and beginning to play directly with the graphical environment.

You could also have a look on these things
http://viralpatel.net/taj/tutorial/hello_world_bootloader.ph...
and of course on Kolibri OS http://kolibrios.org/en/?p=Screenshots
If you're using sites like this, and you're in the UK, you will need to pay tax (in real money) on the market value (in real money) of the work you undertake. If you're a sole trader, the bitcoins become yours, so if you are planning to keep them and "spend" them later when their value increases, you may be liable to capital gains tax on any appreciation in value (over a certain amount) as with any other asset. If you are a limited company, the bitcoins will become an asset of the company, and tax implications for disposal are as with any other asset.

I am not an accountant, always check with yours first!
How “Presentation Zen” changed my slides
Simply trying to lighten it up, my friend.

No, we can never really know any historical figure or event. The most we can do is try to learn what we can and hope that it has an emotional impact on us. If you really want a historical person to have the most influence possible in your life, you should strive to learn both the good and bad things about them -- not in terms of dates and facts, but in terms of how they thought about things.

Reading about historical figures should be an emotional experience. You should try to empathize and feel the things they felt. This is, of necessity going to cause you some discomfort as well.

Not only is it possible to say "X is a jerk", but it is necessary. Otherwise people from the past are just little cardboard cutouts in a sea of data. Fan of Plato? Then you should not only know his works, you should have a personal feeling of how you view the way he thinks about things. Yes, this is imaginary, but it's also necessary. History is not just a list of famous guys doing things on certain dates. It's something you, personally, should use your imagination to dive into and enjoy.

History is fun. People are complex. We use our imagination and comprehension and passion to drive us towards better understanding of historical figures and their actions. This is the good part.

I'll bow out. Seems like you are making some other kind of point about really knowing what's in the heart of others and judging those we may never culturally understand. That really has nothing to do with anything. I say grab onto somebody in history you admire and dive deep into their personal and emotional life. Make your own judgments, ask yourself how you would have acted in similar circumstances. Learn and respect both the good and the bad. Have passion.

Thanks for the chat!
Google's Digital Creative Guidebook
I still run 32-bit Linux on both computers, despite having 64 bit processors. One has 2GB of RAM, the other 3GB, so I see no reason to switch. Computers bought 3 years ago are hardly 'a distant memory'.
I did not understand your Q1
for Q2: Identifying sequence of lines vs identifying bezier curve was toughest problem for me.
"Why does a law school need a fancy building? All you need is a room and a professor"

Or in my subject, a room, a few whiteboards, some textbooks, plenty of scrap paper, and the attention of my students, which is getting harder to get.

Something has gone wrong in the UK as well, we have a culture of checking, inspecting, compliance, data driven quality &c and all it does is increase costs.
Weirdly, I did a project like this at uni, except we used an Xbox 360 controller to control the car, and I think more interestingly, we used MiWi (PIC chip wireless subset) to communicate with the car.

Whereas other teams sent a packet every time they did an "update" (they were using keyboard not 360 controllers), this meant there was a lot of lag as the link was limited to 500 bytes/sec, and sending a package irregularly meant lots of overhead.

What I did instead was I engineered it so we constantly sent (and received) a packet 40x a second, and this meant our updates were far less laggy and much more consistent. We just had a couple of bytes for the steering, a couple of bytes for the acceleration, and some other "flag" bits to determine what data should be sent back (reading off all the sensors at once leads to blocking).

We also had an accelerometer in the RC car, which I mapped (roughly) onto the 360 pad's force feedback, so you could "feel" what the RC was feeling.

The fact that we used miwi meant that we could control the thing over IP which was cool.

Great fun, we won too! I'm just sad that because our code was in a Dropbox shared folder, some idiot has deleted it.
Minecraft: Pi Edition Video Demo
By "native" they mean JVM-native (not OS-native). I believe what they really mean is that they use JVM primitives for dispatch, as opposed to building their own using functor objects and reflection-like API (which was the only way to implement MOP pre-InvokeDynamic).

It is a bit misleading as there is still a lot that would have to be be emulated - the JVM does not support open types and the Java is centered around classes, which makes prototype mutation hard to implement efficiently ( InvokeDynamic somewhat helps, but would still impose a performance penalty when the prototype is changed).

See also John Rose's article about species:
https://blogs.oracle.com/jrose/entry/larval_objects_in_the_v...
Setting Out To "Teach The World" Is One Big, Hairy Goal
I've heard this advice before but I'm not sure what the benefit is? Will give it a try though - I guess it makes things more interesting when you mix it up.
You can get constant (not linear) acceleration with a second order differential equation. Here is an example:

d^2 x
----- = -g
dt^2

Solving this gives us the parabola we are all familiar with, when an object falls under constant acceleration:

x = -1/2 g t^2 + v_0 t x + x_0

This is a second order differential equation, but it is too trivial an example. Here is a more interesting differential equation:

d^2 x
----- = -x
dt^2

All solutions to this equation take the form:

x = a sin t + b cos t

There are a lot of physical materials in nature which produce this kind of relationship between force and position. Basically, anything that is kind of like a spring. Reach over and flick a glass on your desk with your fingernail. Hear it ring? The sine wave that it's ringing with is predicted by the relationship between force and position that we understand. Every tuned musical instrument in the world, with one exception, generates notes that can be modeled by some differential equation. Pianos, violins, and horns are relatively easy; drums are much harder but still tractable.

The chemical and physical systems in living tissue are much more complicated. Our best models for them often incorporate nonlinear elements (the sine wave example is linear) or a large number of variables. But periodic behavior is still quite common, and the sine wave is in some senses the simplest function that is smooth and periodic.

Note: The one musical instrument for which differential equations are not the best model is the digital synthesizer.
Volatility is a concern if you want BTC to be a viable currency for storing value and setting prices rather than just a quick medium of exchange. Currencies like USD may fluctuate but they are a bet on the long-term stability of the US, and are tightly regulated, even if that power is sometimes abused to debase the currency.

One of the main problems with Bitcoin from my perspective is that nothing backs its value; the value is unregulated and purely arbitrary and thus subject to all kinds of manipulation and confidence tricks. The current price depends entirely on confidence. It's an interesting experiment but I wouldn't want to store value in such a currency, and if you can't reliably store value or reliably price goods in it vis a vis other currencies, it's more like a payment method than a currency.