skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The MIT license and the BSD license are much truer to the idea of "free" than any FSF licenses.

The point of the licenses is different. BSD and MIT gives you the freedom to take away other people's freedoms using the code. FSF does not.

I don't think it's quite obvious which of these is "truer to the idea of 'free'", which is a pretty vague phrase. Where you are coming from makes sense, but one could also think of it as MIT and BSD giving a certain user more freedom, and FSF protecting all user's freedom better.
very cool thank you
You honestly think his rhetoric (mostly ignored) overshadows emacs, gcc, and gdb? You must be kidding.

Also, if he wasn't such a pedant from the start we'd be MUCH worse off.
Before people criticize this political story on hacker news, note that it's as relevant as a story about a time bomb planted in Silicon Valley. This law brings an end to constitutional separation of powers in the U.S. government, in that the executive branch is no longer answerable to the judiciary.

Obama, as the presumptive Democratic nominee, is in a position where the media cannot ignore him. He could have pointed out that the 1978 FISA law already allowed for retroactive warrants, so no "modernization" was necessary. It would not have hurt him politically to vote against this bill.

Obama does not uphold U.S. law or the U.S. Constitution, but I'm going to vote for him because McCain is worse.
I was more saying that you shouldn't attack Gates FOR his philanthropy, as Stallman does. Not that his giving makes his business practices or proprietary software immune to criticism.
It's like this. He tried to get it amended, but it failed. And as it stands, he can't go about filibustering this close to an election.

If he voted no, it'd give the republicans a chance to jump on it and use it as a weapon.

So he had no choice but to say Yes.
Doesn't Xobni do something similar to #7?
Depends on your definition of better. The fact that Adobe's revenues were over $3 billion would indicate that quite a few people would define "better" in such a way that Photoshop is better than GIMP.
It's hard to argue that the man who was the world’s richest for decades could have somehow done better for himself or his shareholders, or the world at large.

Easy - if he had pushed Microsoft to release an open standard instead of .doc, .xls, et cetra, he would have done better for the world at large by leaving a competitive market for office products.

Another - if he had insisted IE6 were standards-compliant and open source, he could have saved companies in web development a whole lot of time and money, and done a lot more good for the world at large.

In the long run, this would also have been great for MS shareholders, as the short-term gains of dominating the office and web browser markets are offset by the long-term damage to the MS brand.
I usually am not one to make such comments, but a recent trend in HN has been submissions unrelated to the guidelines (see http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Not too long ago there was an article on Obama and I defended its relevancy and was heavily downmodded (and deservedly so).

Digg and Reddit have become almost useless to me and HN is my main community to participate in. I have noticed that with its growing popularity, the articles have increasingly become weaker and so have the conversations. The length and depth of posts have been reduced to the level of both Digg and Reddit. People attempt to get in their "clever" one liners and the the site becomes watered down with its popularity. I strongly believe that if the community reaffirms the core guidelines to the newer users (I am quite new myself even though I was a lurker for some time), HN can retain its quality while it scales.
It's obvious that up to this point, proprietary software has created a vibrant ecosystem and immense profits that probably would not have existed were all software open source. It's driven the computer revolution, which is the most significant shift in technology and user behavior in living memory.

I would argue that open source technology has been a much more "vibrant ecosystem", and that open source software is creating a much more "significant shift in technology" than proprietary software is.

I don't think it's reasonable to say anything about what the world would be like "if all software were open source", or how that would happen.
Ajax overhaul, Part 3: Retrofit existing sites with jQuery, Ajax tabs, and photo carousels
Here's Why You Shouldn't Start a Tech Company in Silicon Valley
Semirecently got out of a long relationship. So long that I was basically a kid when it started and if there was such a thing as a dating site on the Internet at the time I knew nothing about it.

I've not tried any dating sites. Why?

1. The factors that attract me to a girl are difficult to quantify and encode digitally. But relatively easy to sense in a face-to-face interaction.

2. I trust my own senses and instincts more than second or third parties when it comes to gleaning truthful information about someone. I am confident in my ability to read people in face-to-face situations. Why put a computer in the middle given that it essentially hobbles that critical ability?

3. I believe seconds/minutes/hours spent messing around with dating websites would be better spent out in the wild meeting, hanging out with and getting to know girls in person.

4. I suspect "permanently single" people are disproportionately attracted to these various tools and I'm better off fishing from a random sample to find who I'm looking for rather than a negatively biased sample. Or, ideally, I'm better fishing from a better-than-random sample biased, for example, by people I know and trust in the real world and THEIR extended circles of friends.

5. I strongly suspect that the hypothetical girl I like is basically feeling the same way and taking the same approach that I am.

Perhaps I'm off-base. And perhaps I will modify my views with time but this is what keeps me away from such sites currently.
To me, FSF is synonymous with "hypocrite"...

The FSF licenses aren't about giving individuals more freedom, but about ensuring more freedom for everyone. Think of each time someone accepts a license as an edge in a graph - with his licenses, Stallman doesn't want to just add more edges to the graph, he wants to change the shape of the graph all together.
You're missing where the legal fees begin. How do you know what the government asked you for is illegal if you aren't paying lawyers to tell you that? You're a businessman, not an attorney.

Also, "going to court" even if you do the bare minimum is still costing money as well. Is your CEO going to go take the stand or something? This isn't a criminal trial (yet), you can't simply plead the 5th.

Do you think you can just disobey the government, lose a court case, then obey them, and that's the end of it? No fines? Do you think you can just not even try to represent yourself in court and not anger shareholders?

That strategy is just silly.
Software has freedom? That's deep...
So You Want To Be An IT Consultant
In all fairness it turns out YouTube would not let me sell this information on their website, so I don't think he really has a case.
Here's an interesting idea for a (niche) dating site:

One for people who spend more time reading books than watching tv or movies.
Even if the article can be defended as appropriately tech-related rather than political, the politically-charged headline can't.

Appropriate candidate for flagging?
I think he meant to say "one can't deny others the same freedoms on derivative works".
BOSS – The Next Step in our Open Search Ecosystem
Free Ipod!
Terms and conditions apply

I agree about the different purposes, but I'd also point out that usually the more "terms and conditions" the less likely what you're getting is really free. To remove vagueness regarding freedom, Webster's definition:

1: the quality or state of being free: as a: the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action b: liberation from slavery or restraint or from the power of another : independence c: the quality or state of being exempt or released usually from something onerous <freedom from care> d: ease, facility <spoke the language with freedom> e: the quality of being frank, open, or outspoken <answered with freedom> f: improper familiarity g: boldness of conception or execution h: unrestricted use
It's also available on Google Video:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7707585592627775409

or as avi: http://vp.video.google.com/videodownload?version=0&secur...

It's funny, but I thought Stallman was portrayed very well in that movie. I found final scene in which he describes what "the whole GNU project" is in one sentence especially touching - it's my favorite in the film.
Awesome. I'm rather excited about it.
Only use XHTML when you need to have your content parsed as XML. Otherwise, there is nothing wrong at all with well-formed HTML.
Some Good News Out Of Sunnyvale: A Yahoo Product That Looks Cool
Guh. It doesn't even send your private key back to you using SSL. Not that it would matter much. I don't want my keys escrowed!
eHarmony has such testimonials in their ads all the time. It's kinda their bag.
You know you're good when somebody who actually uses what you wrote tells you that they love what you've done. It could be somebody in your target audience, the person who takes over your project, or even yourself for a personal project, but for me, that's the moment when you've arrived.

You can obsess about development process all you want, have fun trying to push bits until they sweat, and create code that is like executable art, but I still believe that even computer programming is ultimately centered around people.
I use Moleskines not for how they look now, but for how they look later. It gives me a sense of satisfaction to have personal notes stored in an attractive way. For that's it's worth the premium, though I can understand dissent.

I may go away from Moleskines if I decide I want to take the effort to copy and rebind old notes. It's a tempting route.
Industrial Robots - A Marvel Of Engineering
the opposite should be your strategy because XHTML is more easily machine read, and thus more easily repurposed (and therefore, a more powerful storage/interchange format). use XHTML so your content can be parsed as XML unless you have a specific and clear reason to abandon easy machine readability.
Here's the problem with Moleskines: if you s/moleskine/notebook/g on almost any article written about them online you get exactly the same effect.
Actually, they do -- the Google intranet search thingy is profitable. There are a few other sources of revenue like Google Earth licensing. But these are like candles next to a supernova.
What if the Administration asked a company to go kill somebody in the name of fighting terrorism, somebody gets killed, but the company is exonerated? These American companies (incl ATT) had every right to refuse to support this, and could have chosen to do so, just as Qwest did. But ATT chose to cooperate, just because the Admin asked them to. So now we cut them a break by not allowing a lawsuit by American citizens to be filed?

That's the problem with all this stuff. The government compromises everything it touches to the point that bailouts overrule justice.

All this debacle will repeat itself, and next time it will be a little bit worse, and the circumstances get a little bit more ridiculous. But we American citizens will keep adjusting to it, because we become a little bit more compromised along the way.

This is wrong, and should be treated as such no matter what the consequences to any company.
I think the most useful part of this article is the last paragraph, where the author notes that none of The Pirate Bay's lofty projects have come to fruition yet. Until there is something that I can download and install on my computer, this is just vaporware.
Unless Obama's flip flop involves using LGPL vs GPLv3, then it doesn't belong on YC, if you ask me.
Sequoia's $4.5 million bet on casual game site
But think how much shift-key this saves. For a language that's fully bracketed/parenthesized, would be nice to be able to hit both bracket keys without holding Shift or tweaking the keybindings.
Reiser turned down 3 years on voluntary manslaughter for the crap-shoot "geek defense"
He would have been free next May had he simply fessed up and shown them the body!
If the feds come to your office and ask for help with an investigation and you refuse to help, they'll just go away and there's nothing they can do. Then they either come back with a court order or they don't come back at all. You are never legally required to help with the investigation of someone else unless you are under a court order. It seems pretty cut and dry to me, and I don't see how any criminal charges could possibly be filed against you.

Also, since the wiretapping program was classified any legal action would take place in a secret court (or possibly the transcripts would be sealed), so angering the shareholders is a non-issue.

edit: If the feds come and tell you that you are legally required to do something THEN you need a lawyer. But that isn't what happened in this case.
Actually, that's a pretty good idea. A site with no fancy profiles, just some really light filtering for age and location, and then a parade of people you can video chat with for 30 seconds. As the 30 seconds winds down, both partners have to press a big "greenlight" button to continue chatting.

This might be like skydiving for some people but I bet it would ultimately make them more confident. And it could be sort of addicting -- if you hate this guy/girl, just wait a few seconds.
What's the most expensive keyword you can find? I got "apply for mortgage online" at $23.84.
The Patchwork Years
I'm the author. I just found out about ycombinator by finding my site on it. So I didn't submit it.

Glad to see it got so much interest. There were literally tens of thousands of people trying it out just a few hours ago.
This is great - One of the problems in Phoenix is that it's so spread out. There is a decent set of .Net user groups, but other than that, it's seemed pretty dead.

Someone has done a barcamp or two here, but that's been it.

I'll have to check this out sometime.

[edit: oh wow, you guys are 4 miles from my house; I'll definitely have to check it out sometime]
That also makes it easier for others to repackage/repurpose/mash.
> Direct read/write access to the environment as a map.

this is one of the things i like about Lua (which is listed there as a source of ideas)

i definitely don't like the choice of square brackets though, it's very ugly and hard to read. they should have stuck with parens
Lovely Charts - Free online diagramming application
Read: "My fashion accessories help me fit in with my guild, so it's OK. Your fashion accessories are just silly, don't waste the money!"

Hoist by your own petard.
Why Spec Work is Evil
Ask HN : Best Computer graphics book?
I took courses in computer architecture, algorithms, theory, compilers etc at school but never did one in graphics. However now I am itching to learn something about computer graphics and maybe play with OpenGL and/or DirectX. Any recommendations about books/lecture notes etc? What will be a suitable project that I could do to learn some graphics?
Or bubble sort.
"For an invalid XML document, browsers did not even make an attempt to parse the document as best they could, as they would with HTML—instead, they just displayed a validation error and stopped".

Yes that is the idea: Force developers to write valid code.
So, a recent Windows update clashes with the ZoneAlarm firewall. Workaround: Uninstall the latest Windows Update patch via Add/Remove Programs.

This isn't particularly surprising; Windows Update frequently clashes with third-party software (there are a lot of Windows PCs in the world and a lot of Windows programs that muck with internals). At least there's an easy workaround. No need to panic.

It probably would have been better to just submit the timesonline.co.uk link and skip the drama / faint condescension.
Even Obama knows bubble sort is probably inappropriate.
Generally ~kingkongrevenge. Many ways to do things means people who know enough to be competent at writing a language still have trouble reading code created by others due to unnecessary style differences.
The scene I found most amusing was during Stallman's acceptance speech of an award at LinuxWorld when Linus Torvald's kids were running around on stage distracting everyone. Stallman then goes into his usual diatribe about how Linux should always be refered to as "GNU/Linux". Cut to scene of LinuxWorld show floor, with no "GNU" in sight.

Very symbolic and representative of the GNU and Linux relationship.

(starts at 1:11:45)
Moose "takes the tedium out of writing object-oriented Perl."

Which doesn't sound like something you need in Python - you'll have to be more descriptive.
Do they really mean unlimited queries? I think they need to do or say more to assure the developers they really meant unlimited.

The API can be found at http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/boss_guide/index.html and it seems very simple:

http://boss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/{vertical}/v1/{query}?appid=xyz[&param1=val1&param2=val2&etc]
vertical - web , image , news...
query - text query
appid - your Yahoo application id
parm1,2,3 - filter, type...
filter - -hate , -porn...
type - pdf , html , nonhtml , ppt ...
I just googled news Microsoft zonealarm and got pages and pages of stories about it - why couldn't you?
Why force them?
BOSS: The Next Step in Yahoo's Open Search Ecosystem
http://www.bash.org/?742386
You might want to specify approximately where you will be working. There are directional traffic flows that make some areas easier options if you happen to be doing the reverse of the standard commute, and some places that become cheaper options if you are working on the penninsula or in the south bay vs. working in SF.
This Matt fellow needs to lay off the vitriolic rhetoric if he wants to be taken seriously by those he criticizes.
How does 280slides.com do Cocoa on the web?
Apart from all the Objective-J talk going on, I wanted go in detail about how they managed to port Cocoa to the web. Apparently they write absolutely positioned divs for everything, and calculate position-size. This way they never have to deal with the actual CSS/HTML, and write only javascript code. This is really cool stuff, not only because it makes your frontend more stable and cross-browser, but also for development purposes. The people at qooxdoo.com have been doing it as well, but I havent seen many other folks doing it.
isnt all this chaos with interoperable, semi-compatible enough for you???
I hope they give me movie data! I want movie info.
You're absolutely right, but realistically a plummer or consultant messing around and inflating his price or screwing around will cost a few hundred or thousand dollars extra. Not millions or billions except in the most ridiculous of circumstances.

The main difference in this agent-principal conflict is the amount of capital one person is responsible for. It's actually very similar to the CEO agent-principal conflict.
i think the idea is that $$ is a huge incentive
I dont get all the hate. I personally think scribd is awesome... it makes showing documents on the web way easier! On windows I hate viewing PDF's cause it makes me load up acrobat.

Plus A LOT of people are retarded and don't know how to view or download a PDF.
Apart from all the Objective-J talk going on, I wanted go in detail about how they managed to port Cocoa to the web. Apparently they write absolutely positioned divs for everything, and calculate position-size. This way they never have to deal with the actual CSS/HTML, and write only javascript code. This is really cool stuff, not only because it makes your frontend more stable and cross-browser, but also for development purposes. The people at qooxdoo.com have been doing it as well, but I havent seen many other folks doing it.
China Licenses Online-Video Site
iPhone App Store To Launch Thursday Morning
Can't? No - won't.

The interesting question is what won't Obama do to win the election.

And, is the election actually that close or is Obama more willing to abandon his principles than his chances?
http://featureorbug.com/post/25634511/david-barack-obama-how...

(video)
Index Puts $35 Million Into Cnet of Europe (BestofMedia)
You might find this helpful (#2, #15): http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/boss_guide/faq.html
"About the charts: All charts in this post are illustrative, not data-driven."
"XHTML is still worth using, because it’s a transitional standard that moves us towards a pure-XML Web. XML is inherently better than SGML, because it’s simpler and stricter, and much easier to parse (once you’ve understood its rules)."

This is where I have a problem. In my experience, one can either have a format designed for computers or humans. XML is badly designed for both. Humans don't like it for its unnecessary strictness (unnecessary because SGML can be parsed in a decidable fashion) and computers don't like it because of all the extraneous characters. Where does that leave XML?
Unreal. This is mainly an indication that the prosecutors knew they had a weak case or they were lying to him.
This would not have been a desirable outcome. Thankfully, Hans acted in our best interests.

He is a sociopath and there is zero doubt on the matter of his guilt. I hope very much that he gets the maximum sentence, even if (as the article argues a bit too strongly) it will cost us all a little more money.
Mortgage Fraud on the Rise: It’s Easy It’s Fun It’s…Illegal?
Commentary on the current state of mortgage fraud in the US.
Wait... didn't the Apollo program end like 30 years ago? And they're just now finding water in the material brought back?
It is a redesign of one of the major e-commerce sites. Is anything related to an organization that is 'disliked' a troll?
I hope very much that he gets the maximum sentence

I hope the sentence is reduced due to him leading police to the body. Not because I feel he deserves it; rather, because I want the next murderer to feel that he has a reason to do likewise.
I actually know someone who quit his job so he could work on his natural dog food business full-time.

Last I heard, he was doing well.
I love the juxtaposition of the article's outraged tone with a link to Playboy's website.

Actually, now that I think about it, that's the perfect recipe to drive clicks to both...
What's 'new' are the implications of the attacks everybody already knows about. Nobody really thought it through all the way to the end 10 years ago when DNS cache corruption was discovered and mainly only ever used for creating vanity host names on efnet.
Get Your Logo, Reviews of Logo Design Companies
Get a logo for your company at GetYourLogos.com. You will get offers from different design firms with several discounts
This just proves that he is simply insane.
I worked on some visual search stuff.

http://www.diamond.cs.cmu.edu/

Then I dropped out of grad school.
Remarkable in the sense that BOSS is a search service that will have 'No Restrictions on Presentation' and 'Blending of Proprietary and Yahoo! Search Content Allowed'.

But AMAZING it will have monetization, even though right now its says 'Coming Soon', wouldn't be strange if they took a while on this.

Its their kind of resources and scaling capabilities that allow 'THEM' to monetize search the way the do, now they will give everyone the same crack at using their same power and on top monetize it..wow..sounds like this will shake things up a bit in search, if BOSS delivers on what it says it will.
woome.com attempts to recreate that, in fact almost exactly like you are describing...eerie.
Nissan GTR
Nissan Skyline GT-R forum with classifieds, mod discussions and vendor specials.
The whole book is an invariant section!
I doubt it. I think the only real way to keep quality up is to improve the system. Asking people to play nice only goes so far.
MetroPhase
You're assuming that murderers are rational.