skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Apple is not part of this

Apple is absolutely part of this. Apple is the party that has released a platform that you cannot install software on without going through them for permission (unless you jailbreak it using a remote-root vulnerability which is patched in more recent releases). Apple is the party that decides what can be in its app store under what rules; and it has decided to use a set of rules that are incompatible with the GPL. Apple has thus chosen to limit the software that is installable on their platform.

Apple could choose to allow VLC; they have the choice of making their terms compatible with the GPL (it's not that hard; just don't impose any additional restrictions on top of the ones that the GPL already imposes, and let the authors handle the rest of the GPL's requirements), or enabling people to side-load apps outside of the App store. Google does both on Android; the market terms are compatible with the GPL, and they allow side-loading (and even rooting on some phones).

However Apple chooses not to do this. Thus, Apple is limiting the set of software that can be used on their phone. If you use an iPhone (or iPad, or iPod Touch), you should be aware of this; you may not ever be able to get some software on it without cracking your phone's security, and Apple may be arbitrary and capricious in what they choose to allow and disallow. Apple may also remotely disable and uninstall software or content that is on your phone. If you want to choose what to install on your own phone, you should either buy a phone that gives you more freedom, or jailbreak your phone and then install whatever you want.
I'm not sure that article convinces me yet. Here is the experience of my employer, which offered 3 different healthcare plans for employees. Healthcare plan costs skyrocketed this year, to the tune of 30%-50% (not necessarily due to the healthcare bill, but a damaging hit nonetheless). As a result, the company was forced to eliminate the two most expensive plans that it did offer and consolidate down to the lowest cost one. In turn, many people were forced onto a plan they had never been on before.

He surveyed a couple different health insurance providers, but not a complete sampling by any means. Those providers he surveyed could very well have been the ones offering the cheaper plans. So I have to ask the question, could we be seeing a consolidation in the market rather than just an explosion of coverage?
I'd comment that it's actually Erlang.
I find it very hard to believe that Google's Matt Cutts would [...] answer comments on a website.

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Matt_Cutts
How do you know that's true? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm genuinely curious.

Older games built on the Quake{1,2,3} engines use hardly any network bandwidth. Most Bad Company 2 games have only 32 players, which is hardly bigger than Quake1. What's going on that's so much more bandwidth intensive?
Douglas Adams, Stephen King, John Updike, Joseph Heller, JRR Tolkein.

Among other notable storytellers: Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Danny Boyle.
For those of us who offered healthcare to all employees prior to these "reforms", these new "incentives" offer me nothing but additional expenses and tax burdens.

Don't get me started on crow-baring the "1099 everyone" BS into it. I know its been discussed at length around here. Le sigh.
Awesome that is about 20 times better. Now, just working some more on the fonts and the presentation and it's become pretty interesting. Currently, what I need from it is some feature that will pull me. For instance, have a "login using twitter" option.
I think practice and patience can overcome the affinity issue. I think what stops most of the population from programming is zero interest or a low tolerance to getting frustrated and quitting.

At the same time though I do think there is a class of people for which programming comes very naturally.
Persistent Iteration and Strategic Speculative work
Thanks, that was helpful. I'll have to take on that course as I do need to work on communicating clearly. The unedited stream of thought thing does a good job of hiding what I am trying to say. counter-productive.
It generates downright disturbing results when you apply it to http://twitter.com/Othar

Oslaka died 2 kilometers in order to come from seafaring folk, so I do it. I spend twenty minutes left! He is hideously scarred. My host removes his face a lot in college.
With open-source infrastructure software like web servers and databases, the software is not a product. There's no disadvantage to being forced to publish your modifications, and the license does not infect your end-user software that runs on them (the actual products).

The problem with the GPL in regards to user-facing software is that a developer using GPLed libraries is forced to publish ALL of his source code, even when he has not made any modifications to the library itself. In this situation there are no advantages for the developer (and serious disadvantages, even if you're not trying to sell the software for a profit but just want to maintain your rights to the source code), and there are also no advantages for the library project itself.

This is why, for example, the core engine of MongoDB is GPL licensed, but the MongoDB drivers are Apache licensed. If the drivers were also GPL licensed, developers would likely just choose to use one of the many alternatives with more palatable licenses.
Glad I'm not the only one. I learned to program making Unreal Tournament mods.

The replication model of the Unreal Engine remains one of the best I've ever seen. Nonetheless, as with anything involving a distributed system, it is very easy to make errors.

Even the original UT (version 400) had a serious error due to the ease of marking functions network transportable. The function to cycle maps was marked to allow the client to send it to the server. It was certainly nice having the ability to select maps on any server. :)
> Please don't call it "Obamacare".

I agree it's stupid, but let me ask you since I've been wondering - what's the difference between using "Obamacare" derisively vs. "Bush tax cuts" derisively?

It seems to me that both are trying to paint a specific set of legislation as solely due to the president's prerogative. IE, I don't see people upset at the term Obamacare try to get people to call the tax cuts "the '01/'03 tax cuts" which is much less politically loaded and much less emotional...

(I do think both are stupid, and ignores the culpability of Congress in decisionmaking)
Average stock ownership: 22 seconds
Fluoride, Teeth, and the Atomic Bomb (1997)
This is good. Teaching about electronics with adruino. Exactly what I needed.
The article seems to focus more on small businesses (fewer than 50 employees) who have not historically offered health care plans but are now starting to offer them because of the tax cut in the new law. The numbers appear to support the conclusion that at least this part of the law is working.
SFU was replaced with SUA in Vista. SUA supports more of the POSIX standard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX
Contrary to the article http://rememberthemilk.com does support multiple lists (I currently have a dozen or so).

I've been trying RTM for a few weeks and my biggest cons are:

1. the mobile clients are hobbled.
The wife and I Use the android and iOS apps and constantly feel like common things are difficult and uncommon things are impossible. You cannot creat a new list from the app, for instance.

2. Poor support for batch operations.
This is especially true on the mobile app. The only batch operation is "complete/uncomplete".

The two big Pros:
1. There is an iOS and an android client

2. There is support for sharing lists between accounts.
There's a similar problem with law.

While there are attorneys who get jobs at big law and make $150k+ starting, a significant percentage of students entering law school this year will not get a positive return on investment over the course of their career.

{The cost of the law degree} + {The opportunity cost of not working for three years} > {the increased salary that they'll make over the remainder of their career}

EDIT: There were a bunch of articles floating around about this over the past year, here's one: http://www.abanet.org/lsd/legaled/value.pdf, or more recently http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/business/09law.html?src=bu...
The similarities between 1930s Japan and contemporary China are frightening.
It's neither and all. As pg said, it's any esoteric language which is not strictly learned as part of standard commercial software development.
This surprises me. Citation needed?
... says the "astronomy priest" to me :) I have to take your word for it. I know there is what appears to be a star that looks brighter than most others. I, personally, don't have a means at my disposal to know it's mars. I just have to believe you.
1000fps using Apple Motion instead of Twixtor
Googling:

site:news.ycombinator.com +"the python paradox"

site:news.ycombinator.com http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

Pulls up only a handful of results. There are comments pointing to this link, but I don't think there's any story submissions. I could have sworn that this has come up before, but maybe we're both remembering wrong (or those submissions were killed and are now '[dead]') and we're just thinking of discussions where someone mentioned it in the comments.
MapReduce for Idiots
How long until the link expires?
Query, with regard to paragraph #3: If someone can hack soawesome.com while the User is logged in, does she unconditionally gain the User's login credentials on soawesome.com, ie. can she impersonate the User on soawesome.com from that point on?

[edit]PS. Also, on a different subject, just to see if I got autho.me straight: in the SRP protocol description [1], autho.me would be Steve, correct?
So, you're saying that for an end-user developer, it's "appropriate and beneficial" for their infrastructural components to be GPL. But, it's not for components that directly link to their end-user product, because it forces their product to be GPL?

What about web servers and databases that are sold as products? Why does that same argument not apply for them?

And, what about the users themselves? The GPL guarantees that everyone downstream (not just the next developer) gains the advantages of having the source be open. The hypothetical library project that licensed under the GPL does gain an advantage because they have access to the source for software that uses their code.

I definitely agree that MIT/BSD/Apache/etc. licenses give developers more options wrt. licensing and distribution. But, I don't see how that necessarily encourages innovation. Nor, do I see how that innovation is encouraged only in the case of end-user software vs. more infrastructural software.
The matching counterpoint article was also published in 1996. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=227720
I follow all three (tptacek, @dakami, zedshaw), and at times I want to kill myself for using Twitter.
Software Engineering is the best Job of 2011
> Games that don't optimize and use more data on the wire actually feel more responsive than games that are wasteful with data.

I re-read this three times and still can't parse what you're trying to say. Mind clarifying?
Related:

wikileaks.ch is both more popular and more relevant than wikileaks.org
"Poor Man's Patent" or Minimum needed to apply for a U.S. Patent?
My friend has a good idea for a hardware thingy.

An example, not his real idea, is below:

"A device that hooks onto a ladder so you can add a second ladder easily and safely."

I told him he should make it and then apply for a patent and he said he already emailed himself the idea which he calls 'the Poor Man's Patent' and that he is covered. I told him that as far as I know it doesn't count. He has no drawings or diagrams or even a journal showing any work on it. He said that he believes that the idea itself is patentable and his email covers that. I said it is not and it is the finished fully described and replicable device that is patentable -- that ideas themselves aren't patentable. I then told him that since I made no verbal contract to not pursue his idea and that since I did not sign a NDA that in a few months if I applied for a patent and I have the schematics and diagrams and my notebooks showing all the things I tried and what worked and didn't then he'd be out of luck.

That it isn't the idea:

"A device to make time travel possible"

that gets a patent but an actual, working device:

"A device to make time travel possible" Along with the schematics to make the device and such.

Which one of us is right?
Surprised how few of these I knew, considering I read HN pretty regularly
I, personally, have no _evidence_ that the big bang really happened. I have heard people tell me it's so. I've read books claiming it's so. I have to have faith in these books and these people. That's the essence of my argument -- very, very few of us have actual evidence. What we have is the words of others. In other words, there are only a small handful of people that have built a device that can measure background microwave radiation and devices to measure red-shift, etc. Those few people know what they have observed and can interpret that information. Everything else that is built on those observations (many more theories, etc) is based on a belief in those original few peoples' work. And we, the masses, then have to believe those secondary interpretations. Heck, I haven't even gotten the information from the data interpreters, but rather from other writers who have interpretted it further and written text books, blog posts, etc. So yeah, it's pretty close to blind faith since I'm so many steps away from the truth, and don't have the ability (currently, with my existing education) to truely know it anyway even if I could speak directly to one of those scientists that built the space probe. I'd STILL have to trust him when he showed me the raw data.
Then you have an advantage!

http://blog.ted.com/2009/03/11/aimee_mullins_12/
I like many others thought that this was a terrible interview question.

On the other hand, I learned something today (probabilistic data structures?!? WTF?!?)

I think the fundamental problem with the question is that it is the wrong way round. It is designed so that the interviewer can show off his expertise, whereas traditionally the view would be that you need to get the person being interviewed to show off their expertise.

Of course, if what you are really interviewing for is people who will bask in your awesomeness, then it is ideal.

----

I had a really weird interview this week. I couldn't get a word in edgewise. Haven't heard back from them either. Bizarre. If you're not going to let me talk, what is the basis for rejecting me? :D
While Google at the moment may be committing 50% of the contributions and patches, I would like to point out that Apple has its internal branch of WebKit that they are working on, and when the time comes for a public release there is a ramp up in the WebKit commits on Apple's behalf. This has been documented before.

See here for a nice chart where you can see those jumps in commits: http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/06/google-apple-webkit/
This does happen in some games - the Halo series comes to mind. A player is determined to be the "server" based on network conditions, and the plus side of it is also that should the server drop, the game will only be momentarily interrupted and you can select a new player to act as the server.

This doesn't work in all instances - most games using this mechanism are fairly small in terms of player count, since the server is not of a guaranteed performance level, the connection its on is probably a home-based broadband connection at best, and it has to invest a lot of cycles into rendering the game. For larger games (say, the Battlefield series) the hardware required makes it such that the system is infeasible. Instead you have extremely beefy hardware running dedicated servers - headless, non-rendering servers that can throw every cycle it has into serving the game.
Bingocams
Foursquare Searching for Data Scientist - A Sign of Things to Come?
Evolution is a good example. Why do you believe it happened? Because someone told you. You read someone else's words. It sort of makes sense. You saw what you assume are dinosaur bones in a museum. All of that is faith, and perhaps blind faith.

I'm assuming you're not a geneticist, so you probably didn't verify that the bones that were stacked nicely into a skeleton actually came from the same being. You likely weren't part of the dig team that found them. You don't know where they came from, or even if they are actual bone. And I'm not even talking about people purposely misleading us, but rather the fact that we have to take at face value what we are told. That's blind faith. We both _assume_ we could dig and verify the facts (with enough time, money and education), but we don't -- we just believe.

My argument is the 'evidence' we think we have, is nothing more than blind faith in 99% of the time, simply because we don't have the time and resources to follow up on everything. We simply believe because everyone else does.
Good luck with your spell checkers for tightly RAM limited devices with no persistent storage and no external hard drives...

Frankly, I'm surprised and amazed that there is still a market for modding old Tamagotchis. Human ingenuity is amazing.
I don't see a problem with people selling infrastructure software commercially. It's well within their rights to make money off of their work. Just as developers who release open source code under a non-GPL license are asserting that they don't mind if someone expands on their work and makes a few bucks off of it. To me, that seems much more "free" and egalitarian. I mean, if I was really concerned about it I'd just require attribution. Fair enough.

I think that GPL vs. non-GPL in end-user software is just a difference in philosophy. I feel that it should be up to developers whether they want to open source their modifications or not. It seems that the majority of developers do publish and contribute back any modifications that are beneficial to the original project, but I don't think they should be forced to also publish the modifications that are only of any benefit to the modifier.
Turkish student made porno film as his dissertation project
Isn't that the idea of hadoop? Build open source replacements for googles infrastructure?
Excellent idea. Shouldn't be hard to implement since these discussions all target exactly the same URLs.
How to avoid modern day public GPL floggings
Actually, let me fix that for you:

"please GPL, feel free to take my source code, slap the GPL on it and nanana at me when new changes are made that I now can't incorporate"

Look at the whole OpenBSD wireless drivers fiasco that happened. Really us BSD guys have not much to worry about when it comes to corporations (I've had my BSD licensed source code used by big business, and they have donated money to my little dinky project because it was useful for them), we have to worry our source code is not taken by the GPL crowd as they slap the GPL on any changes and suddenly any improvements made I am not able to use eventhough it is still technically Open Source.

From personal experience, BSD becomes GPL hurts WAY more than some corporation taking the code and using it and letting me know either by email or by donating money to my small project.

(The code for the BSD project is no longer online after I found some flaws in it that I didn't want to fix, so please don't ask)
Nope. You have given away the right to make decisions on who can use the code when you assigned that license to it.

Could you take said code, remove the license and make it available commercially? Sure, it is your code, but any older or previous copies are still available under the BSD license.
>> The GPL does not give a rat's patootie about users.
>Care to explain your reasoning?
>> The GPL is designed to ensure the maximum freedoms of developers.

My reasoning is that the GPL is about what you can do with the code the program is based on. USERS don't do stuff with code. Programmers do stuff with code. A user is not going to take an annoying bug in your app and fix it, but (given guaranteed access to the source) a developer might.

> You can always double-license it, MySQL-style.

cough Indeed. uncough
Balsamiq Mockups - (Freaking good) wireframing tool for programmers
How can the individual investor compete with that?

A: Don't try. Holding stocks a long amount of time insulates you from the market-timing nonsense where the day traders are fighting tooth and nail for fractions of a percentage point of profit.
Warning, that page has a flash ad that autoplays with very annoying audio, turn down your speakers before you click the link or you'll wake up the whole house.

In fact, don't bother clicking here is the whole text of the 'article':

"What, you bought a stock one whole hour ago? And you still own it? That stock is practically a dinosaur in Wall Street's new reality.

The average time a stock is held is 22 seconds. But that's an improvement from a year ago, when it was 20 seconds, according to analyst Michael Hudson, an economics professor at the University of Missouri.

It's all because of computerized split-second trading. "The financial sector is short term," Hudson said in an interview. "They talk as if they're long term."

Wired has an excellent overview of how computerized trading has taken over Wall Street. It's so bad now, in fact, that computers now read news articles at lightning speed, searching for key words that will help them buy stocks.
"The machines aren't there just to crunch numbers anymore; they're now making the decisions," Wired reports. Computerized high-frequency trading makes up about 70% of all trades, experts say.

How can the individual investor compete with that?
Whereas your definition is enormously abstract.

I do get it. Just because I don't share your sad devotion to that ancient religion doesn't mean I don't understand it.

I think you need to go do some research. There was a good bio on RMS that came out ~10 years ago, you should go read it.
Hi-Tech camera battle: RED Epic vs ARRI Alexa vs Canon 7D
Yeah, it seems with high speed algorithmic trading your larger competitors are always going to have faster machines, better connections and likely many many programmers just as smart or smarter than you are.
I found it superficial and bordering on mistaken.
I understand when people copy the content of some blog post the author submitted to HN while a server is too overloaded to read it at the source.

I don't understand you copying the full text of an MSN news article because you don't like the advertising. Please respect copyright a little bit. If you don't respect copyright, at least respect Paul and don't create reasons for lawyers to send him DMCA infringement notices.
If you're already providing coverage, what are the additional expenses and burdens (aside from W2 reporting)?
Compare this to Mr. Buffett, who has been quoted as saying:

"I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years."

Quite a contrast.
Online Business Success Stories from India | Noobpreneur Business Blog
I certainly do not think 4sq needs a data scientist to build a basic recommendation engine at this point. Instead, hiring a social psychoanalyst might help to find ways to encourage people to check-in.