skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's important to note that it wasn't always like this. The basic concept of termination rights -- recognizing the wild power imbalance between artist and publisher, and therefore giving the artist a second crack at selling their rights -- is quite old, but in practice it hasn't mattered; the upshot was that the standard publishing deal included an automatic renewal, so the right may as well not have existed. So in 1976 Congress chose to double down on termination, making it explicitly an inalienable right that cannot be sold by any type of contract.

It strikes me as a rather tortured reading of this that makes it a limitation of the artists' rights, rather than the publishers'; like laws which outlaw contractual slavery, while it technically bans both parties from participating, the intended impact is much more on the would-be oppressor than the oppressed.

Now, the impact that this might have on open source is certainly interesting, but I doubt it would have far-reaching implications since termination wouldn't retroactively affect licenses that were in force at the time, so derivative works would be in the clear. On the other hand, who knows how the case law will shake out on this over the next few years... software will probably not be the most affected industry.
The book "Epidemic of Absence" is the best summary of the research on this, to my knowledge.
S.F. rolls out 3 miles of free Wi-Fi
> How is it better than an XML field in SQL Server

It changes the default, which results in a drastically different programming experience. The difference is difficult to describe in the same way a dynamically typed programming language is difficult to describe to someone who's never tried one.

I'd encourage you to try a document store (Mongo, Rethink, whatever) for a throw-away project. A ten minute tutorial walkthrough is worth a thousand HN comments when it comes to stuff like this :)

Here's the Rethink tutorial: http://rethinkdb.com/docs/guide/python/. Just play with it and see if you like it!
It looks like they are working on it:

https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure-iOS
It's a good way to direct people's anger at their current ISPs anyhow, leading into purchasing their Fiber product.
At the risk of playing messenger and getting shot, I'll say this: I think what rayiner's trying to do is clarify the narrative. Right now the dominant narrative on HN seems to be "the government has expanded their powers to intrude on our right to privacy." Rayiner is suggesting that perhaps the government is simply exercising the power it had been granted over years of precedent-setting court decisions (including, critically, the loss of expectation of privacy when information is handed to a third party). According to this alternate narrative, what has changed hasn't really been the government's scope of power, but rather our increasing reliance on third-party services to mediate our interactions in the modern world. As more and more of our communication is digitized and aggregated by third party services, more of our information falls within the government's constitutionally limited scope.

A key point of contention is whether what we're seeing here is the government breaking laws, or the government following laws that simply haven't caught up with the times. Rayiner believes (I think) that it's the latter, and therefore has reason for optimism; as he says, "I think those laws [to protect electronic communications] could work because I don't believe the government is just ignoring the law."
Hi Josh, thanks for the question!

As it is, we're actually under wraps for full disclosure of sourcing, but what we can say is that we don't white label our gowns from stateside manufacturers (common practice in the industry).

At the same time though, we're not the same as the factory owners who create copyhouse/replica websites. (We'll be writing on that too.)

We worked with our factories to create our designs, and ordered everything up front. Final product QA was done in-house. Hope this answers your question!
Are Explainer Videos Getting Too Quirky?
You're not wrong. I said the same thing in the comments.
Everyone's salaries come from shareholder's profits - including the factory worker's.

I don't think either reason holds - and if it does then those companies will fall to the wayside. If you think Google, Amazon and Apple are wasting millions of dollars of year overpaying for talented leaders then share your plan with the world to do better and take them out of business.

I think it's actually because within 10 years a company can be absolutely destroyed if they don't get the right leaders. Look at Blackberry, Nokia and Microsoft. All were leaders in their fields ten years ago and now have competitors that are outpacing them (in the case of the two latter ones) or simply erasing them (in the case of Blackberry). If Blackberry discovers multitouch first and puts out an iPhone or if Microsoft makes tablets work in a consumer friendly way by hiring Jony Ive - then the whole landscape changes.

Also in large companies workers making $200k+ aren't usually buddies with the board but there is a highly competitive market for them which allows those salaries to be the norm. It's a skills economy and for people without skills a comfortable, not flashy, life is a good and available option.
@"I don't know if Loren is sincere, or if he's part of a disinformation campaign."

Those two states are not mutually exclusive in their entireties . It depends on what information he's been fed and believes. What is undeniable is that NSA has launched a Christmas disinformation campaign via staffers[1] and earlier, its extended family.[2] (Documents are at the bottom of the pages.)

Paul E. Merrell, J.D.

[1] http://preview.tinyurl.com/q6jp8gg

[2] http://preview.tinyurl.com/n3pxwen
Yuri wasn't the sole investor in the YCVC notes. At least not each batch.
People exist in every area you could possibly want to go into, but the peculiar hassles of enterprise sales don't. "Politics" seems like a decent label for it to me.
Obama To Meet Tech Execs Over NSA Spying, Obamacare Website
Regardless of whether you are right or not, your tone is very off-putting. This is not an academic concern – this sort of attitude is a huge part of why the tech community ends up being very exclusionary. Oh yes, watching someone make mistakes while learning how to build a web application or learn regular expressions is hilarious. Much better to laugh condescendingly while watching them struggle than try to help. Concocting "straw man" noobs everywhere who do things in obviously wrong ways doesn't make you more right. And it definitely doesn't make you smarter. It just makes you seem like a jerk and makes it a little harder for people to stomach getting into the tech field. Please stop.
Yep, that is a common tactic. But there is often an implied date.
Thanks for your reply.

It's good to hear that you did your best to create a good atmosphere there for everyone, and I wish you all the best in your other endeavors.
DST investments in YC seed stage are probably less than Yuri's property tax bill on just his Bay Area house. If it made it easier to get into any good Series B deals, doesn't that make it worthwhile?
My understanding from my optimisation research co-workers is a MIP isn't ideal for TSP and there are better ways, such as meta-heuristics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaheuristic
Just the YCVC portion I'd guess - which is the "guaranteed" investment into all YC companies when they start YC. That's not even seed stage. That's just YC stage...
America's new moral standard? Better than Al Qaeda.

We should be striving for much better standards if the west is to have any moral authority. Not as bad as Russia, China or Al Qaeda is not good enough.

Then there are practical issues that indiscriminate attacks are liable to create as many enemies as they kill as sons, brothers and fathers are bereaved and decide to join the fight.

[Edit: I'm British not American and I'm not saying Britain is any better but I really hate the "we aren't as bad as something really bad" as a defence for either country's actions. We should do better].
Looking this up on Wikipedia reveals it's relationship with the Three Prisoners Problem[1] as well. The solution presented in that case helped me in reasoning about it.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Prisoners_problem
The geolocation data is not tied to placing a call, the cell carriers keep and have a record wherever my mobile terminal is whenever its turned on and registered. Its tantamount to putting a GPS tracker on my person. This to me is a totally unreasonable encroachment on my right to privacy.

The where attached to a placed call is a grey area for me. It's might be acceptable, it might not, because where is a given when using a landline.
And I should trust you -- someone with direct access to the database -- to not change the user_id on that row in the DB that says that ticket is mine?
To trust that your digitized "evidence" is actually real?
How do I know you haven't bought 10,000 tickets with our money and scanned one ticket and assigned that to everyone, keeping the other 99,999 for yourself?

I swear I'm not paranoid, but we're talking about potentially millions of dollars. You only have to have one of your customers win once and then disappear with the money. If the ticket is safely on my person or in my wallet or in my safe deposit box or in a safe in my home or somewhere where I have direct access to it, then I can say with certainty that it's my ticket and not anyone else's -- and I don't have to trust anyone else with it.

I certainly trust myself more than a couple of guys with an iOS app, yes?

Edit: I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just asking what I consider to be legitimate questions -- questions that you are not answering on your live site and questions whose answers are (and should be) more complicated than "trust us."
It's totally illogical. I'm not arguing that it makes any sense...I am arguing that's the mentality you'll find in the consumer Internet space.
> Also, i am assuming 90ms per structure, if that is correct, then that is equal to 11 inserts per second which is unfortunately very slow..

You can't quite divide like that. In Rethink

r.table('users').insert({ 'name': 'Bob' })
r.table('users').insert({ 'name': 'Jim' })

is much slower than the equivalent batched insert

r.table('users').insert([{ 'name': 'Bob' },
{ 'name': 'Jim' }])

The latter isn't subject to network round trips and can batch disk writes, drastically increasing performance relative to multiple individual writes. You can see a similar effect in most other database systems.

There other nuances to this -- the complexity of measuring things properly is why we haven't published benchmarks to date. Check out this doc on insert performance for more details: http://rethinkdb.com/docs/troubleshooting/#my-insert-queries...
GoG doesn't, and a couple of other high-profile sites don't (Amazon for example), but the vast, vast majority of card payment forms on the Internet require a full address as for fraud prevention. Do you not often buy things on the Internet?
Not sure exactly, but I guess the dirty tricks are what really makes the difference. If you want to optimally solve a TSP, and know you are optimal when you stop, this is the approach you would use in practice - as far as I know it is the only thing that scales well. Its the underlying principle behind Concorde (http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/concorde.html) which AFAIK is the best TSP solver out there.
MORE CLIMATE KOOKOLOGY DEBUNKED: Earth was warmer in Roman & Medieval times
I plan to move into something like marketing or something really silly like SharePoint administration. Scripting all day for a wage with no upside... it is hard for me to get excited. I am working on an idea, runcampaigns.com.. if I can make money with it as a lifestyle business I will be all set.
Verdi (the union) is quite a strange animal. As many other unions in Germany they have been losing members for years now but are still a political force (or at least perceive themselves as such). The "American capitalist" Amazon is thus a perfect "enemy" to target, fight - even if just to show off - and improve their own standing in the public arena.
That's kinda silly unless you can confirm that the other companies are not doing exactly the same thing.
They can be OK if being optimal isn't a concern, or the problem isn't too hard.
Yep, that's exactly the kind of thing I've noticed.
Agree, won't DNS do this caching automatically with valid=300s?
You should be very careful with that snark, because it is widely believed by experts and, more importantly, stakeholders that what kept the USG from utilizing its intelligence to stop 9/11 was inter-agency siloing; ie, NSA and CIA not sharing information with FBI.
11 Countries Are Meeting in Peru to Figure Out How They Can Control the Internet
While I agree with you, I think looking at this through the lens of only "hey look some irrational muggles" belies the fact that hackers do the EXACT SAME THING.

Web vs native? Vi vs emacs? Tabs vs spaces? PHP vs... everybody else? TDD vs anti-TDD? Git vs Mercurial?

I mean sure there are statistics and facts to back these views but there are also statistics and facts behind which sports team is the best or whether the debt ceiling is bad. There's no meaningful difference.
Blimey Charlie, I definitely wasn't expecting this discussion thread to be Godwinned.
Stop Saying 'If You're Not Paying, You're The Product' http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121219/18272921446/stop-s...
60 Minutes Brings the Cyberterror in NSA Puff Piece
Most of these cited failures have no root in Ayn Rand ideology whatsoever. Selling rolexes at Sears is not a smart free market idea.

Not sure the details of how he "pitted" company managers against each other but he perhaps did do an experiment in human organization theory that failed.

Free market ideology is not about pitting one manager against another...it is about measuring how much value the market (consumers) get from a given manager.

It sounds like this guy was anything but a free market advocate. Manipulating stock prices through accounting gimmicks is NOT the basis of a free market enterprise. The free market enterprise is always valued against how much wealth the market willingly agrees to part with in exchange for even greater value.
Or do what the original Macintosh did, have the sound buffer consist of a block of memory at the end of each line in the framebuffer. So each scanline would give the audio hardware new data to process.
> you can't organize parties on Instagram or Snapchat

You can.

Beyond that, the interesting part is the sentence you yourself quoted. It's utilitarian, it's contact management, it's messaging, but it's not a primary source of content and engagement within the demo, and that's by it's own virtue interesting.
I'm an ERD user from before there was UML so ERD for me. I suspect lots of the old timers (40+) are that way.
That's the wrong question.

Even if it does work (as in kill bacteria) on the hand, that doesn't mean it works (as in prevents illness).

And in medical settings it's yet another question: does it work (as in prevent the spread of bacteria), even if it doesn't prevent illness.

You have to be careful about what your goal is.
> unless you grant me the authority to access datastore Z

NSA analysts accessing datastore Z is not the problem, and never was.

Datastore Z is the problem. According to the leaked documents those datastores contain data of U.S. citizens which the NSA couldn't have legally intercepted and stored without a court order.

E.g. the NSA cannot legally acquire copies of John Smith's email header fields and store them into datastore Z without a warrant defined by the 4th amendment.
Trust as in trust what they're going to do with it. Google and Amazon are very up front about it. I trust I have a pretty good idea what they do with my data. And I'm pretty happy with it. Amazon knows I own a table saw capable of holding a 10 inch blade with a 5/8ths hole and I'm pretty happy with that and I sincerely hope they target some advertising for a nice 80 or more tooth plywood blade in my direction.

Apparently almost no one trusts snapchat to do what they claim. You delete this? Really? Somebody help me, do I have "gullible" sharpie'd on my forehead today? Maybe 90% of the population and I are wrong and they actually do what they claim, but...

Don't read it as "I trust you're doing the right thing" but "I trust them to do what they say they'll do".
Experts Share their Best [blog] Monetization Strategy
Furthermore, two instances of life with the same abiogenesis point, isolated and diverged sometime in the past, would be very valuable for biologists.

Isn't this something you can basically get on Earth? Perspermia doesn't really seem to be required.
They should keep doing the stuff that reduces violence. That's all good.

They should stop doing the stuff that increases violence. Like this incident.
Just because the third-party doctrine has always been applied to phone records, doesn't mean they were not protected. The court just decided they weren't. The TPD is not law.
Jiu Jitsu, the Book of Tea, and Chuck: Lessons for Entrepreneurs
Sorry, I lost it right here:

"Drake thinks that Bitcoin could eventually make banks as obsolete as telephone switchboard operators."

I like BitCoin, its fun to see an actual proof of concept implementation of something speculated on at the turn of the century, but please folks, go to the community college and take their micro/macro economics classes (or listen too one at a MOOC, or a classes online) and learn what Banks do, what is a currency, and what is an economy.
>I'm curious what your definition of "nutjob" is

I don't really have one but if you must, it's probably someone with a dissociative disorder. I'm just noting that you don't have to be sane to be right.

>given that you would apparently apply it even to people who are correct about all of their theories.

When exactly did I say that?
Does it really make it easier? If DST knocked on the door, I know I'd answer. Well, if I was looking for funding ;)
You could trivially restructure the code to factor out global page actions into an object, like this:

// Make a global page actions object
PageActions = {
selectAll: function (event, context) {...},
nextPage: function (event, context) {...},
prevPage: function (event, context) {...},
};

// Hook up clicks to global actions
// Eg: <a href="#" data-action="selectAll">All</a>
$("[data-action]").click(function () {
var action = $(this).data("action");
PageActions.selectAll("click", this);
});

// Hook up keypresses to global actions
Mousetrap.bind("a", function () {
PageActions.selectAll("keypress", this);
});

This would help with code structure and organization, at the cost of flexibility.
since we all started walking around with internet-connected mobile devices with a ton of hardware sensors this got a lot trickier.
Show HN: Favicon Generation Tool
> people that have no skills to offer to society

If you sincerely believe this I think you are morally bankrupt. Since this is HN also have a think about the value of human labour and the current wealth of nations.
I'm really sad I don't have your e-mail or the possibility to send you personal messages to demonstrate you how hurtful it is when you are being named the names. But I will not fail to your level to do it here in public. And I still don't see that you understood at all the topic which I discussed. Stay classy my friend, I won't answer you here anything more no matter what you write. The same goes to the other name namers.
Although to be fair, the index doesn't really show that consumers trust Google and Amazon. It just shows that they trust Google and Amazon more than the others.
It's really all of them - If your doing a job that involves either customer care, or resolving call based issues, you have the ability to: See call detail records, sometimes capture voice calls to and from that subscriber, capture signalling data in realtime, track a mobile user in call thru the system for the purposes of finding defective network elements.

There is a good reason why we had these abilities, they were essential to resolve and troubleshoot user reported issues.

For example, if a customer reported troubles or call quality issues calling 202-555-1212, I needed to be able to pull their CDR's so I could determine which outbound trunk group the call went out on, so I could report it to that carrier to see if they could resolve.
That's true, but what you can't really do is target those people passively. You need hunter-gatherers to find them, corral them, and set up a collaborative sales process with them. Graham calls this "brutally hard", but what it really is is expensive: it requires direct sales teams, which in turn requires a founding/managing team that knows how to (a) hire and (b) manage direct sales teams.

Those tasks, tasks (a) and (b), are probably what's really brutally hard about enterprise sales. When an inexperienced founder/manager hires a direct sales team, the sales team sets to work on selling the founder/manager instead of the customer base.

An alternate path to getting a beachhead in an enterprise market is consulting. It's much easier to sell services to bigcos than products. Delivering services to someone gets you ~60% of the way to being able to sell products to them. The other 40% you can do on your own. That's worked for us (to greater/lesser extent depending on the specific offering we're talking about). But "consulting" is toxic to the species of startup we talk about on HN.
Yes, nearly everybody know that. I wrote hours ago that think working conditions in capitalism and slavery are very different, in general far better in the former, but that you could use the argumentation in favor of capitalism the parent used in favor of slavery too.
bradleyjg: I generally agree except that "if the district court had ruled the other way, maybe that would have been the end of the story." This was a case that would have been appealed no matter who won and who lost. Still, the factual record established by the judge (who indicated he was annoyed at misrepresentations by NSA/FedGov) is going to help the plaintiffs quite a bit after FedGov appeals.

Also, I wonder if Orin read the opinion fully. His post incorrectly says: "Finding the entire NSA metadata program unconstitutional, Judge Leon enjoins it..." That is not true. The judge's opinion did not halt the NSA phone metadata program overall; it merely orders two plaintiffs removed from the NSA's database. I posted about that important distinction here:
https://twitter.com/declanm/status/412697277363286016
There's no reason to assume that we are currently working with a single independent abiogenesis point on this planet, that is one plausible hypothesis among many and not one I particularly favor.

I am particularly interested in biology, enough to know that the chances of an Earth-adapted microbe or lichen running roughshod over any Mars-adapted life are roughly on the order of the LHC spawning a black hole when it was switched on. Analogies to organisms crossing between the continents and human populations of Earth (which you have not made but several posters have) are incredibly far off the mark. Whatever life has tenuously held to Mars, if it exists, will not be disturbed by our minuscule presence, and it will be sufficiently novel at the biochemical and sequence (will it even have sequences?) level to be readily recognizable, even if it is cultured from the 22nd equivalent of a Starbucks parking lot on Olympus Mons.
If this water evaporates so quickly, there must be a ton of it. Or else wouldn't it have run out by now?
It isn't an app in the Apple app store so the title is misleading. It is an online web service that you browse to. Apple wouldn't ban that anyway.