skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I don't understand is why people aren't calling for massive restructuring of the financial system that leads to fucked up situations like this, i.e. collapsing bubbles caused by greedy investors looking to get something out of nothing. A CEO gives himself a multimillion dollar bonus and nobody flinches and chalks it up to the way the market works. If the cognitive dissonance doesn't make your head explode well then there isn't much point to making up sob stories like this.
I'd say it's not worthwhile to write about programming if people already have high expectations for you. Spolsky is definitely well-known and some people probably view him as somewhat full of himself, so they like to pick out anything that might hurt his image.

For the average joe schmoe programmer, people don't have such expectations, so there is far less negative reaction. Also, personality does play a huge role. Someone who doesn't seem too aloof and distant from other people will be better off (take _why for example).
"Next, a LocalNews 5 Special Report: Is Your Microwave Killing You?"

I miss all those special news bits, like how having high-tension lines near your house kills you, or how irradiated meat will make you glow in the dark, or how we are mere days from being overrun by BSE-infected zombie cows.
I'd love to hear some comments here on equivalent Django/Python solutions. I know of Webfaction and that's about it. I really want a Heroku for Django!
I did not say this. I just said some people don't deserve to eat.
It's a long way from 'allegedly' to trial or even a charge. How can 'allegedly using an illegal substance requires a trial' be even remotely correct? Hitting the bong in your mom's basement requires no trial. Neither does me telling your mom about it (allegedly). See also:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/02/16/michael.phelps/index.htm...

Note lack of trial or charges.
the guy who didn't introduce himself at beginning I believe was Jacob Kaplan-Moss of Django
On Finding Mentors Through Issuing Challenges
Although my evidence is only anecdotal, it seems like a lot of the programmers who are constantly argumentative and the biggest flamers are loners who in some cases have never even worked in a team environment.
Doesn't that just come with the territory? If you're successful with your opinions, people will argue with you.
You know, I don’t normally get into these types of debates, but the heartlessness of your comment really bothers for some reason. It reminds me of the fable of the ant and grasshopper (circulated by the teabaggers lately), which basically states that the grasshopper, because of poor planning, should be kicked to the curb to die in the cold rather than forcing the industrious ant to lend a hand. (You would love the altered version descibed here: http://www.grist.org/article/the8/)

And your comment further down that they should have set aside money for moving when they still had it is completely unhelpful. I once heard of a person who took his Pontiac to a mechanic because of a problem he was having with it. He asked the mechanic "What should I do?" to which the mechanic replied, "Don’t buy a Pontiac". Not really helpful.

So, your solution to Ms. Eisen’s problem is that they should simply move to a cheaper apartment? Well, turns out that due to a work injury, her husband is confined to the couch. So, not only would he not be able to help move, but they type of apartment they could get would be restricted by his accessibility requirements. And, their vehicle broke down, so they would have to rent a moving van or rely on friends. Moving does cost money and it may not be an option.

Oh right, they "should have thought of that when they had money". Well, setting aside how completely unhelpful that comment is, maybe she didn’t think she would be out of work for 2 years, and now the money they had set aside is gone, and they never thought they would get to the point where they would have to move? Maybe they live near by treatment centers for her husband and the only places with cheaper apartments are too far way? There is not enough information in the article to come to the conclusion that simply moving to a cheaper apartment will solve all of their problems so that you won’t have to "pay more taxes so she can live in an apartment that costs more than mine."

So, what would you do if you were standing in front of you? Tell her "Too bad so sad, you should have thought about all this when you had money", and then throw her aside in disgust, but not before handing her a couple of Ayn Rand’s books so she can learn how to pull herself up by her own bootstraps?

When society begins to suffer, we all ultimately suffer my friend, no matter whose fault it is.
A trial is required to execute someone (or imprison them, but I don't think anyone's talking about imprisoning anyone here) for allegedly consuming illegal substances (just like it is for anything else, including brandishing a weapon). The police officer is not executing the weapon-brandishing subject, he's defending himself and the public. Death is a likely consequence here, but it's not an execution. Likewise, the government wasn't executing people for drinking alcohol; they were making death a likely consequence of drinking alcohol, but they were not performing executions.
I wonder, too. Some of the NYT's most unique content is on its blogs, though, and they're the only NYT feeds I subscribe to.

My guess is that if Nisenholtz does this, a lot of the branded blogs on nytimes.com, including both Freakonomics and Paul Krugman, will simply leave and set (back) up on their own

I think that's a pretty good guess.
lol, even this is an attack on Joel!

"full of himself", "aloof and distant", "For the average joe schmoe programmer (implying only they can appreciate his work)"
Read the license

Improvement: Get a lawyer to read the licence.
YUNG MILLIONNAIRES - Sign In
In the UK there are an estimated 7 million illegal filesharers

Sure, but these people think that only "other people" get in trouble. Or, they are ashamed of their activities and try to overcompensate by being in favor of these laws.

People are weird.
Back when I was looking at trying to write a game in java(pre 05 or so). Java was horribly broken for games. Sound support was so so. On the graphics side Java 3d had been abandoned with vague promises of Opengl support. None of the third party Opengl bindings were mature. So I went back to C++.
Citigroup Warns Customers It May Refuse To Allow Withdrawals
However, there might be some truth to the idea that Google alumni seem to be more successful at subsequent startups than alumni of, say, Microsoft, Amazon, or Sun.
Die Antwoord Ups The Music Game To The Ninja Level
Its definitely murky at best if they are GPL'd. I would venture to say no. I would also to venture to say that it would be trivial for wordpress to push out a new version (with new wording on the license and a reworked template system) which could make any compatible plugins/themes GPL'd if they wish to move forward and have support for new versions of wordpress.
Fantastic stuff :)

I've loved dabbling in Clojure, but now between Penumbra, Enlive, Compojure, Clutch (CouchDB), Overtone (in development binding from Clojure to SuperCollider), Clojure has some of the coolest evolving libraries on the block from creative hacking to serious web development.
Let's just call it a grand experiment and see how it goes.
I've always considered the fact that this discussion is still going on says a lot about the openness of the gpl as a license. :(
The thing is, you really can't trust any of the tech publications. You can find an ethical reporter or two in the crowd, but the organizations tend to be corrupt.

I used to work at an ad agency, and one of my jobs was pitching stories to tech trade media about the companies I represented, as well as researching ad buys. I had sort of a mixed practice serving tech clients - I would do PR, ad research, brochures, websites, business plans, etc.

When I was pitching a story to an editor or reporter, there was never any discussion of ad buys or quid pro quo for placing ads, but on the other side of the shop - when talking to publishers and salesmen who sold ads, I can't even count the number of times I was either straight up offered a story in exchange for an ad buy, or given assurances like "I'll make sure the editors read your press releases." I'm at least happy to say that the agency I worked for didn't go for that type of thing, so I was free to politely ignore their offers, but I imagine that's not universal.

From these kind of conversations, I draw the conclusion that these organizations are rotten to the core, and they let the ad salesmen handle the dirty work. I never had this kind of offer from eWeek or InformationWeek and publications of that size, but the small ones were often dirty, and owned by the same conglomerates that own the big boys.

You should also be suspicious of expert articles written by industry professionals in trade publications. They might just be ghost-written by some 20-something at an ad agency.
This is probably a good reason for client-side, 1-way, password encryption. Even if the password is protected with SSL, encrypted passwords would make it even more difficult for unscrupulous system administrators to crack passwords on a large scale.
Absolutely, but I don't see why it couldn't still manage public keys for verifying signatures and encrypting outgoing mail.

Your private key could still be handled locally. Hell, even if they left signing and decryption (the parts you'd need your private key for) entirely up to the browser or plugins or a full-blown mail client, you could still verify signed mail that you'd received and send out encrypted mail from within Gmail's interface. That alone could go a long way towards encouraging cryptography beyond the security-conscious crowd. At the very least, it spreads awareness.

EDIT: Also, as far as my more unimportant emails are concerned, I'd rather have them bouncing around the internet encrypted by a compromised/throw-away key (i.e., one that Google has access to) than not encrypted at all. But in common use, yeah, the illusion of security would be worse than no security at all.
A Week with Google Chrome
HTML 6.8.3
I think another reason for this behavior is that programmers often define their identity in terms of their preferred tools (you're a "Perl programmer", not merely a "programmer"). That means that any perceived slight against a programmer's preferred tool must be aggressively defended -- hence the abundance of religious arguments about "$X is better than your favorite language."
Apple Is Dead
And entitlement-based economy rewards people based on their situation rather than their contribution. BTW -- Your logic is flawed -- 'should participate in some productive way' != 'deserves a job.'
The Internet? Bah
I actually find statements like this scary. There's just a lot to be said about knowing that installing the next version of a framework like this won't horribly break your code. But then again, maybe I'm expecting too much from a 0.4.0 release.
The GPL is pretty clear on this. I would consider WordPress themes as plugins to WordPress. And thus, we consult the GPL FAQ: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins

"If a program released under the GPL uses plug-ins, what are the requirements for the licenses of a plug-in?

It depends on how the program invokes its plug-ins. If the program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, then the plug-ins are separate programs, so the license for the main program makes no requirements for them.

If the program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. This means the plug-ins must be released under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license, and that the terms of the GPL must be followed when those plug-ins are distributed.

If the program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the ‘main’ function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case."
He has lost all of his credibility. When he kept crying about MySQL being sold to Oracle after he sold it to Sun it was not just annoying but it looked pathetic like he wanted to get his old company back now that it was going to what I gather he once considered a competitor.

Monty's ranting in general is starting to get annoying and I hope that in the near future he realises that nobody is listening to him and that maybe it is time to call it quits.
Hadoop 0.20 on Ubuntu Server 9.04 Jaunty
Someone who doesn't seem to aloof and distant from other people will be better off (take _why for example).

_why isn't the best example - he was awesome, but part of his appeal was that he was distant and not on the same plane as the rest of us.. just not in a negative way. Nonetheless, before he disappeared he tweeted:

programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more.

Even though he didn't attract much negativity due to his whimsical, impenetrable persona, it didn't seem to help him feel much better about his excellent work.
I have to agree with the writers estimation of the programming audience. I have noticed a very similar negative trend even among HN users, with comments on my programming themed blog tending to be generally positive with a few negative replies, while comments on HN on the same articles tend to be generally negative with a few positive replies.

We programmers probably tend to nitpick a bit more than your average audience, and that isn't always a bad thing. It can't be all that encouraging to the writers though.
I was trying to describe how people who attack him think of him. Also, by "average joe schmoe" I meant someone who, among other things, hasn't published an entire book.
No, they can't do this unless they have copyright assignment from all the authors. If I contributed code to Wordpress under the GPL, I would expect that that code be GPL'd forever. Wordpress can only change the license if they remove my code. (I haven't contributed to Wordpress, but other people theoretically have.)
A Holy Hole in Your Head?
Making nail manufacturing more efficient freed up labor to manufacture more complex and valuable things. Automating the entire manufacturing industry will require workers to shift to something that isn't manufacturing.

"Earlier generations of automation actually replaced fairly skilled labour with relatively unskilled labour ... There is good reason to assume we can go the other way too..."

The other way is vastly more difficult. If you replace unskilled jobs with skilled jobs, more people will need more education. What happens to the people who aren't capable of learning more complicated things?

Based on history, it's very likely that I'm wrong. Based on the facts of this specific case, it seems hard to justify the need for non-creative labor.
I am not sure I agree with this analysis. Stallman convinced someone to open-source his entire lisp compiler because the REPL used the GPL'd readline library, and Stallman seemed like he would have taken the issue to court. Wordpress themes depend on Wordpress more than a compiler depends on a line-editing library, so theme authors might want to assume that they only have the protections of the GPL on their side. Anything else may be accidental.
ErrorHelp Search And Collaboration
It depends on how you look at Wordpress. Are themes data that Wordpress processes, or are themes programs that use Wordpress as a library? In the first case, it is certain that the GPL does not apply. In the second case, it is certain that it does.

Personally, I see Wordpress as a library for implementing Wordpress themes, and it follows that Wordpress themes must be distributed under the terms of the GPL. (Wordpress could easily fix this problem by making themes data, not code. But they didn't implement it this way, which leads one to believe that the authors intended for the themes to be GPL'd.)

Also, it may not be clear at first glance, but the author of this article and several of the commenters are lawyers.

True, and their analysis of the law is very good (well, it sounds good to me, anyway). But their analysis of the software is not so good; I think they decided on my first scenario, even though the code does not support this.
I do not think this is true at all. I've been addicted to drugs before (cigarettes) and I certainly was not happy with that. And I've flirted with alcohol addiction too. Again, that was hardly a positive situation I was comfortable with continuing.

I've known others, too, addicted to stronger things. A friend of mine battled a speed addiction for a year. He could very much imagine getting by without it - in fact he quite desperately wanted to, he just couldn't. I would presume the same is true for many, if not most, addicts of heroin.

Anyway, my understanding is that modafinil is not a drug of physiological addiction. It's a tool that one uses to overcome certain physical limitations, if and only if that is required. Think of it as a headache pill, but for tiredness. Certainly that is how I and everyone else I know who uses it views it.
Placing blame is worthwhile when it can inform the future decisions of the audience. If you neutralize all mistakes, more people will make mistakes. Someone living in a relatively expensive apartment shouldn't have their housing costs subsidized. Subsidizing moving costs would be something I could get behind, and I'd rather do it through a nonprofit than through taxes.
> Stallman convinced someone to open-source his entire lisp compiler because the REPL used the GPL'd readline library, and Stallman seemed like he would have taken the issue to court.

Defeating a bogus lawsuit costs money, so this could have just been the cheaper route (or maybe the guy just wasn't familiar with the cases cited in the article here).
Have you ever been to Russia?

Walk the streets of Moscow at 7am, and you'll see businessmen on their way to work, halfway through their first bottle of vodka. It's hard to believe if you don't see it, but a significant fraction of the people there are drunk or drinking all the time.

So no, even though I haven't seen any hard numbers, I don't have any problem believing the grandparent's claim.
Hence why I said a new version of wordpress where previous versions of modifications and themes are non functional. Hence if you wish for your product to be ported to a new version you would need to agree to the new terms.
ESPN Holographic interview technology
Oh no! If only there were other blogs on the internet.

I suppose I'll just have to get a subscription then.
Clicking stuff and pressing keys is their job, while sleeping is not. It makes perfect sense.

(I work in a pretty enlightened workplace, and I'm sure I could take a nap if I wanted. The problem is, cubicles aren't very comfy. I just wait until I get home instead.)
While I'm happy that the library is being broken down into smaller pieces, I am left wondering what is left in Compojure itself. Http is handled by ring, html is its own lib, routing is its own lib. Can someone clarify what the library provides now?
I think it turned out that the clisp author just liked the idea of the GPL, but hadn't fully understood it before Stallman confronted him.
Your point is logically sound, but you're judging the (possible) consequences to the few as of inherently higher importance than the benefit to the many. You could say very much the same thing about alcohol - some people just can't handle it and should probably not be allowed to drink it, but you can't deny it to everyone else just because of that. Or we don't, anyway, with alcohol, for historical reasons.
We are all familiar with software licenses that place broad restrictions on what the customer can do (“you may not decompile, reverse-engineer, benchmark, or play FrisbeeⓇ with this Software...”), but if those restrictions have any legal effect at all, it is only because the license is in the form of a contract (“by clicking ‘I ACCEPT’ you agree to all the terms of this License...”) between the software vendor and the customer.

The GPL is, by design, a license rather than a contract, and therefore it cannot forbid any action that copyright law permits. If indeed a WordPress premium theme is not a “derivative work” within the meaning of copyright law, then the GPL cannot touch it, regardless of the GPL author’s intent.
As far as I'm concerned this is just another piece of opinion put online by a programmer. That's not a bad thing - putting things out there and talking about them is integral to the programming profession as a whole. Look at the body of writing work out there written by programmers that's considered 'classic' already. Never mind that most of the discussion is usually subjective, highly opinionated, often misinformed and abrasive, insulting or abusive.

Anything that is out there for the public to comment on is subjected to this. Just take that as a given, this is what you get when you make public comments. People not being nice on the internet is just a fact of life. That doesn't immediately devalue what you're saying. There are plenty of people out there who don't read or write commentary and read postings on their merit.

Not writing in public just because people might say nasty things about you or your writings seems wrong to me.

Also, VI rocks! Down with Emacs! Yeah! Screw your non-modal editors!
> The GPL is pretty clear on this. I would consider WordPress themes as plugins to WordPress. And thus, we consult the GPL FAQ

Which says things like "A consequence is that if you choose to use GPL'd Perl modules ... in your program, you must release the program in a GPL-compatible way", which we can see from the cases cited here (or just by reading the actual law) is clearly bogus. And there's no question of your binaries being derivative due to incorporating code derived from the module's header files (because Perl doesn't work that way).
If they haven't rewritten Wordpress to deal with the plethora of obvious technical problems, it seems unlikely that they would rewrite it for mildly-obscure legal reasons.
In the US, Texas is one of the places with the best employment prospects, and it also has a fairly low cost of living. We spend so much money subsidizing dying Rust Belt cities and expensive housing in coastal cities, when there are plenty of people who should really move to places where they can get better jobs and pay lower costs.

Moving is a socially expensive act, but we shouldn't subsidize staying in place much more than we subsidize moving to a more economically reasonable area.
I nap for about 20 minutes at about an hour after lunch(usually 1 to 1:30 PM). If I had a 6 hour sleep cycle, I nap for about 40 minutes. I definitely can think and program better after the nap. I nap in my car. I drive out to a Publix lot and do it. I have tinted windows, so people seem not to realize I am napping in it. My real trouble is waking up early. In my office, my CEO shows up at 6 AM and everyone else shows up an hour after that. So I have trouble getting up at 7:30 but I am working on it.
...or maybe this happened before the Galoob case that the OP mentioned, and therefore the compiler author’s lawyers had good reason to fear that a court would side with Stallman.
Definitely a scary graph. But surely it's more likely that it is a graph of a bad recession happening than a sign that a trend that has run for hundreds if not thousands of years has stopped at this exact point in history.

What was the number like in 1933?
Maybe for your own site, yeah. But for sites that you've built and handed off? Are you going to update them for free? Are the clients going to pay you (again) to rework the interface (non-trivial) for a small minority of users?