skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To me, this sort of stuff seems like the IP law equivalent of bailing out banks (or GM) because they are "too big to fail."

Even if specific instances of Mickey Mouse's likeness are trademarked, I have a hard time believing that someone could be selling "Mickey Mouse" t-shirts on the street and not be in a risky legal grey zone.

[I'll also note that as an IP lawyer he probably has a rather conservative view of this. Thinking from Disney's perspective they don't want any trademark lawsuit to be in a legal grey zone. They want them all to be slam-dunks so that they can get their way.]
perhaps it might be better to have doctors prescribe for a specific issue (eg: needs something for allergies) and then leave it up to the pharmacist to decide which specific pill and dosage level as opposed to prescribing the specific pill themself (eg allegra). I mean, it's not like the pharmacist isn't going to already look over the prescribed medication to make sure it won't negatively interact with the patient's other medications

of course, that's assuming that the doctor and the pharmacist will be able to see each other's notes and that egos won't get in the way. but it's not like doctors don't alredy farm certain tasks out to specialists (eg radiologists for reading x-rays or neurologists for reading ct scans).
The Marina was wiped off the map in the 89 earthquake. It's built entirely on landfill and suffers from terrible liquefaction. The buildings there suffered bad structural damage and many people who lived in the Marina at the time moved elsewhere because of all the damage, making room for all the yuppies that took over that neighborhood.

So long as the foundation is bedrock, there is nothing preventing the building of highrises in San Francisco. We have the technology.
#18 actually seems like a real-world problem a programmer might face. Besides, there are coldly logical steps you can take to solve the question, and a closed, correct answer, unlike most of the open-ended waffly answers elsewhere in the list.
A Map to Calculus
Wait, so why do people want to live there?!

[A real question; I've no idea about Palo Alto or Mountain View, but have vague memories of hearing they're "desirable" (and expensive) locations in SV...]
I lived in New York for most of my life, I know nothing is comparable to it directly. Assuming we aren't considering San Francisco as part of the valley, what other road comes even close to being such a vital thoroughfare in the bay? And back to the topic of conversation, wouldn't it be more important for a road spread over 30 miles to have public transportation than a New York City block that spans only 2? Last time I checked there's an east-west bus on 57th every 4 minutes.
I checked the same figures for the two largest cities in my country.
Stockholm and Göteborg have between 7000-12000 / sq mile. That is less than SF, appearently. But the public transit is just like the rest of Europe - much better than the US. I think population density is not the real explanation, it just appears so when you compare between US cities.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6teborg
China Mandates Fibre For All New Homes
A Strategy for Internationalization and Node.js
Oh, forgot to mention: you can embed in source files editor instructions (between -*- for emacs, something I can't remember for vim) that specify a default presentation format.
Ah yep that'll be it, congrats on shipping!
Nothing happens. Is this a clever way of saying that nobody should scroll at all on the web? Why is this the top story on HN? Or is this saying that everybody should use Chrome? I don't. I use Firefox and it doesn't do anything either on Windows XP, Windows 7 or Windows 8. I have all three sitting right here. Nothing happens.
> why does someone have to give me rights over it?

They don't have to give you rights over it. You already get all of the natural rights associated with it. What you don't get is the additional right to prevent other people from using it or copying it until a government gives you that right.

Restricting other people is an artificial construct and that is enforced by the government. This is artificial scarcity unlike property rights where ownership naturally deprives someone else of the property.

Ideally, the government only grants you a limited (time) monopoly in exchange for incentivizing people to create. If we aren't going to get anything in exchange, why should we grant you additional rights?
ABC to look at 'Star Wars' live-action TV series
Good public transit helps everyone, even those who don't use it. The more people who do use it, the better traffic is for people who still drive, the less dangerous the roads are for people who walk or bike, and the less polluted the air is for everyone.
Easy to use Video Scripts for your Video Sharing Website
Neat, but some background information would be neater.
I've had my current Lenovo Y410 Notebook since 2007. Solid performance even after all these years. I recommend only Lenovo to any one who asks.
It 'isn't' helpful. It's religious nonsense.
Maybe not, if it's something I invent or write, why does someone have to give me rights over it?

You do not control the neurons in other people's brains. If you share an idea, it is as much theirs as yours. If someone produces something based upon that idea, you cannot rightly take it from them because the thing itself was never yours. There is no way to enforce IP without undermining physical property rights.

They shouldn't take them instead... "shall not."

Sidestepping the issue of espionage, nobody is "taking" anything from you. In virtually all of the cases that attract attention, IP was intentionally shared. If you publish a book, you can't rightly turn around and yell at someone for reading it. Futhermore, producing a copy of a work does not deprive any of its existing possessors.

I understand how the constitution is written

It's the why that matters. You are looking at this from the perspective that IP rights are negative rights (= freedoms), when they are clearly not. When you recognize that IP rights are positive rights (= privileges), then you will see that the authors of the Constitution were being generous in affording this protection, which in the "life, liberty, [physical] property" framework you would otherwise not have.

It is better to think that you do not "own" IP, but rather hold it in trust for the public, and in the interim, you get to reap some benefit as recompense for your creative contribution.
What a pity the lawyers have misinterpreted the patent to mean that the application's language itself should be non-obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art.
tech companies asking these silly questions doesn't make them top employers. they should better be focusing on the domain instead of wasting time on nonsense stuffs. it happens only in bay area. crap!
> The NHL has a similar system, though. They draw on NCAA and international minor league talent, neither of which are paid for by the league.

Not at all. Most NHL talent development is done through an extensive farm system affiliated with and financially supported by their NHL teams, similar in some but not all respects to the MLB.

Prospects pursuing the NCAA route vs junior leagues and the AHL are widely regarded as inferior, facing significantly less stiff competition. A typical player (ie, more than 50% of current players) would grow up advancing through various levels of midget hockey, forgo college to play in one of the CHL leagues (QMJHL, WHL, OHL), from which they would be drafted by an NHL team and assigned to their AHL or ECHL affiliate. This is true even of international players, who are often sent from their home countries to stay with Canadian host families while playing in the Canadian junior leagues.

Making the NHL out of NCAA is the exception, rather than the rule. The system is much, much less subsidized by tax payer funded schooling than the NFL's.
> "I want stuff without having to pay for it"

I don't want to rationalize stuff, but I've just finished reading Locke's "Two Treatises on Government", one of the guys that started all this "the only true freedom is the protection of property"-thingie, and I just want to add that irrespective of the fact that one might agree or not with Locke's views you have to take into consideration that it has not always been like this (i.e. private property being "sacred" etc). In fact, Locke starts by arguing against people (Filmer and others) who were saying something of the like that the monarchs of the time had an irrevocable right to rule (and presumably to own everything under the skies), handed down (the right to rule) to them from generation to generation since Adam (the Genesis Adam). To say nothing of the 20th century madness that afflicted almost half of the known world, I'm talking about the Marxist/Leninist views on property.

What I want to say is that what constitutes "property", "to own stuff" etc. has not always been "set in stone" as a "moral" thingie (whatever definition of "moral" you want to come up with). So people for whom piracy is "immoral" are taking a very short view of the whole thing, and possibly also deluding themselves into thinking that what is "moral" is almost by definition "immortal" and forever. They should take a more pragmatic view.
Learn (just enough) to make (almost) anything
It doesn't matter what a penguin says, I won't understand it any more than a talking lion.
"Using PR to lose customers"

The idea is that there is a net gain. People will remember the name and forget the bad rep. The amount of people who remember or stop doing business is less than the amount gained by the bad publicity.
> It was novel, it was not obvious, and it was useful.

You could say the same of the Pythagorean theorem, or FFT. Thankfully in the case of the later, IBM's patent lawyers exhibited sanity.
Ok guys, I'm going to help us all stop pussyfooting around the issue. Maybe you people in Europe have a hard time understanding this, but I think a lot of the nervousness about mass transit has to do with the possibility of too many of what suburban neighborhoods consider "the wrong people" (e.g poor) showing up because they can now easily get there via cheap mass transit.

The happy rich people live in the suburbs because they don't like the people in the inner cities and the only way they can limit their interaction is with distance. Why do you think the shiftiest neighborhoods are always around the greyhound station? For example of this extreme anti-poor paranoia: Palo Alto recently threw a huge fit because they wanted to put in a 7-eleven saying that it would attract an undesirable element. (http://www.mercurynews.com/san-mateo-county-times/ci_2199808...)
I can't see the 3d effects - it all looks 2d - but neither do I see red and blue lines or the like.
The problem with cartoons is we outgrew them, that did not happen with PCs. PCs evolved so fast in the span of a couple decades they became ingrained in most aspects of our lives and works and educations.

Three years ago the iPad didn't even exist.
<sarcasm>
But why would you replace the huge, powerful Diesel engines that blow large billowing clouds of exhaust fumes with wimpy electric trains? And would we still have the crazy searchlights and blaring horns that scare the cattle off the tracks in the middle of the night?
</sarcasm>
What's in Redwood city?

[I stayed there for a week or so once, and as best I could tell, it consisted entirely of office parks and strip malls connected to housing developments by enormous roads, everything well lathered with parking lots. We walked around as best we could, but there seemed nothing beautiful or nice there... just endless vistas of office parks and pavement...]
Atleast the name has vowels.
Just so everyone knows, Zavers is a company (local to me here in Kansas City) that was bought by Google probably over 6 months ago now. This article doesn't even appear to mention that fact.

Edit: Here is the techcrunch link to the story when they bought it: http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/02/google-zave-networks/
It was for a company which does "Advertising & Marketing Services."
Enforcing the type is important.

For example float vs decimal types in finance. You really want your bank running on floats when doing interest calculations?
It seems like you are implying that you want them to die. Can you elaborate on this? I think URIs and DNS are pretty nice if used correctly. How else would you identify things across protocols and the entire web?
On Antifragility in Systems and Organizational Architecture
Sick and tired of the idea that depression somehow feeds the creative juices of the creative class. True depression is an absolutely paralyzing, life-stopping illness. Creatives who say "depression" fed their creative juices are really talking about something other than depression. Malaise? Ennuye? Some hipster version of depression-lite.
A standard defined by an RFC will be a win for consumers, not sure if it'll be a win for companies though. If whatsapp can create a monopoly and make money from it, that's a win for them.
WTF Who necessarily reads books within 4 months of buying? I have many, many bought and borrowed books 3+ years old in my to read pile.

I think this is Bruce Schneier's way off the mark, even inappropriately so. His book culture is not everyone else's and he shouldn't by default expect that from them.

Paying $11 for a book and then having to do a review is not an amazing deal for the buyer. It's just a deal. If no time line was specified in the deal people have every right to read the book when it suits them. They didn't save $5-$15 to get a chore.

For me that would have been a within a year estimate.
Agreed. I clicked the article thinking it would be about how regulation is threatening the internet. After 2 sentences I saw it was another article that the old web is dead and that we will only use apps in the future... so tired of hearing that line. As many others have stated, walled garden vs. free-flowing information, etc. Drives me nuts.
Love the map of SV private commuter bus lines linked there: http://content.stamen.com/zero1
> it incenses me to see how darwinistic capitalism rides roughshot over the common interest.

Under actual "darwinistic capitalism" anybody who wanted to would be able to start a competing transit service, even if it stole all the customers of a current one. At a minimum, you'd see a thriving private jitney industry - private bus services outcompeting the public ones and private part-time cabs underpricing the metered ones. No, to get mass transit this bad requires active interference with the workings of "darwinistic capitalism". In particular, laws making it illegal to compete with the established quasi-monopoly firms. The government at various levels doesn't just do a bad job of providing transit, they also make it illegal to compete with the crappy transit they provide. Fix either half of that equation and things are a lot better.
Argh! I had just forgot about that demo and have been dreaming of a similar device ever since I saw it. Makes me quite sad that no one seems to believe in a market for such a device.

If it weren't for the iPad I believe we would have gotten so much further with eink devices.
Personally I'm a fan of places where people simply avoid defecating on the subways seats, but I guess in the U.S. that method doesn't work so well...
Love this post!
Only thing I disagree with is that you only need on to say yes. The first yes might not be the best match for you. Compatibility is not quite as important in business as it is in romantic and sexual relationships.
Legitimate banks don't get hacked via Rails exploits.
Show HN: Voice-over any YouTube video
because they acquired a company called "zavers."
Bank accounts require identification and bank transactions have paper trails. Additionally international transactions have a lot of delays built in. Robbing a bank is probably safer then hacking one.
I tried this on a Wikipedia page and realised why scrolling is awesome: overview. I also realised why I often don't read long texts from my screen: I don't want to. I want find the answer to my question asap.
I'm not sure if the link was changed here on HN, but the first time I visited the article it was a single page, there were no images visible, and references to 'Figure n' were hyperlinks that would end up at drdobbs.com after a redirect. Now, the figures are visible inline as one would expect.
Ctrl-Shift-J, Ctrl-R - what do you see in the log?
There's a little "start scrolling" button in the lower right of the window. It took me five extremely confused minutes to find it.
Penguin in a sombrero? It sounds to me like one of the smaller penguins from Happy Feet, so any line one of them might say. For instance, Hey, where did all the girls go?

My guess is that they want to learn your sense of humor, to know whether you'll fit with the team.
Futile by Matt Rix (maker of Trainyard) a code-centric 2D engine for Unity3D
As a side note, the Google translation from Dutch to English seems pretty bad. I submitted a few improved translations; I did not know this feature existed before, and I'm curious how it works behind the scenes. Presumably a human has to read them to verify they are correct; I don't know Dutch, so I am making educated guesses based on the existing translation and online Dutch to English dictionaries.
Actually, the article does mention it at the end, in regards to the name. The company is called Zave Networks, not Zavers.
It'd be even better if it's a quine too!
"What you don't get is the additional right to prevent other people from using it or copying it until a government gives you that right."

If you can copy my code /book or whatnot what rights do I have? Almost none. If there was no government, I could kill you for it to maybe scare others.

> "This is artificial scarcity unlike property rights where ownership naturally deprives someone else of the property."

Can I use your house while you are away? On the nightstand, I'll leave $5 or whatever the wear and tear might be for the night.

Or "clone" Coca Cola? They can keep theirs
The case is against live-action for many reasons:

A. Disney just took things over from LA, so its a very risky decision to fun a live-action series because A. Star Wars came into prominence as a movie B. The New Content won't be the same (Yoda-Obi Wan are both ghosts now, Luke might be a old man now, and lot of the real life actors are either old or have moved on to other projects). At this point, they would certainly introduce a lot of new characters, A movie is the safe bet I think honestly.

B. The return on 120 minute content for a movie vs a live-action tv series are worlds apart. Movies make a lot of money for a lot less content.

C. Movies stars and Movie Production houses have a bigger mass appeal and reach than TV ones.
Not everyone who does this was in a CS Program. When I learned about them, I went with a lock-free model for my own project because semaphores seemed to add more complexity than they solved. I can understand the author's desire not to use them.
Seconded! I frequently find myself frustrated that I cannot read ${programming_book} on an eInk-style display (generally in PDF format but the EPUB versions I've tried haven't been much better). Yes, there are e-readers out there that can open the format, but the display is either scaled into illegibility or paginated weirdly or I have to scroll around to see the whole page (all of which are tremendous impediments to the goal of transferring information into my brain). ~brandishes fistful of dollars~ If something like what you suggest existed, I would absolutely buy at least one. I might even spring for overnight shipping, which is unheard of for me! ;)
Higher Education Bubble and Athletics
I absolutely love looking at other people's ideas -- it's so motivating and inspirational. The ideas of others so often spark my own desire to get cracking on a few new projects.
I used to go with Brian Tracy's advice and write my goals out on a piece of paper every morning. Then review with what I've put down in previous days/weeks. It forces the creative muscle and also some goals reveal themselves as less important when they get omitted enough times.
That doesn't actually address either of my questions.
Actually it's not the proof marks that lead me to assume InDesign. It's the Adobe-Offset-Printing-Industrial-Complex. Most professional, high volume offset printers can take any old PDF you throw at them and whip it into shape for their own use, but when you start doing book production and want things to go your way, you are going to start doing things like detailed preflight testing/tweaking of the PDF in Acrobat, for instance. And InDesign just does a better job than anything else out there at getting PDFs ready for print (not just the "visibles" like the trim lines and registration marks, but the many weird issues that can creep into moderately complex PDFs).

Typing this on my Linux machine, and I'd sincerely love to be wrong about this, but Adobe is like the device driver for the physical book publishing world.
Social Hacking - Doing things the advantage of not using an easy
The batch requests should be helpful. Thanks for the update!
Correct. I think as intelligence comes into play, SkyNet is going to be inevitable for preventative measures. Regardless of intelligence, you'd probably want a data center or a control panel of some sort for software updates, analytics and etc.
What bygone absurdities can tell us about the future
Groupon was not founded on the idea that propelled them to success (assuming Groupon still counts as a success). The site grew out of ThePoint.com, a group fundraising site.

They took the expertise they had building that platform - for years - and then applied it to coupons.

There have been a zillion iterations on coupon sites. Some of them probably came close to Groupon's basic model. The idea was not really the main thing.
This actually happened to me a few months ago. The field only had a few competitors and I followed the usual advice of getting at least 'something' out there. The problem was, I did too good a job of showing off how much better my product would become.

The main competitor updated their product and website to list all their new features, clearly inspired directly by my product to the point of even using the same copy in the feature descriptions!

Stealth mode does have some benefits when dealing with smart competition.
You can't pay your taxes in gold. Or yuan for that matter. That doesn't invalidate it as a currency.
Thanks for all the info. Oddly enough, I was working out of the Boylston Starbucks all day today and was there when I posted the question. I'll make it a point to get over to Kendall Square.
I get that impression as well, but I think a clipboard would probably solve that problem ^_^
For a "rockstar", it's also about minimising snark directed at your product [concept] before it's ready for widespread public beta.

c.f. Color which failed because it was so underwhelming when it came out of stealth.
I don't find it the least bit hard to read on the web, and traditional scrolling has never interfered with my reading pleasure, but I'm pretty excited about the fact that if I can get the scroll speed right on this thing, I can probably use this to read in bed on cold winter mornings without ever having to move a hand out from under my warm blankets to hit the pagedown key.

(I know I could use automatic scrolling for the same purpose, but I don't like it when the text is constantly moving.)
Derek Sivers offers a counterargument (with citations) here: http://sivers.org/zipit
If they want a frame, they should've just used a <frameset>.