arfar's comments

arfar | 3 months ago | 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 | 5 years ago | 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 | 5 years ago | 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 | 7 years ago | 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 | 7 years ago | 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 | 7 years ago | 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 | 8 years ago | 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 | 8 years ago | 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 | 8 years ago | 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 | 8 years ago | 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 | 9 years ago | 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.

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