weel

There's a whole lot of people who don't have the luxury of just being able to assume a baseline level of trust, because they feel out of place for whatever reason. Think about what groups of people that might be, in the kernel context.

He's actually quite a nice guy. (Or is that just what he wants me to write? https://www.facebook.com/careers if you really want to find out!)

In the end they are set by politicians. Not for malicious reasons; politicians don't need to be malicious in order to make bad decisions, they have plenty of other reasons for that. In many parts of the US, surface road speed limits are quite reasonable, but freeway speed limits are ridiculously low.

You are correct, by the way, as far as I know, that the 55mph speed limit was originally an energy conservation thing. This was during the oil crisis of the 70s, when it was federally imposed. Ever since the federal mandate was lifted, speed limits have been creeping back up, but at very different rates in different states.

To give a comparison, in France freeway speed limits are roughly 80mph in dry weather and 70mph in rain (I say roughly because they are, of course, in metric.) In Belgium, and the Netherlands it's 75mph, although The Netherlands has introduced many variable speed limits (electronic signs based on congestion) and recently bumped it up to 80mph on certain rural stretches (rural by Dutch standards). Germany, of course, has no speed limits at all on many long-distance Autobahns (about 50% of the network), although in metropolitan areas, contrary to popular mythology in the US, they often do have speed limits, which go by the charmingly long-winded name of "Geschwindigkeitsbeschränkung," often shortened in colloquial speech to "Tempolimit." The de facto speed limit on the unrestricted Autobahns is 125mph, since that's the fastest unmodified German cars will go.

So did some technocratic bunch of engineers evaluate the conditions in each of these countries and decide that somehow some subtle difference of geography that Germans are capable of safely driving a full 65 mph faster than Hawaiians?

I doubt it.

May I also remind the reader that East Germany used to have a rigorously enforced 60mph limit that was rather promptly lifted after the reunification, which was by no means an event of particular relevance to traffic engineering.

Irrelevant, though. Sure, there may be no copyright preventing anyone else from ripping off his reformatting work, but that doesn't prevent him from charging for it. He just has to endure the risk that he may not get for it what he charges for it when somebody else rips it off and sells it for $0. This is analogous to selling a nice, commercially pressed DVD of a linux distro for $5. You have no protection against the next guy giving an equivalent item away for free, but there is no law preventing you from charging money either.

Which is completely irrelevant because whoever does have the original copyright has already licensed them to everyone under publicly available conditions.

Doesn't work from here. Wonder if maybe the local DNS server isn't happy with it.

Been a long time since I last saw "cow-orker". Or USENET, for that matter...

Back when I did some small scale sysadmin work, I found that our CD/DVD burners were a lot more reliable as CD burners than as DVD burners. This seemed to be true both of the older Dell ones we had and the newer generic-brand ones. I had much better luck using CDs for basic installs and then fetching additional stuff from the net than trying to use DVDs.

"Crimes for which someone wronged can sue" are actually not crimes but torts.

Copyright infringement is always a tort, but the conditions under which it becomes a criminal offense vary by jurisdiction.

They already have.

Or better yet, the current annual price of the plan divided by the current yield on British consols.

Yup. Now as for damages, though, even though indeed they are supposed to cover your lost value and not the original price, the original price is going to set a point of reference that will influence how much you could reasonably convince any judge your lost value is. But say we compute it another way. Suppose you can buy equivalent service from Amazon for $100 a year forever. The net present value of that perpetuity at a 10% interest rate is $1000. You can easily see why if you imagine investing the $1000 at the 10% interest rate and using the interest each year to buy hosting: your principal would stay at $1000 forever. Now plug in numbers you actually think are feasible. And subtract attorney's fees. Good luck.

I am not a lawyer and the following is my oversimplified understanding of the law as an economist who has taken some law&econ classes. But...

Just because you have a cause of action for breach of contract (the law recognizes the other guy should've kept his promise) does not mean you can get the remedy of specific performance (where the other guy is actually ordered to make good after all). The standard common law remedy is _in specie_ damages (the other guy has to pay up). The exact rules about when the court can compel specific performance are messy (written by lawyers), but it seems to me that basically what they all come down to is that no judge is going to say "I compel performance" if there's no feasible, relatively hassle-free way to actually, physically, compel performance. And that, in practice, tends to mean cases where the promise was title (legal ownership) to property: the judge can make the promise be kept by simply awarding the title to you. Actually getting the other guy to give you the cow or get off the land that's newly yours is a matter of property law, which has procedures such as replevy (where the Sheriff waves a gun around while you take the cow) and ejection (where the Sheriff waves a gun around telling them to get off your land.) These things can get messy enough as it is, and no judge wants to be responsible for having a sheriff waving a gun around to, say, compel somebody to give you a haircut. (And a GOOD haircut too, or else I'll shoot!) In such cases, the tricky specific performance business is transformed by the law into a straightforward money debt of the sort that can be enforced using, you guessed it, Sheriffs with guns, as well as garnishment of wages and the like. (I'm pretty sure that in the US, though, debts arising from judgments in breach of contracts cases are dischargeable in bankruptcy. Don't trust me on this, but I think it's pretty much only tax debts, student loans, and judgments for "intentional" torts that aren't dischargeable.)

All right, so after that long paragraph full of chattels and replevies and Sheriffs, if you are still reading, let's just assume that what could be had in court was monetary damages.

How much?

Oh, I would say about $500. Maybe a small multiple of that, but how are you going to convince a judge that you paid $500 for something that is worth much more than a small multiple of $500 to you?

Wow, that's an impressively well-researched piece.

The problem with translating law is that a lot of the time words are used as "terms of art" that have a special meaning based on tradition or, worse, precedent: some court at some point was forced to decide on the meaning of some very fuzzy word, they came down one way, and now the very fuzzy word has a very precise meaning and lawyers like to use it precisely because it has a precise meaning!

That sort of stuff easily gets lost in translation, which is why legal translation is such a pain to do. And probably a good part of why it took the English courts so long to switch from Law French (an old dialect of Norman French long used for English legal writing) to English.

The difference between civil and common law is an elusive thing. On the surface it is enormous, but the deeper you dig, the less you find.

Sometimes it's claimed it's about precedent, and indeed some civil law jurisdictions claim that they do not believe in binding precedent. But of course for a legal system to be at all useful, decisions need to be consistent, and the idea that you can achieve consistency by writing every detail in a code so that every decision logically follows from the code is bullshit; if that were the case, all civil lawsuits would be 100% predictable and therefore rational actors would settle them and the judges could all go on vacation.

The reasoning I once read in some Dutch first-year law course notes was along the lines of "we don't do _stare decisis_, but we support equal treatment in equal cases, and it would be unequal treatment to treat you in way X when we treated the other guy in way Y, so we're going to follow precedent, but not because we must follow precedent, but only to avoid unequal treatment." I suppose that it is true that digging up absolutely ancient judgments is a little bit less convincing in a civil law setting, especially if there are periodic recodifications so that you can simply toss away a 17th-century precedent by saying it was an interpretation of the old code, not the new one.

Some say the difference is codification, but as you point out, not all status in common law jurisdictions are just piles of unrelated acts: a lot of the time, they are organized as systematic codes that are amended just like civil law codes. And besides, civil law countries have uncodified case law, too. The section on torts in the French civil code, for instance, is incredibly terse, saying basically that if you unfairly harm somebody you must compensate them. But of course France has tort law just like England does. Interestingly, since French court decisions do not normally provide much reasoning aside from quoting sections of the codes, the details of that tort law get elaborated mostly by law professors in books and articles; but in other civil law jurisdictions, like Germany, judges write long, reasoned decisions just like in the US (except more stilted and formulaic in style). And Scotland, considered traditionally a civil law country, has lots of English-style uncodified legislation.

So maybe then it's the Roman basis? Nah. English law had lots of Roman influence, too, and continental law had lots of influence from local customary law, canon law, and the law merchant. (Just read Berman to find out the details.) Maybe the continentals were bigger on pretending that it was all Codex Iuris Civilis all the time, but nobody ever really believed that.

So then what? Sometimes you hear particular doctrines called out as being significantly different, like consideration in in common contract law as opposed to the intention to be bound in the civil law of obligations. But the consideration rule has so many exceptions that if you can reasonably be thought to have intended to be bound, you'd better know the law very precisely if you still want to get out from under things based on lack of consideration. Besides, consideration may not be required in the civil law, but a payment can serve as evidence of a nonwritten contract.

That's not to say that there are no differences, but it's hard to pin down anything that really applies in all civil law jurisdictions and no common law jurisdictions or vice versa. Notaries, I think, are a pretty consistent difference, although they don't exist in some Asian civil-law jurisdictions.

English libel law is ridiculous, and yet it still hasn't gotten reformed. Remember the McLibel case? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_Case)

I don't exactly sympathize with the panicky rhetoric of the pamphlet that was about, but nothing in it comes anywhere close to the kind of thing libel law legitimately protects against, and it looks like stuff that would be perfectly legal to say in more reasonable jurisdictions like Holland or the US.

But yes, even more outrageous than English libel law (there's no such thing as "UK libel law," since Scots law is different) is this Libel tourism business.

I wonder what it would take to get this reformed. Any British people on here who have a better view of the local political climate? I somehow suspect that a push from local constituent carries more weight in British politics in today's climate than ECHR judgments like the one in the McLibel case. Is there anyone strongly pushing for these strict laws, or is it just a case of inertia combined with nobody pushing very hard against it?

You only need herd immunity. There is experience with vaccinating wild animal populations against rabies.

This is a classic example of a question that can only really be answered with data. Generic studies are good, but nothing beats data you gather about your particular UI.

It is true that people his age don't usually die of disease, but that still leaves other options than suicide. The most common for males 15-24, according to http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa-cause-of-death-by-age..., are traffic accidents, violence, suicide, poisoning "other injuries," and drowning, in that order.

Also, while his web site is not the paragon of UI design, it does manage to be #1 on google for "stickers." I can think of half a dozen things off the top of my head that he could be doing that, it would seem to me, intuitively, would make his business vastly more successful still –– but why would I think I'm right, having never lifted a finger to explore the sticker-selling business, while he has clearly been iterating the hell out of it?

If ever the online recruiting system gives you trouble but you think you ought to be able to apply, send your application to HR by email. (careers@fb.com should do it, I believe) And tell them about the bug too, so they can get it fixed.

Also, if you know somebody who works at Facebook, try to get them to refer you instead of applying directly. (Just email them your resume and ask if they can forward it.) This applies not just to Facebook but to most other big companies, especially popular employers that get a lot of resumes every week. Our recruiters try hard to evaluate all the resumes they receive, but if you guessed that they probably look more closely at ones that reach them by way of an internal referral, I think you guessed correctly.

Yes, you can beat the standard malloc. Use jemalloc. https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/scalable...

By the way, don't interpret the above as saying that Amsterdam, or Holland generally, is a horrible place.

Amsterdam is a cosmopolitan, small city -- a combination you won't find many other places. It's a college town, a tourist attraction, and a center of international commerce. The city center and indeed many of the residential neighborhoods are extremely beautiful, at least if you're into brick and trees. You'll find many decently trained people to hire, all of whom speak Dutch and English fluently as well as a bit of German and French. You'll find that official bureaucracy is comparatively efficient and honest. You'll find well maintained, if slightly underprovisioned, highways linking you to the rest of Europe, as well as comfortable, clean trains running to every significant town in the country twice an hour, and a very well designed and operated international airport with a train station in the basement.

The tax does NOT include medical insurance. You're supposed to take out your own "zorgverzekering" (i.e. medical insurance) from a private company, although you can get a subsidy to cover the expense ("zorgtoeslag") if you have a low income. What you may be thinking about is AWBZ, a national insurance scheme for which you do indeed pay the premiums along with your taxes and that covers various sorts of long-term care, mostly for the disabled and the mentally ill.

In general, for some reason Americans imagine that European countries always have government-run healthcare, presumably because that's what Britain has. In fact, most European countries have hybrid systems, with insurance provided by private companies or in some cases unions, and heavily regulated and subsidized by the government.

As for taxes: while taxes in NL are indeed extremely high, there are loopholes for foreign high skilled workers ("kennismigranten.") My cynical public choice economist interpretation is that the Dutch government realized that this group of people is more likely to vote with their feet, inducing a different Laffer curve, and as such the taxation rate maximizing public revenue is a bit lower in their case...

As for finding housing: very strict rent control laws depress rents way below market rates, which of course means that demand outstrips supply and some allocation mechanism other than price must be invented. In the Dutch case, most rental property subject to rent control is owned by semi-public nonprofits, and their allocation mechanism is almost universally a waiting list. In the case of Amsterdam, there are many districts for which a 7 year waiting list is not out of the ordinary. While there is a blanket exception from the strictest rent control laws for properties with a monthly rent above about 650 euros, the city of Amsterdam has the additional problem that an even larger share of rental properties is owned by said semi-public nonprofits ("woningcorporaties") than in other cities. As an outsider looking to get a"vrije sector" apartment (i.e. over 650 euros a month and thus exempt from the strictest rent control rules) you're in trouble. Consider living in Amstelveen, which has a lot of "vrije sector" housing because it is historically run by the liberal party, whereas Amsterdam is historically run by the labor party.

I think you are right. But that does not mean that this isn't in Uber's interest. Normally, it's not in any business's interest to lower prices to the point where you don't have enough capacity. That would be leaving money by the curbside that you can readily grab, and it would not even be particularly useful for your customers, because your product still needs to be allocated and customers end up spending time and effort to get their slice if they cannot simply buy it. But that reasoning assumes that everybody who might like your product already knows about it. And that simply isn't true for Uber, which is why they need all the marketing they can get; and what better marketing than this. The fact that they are rubbing up against a popular-in-SF (if batty) trade unionist ideology only makes it better, because that will mean more newspaper coverage.

I'm not sure I understand what is cynical about it. The union represents a small number of taxi drivers and tries to improve their economic position at the expense of that of everybody else in the city. Moreover, basic price theory shows that the union is likely to hurt "the people" (i.e. everybody else) more than it helps the drivers, because they don't just increase the fare (which would be a pure transfer from customers to providers -- fair or not, it's not a net loss) but they also decrease the number of rides. If it weren't for people imagining that their own economic well-being was somehow wound up with the taxicab union, they'd be better off, and thus eroding public support for the taxicab union is a public service.

Sincerely, your friendly neighborhood economist.

I've got one of these on my desk and I can assure you that it's amazingly solidly built. Evan and Mike have tweaked the dimensions just so that the plywood they use, sanded and waxed in the way they sand and wax it, fits very precisely -- or rather, it doesn't quite fit, unless it is squeezed a little bit, which is actually what you want, because that means it snaps together securely. And this is why the laser cutting is necessary: it's the one technique that lets you achieve the tolerances you need for this sort of thing without manual adjustments to each piece.

Congratulations!

Yes, of course. (And I believe YC already asks a question about that.) Employers regularly claim intellectual property rights to the inventions of their employees. But issues coming up does not equal issues being unsurmountable.

First of all, many jurisdictions make it hard for employers to try to control things you invent on your own time without using their facilities -- which doesn't keep employers from trying.

Secondly, even if your employer arguably does control the IP you need, that doesn't mean they won't give it up. Woz famously realized that HP had a claim to the Apple I and offered to let them have it; HP thought of it as more of a hobby than a business and the rest is history.

Universities and other research institutes routinely let employees spin off companies, usually in exchange for some share (although, anecdotally, it seems that universities that are new to the game often ask for more than universities that already have strong spin-off cultures).