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arfar

132 karma · joined July 15, 2013

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arfar··on It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)
Not to nit-pic, but it's a Trademark cancellation - not a patent. The confusion probably came from the fact it's before the US Patent and Trademark Office.
arfar··on The Children of Pornhub
Very serious "whataboitism" here. People can care about more than one thing. Different people in societies can care and want to work on different things.
arfar··on A creature that eats its own brain
I know it's not actually relevant. But what a horrible website to read. The grey text is soooo lacking contrast on the white.
arfar··on Teens' anxiety levels dropped during pandemic, study finds
State your conclusion. Not doing so forces us to guess what you mean and is just poor communication. You're forcing me (and everyone that reads this comment) to guess what you mean.

Based on what _I think_ you're trying to say, I think this is a terrible take and I hate everything about it. People aren't trees. Society, people, and children especially shouldn't be forced to be exposed to anxiety inducing, depressing, and stress inducing situations. (But that's what I'm guessing what you're saying, since you have not put a real conclusion or clear statement there.)

arfar··on NES.css: 8-bit style CSS framework
I think even if it wasn't trademarked, they'd likely look into Passing Off (or whatever equivalent laws are present in the country they would decide to proceed with legal action is available), given the exact same name and style of a Nintendo product is being used.

There is also copyright in the design and layout of the NES interface, which has obviously been copied (it's the whole point of the project!), there's likely another option there.

arfar··on Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
Copyright only protects against actual copying. It's quite a limited right in comparison to patents. A patent can prevent others from implementing/selling/making/importing/exploiting the same invention independently created.

Copyright pales in comparison to the protection afforded by a patent.

arfar··on Show HN: Point your repos to their new home
I think is more about the political statement of leaving GitHub rather than the practicalities of code management.
arfar··on Ask HN: What's your view on software patents?
I work in the tech transfer office for a medium sized university (a non practicing entity! shock horror) and patents are a very key tool for us.

Many players we license technology to are only interested in licensing a technology if it's protected by a patent. If there isn't any patent protection, then any third party willing to put enough in can simply read some journal articles published by the researchers (because they do publish everything they can for prestige and more government money) and implement the software themselves and the licensee has no way to stop them (other than through their own execution).

I haven't work at the tech transfer office for very long, but I think I have only seen software related inventions be licensed that had patent protection. When we do license a patent, the licensee most often receives worldwide exclusive rights to exploit the technology in their field. (well, I guess it's not quite worldwide monopoly, it's only a monopoly in the regions the patent is filed in, we do give them worldwide rights to use other stuff like copyright and trade secrets though).

arfar··on FDA permits marketing of AI-based device to detect diabetes-related eye problems
Oddly enough that's what they're aiming to claim a monopoly over.

Here's[1] a patent they have filed towards the system. Claims 1-18 and 20 are focused on the training of the neural network. Looks like Claims 1-18 are going to be granted soon largely in that form also from looking at PAIR[2].

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160292856A1/en?q=AI,ar... [2] https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair

arfar··on Project from Hell (2008)
In English we do have the word "liberty" for freedom.
arfar··on Show HN: Fruits and vegetables in season in your zip code
Oh gosh those are the worst. And they never look good on your phone, so you have to get your laptop out (or tablet if you have one).

If it's not a pointless blog/article header, then the ingredients and method are split up across "tabs". So that now, when it says "melt the butter and whisk in half the flour", you need to flick back and forward multiple times for each step to remember what to do and how much to add.

arfar··on Six year old PDF loop bug affects most major implementations
QubesOS has a really nice solution for opening untrusted PDFs: https://micahflee.com/2016/07/how-qubes-makes-handling-pdfs-...
arfar··on Raneto – Markdown Knowledgebase Platform
Pelican is great for blogs. I don't know that I'd suggest it for a "Knowledgebase".
arfar··on Ask HN: What are some small scripts you use daily?
Looks pretty handy! How do you interface with the KeePass database? Is there a library? with Perl bindings?
arfar··on Redditors design worst volume sliders possible
Log/lin depends on your target market a lot I think. I don't know, but I imagine, audio engineers and the like would be expecting a logarithmic scale for their volume knobs.

I make guitar pedals sometimes, I've never seen a volume knob not be a logarithmic potentiometer.

arfar··on Secret Dots from Printer Outed NSA Leaker
But #fefefe isn't black or white? I presume the commenter specifically didn't say greyscale.

EDIT- checked the source:

It looks like imagemagick's 'threshold' [0] command is being used, so everything is max/min/black/white:

https://github.com/firstlookmedia/pdf-redact-tools/pull/23/c...

[0] https://www.imagemagick.org/script/command-line-options.php#...

arfar··on HBO has renewed Silicon Valley for a fifth season
>That's just like, your opinion, man

There are other examples of shows that do fine without strong plots. One example from the top of my head is "The Chinese Restaurant" episode in Seinfeld. Little to no plot at all in that episode. Just a string of funny interactions between characters.

arfar··on JSONbin.io – Simple JSON Storage (Beta)
Any method of deleting bins?
arfar··on India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste
It could be a typo. "no dice" is an idiom in English for an "unfavorable result".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/no_dice

arfar··on Graffiti from Pompei
With respect to Catholicism, I was getting at the fig leafs that were applied to classic (Roman and Greek) sculptures and paintings that depicted nudity and the general sentiment behind that movement.

Personally, I've never seen such explicit graffiti. The worst might have been "Call XXX-YYYYYY for a good time" sort of messages.

arfar··on Graffiti from Pompei
I'm amazed how raunchy and explicit it all is.

I guess you can blame Christianity (maybe Catholicism in particular?) and Victorian propriety for pulling it back the other direction.

arfar··on A lawsuit over Costco golf balls
I know, I was just replying to the parent's comment and highlighting that suing (AFAIK) is the only way to enforce patent rights. Apart from maybe threatening to sue, but same-difference there really.
arfar··on A lawsuit over Costco golf balls
Which part are you commenting on? Is it the use of the word "legitimate"?

Because suing someone for patent infringement is a "legitimate" course of action, i.e. it's a lawful thing to do. In fact (AFAIK IANAL etc etc) it's the only way to ascertain whether a patent is being infringed or not without working with the opposition directly and sharing trade secrets outside the context of a court room with proper protections, something I doubt anyone would be particularly happy about.

If it's the "don't really begrudge the approach" part. I don't know that any of us really have the knowledge from within the golfing industry to know what different companies think of the practice.

arfar··on Physics explains why rock musicians prefer valve amps
The article would be greatly improved with some images of the sine waves and the varying levels of harmonics.
arfar··on Night’s Nirvana: On Norwegian Black Metal
>You could not pay me to listen to Burzum.

It's funny how tastes in music work. No 2 people are ever the same.

Personally Burzum is my favourite from that scene. It's beyond stripped back. There's something that resonates with me about picking a nice simple melody, played on a plain old MIDI keyboard (presumably) with a basic sine-wavey type instrument and just riffing on the atmosphere for 8 minutes.

arfar··on Brian Eno Plays the Universe
Random bit of trivia about Brian Eno is that he wrote the start-up music to Windows 95.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Eno#The_Microsoft_Sound

arfar··on E Ink announces a full color electrophoretic ePaper display
A combination of any of these 1500

    https://patents.google.com/?assignee=E-Ink+Corporation&sort=new
This is the first one that comes up mentioning "color":

    https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160116816A1
arfar··on White House Source Code Policy a Big Win for Open Government
You're completely right, it's odd. Also I didn't realise that the return type was also on the same line as the function name, in which case, even more odd.

I think the idea dates back to early C. I've definitely seen C code with the return type on a separate line.

arfar··on White House Source Code Policy a Big Win for Open Government
It's handy if you're looking for the methods definition using a regex. Instead of doing something like (in pseudo-regex):

    $[public|private|whatever-else-can-behere](FUNCTION_YOURE_LOOKING_FOR)
you can do a slightly simpler

    $(FUNCTION_YOURE_LOOKING_FOR)
Obviously your code editor/IDE should handle that, but maybe if you wanted to whip up a quick script to something a little odd, it'd be quite handy to have the function name on a separate line.
arfar··on FlappyBird hack using Deep Q-Learning
My favourite when writing C is:

    #define ever (;;)
    ...
    for ever {
        ...
    }
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