skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
MIT vs GPL in a nutshell:

MIT: here's my code, you can do what you want, just don't be a dick.

GPL: here's my code. If you use it to build something on top of, your code must be open source two. And here's a long list of ways of bypassing that that aren't allowed.
You assumed that... yet in your list of possible reasons, a simple typo wasn't listed?
Stealth Startups and Acquisition Rumors: Some Seattle Tech Gossip and Tidbits
It's essentially the tit-for-tat response, which turns out to be a very effective strategy for all sorts of things, not just bullies.
Why not do both? Give the credit and send the email.
I know they don't love me but it's much better than what most do.
This only works once they're old enough to realize that you're ALLOWED to not give a fuck. Otherwise, it just marks you out for more.

So I'd stick with the hitting. I don't think people understand much else until they mature a little past grade 8-ish mentality.
If you really want to fight back, fight smart and fight dirty, call the police immediately after anything illegal (violence and threats of violence are illegal). File a report with the police after they arrive, photograph any bruises, etc. Upon repeat or grievous offenses, file appropriate lawsuits against the school and parents of bully. Yeah, it's lame, but not as lame as fighting fire with fire.
In high school I was told my the assistant principal to "Deal with it" when a bully was stealing stuff, like my TI-86 calculator, from my locker. A few weeks later I ended up getting in a physical fight with him which resulted in me getting suspended. When asked why I did it, which I fully admitted to hitting first, I would only reply that the assistant principal told me to.

At the very least, my shit quit disappearing.
Umm, pipes has been around for a while, like nearly 4 years...
The off-topic HN posts are getting silly. This isn't coding, or business, or some kind of cool interesting hack. It's not even interesting and could be summed up in a few words instead of a long, rambling .... ah, fuck it, HN is over anyway.
I have something against the magazine because it continually distorts the science behind the stories to such an extent that the person reading them is frequently left with the wrong impression. Having noticed this several times, it makes sense (if you trust induction) to treat all such articles from the same magazine with similar suspicion. This article is no exception.

You are of course correct when you say that many people enjoy reading it. I just expected most of the readers of HN to have studied science to a high-enough level to be aware that much of what is written in New Scientist is, not wrong, but perhaps immature.
Of all the things arbitrary, why a pan flute?
Then say "ah, screw it!" and code your own editor.
I'd say that techcrunch may have just saved a few hundred people their jobs.

>Carol: "Shit, TC is onto us. reduce it to ~17.9% and find me the person who leaked this info OFF WITH THEIR HEADS"
"Reading this thread, it occurs to me once again how countercultural the Sermon on the Mount is, and how hard it is to seriously live it."

On the other hand, the reward (if you believe it) is eternal paradise of some kind. Infinite good in exchange for some finite pain. Yay religion.
Evaluating Extraordinary Claims
One way to help answer this question is to imagine what would happen if, around the same time Larry & Sergey started Google, two identical grad students were working on the same thing at a university elsewhere in the world. The second story would have played out a lot differently.

This thought experiment isn't a complete answer, but it's not irrelevant either.
Exactly, why do you think they send people to jail for not paying taxes, by escalating things beyond a reasonable level, they get people to pay. The mafia uses a similar methodology to collect its protection payments.
In my mind, the answer is “better” if we also no longer need to worry about money (that is, a post-capitalist system). I’m not sure about the meantime.
It's a fine line really, knowing when to fight back, retort or walk away. If you never teach/encourage your son how to hold their own, then you are doing them a disfavor. Probably the caveat I would throw in is that the older your child is, the higher the stakes are (in physical terms), and the more likely something very ugly will result.
I agree with you that this is not necessarily the ideal approach. Whether or not it's a valid way to solve problems, fighting back is only effective against individual bullies, which are hardly the larger problem.

I disagree that "The smart solution to bullying is to make it socially unacceptable." A solution is not a smart solution if it cannot be put into practice, and it's not as though there's any real control over what's socially acceptable among children.

If there's a real solution, it's to be found among adults. Children are basically small adults. While there's a bit of a gap in reasoning capacity, the gap is much smaller than people give it credit for: children are smart. So, why do adults not "bully" each other all the time?

There's a strong argument to be made that this is because we've cordoned adults who are likely to instigate violence off into their own social environments (criminal). That's a strong possibility, but it probably doesn't hide a solution to the problem: we don't give children the power to do this, and doing it for them would be a ground ripe for abuse of power. As much as I don't like it, there may be no good solution.

There's also a strong argument to be made that adults don't get into fights simply because they have better things to do. That might be a good place to start: give children more and better choices about what to do.

Probably the strongest argument is that adults have a perfectly good nonviolent way to signal status: money. Children don't have any such thing, so they come up with their own. Counter-intuitive though it seems, giving children a strong status-signaling mechanism other than bullying might be effective.
I find this quote to be interesting...

"On the contrary: the programmer should let correctness proof and program grow hand in hand. Argument three is essentially based on the following observation. If one first asks oneself what the structure of a convincing proof would be and, having found this, then constructs a program satisfying this proof's requirements, then these correctness concerns turn out to be a very effective heuristic guidance."

Anyone else think that TDD is a close approximation of what Dijkstra was talking about in the quote? FWIW - I say this as a non-practioner of TDD.
Not if they're the targets. Do you really want to see how homicidal someone else can get towards you?
Im curious why you draw that conclusion, and also what things were like when you were in school. Did you get in any fights? Were fights frequent in your school.

The reason I ask is that I think I'm a bit older than the average HN reader (pushing 40). When I went to school, fights were certainly not encouraged, but the occasional lunchtime or after-school fight was not at all unusual. And there was definitely bullying.

It wasn't any kind of indoctrination that kept their victims from fighting back. It was pure and simple fear! Most of the bullies were either physically larger than their victims, or just had a way of projecting an aggressive, intimidating presence that had most of the other kids reluctant to throw down with them.

Now I agree that a good punch was (and probably still is) a good individual tactic for getting a bully to leave you alone. What I disagree with is what I believe is your assertion that it's some kind of recent policy change that makes bullying possible or causes it to flourish in some way.

A policy of allowing or even encouraging physical violence isn't going to end or discourage bullying. Human behavior isn't that simple, real world solutions aren't that black and white.

Bullying didn't suddenly "spring" into existence when schools started earnestly preventing violence. Bullying has existed longer than human history. You see it in all human societies, and all even in animals.
That's a good point. I should have said mostly negative press.
Interesting...I never would have guessed that it was frivolous...but that's just RIDICULOUS!!!

$1.3B revenues with $80M profits, and crazy spending just because they can. Ugh...I shirk at the thought.
In the big cities, possibly.
In a way its a good thing. Everyone thinks Yahoo! has a lot of potential, it is just that they aren't living up to it. Better to be on that side than not having any potential to live up to.
Honest question; what valuable/useful services does Yahoo still offer?

I haven't logged into Yahoo mail in more than 2 years.

I do see that finance.yahoo is still a good site -- but hardly an entire business.

They dont have core technology in search any longer, right?

Ill have to look into what S4 is... ok that looks interesting. Is it competing with such things as DataSift? -- well its OSS - so not a revenue stream for them, yet...

I am seriously trying to understand how they would rebuild a business. Serious pivot is needed it would seem?
I'd say that techcrunch may have just saved a few hundred people their jobs.

Doubtful. If they're going to lay people off they'll just stagger the "changes" by a few months.
Must be a slow news day if this is making it to the front page of HN.
I was referring to the title of the HN submission. The submitter commented and said it was due to the character limit for HN titles, so I suppose I should be "whinging" about that instead.
I think Dijkstra had a far higher bar for what counts as proof, compared to tests.
If he escalates with a knife or a bat, that's no longer bullying, that's assault with a weapon.
Although you could say bullying is assault, nobody is going to send the kid to juvenile for punching you. But they will sure as hell will send a kid with a knife to another place to protect the other kids.
It seems to me like they could be prime for disruption.

The latest redesign is dreadful. It's like they decided that CRMs should be exactly like twitter, or facebook or OH MY GOD LOOK BIG SHINY THING WE MUST HAVE THAT IN THE RELEASE!

When it was rolled out nobody knew where their stuff was, it took a couple of days for everyone to get used to it. A good CRM should get out of and stay out of the way of sales. You should spend as little time as possible in it. Not updating statuses or following accounts (no, seriously it does that).

I'm not surprised they're only making $80 million profit given the stuff they're blatantly wasting their time on.
I'm not really sure he has -- I think he might be right. The Internet is pretty much the perfect representation of "sound and fury" that I can think of. He makes a living by being an asshole and making people mad and, honestly, I thought it was pretty funny. There's so much populist bullshit on Reddit that I'm surprised that they're not just angry about everything all the time.

That said, I also think this may not be Hacker News-worthy.
Uh, no. If someone punches me there really is no decision matrix in which I will not punch him back. His motivations are frankly irrelevant to me and are something he needs to work out on his own.
Did anyone else read the 1001 in the title as 9 in binary ?
Cory Doctorow: A Cosmopolitan Literature for the Cosmopolitan Web
Congratulations! You've found a formula that works... FOR YOU!
Why haven't Microsoft ... realized that building a platform to encourage "hacking" would make a lot of money.

Because while it would make some money (perhaps 'a lot'), forcing people to buy their locked-in $60 games (and often more like $80 in UK and Europe) will make them even more.

I'm a total open-advocate so the above saddens me but that's why consoles are locked to license holders who buy access to build games for them.

Keep in mind that even at $150, the Kinnect is probably being sold at cost/loss at the moment so essentially they are subserdising the hardware to make money on the software.

My guess is that if "Open Kinnect" becomes a trend with a lot of applications, you can be sure someone like Logitech/etc will bring out an 'open' bundle of the same technology stack that can utilize the foundation of apps. But it will probably cost more as it won't be subsidized like MS are with Kinnect.
there have been rumors of an AOL & Yahoo merger lately. i wonder if this confirms that rumor. it seems AOL and Yahoo have a lot in common in terms of tech assets and also in terms of the users having a similar "mindset".
Yes, I would call people that work on this hackers in the older more positive sense, but the common, inflammatory meaning of the word "hacked" usually has something to do with a security exploit. As in Headline: "Blahblah.com was recently hacked." As a headline, you would never think that means blahblah was reverse-engineered, but that it was vandalized or people's accounts were stolen.
Also, I just double-checked the dates. Apple switched to Intel in January 2006, which is 16 months past the end of his 18-month window, not nine.
In-house Design Teams: The Sole of Your Organization (a Zappos Case Study)
Why I Loved AMC-TV’s Rubicon
I couldn't help but think about Warhammer 40k's Astronomicon (http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Astronomicon) since that's supposed to extend for about 50,0000 light years as well. Then again, I am a bit of a WH40k fan...
OK, you're right, that character limit is very annoying. Sorry to sound off about something tangential to your post.
I was mugged in London 4 months ago. In broad daylight, the guy caught me off guard and pushed me to the ground.

When I tell people there's usually someone who tells me I should have fought back, or whatever. And I went through relief, anger, fear it would happen again and the thirst for revenge afterwards, replaying the situation and second-guessing myself, wondering if I should have fought back or done something differently.

But it's not worth the risk. My friend works in public housing in the area, and said the guy was probably a local gang member. These guys fight and carry knives from when they're children. I've never been in a real fight and I have a desk job - odds are that I would have ended up in hospital.

So I handed over the 40 pounds cash I had in my wallet, and he bailed.

A random encounter like this is a totally different situation to a bully at school, where you mostly know who you're dealing with. There's a couple of times I now realise I probably should have stood up for myself at school, but being mugged on the street is not the time to start learning to fight.
And call it the BestOfBothWorlds Editor.
> The solution to escalating warfare is to break the cycle.

That is not true. MAD worked in the cold war. The solution is to let the other side know you will not go gentle into that good night.
I think that humans don't like getting hurt. What's so difficult to understand about that?

yhe above simple logic and my own personal experience fighting back is what this is based on, not some corny Kung foo movie.

Don't put words into others mouths, its rude and unnecessary.

Re your going columbine troll, the response should be limited to what's required. Snd, obviously, violence is already the supreme authority and final resort in society - that's what police and the military are for.
- Run your own web server.
This guy is right on. I have a brother who is very reserved and quiet, and would be the last person you would expect to get in a fight. He and I were both bullied when we were little, and he had this one guy that would never give him a break. One day it went too far and my brother decided to involve a cricket bat. Teachers came and broke up the fight, they both got taken to the principals office, etc... My brother was willing to apologize, but of course the bully just kept being a dick in front of the principal. Brother? Got off the hook. Bully? Suspended - never bothered him again.
why is this wonderfully simple timer using flash?
I don't disagree with that, I do disagree with unleashing the private details of a private person onto the public internet.
136 Million unique visitors[1]. Even if its not completely accurate, its still a very, very large number.

I know plenty of people who use Yahoo as their homepage, for email and for search -- even if it isn't powered by Yahoo anymore, it still gets plenty of uses.

1. http://siteanalytics.compete.com/yahoo.com/
I upvoted you. It's a good story and far more common than most people would like to believe. But I would caution you against generalizing your anecdotal evidence to the profession of teaching as a whole. Some teachers would do exactly what you did and throw the bully's out and the vast majority wouldn't blame the victim. In my relatively large (but admittedly still anecdotal) experience with CPS and public suburban schools, I've only seen teachers close to what you describe in a small fraction.
I agree strongly with this.

I was hardly picked on in school because I'd just ignore any teasing... and the first time I let it get to me I stabbed the bully (in class, in front of the teacher) with a pencil and sent him to the doctor.

I got off with just a chat to the headmaster... not even a very stern chat, because the staff all liked me as a good student and disliked the bully because he was a known bully. Doing the same thing now would probably lead to expulsion and charges of aggravated assault. If I had a child today I'd be telling them to make sure they drop the pencil first; using fists would probably work nearly as well, and a suspension for fighting on your school records means nothing in the real world.
I was about to write an answer, but I suddenly find I have troubles even understanding what it is you want. Do you want to change the laws of attraction? Should men (and women) be blamed for wanting attractive mates?

You think attraction has nothing to do with biology at all?

How guilty should I feel for being a man, knowing that my mere existence apparently forces some women to buy Cosmopolitan (the horror!!!)?
Arg! I have this same problem. I typically end up killing it at one of the ttys at some point during the day.
Ludoliteracy:  Defining, Understanding and Supporting Games Education
Bullying is, according to the media, "on the rise". You only need to a simple Google search to find an army of articles dated 2010 that make this claim.

Is it true? It's my outsider's perception that there is some truth to it. It's my perception as the husband of a schoolteacher that it is. But my eyes cannot gaze upon all the schools in the country. However, the combination of the anecdotal evidence of my wife's school combined with the national media suggests to me that I am not far off. (Even though I recognize the media's fondness of latching onto a story that is guaranteed to draw attention)

Nowhere did I state that this trend has caused bullying. I am only saying that it has affected bullying.

I am also not necessarily putting a timeline on when things changed. I simply don't have the data for that. But I am looking at schools as they look in 2010 and I am seeing a lot of examples/stories of bullies operating with impunity. And it seems at least to be much more so than in my school days.

The one thing I can state as an absolute fact is that bullying is an extremely hot topic among teachers and school boards. I have to think that there is more than just bully status quo behind that.
Why WAS America so rich? Most of the competitions were wiped out by WWII.

But now they've all rebuilt and caught up. Now the US is in trillions of debt, the largest debt holder in the world.
I certainly don't want to be friends with somebody who might turn psycho/homicidal on me one day. So maybe your strategy would work in getting rid of the bullies, but it would probably drive away everybody else, too (people who might have become friends).
eFirefox theme
The Brutal Decline of Yahoo (Infographic)
And if you have to fight - trust me on this - you have to go all in.

Truer words have never been spoken. Fighting isn't a first option--it's a last option. But if you were teased in school (like I was), the last thing a bully expects is a kid that will rage on him.

Making bullying "unacceptable" isn't a reality.
That is just going to thrash hell out of your disk unless it's executing on distinct machines with data well spread over a shared filesystem.
I thought adding more features to emacs still made it emacs.
Reimagining the Web
A thought struck me in my media theory class today.

Imagine if you had a chance to build the web from the ground up. I could imagine baking in anonymity from the ground up. I could imagine a text-only interface so that the sight-impaired could have universal text to speech access. I could imagine some kind of identity management baked-in that would ensure privacy and remove the need for OpenID and creating login after login.

What I'm trying to say is. Imagine if you had the chance to design the Web✝ from the scratch. How would you go about it? There was a discussion today on this site about a universal bytecode instead of Javascript, the one scripting language. Imagine if it was text only, how would that affect HTML5. What would the "browser" of this new space look like? What sort of development and debugging tools would be built-in? Would it be more peer-to-peer and Tor-like? Go wild, I want to hear all your ideas! Would you change DNS? Would you change how ICANN works? How about a flat-fee subscription model that would remove the need for advertising? These are just "out there" ideas, I'd like to hear yours.

✝(Just the web, not the internet - I think the internet with IPv6 is fine, the internet is just numbers and pipes, it aint broken apart from the finite resources of IPv4 as far as I can see.)
That's interesting. There's quite a few places around the world where it would've been different, but how different depends on the targeting.

At the time Google started up, Yahoo! was the biggest (IIRC, it was a long time ago). Both were American companies and both initially targeted the US (I distinctly remember using Google and finding it crap for UK-specific stuff, so went back to flitting between Lycos and Altavista.

Had Google started up in Cambridge or Oxford, I imagine they would've targeted the UK and possibly Europe initially, focusing on different search patterns, different promotional strategies and so on. They may well have been intimidated by Yahoo in some respects but would've seen an opportunity to attack Yahoo's poor local search.

Had they have started in China they could've been Baidu.cn.

Of course, all this is academic but an interesting thought experiment nonetheless.

I think if Google started in the US at the same time as a UK search engine, the UK engine would've been more reliant on the UK market and would've seen slower growth once there's initial traction, but Google's search domination isn't completely global.
They neglect to mention Bretton Woods establishing the US dollar as the world's reserve currency.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Monetary_and_Fin...

>the IMF insists that the foreign exchange reserves maintained by other nations are held in the form of dollars, so no matter how much debt the US accumulates, its economy will not collapse.
This is sometimes true.

I think that Parallel is more interesting as an instant server-farm for "taco bell programmers" -- q.v. http://teddziuba.com/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1818816 for the HN discussion -- as per Mr. Dziuba's definition.

Like, async spidering with parallel is a one-liner, but comparatively, have you seen how much absurdly syntaxed pycurl boilerplate you need? It's crazy. I for one will take the simpler method any day.
My friends are pimping this on facebook hardcore right now. Non-tech people, especially. Strong work, ladies and gentlemen. I call it "crackberry for the iPhone."
Step 1: Go back in time and acquire Godparents.