ahlatimer

There's power yoga. I prefer Vinyasa, but the classes I've been to and the DVDs I've watched all have had some mysticism to them (for certain definitions of mysticism). That doesn't bother me, though. I enjoy the meditative aspects of it. I just ignore it when it starts to get a little too out there.

I do alright. I went with something that's lower salary, but there are things in life that are more important to me than money. Dailybooth, the company whose offer I accepted, seemed to have the maximal overall combination of the things I was looking for.

What I did wasn't magic, though. I worked my ass off to get relevant work experience starting as soon as I could. I used that to get into a YC company. They liked me and my work enough to write me a letter of rec and forward my resume to the YC founder's list. FWIW, no one even asked about college beyond "how's college going?" as I was in final's week of my last semester when I interviewed with a bunch of companies after the forward.

Undergrad, and I didn't go to a prestigious school.

As another anecdote, I was offered $115k/yr + $10k relocation from Groupon right out of college (I didn't accept, but that was the highest offer monetarily).

Looks like he scanned commit messages, not comments, so the only people who could read them are people browsing Github or have access to the repo some other way.

I was referring to this claim in the article: "Knowing that Google+ would use “circles” to segment actual social networks (“Family,” “Friends,” “People I Secretly Despise,” etc.), Facebook launched Groups and Lists, which hardly anyone used." FB couldn't have copied G+ for Groups and Lists because G+ hadn't been announced when those features launched.

My mistake. I thought it didn't work if you linked to it directly. It turns out the bug just manifests itself differently if you do that.

Groups and lists also existed months before the first G+ announcement. Hard to copy something you don't know about.

Unlikely. You'd have to get someone else to run the same query.

Except that it isn't the government suing these companies, it's the people named in the credits.

It took a bit of digging, but here's a document on how the UN estimates mortality: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/adultmort/Comp...

You're sort of taking the quote from the US ambassador to the UN out of context. The US ambassador to the UN said that the UN Security Council can't even issue so much as a press release without US agreement. Never mind that this may just have been hyperbole, but it would make sense that the UN Security Council may have trouble doing things without the backing of the world's most powerful military. It says nothing, really, about what the UN as a whole, or the body who forms the mortality statistics specifically, is capable of doing or not doing without US backing.

I've written about this before [1]. It's really not that hard to get a job as a developer. Companies are dying for smart, capable engineers, and it's just a matter of directing your efforts in the right way.

Two points I'd like to address:

- Experience beats GPA. I don't even include my GPA on my resume (not because it's bad, but because I don't think it's relevant), and, so far, no one has asked for it. Experience, on the other hand, has opened far more doors than college has.

- Direct your efforts. It's amazing how many more responses I get when I specifically craft a cover letter/resume just for that position that I do when I just send out resumes blindly.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1809107

Edit: To be clear, I just graduated from college in May, and accepted an offer in SF two weeks after graduation (without sending out any applications). I also had no money to move and the area I'm from has practically no tech industry. I'm not particularly smart or talented; I just happened to do a few things that built on top of one another.

20 years after filing date, IIRC.

I think we were all aware that the system could be abused. It was based entirely on the honor system since we don't know who was using the card, only that it was being used. The original thread was full of people talking about how it could be abused.

As far as what Sam did in particular, it'd be entirely different if Sam came out and said, "Hey, look! I was able to write a script that has syphoned off $625 from the card and put it into Starbucks gift cards. I could then turn around and sell those cards on eBay and turn them into cash. I'll be putting the money back onto the original card, but I just wanted to expose the exploit." Instead, he followed through with turning it into cash and wrote a snarky blog post about how yuppies buying yuppies coffee isn't all that interesting, and he had decided to redirect the experiment to "will someone buy a Starbucks gift card for full price."

I think it started with the post about tech talent earlier today [1]. The article specifically mentions Bridgewater. It also isn't the first time Bridgewater has been brought up on HN [2], although this seems to be the first time it has received an appreciable number of upvotes.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2812324 [2]: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=bridgewater...

If you had cut out the "Admittedly I stopped reading the article when I got to" part of your comment, you probably wouldn't have been downvoted. I think the general perception is that it's difficult to add to the discussion of an article if you didn't even bother to read that article, especially when your comment merely echoed the article.

Well, you can't only have these things powering US homes because I can't imagine they work that well at night.

Yep, that's the one. The other one I was thinking of was Alfred Bell & Co. v. Catalda Fine Arts.

The content doesn't, actually. I'll look up the specific case when I get home, but phone book publishers most definitely do not have any copyright claims to the phone number or addresses. They do have copyright claims to the font choice, layout, etc., so you can't copy the phone book wholesale, but you can take the phone numbers, rearrange them, and set them in a different typeface and you'd be in the clear.

I don't believe there's any part of copyright that takes the amount of effort into account. There was a case (again, I'll look it up when I get home) where a copy of a work that was in the public domain was granted its own copyright because it had a few errors in it. The errors were unintentional, but copyright was given. In the phone book case, the court specifically mentioned that even though there was no doubt a significant amount of work required to produce the phone book, that didn't give the publisher copyright.

Texas property taxes are the third highest in the nation [1]. About 1.81% of the property value annually, or $5,430 in this case with a home value of $300,000. That's about $450/mo., which seems reasonable for low end rent in some parts of Texas. Property taxes vary by county, so Denton may have a higher or lower property tax than the average in Texas.

[1]: http://dallasdirt.dmagazine.com/2010/10/05/texas-property-ta...

I think the point is that they aren't just going after illegal streaming sites, but also people linking to them. To use your analogy, they're going after drug dealers and people who tell you where you can find drug dealers.

But Google started in '98, making them two years too early to be "of the decade."

You could argue that CAMPBELL, AKA SKYYWALKER, ET AL. V. ACUFFROSE MUSIC, INC. [1] wasn't a criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research (the court ruled that it was a parody). In CAMPBELL V. ACUFFROSE, the court also ruled that it being a commercial recording didn't stop it from being covered under fair use. There was another case which slips my mind at the moment that found similarly (that commercial use doesn't stop it from being fair use).

IANAL, and I am not familiar with all of the little details that go into determining whether something is fair use. From the reading of the applicable laws and precedents and having an actual lawyer go through those with me (I took a class last semester on IP law), however, I don't see anything that would outright bar this from being fair use.

[1]: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=searc...

Even without the magic printer, you'd probably be stepping on a number of patents by reverse engineering a Porsche (not to mention copyright/trademark infringement for things like the emblem). You could still be found to be infringing upon patents if you were only using the duplicates for personal use (IANAL, though).

As far as the length of copyright (which, I agree, is currently too long), you can thank Disney for that.

I worked for a company that did a website in COBOL instead of using PHP or ASP.NET when they already had developers that did both.

I think the column line depends on either the compiler or a setting somewhere. When I wrote COBOL, the comments were in columns 72 to 80.

I think the actual test is if the intended audience would get confused between the original and the imposter (see the H. R. Pufnstuf v. McDonald's case, although that's copyright, not trademark).

You could still lose that fight, even if your work came first, if you never published it or filed a patent for it. First to invent only holds if you reduced it to practice (either by actually inventing the thing, or boiling it down so someone reasonably skilled in the art could then invent it) within that year. You lose rights to it after that if someone else wants to patent it. There's also first to conceive stipulations. The intellectual property class I took last semester would have been a lot easier if the U.S. just went first to file (like basically everywhere else).

Modern English is a hodgepodge of a variety of languages. The history of the language is really quite interesting, and I suggest anyone look into it if they have interest. If you try to read pre-Norman English today, you'd be hopelessly lost (unless you were previously trained to do so). Take a look at the original text of Beowulf and compare it to, say, the Canterbury Tales. The Canterbury Tales is a rough read; Beowulf is unintelligible.

I know some people have gone from EFI to carbs on some motorcycles (KTM's early EFI offerings being the few I'm familiar with). I'd imagine it would be possible to go the other way, although I'm unsure of the difficulty of it.