skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is exactly it. I think XP is the first desktop OS that was truly "good enough" for typical, everyday business use.

Sure, Windows 7 is clearly a better OS... but is that going to make Company X produce widgets any faster? Probably not enough to justify the cost of licensing and upgrading to a new OS (and that's assuming that there are no compatibility issues with e.g. that old timecard app the intern wrote in 2001)
From what I've seen of the portion of the GPL in question, the definition of "derivative work" is subject to interpretation, in my mind. Something for the lawyers to figure out.

My 2 cents: Myself, I'm not convinced that a theme is a derivative work. Isn't the API documentation public? Is it not -theoretically- (although impractical) possible to create a theme for Wordpress without having Wordpress itself? (Having said that, it would also be possible to write a non-GPL blogging engine that uses the same API without seeing the Wordpress code) Also, since the theme isn't distributed with Wordpress, I personally think it's harder to argue that it's a derivative piece of work, since none of the original Wordpress code is altered.

A better source of information from a legal perspective is the guy at perpetualbeta.com, who delved into this a few months ago with a couple of posts:

http://perpetualbeta.com/release/2009/11/why-the-gpl-does-no...
http://perpetualbeta.com/release/2009/12/why-the-gplderivati...

From what I understand, he -is- a lawyer, and he has done intellectual property work, so his opinion, at least on the surface, would seem to have some weight. His position that "fair use" moots the GPL argument is quite interesting.
Even if Google cloned Facebook line-for-line I'm not sure how would it gain any traction. I have such an incredible amount of metadata locked inside Facebook that it's going to take a LOT to get me to change to anything new. And why -- just so Sergey can own my data instead of Zuck?
Is probably going to subside after the press conference on Friday.
Seems unlikely those teensy infrared LEDs are going to light up my license plate. At least here in DC, there's a giant flashbulb type thing that goes off.
At one point the Volt was expected to use lithium ion phosphate batteries from A123 Systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A123Systems), but at some point they were dropped in favor of a lithium ion polymer battery system from LG Chem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Chem). I'm under the impression that commercially available lithium ion phosphate batteries are already good enough that they can reasonably be expected to last for 8 years / 100k miles.

The most notable tradeoff between the two battery chemistries is that lithium ion phosphate batteries tend to last longer (maybe much longer), but lithium ion polymer batteries have about twice the energy density when they're new. If Tesla were using lithium ion phosphate batteries, they'd only be looking at a 120 mile range on the Roadster instead of 240. Since the Volt is a plug-in hybrid with only a 40 mile range on battery alone, it seems like lithium ion phosphate, with its longer life time, would be the ideal choice.

This raises the question of why, exactly, GM switched to lithium ion polymer. I don't know, nor have I seen any informed opinion about that. My guess, and this is total speculation on my part, is that a) they didn't think A123 Systems had the capacity to support the Volt, and b) LG Chem made them a deal they couldn't refuse.

I suspect (and again, I'm just speculating) that GM may be expecting to have to replace batteries of the first generation of Volts under warranty. I also suspect that LG Chem will be assuming some of the cost, and that both parties believe replacement batteries will be substantially cheaper in a couple of years when they're needed. Finally, I think that GM expects to lose money for several years on Volt anyway. This is not necessarily bad business -- it will be years before Volt and other GM electric vehicles will make a major percentage of their sales. I'm pretty sure Toyota lost money for years on Prius, and few people think that was a mistake anymore.
Ask HN: Review my project - DealBabyDeal
This is a mix between the Twitter API and the (closed beta) API for cash back site BigCrumbs.com.

Tweet @dealbabydeal on Twitter and the "Deal Baby" will send back matching deals on what you're looking for. Follow dealbabydeal and you can get a feed of the latest deals (updated hourly). What I think is most interesting is that one can see what other people are looking for. It's kind of like Blippy, only before people buy.

http://twitter.com/dealbabydeal

And yes, I got the idea for this from Scoopler's @wtf.
Hey CouchDB, do you have a page of people using you in production?
You wouldn't do it for all geographic areas, just targeted ones that have sufficient demand to make it worthwhile.
Obnoxious or not, I think the point of contention is whether a theme can considered a derivative work or not. I think you can easily find lawyers who would have no trouble arguing either side of the case.
It's written in Scheme. Awesome.
Yup. See Also: Drupal.
One thing people always seem to forget: startups are almost never profitable. Meaning, they don't pay dividends, and they expense everything else, so (with a decent accountant) the corporate tax thing is more or less irrelevant.

Much more germane to startup costs are the salaries (which are strongly influenced by personal & real estate tax rates), benefits (health can be 2X or more in expensive areas), and space.
No, not based on one anecdote from the book. I'm using that anecdote to summarize the entire movement based on reading the entire book. I thought that there were several cases where a lot of time was spent without much payoff.
This is very cool, I just tried it and it works as advertised.

But what is going on with the DropBox API? They have changed it around to require pre-approval:
"At this time, only mobile apps that run natively on the device are being approved"
https://www.dropbox.com/developers/announcements/6

The documentation on how to do the OAuth authorization is missing -- just the mobile method is up.

And this kind of documentation does not exactly inspire confidence:
"Remember, if you ever feel you need to store their password, then you are doing it wrong. Very wrong. Storing passwords is evil, and makes us hate you"

Why not explain that if a user changes passwords your app will stop working. Why not respond with a .png of a CAPTCHA when authenticating with a password?
At my work, I noticed a very similar issue to your point (a) when our iPhone app started to show a decent number of bugs when iOS4 dropped. 3rd party libraries may or may not be future proof and their support may or may not be available in the future.
S3 is like a giant RAID device to me, similar caveats apply from the "RAID is not a proper backup" arguments. There is not protection against deletions (malicious or accidental), writing over a file with a corrupted file, etc.

Further, there is not protection against your account becoming errant in Amazon's eyes resulting in you getting locked out. And d2viant's point remains, Amazon could mess up or be subject to something out of their control.

I'm not trying to diminish the excellent service and good track record they have, I use it myself as a piece of my total backup solution. But just a piece.
So find me a lawyer (more than just a blog post) who have successfully contented against such a case.

Did you watch the whole interview? His views has nothing to do with laws, nothing to do with grey areas within the license (from my understanding GPL is very explicit about this); he basically said "I don't wanna do this because, I don't wanna do this."

How can you rationalize with that?
I'd be curious why they think consulting the Mercurial source code would make the compatible implementation have to be GPL.

Of course, rather than just go ahead and look and then write a compatible implementation from that knowledge, if I needed such a thing in a proprietary product, I'd pay a third party to read the Mercurial source and publish a specification of the file format, protocols, and rules for manipulating the repository (e.g., rules for locking things, and such). Then I'd implement from that specification.

That should avoid any confrontation.

There seem to be quite a few open source or free software projects where the developers think the license has more power than it really does. The reality is that all open source or free software licenses, even the more restrictive ones like GPL, will in fact let people do some things with one's software that one might not like. That's because these licenses are all based on relaxing the exclusive rights of the copyright holder. Unlike the typical proprietary software license, they aren't a mix of relaxing rights of the copyright holder and restricting rights of the user.

Hence, if someone, including proprietary software companies, wishes to do something with with the code or the knowledge embedded therein, and what they want to do is something that doesn't require permission under copyright law, then they are free to do it.

Personally, this is one of the reasons I have used the two clause BSD license for my recent works. People are going to find ways to legitimately do things I might not like. Instead of going with a restrictive free license like GPL and fantasizing that nothing bad can be done with my code and then being disappointed and pissed off when they do, better to just realize the price of giving users freedom is that they might do things I don't like, and not worry about it. Hence, BSD--the release and forget about it license.

What I find kind of funny (hilarious, actually) is that the kind of protection that some developers wish to achieve IS actually available--via patents! The Mercurial developers can get what they want out of GPL by patenting their repository format and their protocols, and then making a free patent license available to implementations that use GPL.
Tools for Distributed Developer Teams
There's a KraftMaid factory near where I grew up, and it is the job that people work when they can't find work doing anything else. The work conditions are pretty crappy (for modern America, at least). It's very repetitive, mind-numbing, no-way-it-can-be-good-for-you-longterm work. And the pay only starts out at like $13/hr. This is in northeast Ohio.
I always wondered if you could put a circuit near your license plate that detects a flash and sets off its own flash to over-expose the image.

It might help at night at least. What do you folks think?
Meh, I was writing out scores for a band; when I started using Finale the musicians thanked me profusely for making it readable.

Unless you can afford your own personal copyist, it's sort of irrelevant. The little formatting nits you learn to work around (or just talk the musicians through it with pencils, which you end up doing anyway for musical reasons)
Yes but. I personally think it sucks that you would force a "theme" maker to use a specific license. However, if Wordpress says they have to be GPL and you know they have to be GPL, then just release it as GPL because that is the right thing to do.
But wait. The theme documentation is public, and as far as I know, you don't have to agree to any license to read it.

IN THEORY, you could write a simple theme without even having Wordpress (albeit totally impractical). So if some mad scientist PHP programmer wrote a theme based totally on the documentation freely available on the website without ever installing Wordpress or looking at the Wordpress source, would that theme be subject to the GPL?
Man and superman
Ask HN:  Anyone use a stand up desk?
I’ve been struggling with weight loss for years. I find that every time I try and start a regime I get really hardcore for 2 weeks or a month and then fall off the wagon. I either get sick or busy working crunch and don’t have the discipline to stay at it.

I’ve been tinkering with the idea of using a stand up desk at work but was wondering if the muscle pain and altered workspace would be too much.

Any advice?
Why would they not submit bug fixes instead of monkey patching everything? If the library is supposed to work a certain way, then it is a bug and should be fixed. Bug fixes that make their way back to the main repository have a much lower maintenance cost than monkey patches.

Every time you want to write a monkey patch, you should really ask yourself if it is worth the likely future maintenance costs.
My ex is working on this degree right now, and it requires 4+ years of schooling along with a 3-month unpaid internship (she's actually paying tuition!).
I think so. That tech exists in the photo world.

Alternatively, you could cover your plate with a hyper reflective coating which would likewise overexpose the plate.
He seems to not understand the difference between lgpl and the gpl.
Meetup went great! We didn’t see you there, though.
Puma Future Cat,Puma Cat Low,Sale Puma Shoes
Werner Vogels says S3 is designed "for 99.999999999% durability." That is eleven nines.

(From http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2010/05/amazon_s3_reduce... )

EBS volumes have a theoretical "annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1% – 0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume."

(From http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/ )

Considering how many EBS volumes there are, that is not that low of a percentage for us to see many cases. It happens and the case at that link is not the only one.

But that person didn't take the advice, he did not snapshot his EBS volumes to S3. It says it right there in the description (as well as in the user's guide): "The durability of your volume depends both on the size of your volume and the percentage of the data that has changed since your last snapshot."
Look at the two links provided in one of my other comments pointing to perpetualbeta.com. That guy is an IP lawyer who provided some opinion that is not on the side of Wordpress.

EDIT: Not many licenses have been challenged in court, including the GPL. Do you have any cases to cite in favor of GPL?
Links of London Handbag Charm - pound 14.44 - LinksUKStore
Haven't watched that movie in awhile!
Drupal is orders of magnitude worse owing to the fact that the design philosophy is to create a powerful CMS that works out of the box with infinite customizability for hardcore developers.

The result of these assumptions is an architecture that has a certain elegance, but is impossibly complex, where writing good modules means having tons of domain knowledge of the framework itself which does not transfer to any other form of web development.

This approach makes a viable framework for a lot of low-budget projects (ie. clients with $5000 and a ridiculous laundry-list of general components), but compared to Rails, Django or other frameworks that focus on the basic building blocks that apply to the majority of web applications the results are horribly baroque.
Physical standards aren't that hard - look up CPAT, finish in under 10:40 and you have a shot. The biggest hindrance is that most larger (high-paying) departments are historically white and male and departments are looking to diversify. If you're a white guy, opportunities are proportionally harder and you may need to get your paramedic license to have a chance.

Great work if you can get it, though, most places work 8-10 days per month and you get to sleep on the job (unless a call comes in). IT people will definitely have a hard time with this work, though, the field does not attract a lot of intellectuals.
Lotus Agenda: the app that failed because it gave users too much choice
Maybe there needs to be "Rails gems app store" where we only allow gems that have gone through an approval process :).

(j/k :) )
Thesis is more than just a gobbled up css theme, its a framework within wordpress. It won't work (the same way) without wordpress.
I am MPiccinato on there.
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=...
The UI surrounding OpenID has gotten better in the last year. In the vast majority of cases it's not you pasting some URL, you just pick the provider you are already using to login with and go.

Jeff has posted some stats (kinda dated now) about the utter dominance of people using their existing Google ID to log in with:

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/31021/what-openid-pr...
I agree… Apple’s definitely structured to produce long-incubation, high-end products. While iPod and iPhone were smash hits, large scale production probably isn’t the best mesh with better build quality.
Hahaha Chris is ridiculous. My favourite part is when he goes off on the massive tangent about his love of "systems" and just wants a "natural" flow. What is he even saying?

He wants to make money and is scared to GPL. Fair enough.

However, Matt and WordPress can sue him and they should. Stop these goofy debates and making Chris squirm awkwardly. Though it is kind of funny...
I'm interested in the statistics of sports, especially quantifying and pricing performance. I'll probably make it to the meetup.
If ever there was a game that could really benefit from a strong and vibrant question and answer community it would be DF.
I had to look up which all-star game you meant.

Baseball's All-Star Game Yields Its Lowest Television Ratings
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07...
Thank you. I investigated padrino because of your comment.

For those of us who prefer to avoid thick APIs yet appreciate sinatra's dsl, padrino looks very promising.
I don't have much choice for the project I'm on at the moment, we've standardised on Eclipse, but I'll give it a look in the future. Thanks.
I would highly recommend listening to the Stack Overflow podcasts, they cover in great detail the design decisions behind the site and how it all came together.
I agree, had a great time. However, no one showed up with a black Purdue hat... ;)
From your search link, I don't see any results of cases where the infringement wasn't based primarily on redistribution of the original work.

I don't think that Thesis is distributed with a copy of Wordpress. I definitely think it's a sketchier argument to make with a theme. Settlement of a case doesn't always mean that the defendant is going to lose either. It can also mean that the cost and distraction of a protracted suit makes it easier to swallow the cost of the settlement.
Never said it was going to be easy. My question, in fact, was whether I should have it take longer by doing it myself, or open it up to the community to get it done faster.
Ok, so maybe it came off a little harsh and I apologize for that. I'll try to address your points a little better:

I think you're focusing too much on the negative aspects of there being a lot of plugins and gems out there that are maybe not maintained that well. I run into the same issues all the time, and a lot of times I end up having to patch other people's code or roll my own solutions. But I'd rather there be a lot of someone good choices out there that are written in ruby and save me a ton of time than relying on a company to provide perfect solutions when they feel like it.

Your headline was also a little sensationalist and considering how us rubyists love to preach about the joy of coding in ruby, a little on the trollish side. You can't say that coding in objective-c is as enjoyable as coding in ruby.

Anyways, I hope that explains my reaction a little better.
The big difference here isn't about the languages, it seems to be about the technologies. Comparing web libraries (esp. add-ons/plugins) with anything else in any language will have a pretty devastating result.

I'm not entirely sure why. It can't be just the fact that nowadays web programming is often an entry-level job, so often you have to wade through the fallout of "My first Lightbox". Maybe it's the idea of packaging something you just whipped up for a project for public consumption.
wow, it's amazing how much our brain is wired for Music... or maybe its the other way around.
Software will be unpatentable in New Zealand
All of the above reasons against firefighting are absolutely correct. There is rampant cronyism, and corruption, as would be expected from a union comprised of supposed civil servants. Minimum standards are moving towards becoming an EMT-Paramedic prior to even being hired. Nonetheless, great work if you can get it.

And don't get me started on people double dipping...
The difference though is that Ask a Ninja isn't an advertisement supporting a product. They tried to take it and turn it into a product, which we all know commercializing anything with growing popularity has a very high potential to take away the very appeal that made it popular in the first place.

If they intend to make this more than just a stunt, this needs to be a first step in a major campaign that will include lots of new ideas and tactics to keep it fresh. Hopefully W+K is headed in the right direction and they will keep us entertained and deliver some ROI for Old Spice.
"The license explicitly says it has to be GPL. End of discussion. He is making up his own rules!"

The license does. However, I don't think his theme uses actual wordpress code beyond function calls. I would hardly call this a derivative work.
Did Apple ever give something for free to fix a problem? What did they do?
Ask HN: Would you subscribe to a "one task a day" web+mobile service?
Hi. Quick Survey. Would you use (and subscribe to, small monthly fee) a web+mobile service that makes you focus on just one task a day? You enter the tasks and it will randomly select or pre-select a task and prompt you to do it for the day (MVP)? The idea of doing one task a day isn't really new. I even saw a Mac app already doing this. But I still haven't seen a web version. Thanks!
The post-Rails Ruby ecosystem is definitely a high-energy place where stability is traded for rapid development. Like any community it has its idiosyncrasies. Rubyists compared to Pythonistas perhaps monkey patch a bit too much, are overly fond of novelty, and tend to have pretty strong yet sometimes objectively unsupportable ideas about the proper way to do testing.

All of these things have annoyed me from time to time over the past 5 years of working almost exclusively with Ruby. However the community also has its strengths which are extremely appealing for passionate programmers.

For one thing, the fact that Rails emphasizes improvement over maturity has made Rails 3 an amazingly modular framework, able to better fit enterprise requirements better than 2004's DHH ever would have wanted or acknowledged the need for. Also, consider the rise of the RSpec and Cucumber frameworks despite the fact that Test::Unit and Mocha already had the bases pretty well covered. In other communities, yes, you get better maintained libraries, but you also get stagnation from having too high a bar for new ideas. In Ruby you have to deal with constant deprecation, but at least you get better chances that your entire ecosystem won't be obsoleted by the next hot language or framework.
Personally I love Confluence and Jira. I've brought them in to multiple companies replacing things like Wiki products, Bugzilla, Mantis, Trac, SharePoint, etc... and it's always been a step up. Are they perfect? No. But so far they're the best apps in the space I've ever used.
> It's like Coke vs, Pepsi (or Sprite vs. 7-Up) - in a blind test, they taste pretty much the same.

Except they don't, those tests only confirm that many people have a crappy sense of taste or are only sipping and not taking a big enough drink to tell the difference. No blind test would stop me from spitting out Pepsi because it's way too sweet.
Facilitating distributed brand conversations online
I don't really have a horse in this race, but from the sounds of it, Chris does seem crazy enough to stick it out in a court fight. My gut tells me he would come out the winner if it went to judgement.
People here have no sense of humor.
Why do you need to "standardise" on a Java IDE? Do you standardise on vi, emacs, or Notepad? Can't developers simply use whichever IDE they prefer, keeping the code formatted in the desired format?