skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Formalities that should be discussed when starting on a group project?
I am about to dedicate a good chunk of my time and money to working on a promising project. The idea was purely of my own invention. I've bounced the idea off a couple people who have reacted very positively and have expressed interest in working with me on it (without me asking explicitly for their involvement).

If I decide to pursue the project with others, are there any formalities that should be addressed -- for example, regarding ownership, patenting, etc. What kinds of agreements should be discussed before we begin investing time and money into the project? Does it need to be formally documented in a particular way? Do I need to involve a legal professional? If some issues do not need to be addressed at the very beginning, then when should they be addressed?

Are there standard procedures/recommendations that should be followed? Where can I get this information?

Up till now, I have only had text conversations (I've made sure to keep time-stamped logs of our conversations). We don't have anything tangible -- no prototypes or design notes.

It would be frustrating to encounter any dilemmas later on that could have been "prevented" by having established some formal agreements. "Cover my ass" might be one way to put it. I'd like to get these matters out of the way before I put in time and money.

Perhaps I am naive but I see real promise in what we are about to work on.
We learned a lot: https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/developer-relations/2...
While I certainly enjoy my comics, "most intricate fictional narrative in history"? I think not.
Worth a mention of xkcd's color survey [1] results [2] with two different shades of cerulean.

[1] http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/

[2]http://xkcd.com/color/rgb/
> Andreessen took the concept of "shooting the messenger" to new depths of stupidity when he said that.

And yet, not really. With the exception of RSA, American tech. companies are being hammered for the actions of NSA, not for their own "crimes". Even German companies obey German legal directives after all, and Vodafone made clear the other day the extent of government monitoring of networks around the world.

To the extent that Snowden has made clear the reality that government (and not just criminals) can take advantage of the jurisdictional problems of an open Internet, that's not the fault of the U.S. tech sector either. After all, some of the most successful NSA programs are really liaisons with European security agencies that run the actual intake work, not conspiracies with Silicon Valley.

The correct solution for Europe if they want to be free of the possibility of other nations (incl. the USA) doing targeted operations in their networks is to completely balkanize the Internet, which companies like Google and Facebook oppose for obvious reasons.

You can credit Snowden with revealing to the world the types of dangers inherent to an open Internet, but that very same set of revelations is a large part of what's harming the U.S. tech sector. You're right that people may have figured it out eventually, but nations and companies around the world tended to agree not to make too big an issue of it since the benefits of an open Internet were thought to outweigh the risks. But Snowden forced the issue.

The only true solution to the issues he raised, if you're a European citizen, cannot be left to voluntary compliance by the other nations of the world, especially since you can never certify compliance with that. You'd have to instead build out your own Facebook, your own Google, your own tech sector, just like Russia and China have done.

So credit Snowden with opening the eyes of Europe to that reality, but you can't eat your cake and have it too. We've seen region locking spread too far with just with RIAA/MPAA to want to see it infect the rest of the Internet, but that is the message Snowden is responsible for (even if it wasn't the message he meant to send).
Can we stop already with this fat is bad for you? There is so much nutrition misinformation that no wonder there is an obesity epidemic... Fat is not bad for you, in fact it's critical to living a healthy life. Sugar is much easier to abuse because it's absorbed too quickly (which is why fruit juice is bad, no fiber slowing down the absorption) and provided in such vast quantities.

We need to real governance here, bring back some real nutritional science in to the consumers attention and make organisations legally liable for spreading dangerous misinformation. It could save more lives than stopping smoking/alcohol/drugs, gun violence, wars and car accidents combined.
There is also a passage about the difference in weight of aluminum cans saving the equivalent of aluminum used in 3400 Boeing 747s, but when we hear this I think we instinctively think of the total weight of 3400 jets rather than just the aluminum in those jets. I thought that was pretty deceptive.
If you noticed it independently, that's clear enough. And if they advertised it but didn't deliver, that supports it too.

I'm interesting in cases where someone really wants X, unknowingly gets not-X, and then is perfectly happy with not-X until they discover the difference through other means. It happens, but doesn't sound like it happened here.
Studies that say something is safe are irrelevant, we only care about the studies that say something is not safe and their follow ups.
That helps put some things in perspective. Unicode is not a well-understood topic among programmers, I've noticed (at least in the US), and for something so important it's surprisingly difficult to find information. The distinction between UCS-2 and UTF-16 must have made sense at one time, but it makes no sense anymore, and it's not necessarily easy to track down the explanation for why there are two 16-bit formats. Thanks.
Intellectually, I know that "fermented milk" is a perfectly accurate way to describe cheese, yogurt, and similar products, but I don't know if I could bring myself to buy and eat something that had it right on the label....
Newton's law of gravity? Worked great for, what, 300+ years? Still, for a wide range of situations, it's darned accurate. Is it 'correct'? Nope: Einstein's law of gravity is more accurate, especially in what in our solar system neighborhood would have to be regarded as extreme situations.

Are we sure that Einstein's law of gravity is the really 'correct' one or the 'last' one we will discover? Nope. Indeed, that doubt is part of why the article got so excited about using one black hole orbiting another one to "test" Einstein's law of gravity. We keep testing that law because we will learn something, either (1) something doesn't fit and we have to ditch the law or (2) the law fits and we gain more 'confidence' in the law.

You can look at it this way: The stuff we 'accept' now is what we have dreamed up and that has passed some apparently 'significant' (don't mean statistics here) tests and so far never really failed a test. Net, stuff 'accepted' at present is what appears to work so far.

But, in physics and cosmology, we have some issues that, at least intuitively, appear to be potential biggies: (1) What happened before the big bang? Can we get some clues from the data we have on what might have happened before the big bang -- some physicists have tried to look. (2) What's with this stuff about dark energy and dark matter? (3) Why does it appear that there is much more matter than anti-matter? (4) What's with neutrinos and how they 'change'? (5) What can we dig out of 'spooky action at a distance', that is, Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR) paradox?

So, maybe more progress understanding one of these biggies will cause us to ditch some of our currently 'accepted' results, look for, and maybe find some new results.

Could everything we have seen so far be just some light show put on just for our amusement? We can't say. So far, it appears that somehow mathematics works shockingly well; why? We don't know.

That there is a law of gravity that works as well as even Newton's might be seen as surprising. That is, why doesn't
the 'law of gravity' change each 10 minutes? Well, some things do change 'randomly', and for them the only laws we have are probabilistic. Newton's law is not probabilistic because so far it appears to work the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, that is, doesn't change. Or our science is what we have found that in some important sense doesn't change, e.g., we can 'reproduce' results. Why are such results possible? Not at all clear.

Even if what we are seeing is just some light show for our amusement, still we get some utility, e.g., via applications to engineering, etc. So, the Internet works because Maxwell's equations of electro-magnetism continue to work as they have for 100+ years now.

> And I can't shake it off.

Relax and enjoy the light show or whatever the heck it is. There's a lot to be amazed about, curious about, etc. And we really do make progress, astounding progress. E.g., we've made a lot of progress since I studied physics i college. The math I studied has been more stable!
This isn't always a 'gotcha' scenario in which the OEM acts in bad faith to the customer. In hardware, when you're under a lot of pressure to be deliver products on time, teams will be risk averse and over design to meet timing. As time goes on, engineering learns of the over design, or over capacity, and corrects the issue to save cost or optimize performance. This becomes an issue when teams trade off performance for cost.
Diet Coke tastes like robot sweat.
This was very easy to read, interesting subject, good photos. Thanks!
I tried divvy but was already using Moom and find Moom to be a little simpler and more intuitive.

It's here: http://manytricks.com/moom/
And costs $10.
> Test prep generates very small improvements in scores.

> If test prep did work, it would reduce racial gaps since blacks do more test prep than average.

You have some evidence for either of these propositions vis-a-vis NYC specialized school admissions tests, or did you just want to grind your axe regardless of relevance?
There are civil remedies for copyright infringement, so you're wrong. This is also why people should listen to lawyers, not random posters on the internet.
Drinking too much water kills: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication

Of course, too much coffee or tea will kill you the same way.
Userland traffic shaping with OpenBSD and Lua
It is amenable to test prep. Perhaps the one difference is that since it's on an off year (7th grade rather than 9th), is only for one school, and there aren't many spots, it isn't as widely prepped for as the 9th grade exam that covers the rest of the top schools.
Or, surely, Hennessy Youngman on Poststructuralism...
I was a developer on a Star Trek Online MMO game (at Perpetual Entertainment, before Cryptic Studios). The most requested feature from beta testers was "ship interiors". The game designers were ex-Blizzard people, so they were recreating what we jokingly called "WoW in Spaaaace". People were clamoring for "Star Trek: The Sims", but we wouldn't give it to them, probably because it would only appeal to a small number of hard core fans.

A good example of a "ship interiors" game was Seed, a cartoony MMORPG on board a generation ship. The game play involved collaborating with other players to run the ship.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/is...
> He wants you to think he's comparing the last 100 years. In reality he's comparing two different time periods because U.S. acceleration ruins the wow factor.

That's an amazingly pedantic and petulant response to what appeared like a perfectly valid comparison. The US economy became the world's largest one some time in the 1920's, which means at least 70 of the 100 years in the 20th century was when the US was the world's largest economy and growing. What's wrong in comparing that to just 3 years of China's growth, a country which is still a smaller economy than the US mind you? That's still wow factor enough for a lot of people, especially non-Americans I guess.

> He wants you to think Chinese consumers have a lot of buying power. They don't. They just happen to like those specific brands.

I'm surprised you think China isn't a major luxury market. Across product categories from handbags to watches to cars, China is absolutely the #1 focus market for most brands. In fact measured by nationality, the Chinese are the world's largest luxury consumers and also the fastest growing. [1]

[1] http://www.economist.com/news/business/21579015-life-getting...
Previous discussion (with cleaner url too): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7887266
Different fixes for the same bug – LibreSSL vs. OpenSSL
I don't think it's required by law, since there are sellers with much less friendly return policies. But some sellers have learned that liberal return policies earn more business than the money they cost.

Some just sort of unofficially try to keep customers happy, but some are up-front about it. Costco, for example, lets you return almost anything almost any time for any reason, or no reason. Electronics are limited to 90 days, but others have no limit. Bought some fruit that doesn't taste quite right, possibly because you left it in your car for two weeks? Just bring the moldy remains back. In the world of clothing, LL Bean and Lands' End are two examples where they take pretty much anything, any time. Lands' End even has an amusing story that they use to promote their crazy return policy, about a man who bought a collectible car from them as part of some promotion, and his widow returned it 20 years later after he died. (Two decades of inflation no doubt ate away at the true value of the refund, but still.) LL Bean will go out of their way to remind you of their policy. I had a button break on some pants and when I asked if I could get a replacement button somehow, they told me nope, just return them and we'll send you a new pair.
> Create other model objects to work with your entities instead of asking them to do things for you.

Regardless of persistence, using such "manager" objects to operate on data records is procedural rather than object oriented programming.
Isn't most of the weight of the 747 airframe Aluminum? I know newer planes use lighter-weight composite materials, but the 747 is a pretty old design.
Generalized Secure Hash Algorithm
Postfix (1998) predates Git (2005) by 7 years. That isn't to say that a VCS of some kind wouldn't have its benefits, but it's completely up to the author's decision.
It seems to me that focusing on component changes is completely missing the point. The real problem was not that Apple had two subtly different versions of their MacBook Pro with no way to tell them apart. The real problem was that Apple was shipping seriously defective hardware. Imagine if Apple hand standardized entirely on the defective LG panels. That eliminates the "panel lottery" complaint, right? And yet the actual problem, in terms of what you get when you buy one, is worse, not better.

Manufacturers need to ship products that are fit for purpose and that perform as advertised. As long as that's maintained, swapping components shouldn't be a problem. If swapping components affects that, then it's the bad products, not the swapping, that are the real problem.
I live in NJ and I see an open (and extremely strong) XfinityWifi network signal. I don't know if this is the default SSID with no security or one of these public hotspots. But since Comcast has a corporate office a couple miles from me, I wouldn't be surprised if they were experimenting with this lovely service locally as well.
I guess open source authors can work however they wish, but the sheer disdain displayed for good-but-differing practices is depressing.

So, now I'm a "kid" (with the obvious insinuation that I'm dumb and inexperienced) if I think maybe perhaps version control is a good idea, especially for open source projects that actually want contributions? Neat.

And git is "bloatware"? Is that guy running on a Commodore 64 or something? Bizarre.
Pretty sure they are doing this after you upgrade your modem. I have been noticing this more and more with my iPhone. Gets sort of annoying though when it keeps on trying to connect to these hotspots and basically causes my internet to drop out due to it trying to connect.
So does Linux...
"I don't find anything objectionable about this article, and I'm not sure that flagging based on source is a good policy.'

I think it's generically the right policy for just that reason: if an article were objectionable, I might not realize it, because I'm not knowledgeable about the subject!

And there is a fairly good Daily Kos article by Roger Fox:

Wow that looks terrible. The critic they're ridiculing, Todd Rider, wrote his PhD thesis at MIT on the subject he's talking about. And they're trying to ad-hominem him as someone "not in the field". Okay..

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11412
Yup. Just keeps getting better (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BpUs_MAIYAEHb2o.png:large).
I wouldn't be surprised if Comcast could effectively deliver 150mbps to all subscribers on their network and just uses the excess capacity to provide wifi. Of course that sucks if you paid for the full 150mbps. ;)

Of course, that doesn't mean where their network connects to the internet won't get more congested...
If he is running on a Commodore 64 with todays products then damn I wanna see his setup :D
CC-NC is still really useful for music. Nobody wants to release their music for free, and then hear it in the soundtrack of a multi-million dollar blockbuster. Or maybe they would, but then they'd sure as heck still be kicking themselves that they didn't get paid.

CC-NC prevents large-scale exploitation. I'm not sure the drawbacks of confusion over trivial use, or small-scale exploitation, outweigh the benefits of not having a large corporation save money by using your stuff and not paying you.
When we imagine the 747 in our minds, I suspect that most of us picture it fully loaded with the engines, electronics, hydraulics, seats, etc since that is what we have experience being inside and "feeling" the weight as it accelerates and decelerates.

I'm not sure what fraction of the total weight the aluminum accounts for, but the phrasing I believe is intentionally misleading.
On Macs, /Applications is probably the first to go. I stopped an rm -rf /* (intended .*) inside /Applications/Adium.app. I'm really glad I wasn't using a SSD!! Adium itself started acting very odd. One of the many issues was that sending a message to a specific person actually sent the message to a group chat. I was lucky to figure that one out before I cursed out the group chat while describing my stupidity.
Jurassic Park source code
It seems like the very old projects are very set in their ways (unsurprisingly). I complained about ImageMagick's process a while ago to no avail: http://www.imagemagick.org/discourse-server/viewtopic.php?f=...
Interestingly enough, there is one of these in my apartment complex. I just connected to it and it allows DNS requests through. You could connect to some ones wifi and DNS tunnel out to the internet. Looks like there is a real easy way to get free internet without giving a penny to CommieCast.
If you look at the link syncerr posted elsewhere in the thread* it's still pretty much just as mindboggling, because for 2011, 2012, and the 2013 estimated value, China used 29.6 times as much cement as the US did in those three years. That's about 90 years of US worth even using current consumption, so the wow factor isn't ruined for me.

As an unrelated point, considering what things were like in most of the US in 1900, it's rather startling that the overall usage in that century in the US still seems to line up pretty closely with the current US's pace. There must've been several years of much-higher-than-current consumption (probably even than the peak in 2005, I'd guess). Would be very interesting to see a 100-year breakdown for the US.

*http://www.ficem.org/boletines/ct-2013/presentaciones2013/1-...
Your Job is Not to Code
I don't think that's misleading, because I don't know many people who instinctively, as you say, have any idea what the true total weight of 3400 jets is, or of anything else that uses massive amounts of aluminum. I think the illustration is used precisely because we have so little experience with such large values.
A good starting point might be average weight statistics on a per-state level. I doubt you could get any finer-grained information though.
Proportion of disposable income spent on luxury brands such as these would be a good metric to look at in dismissing or accepting his claims.

FWIW, in Japan (in the metropolitan areas at least), young professional women living with their parents and making $1,500/mo often own LV bags.
The whole thing is pretty much incomprehensible without understanding the history. It's a bit crazy how much historical baggage Unicode has managed to accumulate in just a couple of decades (and most of it from just the first few years).

It sounds like you have it figured out, but just in case: UCS-2 is the original pure 16-bit encoding from the days when nobody could conceive of needing more than 65536 characters for anything. UTF-16 is the hacked up "oops, it turns out there are a lot more Chinese characters than we realized" version that tries to maintain some compatibility with software built for UCS-2.

Given that there was only a five-year period between the first release of Unicode and the introduction of UTF-16, it's kind of amazing how pervasive the 16-bit encoding got. It's thoroughly baked into Java, where "char" was supposed to be a unicode character, but ended up being a unicode character or a piece of a UTF-16 surrogate pair. Windows APIs and Cocoa's NSString went through the same process. JavaScript too, and the spec still allows implementations to only support UCS-2.
It would be interesting to see how small it could be made.

I posted a link earlier, but here it is again with a quote:

http://www.maximumcompression.com/compression_fun.php

> 'What is the best compressor to get really extreme compression?' is a question often asked on the internet. The achieved compression ratio of course depends on the quality of the compressor used, but the type of data that is being compressed is much more important. To show this I created a tiny 115 byte rar file. When you decompress it, it will turn into a textfile of almost 5 MB (a compression ratio of 99.998%). Here it is: test.rar. Note: Turtle 0.07 compresses the same file to 49 bytes, Hook09c (with switches 3 1 1 1) to 36 bytes and UHBC (with switches -b128m -m3) to 24 bytes!!.

I enjoy watching this "code golf" style competing to optimise one feature of something.
What would you do if someone shows up on your mailing list and demands that you change your decade-old workflow that works fine? Weitse and others replies are not inappropriate.

Some projects do not want contributors. It belongs to the maintainer. Knowing what not to put in is sometimes the best way to keep good code.
Is the Pixel Trek ship layout accurate to the show and published diagrams?
I'm really disappointed by that. Gates shouldn't be promoting beverages that promote obesity, type 2 diabetes, and tooth decay.
Interesting that it holds BRK.B shares rather than BRK.A shares. Is this because the foundation assessed that they would move the market less when buying BRK.B instead of BRK.A?
The collectability bubble also happened in baseball cards at the same time. Like all bubbles, it fed on itself for a while before ultimately dying and taking down many of the later adopters. Afterwards comics moved to specialty stores.
Have you or will you be releasing code for Orion?
That just isn't true though. It might be true for the standard prelude, but there are very high performance options available. Not only that, there are great wrappers to the standard C/Fortran scientific libraries used by everyone.

I have written real time 3D reconstruction and SLAM algorithms in Haskell, so I have had to face this head on.