skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been spending a lot of time today wondering why Matt cares so much about what license Chris uses - it seems like no real harm is being done to either party here, but both parties are digging in their heels so strongly I find it hard to believe it's purely a philosophical difference.

I just had a thought, and I'd like to sanity check it. I don't know Matt or Chris, but I use both Wordpress and Thesis every day, so consider this 100% speculation based on my experience:

1. I use Thesis to manage almost all of my Wordpress sites because it makes my work significantly easier - Thesis extends WP in many useful ways that aren't built into WP core. I'm capable of doing it all myself in the code, but it's much easier to handle it in Thesis, which I think is a major reason why it's so popular.

2. If Thesis adopted the GPL, that means the code is open to be distributed and reapplied by anyone for free. That means Thesis features could legally be added to WP Core without paying Chris royalties. In Matt's eyes, that would be great - it would make WP better by incorporating many new features that users have demonstrated they like/want/need. (I'm pretty sure some former WP plugins have been added to core over time in this way.)

3. If Thesis' features are incorporated into WP Core, Chris' very profitable business evaporates almost immediately - the value is in the added functionality, not the stylesheet, so there'd be no reason for anyone to purchase Thesis. That means if Thesis is forced to adopt the GPL, Pearson stands to lose big time.

4. If Thesis' commercial license is legal (which the post at http://perpetualbeta.com/release/2009/12/why-the-gplderivati... makes a strong case for, depending on the definition of "derivative work" when it comes to software), any IP from Thesis incorporated into WP Core without permission or royalties would violate Chris' rights and potentially generate a valid IP infringement lawsuit.

5. Based on the tone of the conversation so far, I don't think Chris would ever give Matt (or anyone else) permission to use IP from Thesis in WP Core without a massive royalty payment.

6. If Matt wants to have the freedom to incorporate Thesis features into WP Core, but doesn't want to pay Chris royalties, he'd have a vested interest in publicly pressuring Chris into adopting the GPL, which is what Matt appears to be doing. Chris finds that offensive, so he's telling Matt to fuck off and sue him if he really wants to push the issue. To Chris, a lawsuit (which will be easier to defend because his business partner, Brian Clark, is an attorney) is a small price to pay to prevent losing millions in revenue, and he believes Matt will lose in the end.

Again, total speculation, but this is the only reason I can think of right now they'd go after each other so strongly. Thoughts?
D'oh! I was thinking that when I clicked "reply" but then I went into autopilot and typed 14 instead.
Posted a few months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1291580
Er, I think you missed the sarcasm? Someone needs to invent a font that stands for sarcasm.
(Hacker) Hacker News
I think the problem with this sort of scheme is field testing. Short of getting hold of a traffic camera (which sounds difficult), a meaningful test invokes breaking the law with all the attendant problems.

edit: traffic camera, not speed camera.
Almost - the GPL wouldn't apply to the CSS, JS or HTML of his themes, nor would the GPL nullify trademark and copyright. Still doesn't mean that his claim would hold up in court but it probably wouldn't be completely hopeless either.
The Difference Between A Job/Career/Calling
IPhone 4 in Argentina with in the last quarterly Movistar
Yup. 60-odd folks there, though the majority of the engineering crew are still in Sydney.
Strategic Life Goals
I can understand the use of surveys when it's not realistic to actually measure this stuff, but in the 2-3 decades since this survey was done we now have technology like this:

http://www.polarusa.com/us-en/b2b_products/club_solutions/po...

There's no reason why this study shouldn't be updated with real data.
Link to mentioned TED video: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/727

Summary: To find the path to long life and health, Dan Buettner and team study the world's "Blue Zones," communities whose elders live with vim and vigor to record-setting age. At TEDxTC, he shares the 9 common diet and lifestyle habits that keep them spry past age 100.
This seems like a perfectly reasonable question that might stimulate interesting "meta" discussion about marketing.
I am not sure about the US, but in australia if you work as a labourer ie (builder, painter, electrician, etc) your salary is on average equal to or above (six figures) office jobs. It is just due to the current labour shortage.
Given that the title of the post is:

>Rails needs an approval process for Gems

I have a solution: set up a gem repo that does just that, and see if people like it. Gems are distributed by nature, anyone can host a repository.

Though I'd say the utter lack of such a repository's existence (as far as I'm aware) is a sign there's little demand for one.
Work at Home, Online Ad Posting job.
I have an iPhone 4, and I've had a bumper on it since I bought it. I also put an invisishield on the front and back (basically, my whole phone is protected). I have not had any reception issues, and my phone has worked perfectly. Surely there are others out there in similar situations. I wonder why the negativity clouds the internet sometimes.
I have been looking at the HR problem too and FamousActress has a valid point. The chicken and egg problem here is HUGE... and anything that can be a "downer" or "demotivational" will not make it.
Could you give us some examples of condescending remarks that have been made but which weren't intended to offend?
Just signed up and indexed a few pages. After seeing you're caching pages I started thinking about privacy/security issues. Your privacy policy isn't very reassuring. (DuckDuckGo does a great job at this: http://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html)

Having the client perform the task of indexing is great, but it also means I can index pages that only I am supposed to see. Which raises the question: are you going to do anything with the index and cached pages I've built up? If I index an interior facebook page, for example, will you ever expose the cached content to other users of historious?
Oh please. How good or bad Vista was is beside the point; the comparison is between how Vista and the iPhone 4 are perceived.
I'd maybe use it if it were free, but I'd most likely just stick to a conventional free task manager and create a "full-day tasks" list - especially since I already use Remember the Milk a bit, it wouldn't make sense to switch just for one feature.
I agree this isn't going to change anyone's life but I also suspect Apple would have continued to ignore the issues if this hadn't been 'blown way out of proportion'. They have already demonstrated twice the direct desire to play this down and make it go away. While the response has been disproportionate to the severity of the issue, I feel it also is the only reason Apple is being forced to address it fully now. They really really really don't ever like to admit they made a mistake. Perhaps this is what was required to make them 'man up' and perhaps eat a little corporate humble pie.
How will thus affect the Patent Cooperation Treaty?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_Cooperation_Treaty
Invention patents cover, among other things, importation, manufacture, and use of the patented invention. So without US patent licenses, their US customers could be liable for infringement.
FWIW, this is somewhat wordy:

my %holidays = (
'mlk day' => undef,
...
);

exists $holidays{$query}

It's better to use a set:

my $holidays = Set::Object->new('mlk day', ...);
$holidays->exists($query);

This generalizes to arbitrary objects, and is faster.

Also, I'm totally declaring a new holiday: "milk day".
FTA:

"The PHP elements, taken together, are clearly derivative of WordPress code.... They are derivative of WordPress because every part of them is determined by the content of the WordPress functions they call. As works of authorship, they are designed only to be combined with WordPress into a larger work."
Both are important, but doing the right thing is a prerequisite for doing that particular thing right.

If A, B, and C are the keys to success, I may be able to succeed by doing a mediocre job on A, B, and C, but there's no way I can succeed by not doing A, B, and C, even if I do an excellent job on D, E, and F.
What you're describing with the 'fork' button is incorrect. When you fix something on your own branch, nobody on earth but yourself benefits from it. For this to work, you have to contribute your work back and (the hard part), the original owners have to accept it. And that's where open source usually breaks down.

Another point of the original post is that monkey patching is the kiss of death of many Ruby and Ruby on Rails projects.
I'm assuming NZ didn't sign a free trade agreement with the US like Australia (the US-Australia free trade agreement ensures US copyright law applies to and overrides Australian copyright law).
It's common knowledge that Apple's rubber bumpers are a workaround for the antenna problem. But you shouldn't have to buy a $30 case for your $200 phone just for the privilege of making calls reliably.
Some choice quotes from Chris Pearson in this interview:

"This can't be understated or just glossed over as if it's not true. My position at the market is pretty much at the top. I'm the most visible person in this space so everyone's gunning for me. Everyone wants a piece."

"There's no resolving this. Either you sue me or you don't. Or you continue to talk, or you don't."

"I've been arguably one of the top 3 most important figures in the history wordpress."

Regarding GPL enforcement:
"When I was in college in Georgia it was apparently illegal to get a blow job. But that's one of those laws that's never enforced. So that brings up a valid question. What kind of law is it if it's unenforceable?"

"At this time I feel like my method of operation is exactly congruent with my feelings about everything."

"I don't have time for rhetoric, I have time for action."

"There's no incentive that incentivises me to do anything. All of my decisions come from within."

Also, he calls the GPL a flimsy and unenforceable license. I agree with everyone calling Matt gracious and patient. My respect for Matt shot up after listening to this.
Read your list, did not see anything that could not be added by a SP into Vista. I see Windows 7 and Vista as no different to XP and 2000, and Windows ME and 98.

Yes, there are new things in each OS, but they are not different enough to warrant being called a new OS.
IDEA does that rather nicely. Its maven support can reduce your box to a paperweight when it reindexes, but other than that, it's a very nice product indeed.

If you're not working on a complex codebase, it is total overkill though.
I really wish I could just pipe finale files to it and have lilypond make it not suck.
We haven't signed one yet, AFAIK.

There's been lots of rumbling about it when one of our honchos visits USA's honchos, but the application of the US Intellectual Property laws is one of the big problems I have with it.
"Usually"?

I can't think of any change I've ever made to an open source project that hasn't been accepted. This ranges from random Perl modules to Emacs and the Linux kernel. Contributing is as easy as sending an email!
You are a coder, aren't you?

Let me restate it more precisely: The fact that my needs are not being met is their fault. The fact that I have those needs is mine.

My use case, and those of many others, requires the ability to 'follow' others and still filter their 'useful' postings from their 'non-useful' postings. This is 'my fault', in that I require more from the service than they are either willing or able to provide at this time.

Twitter has reduced my ability to use the service, in the way that I would most like to, by limiting their API and preventing screen scrapers from functioning in a legal and non-harmful way. None of this is any way my fault.

I still think my original phrasing was more concise, if not as explicit.
Have you ever thought about building your own tools (as in hardware)? http://www.backyardmetalcasting.com/lathe1.html looks pretty fun.
You need an IDE in Ruby just as much as in Java. It's the easiest way to browse the code, navigate from place to place, get some auto completion and auto imports, etc...

Of course, Ruby being dynamically typed makes it impossible to have most of the refactorings that statically typed languages take for granted, but that's a separate topic.

Look at it this way: you might think you are productive with Emacs/TextMate/vi, but you would be even more productive with an IDE of the Eclipse or IDEA caliber.

An IDE is nevery mandatory, it just makes you more productive.
The most serious of heart attacks
Was there a contract?

The murky legal problem with the GPL and other free software licenses is that there isn't any consideration (no exchange of money), or proof of offer and acceptance.

It's a lot easier to prove with paid software and the clicking of a checkbox.

IANAL, but it would be interesting to know if there's any legal precedents for the enforceability of free/gpl/open source licenses.
I have a story about this.

One time, I went to the store and bought a bike wheel. But it didn't come with a little strip to protect the tube from the spoke nipples. So, I threw it away and built my own wheel. Actually, I first built metal-refining plant, and then I built my own wheel.

Oh wait, I died before I built the wheel, but at least i didn't incur any 'technical debt'. If I had to buy a separate piece of rim tape, my wheel just wouldn't have been right! It may have given me years of enjoyment, but who cares? Those other wheel makers did it wrong!

(Oh, and last time I checked, 'technical debt' didn't mean, "I didn't get to write a research paper about the internal string representation." But that was a long time ago...)
My totally technically illiterate wife will return her iPhone tomorrow. I canceled my order. We will wait for the next iteration.

Interestingly we have owned Toyotas forever but for the next car purchase we will look at other manufacturers as well rather than default to a Toyota. For phones, the same is true. The replacement for my 3GS may or may not come from Apple. Before, it was a given that I would stay with Apple.
If only it worked. The test suite is giving me a crapload of errors on *.couchone.com. I spent a couple hours getting it installed on my laptop (docs have incorrect dependencies among other things) and the first test just hangs. CouchDB 0.9?
Does Java not allow public fields?

The biggest difference there is that Ruby programmers frequently don't think twice about exposing their object's state to anyone and everyone.

It should be one line of code for each attribute in Java "public SomeClass foo;" if we're going for the same semantics as the Ruby example(admittedly, if you don't want to expose that it's a field, that's not quite as easy in Java, although really, there's no reason to not just do this:

private SomeClass foo_; // I don't know if Java allows methods with the same name as fields.
public SomeClass foo () { return foo; }
public SomeClass foo (SomeClass aFoo) { foo = aFoo; }

Yes, that's not what most Java programmers would write, and it's not too concise either, but it's not nearly as bad as you suggest.
The chicken came before the egg, maybe
It wouldn't surprise me in the least to see Steve Jobs somehow turn this genuine blunder to his advantage, for little cost to Apple, but even greater devotion from his fans. His handling of it so far has been pretty lame, but considering it's not really that big of a problem (there are simple solutions), he should be able to fairly easily knock another one out of the park and come out on top yet again.
This would be just like shaving blades which were mentioned on here the other day, they tend to compete on supposed advanced function when it just becomes a stupid game of adding one extra feature all the time when we just want something that works for shaving.

I've seen ads here recently for deodorants that change smell over time, I guess that's one of that gimmiky "features".

Also these items are in the price range where I don't really want to waste my time thinking much about pros/cons so this advertising becomes more effective. As opposed to an item like a computer where I would analyse the specs of most of the components making advertising less useful.
I've been thinking about trying this too. I'm about to move, so maybe in the new place... Do you have a home office where you could do a test? If you watch any TV shows maybe start standing through some of them.

Your shoes could be a big factor. Heel elevation de-stablizes posture, so you may want to try barefoot/Vibram FiveFingers or something.
Every New Zealand Prime Minister wants to be the one to score an FTA deal with the Americans. Helen Clark worked hard for the chance. John Key will no doubt work just as hard.

I think it's unlikely to happen any time soon. Barack Obama needs to get re-elected. To do that he needs the Iowa caucuses. He's not going to help out New Zealand farmers at the cost of the support of American farmers.
Why engineers don't like Twitter
Much better :) After flipping to a couple other blogs, I realized yours is pretty much at the "standard" right now. Which could very well account for part of the reason why I like it better - you're used to what you're used to.

If you like it wider, a little poking around suggests to me that another couple pixels doesn't seem to make reading any harder, and then it still stands out a bit compared to other blogs. (what was it at before? I didn't check the # until just now)

Something I noticed later: I'd also recommend shrinking the Disqus container a bit, as the text there is rather noticeably larger than your posts' text (especially since their h3 is the first thing you see after your content).
Sunglade condo
Sunglade is a medium-sized development with a resort-themed facilities, with the swimming pool area looking like a real beach.
modularity needs battle-testing

Don't worry, the Perl and Python web frameworks have been doing this for years, and it works great.
"Of course, Ruby being dynamically typed makes it impossible to have most of the refactorings that statically typed languages take for granted, but that's a separate topic."

Most of the refactoring tools that Java IDEs have originated in Smalltalk, an extremely dynamic language.
Beautiful condo near serangoon mrt station, great.
It's too bad posterous is blocked by the Chinese firewall.
That was my first thought too. I also question his confidence that he only needs 3 more months to launch it, given that it's been in the works for ten years (or more likely it seems, on and off for ten years).

It also seems like he's trying to build a cathedral when the blueprint specifies a bazaar. He's already got the source code on GitHub, why not instead focus on using social media and whatnot to enlist another hacker or two, get it to Beta, launch it, see if it gets traction, and then seek funding.
i just did it.
I respect how the author has articulated the problem, but the solution I was hoping he would articulate equally as well never came, other than a few simple platitudes in the last paragraph.

Reminds me of the Jack Nicholson line in the movie "As Good as it Gets" - "I'm drowning here, and you're describing the water!"

If you are interested in solving the problem described, check out Steve Blank's entry on "Mission, Intent and Values":

http://steveblank.com/2009/04/09/supermac-war-story-6-the-jo...
I had a similar experience after applying for a job through HN, with the difference being I was never told we can't proceed... or anything, for that matter.
Pair-programming teams often standardize on an IDE, so that when you hand the keyboard to your pair, they don't have to exit your IDE and start up theirs in order to type the next few lines of code. Standardizing on Notepad is a bad idea, because there's no way to enhance it to meet your team needs better.
On second thought, let's add the glue back to the piece of plastic. ;)
Well, it definitely helps to be passionate about something that other people are impressed by, but unless you're into incredibly obscure areas of academia or work in a bubble, there's probably somebody out there that will be impressed by a job done well.

What are you passionate about?
"Well, if you're asking about the ability of a language to prevent the ability of a corporate army of 1000 developers to blow it's collective foot off, then no, Ruby and almost every other language will forever pale in comparison to Java."

This is the common wisdom about java, but I don't think it's true. I have a far harder time dealing with other peoples java code than I do dealing with other people's ruby code. And yes, I work in a corporate army that happens to do both java and ruby.

Libraries change over time. In java, if you realize your interface needs to change then you're fucked if someone else is using your code.

If you're using someone else's code and it doesn't do exactly what you need it to do then in java you have to get their code, change it, compile your own custom version, and in many java shops upload it to your companies maven repo with some version like foo-lib.jshens-fork-1.0.1. In ruby you'd just monkey patch it. This has it's risks, but those risks are under your control, you don't have to ask someone else for a favor to update their lib. (using other people's monkey patching is a different animal)

Spring, need I say more? In our corporate army there are 1000's of developers with 1000 page tomes telling them how to glue their libraries together in java. Think about that for a minute. Some of the "problems" that java doesn't have are really still there. They're just pushed into things like maven, ant, and spring.

At the end of the day, bad java code makes my life much harder than bad ruby code.

On a side note, what's up with the recent spate of people complaining about rails because they used some shitty library that isn't a part of rails? Here's a hint, you should do some due diligence before using some random library.
It say's in the article that one of the things about "The Game' is that it's generally more honest, PUA don't get girls into bed by dangling a relationship in front of them, actually thats one of the main points, the PUA never offers any relationship.

That essentially these women already want to sleep with these guys, and the guys are merely removing the mental barriers to this desired action(desired by both parties).
Don't know yet - there's still about 7 months to go so it's not a big rush. You'd know more than me - but judging from the direction of the Summit announcements I'm guessing it'll be a Dev Tools team.
There's an easy solution to this, use bundler. Make your dependency a specific version of whatever gem you're using. Then, you don't have to worry about it changing until you want to upgrade it.
The follow up of sorts Chandler seems to be quiet obscure for a similar reason. Sounded pretty good when reading the book about it Dreaming In Code, but I don't know anyone who actively uses it.
Actually I havn't tried, I'm busy with work that does not in any way require Reia so I don't have time.

There's plenty of things I'd love to do with it when I've got time though.
I have to disagree, after watching these videos, I know about old spice (Brand awarness), and if I have to choose from 10 deos in a shop, guess wich one I'll pick in the first place! I guess I'm not alone.
Apple will wait until Verizon goes LTE. The lost market is not a large enough incentive to make a phone that will only work on a few carriers. My guess is June 2011 or maybe June 2012.