jfarmer

45 ms·

361.
by jfarmer 13y ago
I think you've internalized a too-specific rule. Translate "bands won't give me their music if I don't have a big following" to "bands won't give me their music unless they trust me to do right by them an
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by jfarmer 13y ago
Or, since he's obviously a beginner, he means something different by "runs offline" than an expert does.
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by jfarmer 13y ago
> And part of why I ended up skimming the piece is that I'm not convinced original post can be interpreted to that degree. Not to interject -- well, ok, to interject -- but isn't this completely backwards? Shouldn't you s
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by jfarmer 13y ago
The author's claim is weakened slightly by the fact that Sean and Hiten were two of the people involved in coining the term (as he acknowledges) and Noah has used that term to describe himself and what he does. :P The more interesting
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by jfarmer 13y ago
What are the first and second derivatives of those numbers with respect to time?
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by jfarmer 13y ago
Honestly, it seems like you're being deliberately obtuse. Although you might think the author is being maximalist, you don't need to respond in kind. I realize you said you aren't and that you're being sincere, but it&
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by jfarmer 13y ago
There's a few things worth responding to in your comment, some technical and non-technical, but both important for beginners to keep in mind. I assume you know most of what I'm going to say, so I'm pretending a student asked
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by jfarmer 13y ago
Caveat lector : I co-founded Dev Bootcamp ( http://devbootcamp.com ), which might inform your response to my comment. I agree with you that, as far as I know, "Never have we had a privileged class that's so easy to ente
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by jfarmer 13y ago
(Native English speaker.) There's definitely no rule against it. I wouldn't think anything of hearing "who're" everyday conversation. It's rare you see it in writing, though. What you hear in every day speech
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by jfarmer 13y ago
This seems backwards to me. It's not as though things "line up" magically, but rather there's enough "wiggle room" to allow things line up. It's similar to me to saying that given three non-negative inte
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by jfarmer 13y ago
Well, ok.
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by jfarmer 13y ago
I appreciate that you're the OP and have the most sensible, measured reply to my comment, which was meant for other commenters on HN and not you. :D Although I agree with you that the site helped their users overall, it's hard to
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by jfarmer 13y ago
I'm not making a legal argument. I'm explaining why I think Tumblr's response is within the range of responses I'd expect were I the author of the site and why their response doesn't rise to a level that I think de
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by jfarmer 13y ago
Eh, that's pretty pricey! Happy to recommend a good IP attorney who will charge less than that if anyone is looking, without requiring a retainer. :P As an entrepreneur, I don't want to spend that $450 either, but I especially do
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by jfarmer 13y ago
I have no idea what that phrase means. My point was that I don't think someone else needs to ask my permission to use the my name or my company's name first, but likewise I don't think they should be surprised (let alone indi
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by jfarmer 13y ago
I don't think "you can prevent someone from even using your trademark in any way." In this case, we're talking about a service piggy-backing on top of Tumblr using "tumblr" in the domain name. I was mostly try
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by jfarmer 13y ago
Yes, naturally! I'm glad you're following me.
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by jfarmer 13y ago
It's not my responsibility that they take it personally any more than it's my responsibility as the apartment owner, bar, or bouncer that the person being ejected from the line is taking it personally. As Tumblr, I have no relati
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by jfarmer 13y ago
Fair enough! I'd probably still do it, mostly as a CYA matter. There's little downside and it takes too much time / attention to discern between the cases. If my attorney told me it was a waste of time I probably wouldn&#x
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by jfarmer 13y ago
Nobody is abdicating their humanity and the only "dehumanizing" thing I see is the implication that some people are. Let's say you live above a popular bar. On Friday and Saturday nights it gets loud as folks line up to get
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by jfarmer 13y ago
You could be right. If you are, Tumblr will be the worse for it and you can feel vindicated. On the other hand, maybe that's a risk Tumblr is willing to take. Who's to say the cost in attorney dollars and company focus of having
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by jfarmer 13y ago
Although confusion can figure into a trademark action, it isn't the only thing that can. The rule of thumb is that if someone is using your name you should at least attempt to enforce it, lest someone later try to use that lack of enf
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by jfarmer 13y ago
It depends on what you mean by "says the word 'Tumblr' in it." I'd give my attorneys carte blanche to send a C&D to the owner of any service using "tumblr" in their domain name, if that's what y
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by jfarmer 13y ago
This is likely an expensive argument to make and one that Tumblr would be glad to spend legal dollars to fight. Tactically, it would make more sense to be as contrite as you possibly can, play the naïve engineer who loves Tumblr to death,
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by jfarmer 13y ago
Or maybe the recipient just freaked out because he didn't know how to dance to this tune and C&Ds seem like mighty and terrible things to someone who has never received one before? Sending a C&D is fast, cheap, and requires alm
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by jfarmer 13y ago
IANAL, only an entrepreneur, but this should surprise no one even passingly familiar with trademark law. Failure to enforce your trademark's registration can expose you to claims that your mark is no longer "in use." Sure,
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by jfarmer 13y ago
"Startups ruin you" can't be rewritten as "It ruin you," though, yeah? It could be rewritten as "They ruin you," however. "Startups" is plural. "A startup" or "that startup&quo
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by jfarmer 13y ago
Here's a more mathy way of understanding it. You know how Taylor series work in Calculus? You have some differentiable function and you are able to approximate the function arbitrarily well by adding up more and more polynomials. Tur
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by jfarmer 13y ago
Check out Timoni West's design, which takes these things into account: http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical-boarding-p... Note that she wrote this in January, 2010.
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by jfarmer 13y ago
Just some thoughts! Feel free to ignore. None of this is personal, just things I've spent time thinking about in the context of building social software. I could be entirely wrong or confused and unjustified in my opinions. We edit

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