skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
* I, for one, appreciate someone who is so passionate about their work that they go to such lengths to defend it.*

The ironic thing is that Zed's letter is similar to Bill Gates's letter to hobbyists 30 years, yet Bill has been historically flamed by the hacker community (requiring me to pay for software, is a larger crime than me stealing it). I wonder if identity politics play a larger role than ethical admiration.
I agree that the Contacts List needs some similar shrinkage... but this is at least a start. :-)
Perhaps because of the provocative title. I actually think that it shows even less class from martinemde, that he posted that himself.
AFAIK Microsoft has even contributed code to the Mono project.
Magnitude of Unemployment Situation via Calculated Risk
A learning exercise, maybe, but "porting" this book to Ruby is a bad idea. Ruby isn't Python, and it's "Learn Python the Hard Way", not "Learn Programming the Hard Way". It's a book tailored to a specific language, and created to teach that language... which is the point Zed makes.

Had Python simply been the language used to teach basic programming concepts, then yeah, I could understand. While I haven't read LPTHW, if it had a section on, say, threading and the GIL - then simply porting the demo code to Ruby would at best be confusing, and at worst thoroughly put a programmer off Ruby.
I don't see the difference between hacking the machine that makes DirecTV work and the machine that makes Kinect work, but since we're a community of nerds, I'm sure there's at least 1223 distinctions to be drawn here.
Definitely a wide open space, current GoodData seems to have the most mature product offering here (but it's still very internal 'talk to the sales guy'-ish)
This is Zeeed Shaaaaw!!!

I have never met the guy, but I surely hope that I get the privilege some day, even if he just picks on me and tells me that my work is worthless piece of junk and that if it implodes in a second it would be a service to the world - because that might be single most insightful and sincere analysis one might receive.

Kudos to anyone with a pair, that is capable of speaking their mind in today's "politically correct" world ridden with hypocrisy.
Ask HN: Best way to interface with China's startups and market?
I'm going to be in China for two weeks (Shanghai and Beijing). We are working on a product on EU markets that would work very well in China, but I know that it is very difficult to build relationships in China; They are very formal, and almost impenetrable for foreigners. Are there any informal startup meetings (like OpenCafe, meetup.com etc)? Anyone here from Shanghai and Beijing? I'm just guessing startup language is universal and maybe the only way to have a heart-to-heart conversation without being in an in-group. Any advice from people with experience (maxKlein?) would be great.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/86-DOS

See section headed "IBM Interest"
Cool! "TIL", as they say on reddit.
"I messaged you on Twitter and contacted you by email to try to give you knowledge of it. I was quite public about doing it as a _why day project. I made a good faith effort to let you know what I was working on. I even knew you were working on having a learn code the hard way thing and I wanted to contribute but there's no clear outline of your goals or how you expect people to contribute. This is my understanding of what you'd expect for contribution."

I tend to support the martinemde here. It seems he tried contact and was ignored. As much as Zed's coding skills are respected (I never looked into his code myself, but I trust my peers) I have to wonder if they are worth his toxicity.

"have some class", "guys like you are the reason I stopped doing Ruby", "Ruby hippie"... Come on...
> Apple's game has always been getting the difficulty threshold low enough that mom and pop can do whizzy things.

So that anyone can do wizzy things.
I think its a good idea.. add .ac.uk addresses and you have the whole of the uk covered too ;-)

You need to look at all of the other anonymous / closed communities out there and try and find a 'hook' that you can use to pull people in without seeing the content, make people feel like they are missing out on something cool.

I don't know how you feel about facebook kind of stuff, but if you implemented facebook connect you could potentially show new visitors their friends which are already on the site and that would be a good impetus to sign up.
Also, just since we're on a similar topic, you might want to read: https://github.com/martainemde/learn-ruby-the-hard-way/issue... Just so you come up with something original :)
This is extremely disruptive, especially in my company's product space. Congrats for seeing the opportunity and flying with it!
Only OpenJDK is open source. Other than that, Java is closed -- and to certify a Java implementation, you have to pay a license fee, which not the case for .NET.

IMO were it not for the Oracle acquisition, it would be a matter of time until Java were fully open sourced, but with Oracle in charge now I suspect that it's not going to happen.
Yeah, but I think the prosecution was trying to make the case that it's an even BIGGER deal than distributing for profit. If I pay money for a bootleg disc, I won't just give it away when I'm done, because it represents some money to me. But if I get a song for free, then I'm more likely to redistribute further. So the really twisted argument is that non-commercial sharing is even more damaging to the music industry than for-profit sharing, and therefore she should be penalized more than commercial pirates.
I think the bigger takeaway is that martinemde should've realized he was in the wrong.
On mine I listed my email, urls to related sites or projects, twitter id, and my Google Voice account phone number. Most of all, if you can make your cards relevant to the event, do that! Much easier to remember where you got the card from that way, which leads to better ROI of sorts.

At DEFCON 17 I saw people use Bump on their phones to achieve this sort of thing without cards. At that same conference I actually came across a very cryptic card which ended up being a crazy puzzle game of sorts. That held my attention for a good 2 days.
> In fact, many people get extra annoyed when you're nice about this sort of thing.

My guilty pleasure at work is reading support emails. There are a few gems like that in the system.
Or more succinctly: enterprise software.
Certainly it is intended to be sarcasm, but it's a meme that we should try to resist. Rather than regurgitating a reference to show cool insider status, we should look at the situation and reflect on how it is the same and how it is different. Flag it and move on.
not at all -- just thought that was the only part that martinemde could possibly object to.
Love the entitlement evident in his reply, "I'm a fucking Engine Yard programmer for fuck sake. We promote mongrel as a stable deployment stack" - does he think the fact that they promote zed's work means it's okay to ignore zed's rights regarding his own work?

Also, how could anyone take issue with the maintainer of https://github.com/martinemde/dicks and http://dicks.heroku.com ?
If I'm not mistaken he was already a microsoft research engineer
You'd be amazed at how many dumb asses actually believe that. No idea what the word copyright means.
Zed should have sent a DMCA notice to github.
Really? I read it differently. I thought both Zed and Martin came off as passionate, and relatively well-reasoned. Nothing Zed said here seemed over the top or out of line considering the context. Hopefully people who read over the exchange imagine themselves waking up to the same scenario.
Indamixx 2 Tablet Mobile Music Based On MeeGo Linux
I'm probably gonna get downvoted, but now I'm quite sure that web really IS public domain. We just have to state it explicitly. From now on gonna use public domain license on any public work I produce. Who's with me?
Are we being served different recommendations? The Samsung I see recommended is the WB600:
http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/digital-cameras/278734/samsun...

(This is the mid-level recommendation - the top price recommendation is the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3).

I'm not a camera guy so I can't vouch for the quality of these cameras, but I'm not seeing the one you linked to.
Interestingly, Martin has now updated the readme https://github.com/martinemde/learn-ruby-the-hard-way#readme

He concedes both of Zed's main points:

1. That he didn't have a legal right to "translate" the book

2. That "translating" the book from Python to Ruby didn't work all that well anyway

The rest of the message boils down to a complaint that Zed wasn't nice enough in his takedown request. While Zed could have phrased things more nicely, he wasn't especially rude given the context of clear plagiarism and copyright violation.
Node-canvas. Server side HTML5 canvas implementation in node.js
I disagree. Frankly many people don't understand copyright law. Ask average Joe on the street what is Fair Use and most people don't have a clue. The Ruby guy didn't seem to know he was violating Fair Use, if so he likely wouldn't have called "Learn Ruby the Hard Way", and probably would make it more difficult to find for people that read the Python version, especially the author himself.

And I think if you couple that with the Hacker ethos and the way code licenses in our space usually exist (BSD, Apache, MIT, GPL, etc...) taking copyright material, modifying, and redisting, with attribution is usually fair game. Now such a tradition doesn't exist in the book market, but again, I'm not sure if a lot of people know that.

Note, if the book he was writing was a parody of Zed's book, he may be protected by Fair Use law.

In any case, all this points to the fact that he made an innocent mistake. And what I've discovered is that people who make these types of mistakes, while embarrassed, usually are deferential, unless personally attacked ("only an idiot can do something so stupid").
If the guy credited him and Zed's book was free online, then I really think Zed is doing the coding world a disservice here...
Someone, please tell me where there is a copyright notice anywhere on http://learnpythonthehardway.org/ or on the PDF http://learnpythonthehardway.org/static/LearnPythonTheHardWa...

If he's so fanatical about copyright, why can't he post something about it?

The culture developers are used to on github is forking people's work and tweaking it (while still giving attribution to the author). It's not totally shocking that someone would accidentally apply this philosophy to this book. Telling someone he has "no class" for doing this is just being a dick.

But then again, its Zed D Shaw. He earned that middle name.
Yeah, most of them run off a version of MIDI.

Though to be honest, I can't really imagine this resulting in anything more 'interesting' than what we have so far. The 'hard' controls used pretty optimized. Whatever clunkiness is there is kinda hard to get around, due to the sheer level of complexity involved. I mean, what's the interface on the iPad going to be? A bunch of sliders. What are the interfaces in real life? Sliders. Granted, an iPad might be able to do funner things than equipment of comparable price, but top of the line equipment (which have motors to move the sliders/knobs to the presets you saved!) is pretty much as flexible and powerful as it can be.
The worst part of this situation is how martinemde is portending himself to be a "translator" like from English to Spanish, ignorant of the fact that you even need permission to do that. http://twitter.com/martinemde

Also its pretty crappy how the Ruby Protection Squad came to his rescue with blind hate for Zed throwing comments like "Wow didn't even know who Zed Shaw was, now the first thing I learned about him is that he's a total d-bag" - http://twitter.com/PeteTheSadPanda/status/598669095084033

Yes Zed doesn't always say things gently, but what he did say was 100% truth. Regardless of if you like what he says you have to respect 1. the truth and 2. who was really in the wrong here.

Final note: this guy could have buried it by just deleting the whole repo, but left it up to seem like the "martyr" - that is what kills me the most.
Indeed. Many high-end Android phones have HDMI too, but the interface is not replicated on big screen AFAIK.
> It seems he tried contact and was ignored.

I don't think silence is consent in this case. The whole thing seems like an obviously bad idea to me...
Just like a real computer!
Small point, but I think it's important to distinguish between being sued for downloading vs uploading. This wasn't just a bet about costs of buying from itunes vs downloading, which she could probably have done with impunity.
Presenting insecure source code in a beginner tutorial would actually be a great way of introducing an introductory software security book. Do the exploits on the into security book on the code examples from the beginner programming book.
Although I understand the author's desire to not have his work copied, I think he stepped across the line when he used a personal attack:

"Guys like you are the reason I stopped doing Ruby."
Thought it interesting how absurd the "Monica" situation seems, yet we often engage in essentially the same behavior ourselves.

That just doesn't sound as good on a bumper sticker.

EDIT: clarification
That's a different ball game. Support people are often extremely nice when they aren't fixing something that they should be fixing (although in some cases it's not possible). Being nice doesn't address the fact that I just lost two years worth of data.
Fair point. I linked to the TechCrunch story as it was the first to report Google's move, not as the basis for people saying you couldn't export contacts. Perhaps "many" overstated the situation, but I've seen it come up on Twitter and in various articles; see, for instance, http://gigaom.com/2010/11/05/nice-move-google-what-took-you-... Also, Arrington's follow-up mentioned that Facebook has "pretty much refused to let users export social graph data" (http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/05/data-protectionism-begins-i...) It's been my general experience that people don't seem to be aware of the Yahoo trick, and since the Google story has people talking once again about what data you can get out of Facebook, I thought it would be a good time to bring it up.
Heya, I work at Reevoo and helped build JustBuyThisOne.

We pick the price we show from Reevoo's price comparison, choosing the cheapest price from the 400 shops we list prices from - so we're pretty confident we're showing the best product at the best possible price. I'd love to know if we're missing somewhere with dirt-cheap prices, though.

One caveat is that we don't use Amazon Used&New prices for JBTO, just cause things tend to be sold in very low quantity there and so go out of stock really quickly.
I agree.. but I love the site.. I feel like it needs some social validation, though. Long term maybe the site will be well-curated enough to get a reputation that makes it unnecessary.. but right now, I feel like I need a peek at some evidence that these products are as awesome as suggested.

Brilliant execution. Just stellar.
Zed is actually really nice in person.
$62,500 per song? How earth did the jury "determine" this.
Seems like someone pulled out a number out of their you-know-what!!
I'll go one step further than you on social security, and argue that even your take is not quite correct.

The so-called dependency ratio is not a real problem because most people in the economy no longer do productive work. Our standard of living is not bound by labor, but by resources (oil, lumber, arable land, etc). As 60 year old workers start to retire, no fewer resources will be produced, we're not going to produce less oil because 60 year olds retire. But we may consume less resources because fewer people are commuting to work and occupying climate controlled office spaces.
My money's on being caught red-handed at copyright infringement. Plus an unhealthy level of entitlement (I'm a fucking Engine Yard programmer for fuck sake.)
Might it be this?: http://boredzo.org/pointers/

or possibly this (pdf warning): http://home.earthlink.net/~momotuk/pointers.pdf
I read it not as "I'm an amazing programmer because I work for Engine Yard," but "I work for a company that clearly depends on your work - I respect what you've done."
HN seems to delete the apostrophe from that link; there should be one before the last 's'. (I posted a fixed link and the same thing happened to it.)
Cheers for the heads-up - working on fixing that page right now.
I'm wondering what other folks think. I mean, as nicely as git's put together.. there was precedence for it as well. It just seems conveniently controversial to put git above Linux.
Like it or not Zed is entirely right here. It's his work, the guy had no permission, it has nothing to do with being "politically correct" it has everything to do with no being a dick and respecting a persons ownership and the effort they put into something. Whether or not Zed is the biggest dick in the world is irrelevant.
See also: http://www.mathjax.org/

Used in http://mathoverflow.net/
CNN Exclusive: Man in disguise boards international flight
"You didn't respond to me" does not lead to "I can do what I want with material you post". Good faith means honoring people's wishes until they tell you otherwise.

Aside: Normally I look for something like O'Reilly's statement "This book is to help you get your job done." The code is gone, so I can't tell where this would fall on the reasonableness continuum.

Aside Aside: Zed's a nice guy in person; I'd guess the harsh online stuff is a tool to get things done. Linus doesn't have a rep. for being nice online, and perhaps that's how some guys put out so much code.
Photoshop Background Template for #NewTwitter
Threw together this Photoshop background template for the new Twitter. Let me know what you think or if you know other templates that are better. Thanks
Why do people take the time to digitally bicker with veteran trolls? We're all professionals, this isn't something you want your name attached to on the "nothing is ever forgotten" internet.
Everyone's best is different. The best laptop for me is a well configured Lenovo T500. Far from what's advertised.
Before you attack someone's name you should do your homework.

1. he has his name on the book. That is sufficient to claim copyright. There is no need for additional copyright notices.

2. The source to the book was not on github. The martinemde guy put up the code on github. The original source lives in a fossil repository.
On Mac there's MCLIDE: http://mclide.in-progress.com/

It's not Emacs but it speaks SWANK, so it works with a bunch of Lisps.
copyright is implicit in many places isn't it?
I can't recall where or when I read it, but there was some talk that Kinect might also be used in an office setting. Microsoft may well be thinking about it and having an open source driver going around might cut into their plans they could have for Kinect.

Edit:

Kinect is part of Microsoft’s continuing quest to bring to market natural user interface (NUI) technologies, like touch, voice and gesture-recognition. Maybe it’s also part of a grand plan to force users to continue to exercise (even if that just means by waving a hand) while being increasingly tied to our PCs?

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-kinect-for-gam...
Man with "Mission Impossible" disguise boards plane
That's the biggest issue here because I don't think they ever showed that the songs were downloaded from her computer. The RIAA used the make available argument which makes no sense to me.

Frankly, this whole case has nothing to do with Thomas being a good person or an evil person stealing music, rational or irrational. The real question is why 1.5 million was awarded for something that's orders of magnitude less in damages. It's ridiculous.
So You Want to Start a Web Startup
The problem is that you're applying C++ sensibilities to a prototype OO language. `this` doesn't refer to the current class, but to the current object. There are no classes and no methods. Functions don't even really belong to the object they're written in. You can easily rebind (using call/apply) a function to a different object so that it operates as a 'method' of that object. If you have a few minutes, dig up 'Self the video', skip the intro and watch how objects/methods are pulled apart and stuck together. That's the conceptual basis for the object system and it's pretty common for libraries to take advantage of changing `this` to a different object (e.g. `this` is the target element in a jQuery event handler). Opinions are mixed on whether this is ultimately a good idea, but it's part of the language.

Having come from Python to Javascript, I consider this to be explicit and a feature rather than a code smell. I dislike when a language's include constructs dump everything into the local namespace and the `this` is implicit because it means that I can't look at a piece of code in isolation without IDE support and figure out where a particular reference is resolving.

If it really bothers you, coffeescript uses @ in place of this:

Product::make = () ->
@mill()
@drill()
@fill()
I haven't read through the whole paper yet (behind a paywall (I think... I'm at a university that subscribes, so I have access) here: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/science.11952...), but table 1 is somewhat telling: there is no single mutation that's found in all controllers, and not in progressors. Instead, there's a collection of SNPs that controllers have more often than progressors, but not all controllers have any given SNP.
Maybe that border area is a good training area? Training areas are typically kinda hard to find. Have to find a place where people won't mind alot of people with guns running around and possibly blowing stuff up.

You'll also recall a bit ago, a Swiss Army company accidentally waltzhed into Lichtenstein, or when some British Marines missed the Gilbrator and landed in Spain instead on a exercise.

Sometimes mistakes do happen.
I'm a "Blub" programmer, and yes, I really don't have any frame of reference to understand F#.

And I'll probably try my hand at Ruby or Python before F# or Lisp... I've read many posts and articles about how at least trying Lisp will make me a better programmer but I still don't want to take the plunge.

I'm not a hardcore programmer (heck I'm starting an MBA next year (1) ), and pretty pragmatic - if my tools help me build what I want, great. I don't object to learning new tools but there's a significant time cost to that, so I have to prioritize

(1) I've also read a lot of advice about why I don't want or need an MBA but I'm trying to look at it like an entry point into the business world and a networking and career advancement opportunity. I like solving problems outside of programming (making better processes and such). I'm not a salesman or marketer, but I am interested in business.
Ask HN: Are you rich or famous? How did it affect your ability to trust others?
Have you become rich or famous? How did it affect the way people treated you? (most notably, potential dates/significant others)

It sounds like it could be a double-edged sword: not having close relationships, you invest yourself in your work, thus becoming rich and/or famous. Then, when rich and/or famous, people are more attracted to you. But, you suspect, for the wrong reasons.