skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What does "invention" here mean? Is it limited to things that meet patentability criteria?

I can't think of a case citation offhand, but my guess is that most (U.S.) judges would apply essentially the same principles to unpatentable "inventions" -- defined in 35 USC 101 as any "process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, ... [or] improvement thereof" [1] --- that qualified as confidential information of the employer.

(If an invention is unpatentable AND is public information, then normally it's fair game for anyone to use, at least in the U.S. --- EXCEPT that that (A) an employee has an implied duty not to compete with his employer while still employed there, and (B) the employee might be bound by a contractual covenant not to compete for a limited time after leaving employment, which might or might not be enforceable depending on the jurisdiction [California being a well-known case in point].)

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> is there a chart for other types of intellectual property like copyrights (most applicable to software, and hardware too)

I can't think of how copyright might apply to hardware, at least not to functional aspects of it. I suppose that aesthetic-design features of hardware might qualify as a "sculpture," which under 17 USC 102 (a)(5) would be eligible for copyright protection [2] But under 17 USC 102(b), that protection wouldn't cover functional aspects: "In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work." [2]

As to software, that depends on (A) whether the software counts as a "work made for hire," which in this context means that it was created by an employee within the scope of employment [3], and (B) if not, whether the employee signed an agreement giving the employer rights to the copyrighted work. [4]

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> ... trademarks, etc.

In the U.S., trademark rights arise from use of the mark in providing goods or services. (You can file an application to register a mark in the USPTO based on a bona fide intent to use the mark "in commerce that may lawfully be regulated by Congress," but the registration won't be issued unless and until the applicant shows that he / she /it has actually begun using the mark in Congress.)

That's not to say that an employer might not try to claim that a confidential idea for a particularly-good trademark belonged to the employer, e.g., because the employee who came up with the idea was working on a company project when she did so.

[1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/35/101

[2] http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102

[3] http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ09.pdf (scroll down to "Agency Law")

[4] http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/201
Actually, because Clojure is not ideological (though it is very opinionated) -- and certainly not pure -- but rather very pragmatic, it includes a very interesting feature called transients[1]. Transients temporarily turn a persistent collection into a mutable (in place) one in O(1), specifically to allow efficient in-place algorithms like quicksort.

[1]: http://clojure.org/transients
this is pretty needlessly self indulgent
Take Raspberry Pi, build your own private cloud
The real risk with IP agreements isn't that you'll get sued, it's that acquirers and investors usually won't touch you unless you can prove you cleanly own all IP.
I'm not sure if I like introducing computer science with a physical "computer". A physical "computer" is an application of computer science. I rather start with an abstract idea of computation, but my view point is very skewed towards academia. I'd love to hear what others have to say about this approach.
Schema or Clojure would be a good first FP language. It has very simple syntax and structure that allow you to concentrate on the FP ideas.
"I couldn't see my girlfriend in a million years wearing ... and I'd never hear the end of it if she saw me wearing..."

And this is an insightful comment in that the tide seems to be turning anti-kinect, and once the "value is socially constructed by others, not internally" crowd decides as a group that the kinect is embarrassing, its toast in the marketplace unless it can downscale quickly and smoothly which most products can't do.

Occulus can survive while its in growth phase and fashion oriented people don't like it. That's OK, its a big world and there's space for all. But if the kinect org and support system and ecosystem is size "X" and "not being cool anymore" results in a mandatory nearly instant decrease in size by a factor of perhaps 3, that could kill the entire product by having trouble down scaling.

With narrow casting I'm not even sure what "cool people" watch anymore but all you need is some comedians making fun of people using Kinect or maybe some parody commercials during the superbowl or during reality TV or whatever, and that product is simply toast. Watch for that cultural phenomena, and then watch for product discontinued notices six months later.

All that product needs is a sequel of that "40 year old virgin" movie where sony pays for product placement for the main character to use a kinect, or maybe a stoner/teen comedy movie with a kinect in it, and its all over.
Totally Off-topic, but do you know who I have to reach to get an invite for DN? I'm reading it since 2 years and I'm totally desperate, because I want to contribute in a way ( submissions, comments )
Self hosted, self-destructing encrypted notes web app "d-note" v1.0 released
Because someone here shared my initial announcement of my self-destructing encrypted notes app, I figured I would announce here that v1.0 has been released.
This smart ‘landing page’ tech makes first-time app use suck less
Promises in Swift
Bitcoin Rallies on Strong Fundamentals
It looks like it is pretty high on the priority list, the last update in that thread is on Friday.
This only occurs for 'hidden' networks. If you do not have any hidden networks in your known network list than you will not be broadcasting SSIDs. This is yet another reason to avoid setting your AP to hidden.
HD Stock Video Footage on Behance
Well it is trying to render the web, which is no small feat in itself given that rather creative ways in which people construct web pages. One of the more complex parts of a web crawler is the part that tries to extract from the "html" the actual content on the page :-) That some pages render at all is pretty amazing to me.
Elonka has given some great talks about Kryptos, and other Sanborn sculptures over the years at hacker cons like Phreaknic.

http://www.elonka.com/kryptos/ppt/index.html

She also enjoys cracking the "codes" given out at these conferences, usually printed on the backs of badges, etc. She has a great walk through on how she has done this, which are pretty cool. Layers upon layers upon layers:

http://elonka.com/mirrors/AOL/Nova1337/tutorial.htm
Traffic analysis and some statistical methods should give you a lot of interesting data. Yes it's not individualized long-term tracking, but you can figure out when and where people are visiting, and I think even tease out how long people spend at each point, even if the MAC is randomized for each request.
I’ve just discovered a competitor has been accepted into YC. Am I screwed?
Bitmap like Vector Editing Tools in Animatron
lol, totally! Or we'll have no secrets from our grandchildren. I'm actually surprised how much the data still supports the old 1996 study that said 90-bits is necessary +2/3 bits per year to maintain strength. It's less than a decade for anything under 100bits, which is kinda the generally secure duration if I remember correctly.
I'm not sure if your reason for quitting—waking up whenever you wanted—was in jest or not, but it sure resonates with me. It's the little things like that, having a bit of extra freedom, that make a big difference. If you have any employees, I hope they get the same benefits. Thanks for sharing!
Opinionated view of Swift from a Ruby/Objective-C/JavaScript Developer
docker commit produces an opaque container image that's not documented or repeatable.
My first thought was that it would be nifty to pay with Amazon, but my second thought is that I would rather give a less trusted party my credit card number than have to sign in with Amazon to do it (and have to be wary of phishing). Getting a new credit card is easy, and I am fairly confident that nothing overly bad will happen when I use my credit card on a website.
"there really isn't a need for crazy class hierarchies at all, because they're really just a dispatch mechanism for code reuse, but higher order functions acting on pure data structures handle 90% of this just fine with very little work"

You did a better job of putting my thoughts to words than I could.
Reminds me of this:

"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."
You are technically correct in your observations, but I think we're both stuck in a classic "glass is half empty" "glass is half full" observational trap. Both the good news and the bad news simultaneously about a hybrid language is you can implement the same solution two different ways.

If you did both intentionally for educational purposes, it might be fun. I like the many "koan projects" and a side fork that focuses intentionally on doing something two ways might be interesting, if its not already been added while I wasn't looking.
> What language is best for implementing mutable state?

I would say a language that is pure and has a strong static type system. And I say that because those languages allow you to track exactly where mutation is happening (you're using dynamite) and deal with it appropriately.
As the density of receiver sites increases, it will likely be possible to use trilateration to identify broadcasts which are obviously bogus.
Here is a more informative summary from the agency:
http://www.csb.gov/csb-board-approves-final-report-finding-d...
The Island of Dr. Brain was a lot like that for me. Although we've heard tons of comments from kids like, "I loved this game even though I knew I was doing math the whole time". :-]

-Charlie, co-founder
Verizon will miss deadline to wire all of New York City with FiOS
Still a work in progress. See https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/issues/4023
Or schedule flights to their vacation homes using easily identified planes. They don't actually have to go with the plane.

I imagine that a Stingray-like IMSI/IMEI/MEID interceptor that looked for executive mobile phones could be even more profitable.
> What is employers time if you're on salary?

If someone is on salary, "employer's time" is likely to be treated as a shorthand expression; the real issue is whether the employee was acting "within the scope of employment," which takes into account a variety of different factors. See http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ09.pdf (scroll down to "Agency Law") for a general discussion.
That's just a record though. A bitcoin style blockchain would provide a hashing-power based method of deciding which votes count in the case of double voting, which isn't required or even wanted in this case.
Is there a video of that presentation anywhere?
Ask HN: Hints for Plain Language Legal?
I've got scores of pages of legal, across multiple documents for this early stage project. It's quite hard to decipher. I understand boilerplate is part of a lot of these things - as well as some project specific definitions. Of course I've talked to council about these, I'm informed. My partners have proper council as well. But we keep sorting through all these docs, sorting numbers, making sure it's in the proper places and all that.

Why don't these things come with cover letter or executive summary on the front - like one sentence bullet points to summarise the rest of the document.

Then I'd have something to understand; my council could verify with the long-form details. Couldn't all the long-form documents references points on the short-form?

Like:
"Compensation will be $200k/yr[1]"

And the Long form could reference [1] all over the place? Like variables?

Does this exist? Are there any good places to get some plain language legal documents?
I think that's what SideCar is trying to become.
I think of Chrome as postmodern software; instead of trying to make it not crash they handle crashes cleanly. Considering the incredible complexity of the code this approach may reduce development cost significantly.
If it works well, it's not feeling like a square peg in a circle hole, if it makes your life easier; I'd say it's fine.

I've done that a few rare times, and I think in some case it makes a clean solution. See [1] for an example.

However I don't think that's how people should do _all of the time_ when they try to force an OO model onto Go.

[1]: https://github.com/aybabtme/loghooks/blob/master/hooks.go#L2...
Is it really better? It sounds completely within capabilities of current robotics and algorithms. Mix up DARPA robots and AI from FIFA and you'll likely have a winning team.
Is a linux tool like logrotate acceptable here? Wouldn't this be able to rotate the std-out infinitely increasing log files? Yes this isn't built in to docker, but does seem like a reasonable solution.
That's not how it would work. The later request would be made on a fresh TCP connection (since it's a different URL). Your previous unsolicited response is sitting in the buffers for the old TCP connection. They would not mingle.
Show HN: Leeroy CI – self hosted CI written in Golang
That's pretty nice. Personally I use Atlassian's SourceTree which provides a nice shell in addition to their GUI and lets me do git the way I do on Mac and Linux. It works with GitHub nicely.
Are there any commercial offerings that do some of the grunt work for you, like colors and resizing of page, zoom on maps, click to see just one chart, etc?
I'd pay for that.
How is this different from using a regular non-docker setup?
Of course, it'd be nice if we could solve PID races entirely. The POSIX system is unbelievably broken compared to how NT does it. (No, "PID wraparound happens slow enough not to matter" is not a good foundation for a robust system.)
For those interested in improving the whole "screen lights mimic the sun and keep you awake" thing, consider checking out Flux -- https://justgetflux.com/

It adjusts the colors of your screen late at night.
Greek Startup Success Hurdles Unusual Obstacles
The Art of Financial Warfare: How the West Is Pushing Putin’s Buttons
Author here - I'm happy to answers all your questions and would love to hear what features you'd like to see or what you think needs to be improved.
This implementation is too naive. You can't just autocomplete queries, you have to accept typos and errors and suggest the correct query. That's the hard part.
I've got a new iPod touch that I've upgraded to the iOS 8 beta and I'm still seeing probe requests with the real MAC address. I wonder if this feature isn't turned on yet, or if it only works in certain conditions.
I don't know if it's called intents (activities maybe?), but are Android's popup activities (I think) similar? An example is http://i.imgur.com/usXmLzn.png, which is Dropbox providing a file select to another app. Other than being full screen (I'm not sure if Android apps can do these activities full screen) is the concept about the same as that?
I'm pretty sure that it is possible to make a function in Haskell which, while it mutates variables, these variables are all local, so you are still able to offer up a purely functional interface to the world outside of that function.

Whether this is simple and straightforward or even demands some "magic" which isn't usually part of the language semantics - that I don't know. Imperative code seems very doable and maybe even pleasant in Haskell, but I don't know how simple it is to actually write imperative code that is efficient - e.g. destructive updates and all that, rather than making a new value for each "update" and programming in an imperative style though you are really just using immutable values all the time.
Just to play devils advocate, you don't want just data, you want some interpretation of it as well. Kinect (at least the original, not sure about the new one) does not do on-board joint identification. You just get depth data.

You want data and the various extremely advanced interpretations of it, something that is not trivial to build on your own. So there needs to exist at least one more processing layer before you can consume it for most applications. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenNI is a good step, but until those other layers exist reliably in a stable cross-platform way, "just the data" is nearly useless.
>Therefore, if someone labels something (e.g. Go) as "not object-oriented", that has an implied judgement that Go is somehow "handicapped" and has less power than C++/C#/etc.

But that is precisely the point of Go: it IS less powerful. It has no inheritance, no generics or templates, no macros or pre-processor, no raw pointer access, no exceptions etc. This is all completely intentional, and yes it will be a turn-off to many.
I'm sure it's in the ballpark of any of their other specialized IDEs. Also not that the X I was referring to is your time invested, not your cash.

It shouldn't be the "main question" is all I'm saying.
An Amazon S3 File Browser Built for Speed
Cool stuff. If you are interested in creating effects like this you might also be interested in:

http://facebook.github.io/rebound/rebound-js/docs/rebound.ht...
Wait, you're kidding... really?

I have personally been waiting for the release of Xanadu for about 22 years (since I first heard about it) -- I can't believe it's finally in existence! And yes, the HTML-based world-wide-web is a decent (if somewhat inferior) version of what has been built up in my mind.

It's always been my canonical example of how vaporware has a lot more features than running software. With this out and Duke Nukem Forever coming out about 3 years ago, what else do I have to be waiting for?
Modulus is great, can focus efforts on your product rather than server config
p+p is a lot harder to initiate than any of the reactions listed on the Wikipedia page I linked to. The only reason it happens in stars is that gravitational confinement makes stellar cores much, much denser than plasmas we can produce on Earth. It's not going to happen in an Earthbound reactor using proton (+ something else) fuel.

You're right that there will be some fuel particles that escape confinement and react with the chamber walls; but proper confinement makes this effect very small, much smaller than the numbers you were quoting for radiation exposure, which are based on using fuels that produce neutrons as reaction products. Neutron's can't be confined in a plasma because they're uncharged, so they immediately escape and hit the chamber walls. Protons, and other fuel particles, don't have that problem since they're charged and can be confined (if they couldn't be you wouldn't be able to make the reactor work at all).
12 Websites to Watch Fifa World Cup 2014 Online Free
So your argument is, because government projects are usually problematic, we should not be calling attention to new problematic projects? Doesn't that seem a little... fatalistic?
The Hedge Fund Mirage
Google 'Nearby' Lets Other 'People, Places, And Things' Know When You're Around
Haskell Development Workflow Demo (Youtube video)
I suppose I can only speak for myself, but as a functional programmer I would never ask you to give up mutation completely.

I do think it's nice that most FP languages give us pure functions and persistent data structures that are easy to use and relatively performant, so we don't have to go out of our way to provide a pure (by construction) abstraction when we want to.

The key idea is to be honest when you are asking for mutation. Haskell would likely be far on the "left wing" (or right wing?) on your political spectrum but you can do mutation whenever you please as long as you're honest and mark it in the types with something like IO, State, or ST (Clojure does something similar in spirit with 'transient'). There is even unsafePerformIO if you are absolutely sure that you are wrapping an impure computation in a way that you know looks pure from the outside.

Purity isn't promoted because it's a virtue. It's that pure expressions generally come with nice commutativity and idempotency laws which give you the ability to refactor code while remaining confident you won't change its meaning or alter the behaviour of distance subsystems. It's worth preserving those properties when you can.
Interview with Eugene Goostman, the Fake Kid Who Passed the Turing Test
I completely agree with you that rape and assault in prisons is a terrible problem. I still think prison is a better solution, but I definitely agree that throwing anyone in the prisons we have currently (at least in the US) is probably immoral.
What do you think, in terms like this, of the ST monad work in Haskell?
Consumer fuel is a massive, massive cash cow in many places. In many countries 80%+ of what you're paying in retail petrol/diesel is tax.
Adventures in content: from Antarctic Rescues to European Bison
More than donuts. Last Week's 10 Best Marketing Tweets
You gave it a shot and probably learned some things, don't feel too bad!
If you cannot measure a 'crash rate' you're doing something wrong. Because if nothing else, there is a low but present base rate of crashes caused by overclocked CPUs, bad memory, and flaky motherboards.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2005/04/12/40756...

I worked on software for a hardware system sold by my company. We were able to detect when a supplier changed memory suppliers because of the increased number of 'impossible' crashes.
How about understanding that presentation matters. In fact, in the marketing domain presentation frequently is the content.

One man's anti-usability bells and whistles is another person's essential user engagement element that shapes the perception of the product. You try and sell MBP in Courier New/13px at 100% width and we'll laugh it off as the most idiotic idea ever. And that's not even getting into derivatives like website design galleries that generate a lot of viral awareness, but won't even look at sites without a UX gimmick.
Still no built-in diff tool and conflict merger?
Why not use the git SHA?

Because you want your version numbers to make semantic sense. Your entire team intuitively understands that version 4137 is more recent than version 4134, that version 3527 is in the distant past, and that going from version 4138 to version 4137 is a sensible rollback, whereas going from version 4138 to version 4136 is either a mistake or a response to a major failure of QA.

Similarly, resist the urge to name servers generically. "There's something wrong with web-347!" is a sentence that you can shout across a crowded ops war room, whereas "web-129.22.8.44" or "web-a781bc23" or "instance i347bd944" are much harder to pronounce and much easier to typo.
One reason: Not everyone has access to those services within the firewall, so it's nice to have this as an option.
Haskell completely has something you can mistake as an object system! The entire typeclass machinery works that way less classes and inheritance. There's even a highly functional subtyping relation.
The Research and Science Behind a Perfect Blog Post
Misleading title... Definitely read this as a version of GitHub software that works on Windows 2.0 (as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2.0).