skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel the same way about the GPL, in that it dictates very strong boundaries about what can and cannot be done with the code you are distributing. I don't personally feel that the tradeoff is acceptable to achieve a goal of preventing corruption, as you say, and it can be argued that the license indeed does prevent many freedoms to do what you will.

If I write software and distribute it as open-source on the Internet, I'm not interested in (a) suing those who don't follow my license to the letter à la gpl-violations.org, and (b) requiring you to release the source code to your product simply because you use mine. For those reasons, I will never apply the GPL to any of the software that I start, period.

It is my not job, as a software developer, to impose my beliefs upon you. The religious fervor in the GPL debates springs an interesting comparison to mind: the GPL is similar to publishing a book about Christ, and requiring those who read it to adopt Christianity. Viral open-source and the majority of the "free software beliefs" are just that, beliefs; I respect everyone's right to believe differently, and I will not mandate a belief in my software.

Why is a negative opinion about the GPL automatically assumed by you to be trolling? It does have flaws, and the GP simply expressed his distaste of them (perhaps not in the best way).
Ask HN: Review my startup, Local Republic
Check it out at http://localrepublic.com

The idea is for citizens to report issues they see happening around them (potholes, trash disposal issues, poor local government performance, etc. anything goes, really), discuss them and try to find solutions to these problems.

There's a blog post further explaining the idea behind Local Republic here: http://blog.localrepublic.com/we-are-live

We're really looking forward to your feedback :)
Because this wasn't possible until recently. Clojure on Android wasn't easy, and the represents a technical achievement.
The typical per person badge printer fee is upwards of $150 per day for the printer + laptop setup and $250-$500 per day for the labor .. you have to keep in mind travel, insurance, taxes, facilities fees etc ...
I'm inclined to believe you as it regards Apple's policies as of today. As regards the future policies about non-content SaaS apps, suffice it to say that there is non-zero informational value in this announcement.
Not that funny.
Leveraging the Internet in a Global Village
What I want to know is, did Lyon make that post because he has actually deluded himself into thinking that EE is still relevant, or because he thought someone would actually be oblivious enough to read it and stop using StackExchange?

I'm not sure which one reflects more poorly on him.
Failure and finding a business model at Jambool (a 2010 Google acquisition)
Because freedom also means freedom to use my code and keep it to yourself if you want to. There isn't any corruption in that. Tons of software here are using bsd/mit licensed code and not releasing their change, that has nothing to do with corruption (or you don't understand what corruption is, go read a definition).

Using the GPL means you're free to use my code ... As long as the result is under gpl too. You lose your freedom to chose a license. You lose your freedom to keep changes to yourself if you release the resulting binary (why ? because you want to). You lose your freedom to use other piece of code that are not gpl compatible.

I have nothing against the gpl and I use tons of software using it, but it is a fact that it cuts down some of your freedoms compared to other licenses.
Where's Graffiti when you need it?
Agreed. I kind of doubt this is an ideological decision. Just like the app store, there is no mechanism for someone who has downloaded an app to redistribute it to others.
The end key goes too far for scanning. If I want to quickly scan for something, page down and end are too abrupt.

With middle click scrolling I can go as quickly or slowly as I need to.

Of course, the only time I use middle click on EE is to close the tab if I open it by mistake. :)
Simple HTML to PDF Converter
"The idea being that developers want smooth experiences. And the end user absolutely requires it.... It's almost as if developers are saying treat us like everyone else. Just allow us to show our individuality and ways to extend tools and service the ways we want."

Do folks here agree or disagree?
Great business model, come to think of it.
when did people start using the word "Whilst"? This guy's obviously not British...
The default malloc and free, depending on platform, can be ridiculously slow operations (on the range of 50-100µs). Those numbers are old, they are from some testing I did nearly a decade ago. I'd hope it would have improved right now.

But at that time, I wrote a memory manager which had malloc and free calls which were a magnitude faster, at least ten times.

When you need it to be fast, it can be fast. If you don't want it to be fast, or you have to resort to tricks like preventing the compiler from inlining (wtf?), then you really are doing it wrong.
simple questions are already answered (most of them on S.O.). unfortunately i used to ask questions that has no answer so i just almost stopped asking them.
Reaching Life Goals: Which Strategies Work
Who is Anonymous' Commander X? Ain't me, says Benjamin Spock de Vries
Sounds like an interesting idea...especially at the neighborhood level. But I wonder if you've cast the net too wide. Maybe focusing on one or a few communities in the beginning might help create compelling and useful conversations that would then inspire other communities to jump onboard.
It seems OP hasn't quite thought this through...

Apple does not demand 30% of out-of-app sales, just that out-of-app sales are not cheaper than in-app sales.

And as far as I read the release, SaaS is not concerned. Unless you're using Apples subscription mechanism, you're not offering a subscription in-app. So if you simply use a web API, that's not a subscription.

Can Apple change that at any time? Yes. Closed platforms take power from developers and give it to the platform vendor - in exchange for (often) a bigger pie to get your slice from.

Is the OP yet another pageview troll? Yes. Posting blatantly false information in the headline seems to indicate that.
In this analysis (Horace Deidu), it's predicted that the first Nokia WP7 phone only ships in 2012.
http://www.asymco.com/2011/02/14/who-will-buy-the-next-150-m...

Apparently the minimum time to develop a new product is 12 months. That may be so, but Nokia aren't necessarily starting from scratch. They already have many phone designs, the expertise and they already have a pre-made OS.

I guess it depends on how unique they want to make their new WP7 phones. Surely they could just slap something together really quickly? (I'm thinking an N8 with a different OS or something)
Chinese Android Malware Sucks Up Your Bandwidth
TED Launches Quora-Like Platform for Intelligent Discussion
Not to mention the fact that there really isn't any other manufacturer concentrating on WP7: where's the differentiating factor between Nokia's Android phones and Samsung's Android phones? If you stray too far, the Android experience is broken, but if you don't you're just another hardware manufacturer for Google.

Ironically, Nokia is attempting to avoid the problems that plagued Windows-box manufacturers by going with a Microsoft product.
Ask HN: is IBM the new Google?
Given Watson's capabilities in parsing vast amounts of data and "understanding" subtle meanings, could (/should) IBM leverage this technology to search and parse the web, and answer free text queries?
This seems a key failing of our system: people that try to be moderately informed (the best you can reasonably expect - the vast majority can't/won't be political wonks) may end up even less informed in part because the relationship between voting record and the appearance of that record is radically distorted by this kind of thing.

So what can be done about this? It's hard for me to imagine a structural remedy.
Google releases OnePass, a payment system for publishers
You are being pedantic and defensive about the politics statement. I think it was obvious from the context that I was referring specifically to your comment about Apple/Google/Adobe politicking and not about their political tendencies in general.

And for never having said IE9 was a good browser, you sure have said IE is a good browser a lot. Sure, you not have said it in those words, but it is impossible to come away from these comments (a huge percentage of which are yours) without the belief that you think IE9 is better (and perhaps I'm wrong for conflating "better" with "good"). And that impression stems from seeing way more in comments than just "MS is getting configuration management in browsers right."
You don't win Nobel prizes for ideas, you earn them for doing great science, and that takes a lot of time and hard work.
At least, Nokia released Qt under the LGPL. Plus there's the KDE Free Qt Foundation which guarantees that "This agreement ensures that the Qt will continue to be available under both the LGPL 2.1 and the GPL 3. Should Nokia discontinue the development of the Qt Free Edition under these licenses, then the Foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license or under other open source licenses. The agreement stays valid in case of a buy-out, a merger or bankruptcy." (see http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.p... )
> If your network of people and resources is your key competitive advantage, then you want to maximize it -- and you can do this a lot more effectively if you're discussing things publicly.

Why? We are building our network as fast as we are able, much of it via direct personal introductions within a relatively exclusive club. I don't see how letting other people outside that club know what we are doing gains us anything useful.

Also, if there are lterally only a few people in the world who can provide what you need and you can get most or all of them to sign up to your idea, your network is unassailable. If someone who has contacts with the network from other dealings gets in there first, you're in trouble. So it doesn't follow that a network that is highly vulnerable now would still be so after launch.
Intel Demos New Sandy Bridge Virtualization and Security Features (video)
Hi. It really depends, if you want to do it yourself it can be significantly cheaper. I paid less than $100 for the incorporation of my company(c-corp). I'm a solo founder, so I didn't have to deal with partnership agreements and such.

As rmah said, there is no federal incorporation in the US, it's all done on a state level. I'd suggest, if you're not going to take any investments to register your company in the state you live(to avoid double taxation). Also, if you're going to file for a corporation and still don't plan on raising capital, make sure you file for election of a S-Corp after you've received your certificate of incorporation - that'll also lower the taxes.

Hope the process goes well...I'll be sure to write up a detailed blog post for ya on how I incorporated.
Free Online Dating
IBM has spent the past 15 years getting only farther away from consumer facing businesses. This one is a non-starter.
Ask HN: What does Apple's new policy mean for Groupon?
It is my understanding that Groupon is skirting the app store rules by no using the in-app payment API to do in-app purchases. Supposedly some part of their UI is rendered in Webkit and the purchase actually happens in there.

Do you think in light of Apple's recent policy changes, that Groupon et. all are next in Apple's sights?
Ousterhout's reply is worth reading:

http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0009.html

I can't find where I'd seen it, but RMS certainly wasn't really keen on the idea of a BSD-licensed system becoming popular, either.
Konfabulator comes to mind: http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2005/04/macosx-10-4.ars...
Some more info: http://implicit.ly/akka-10-final-is-released
"Even at the time of writing people can still replicate the effect by adding “74.81.170.110 mooo.com” to their hosts file as the authorities have not dropped the domain pointer yet"

What's a "domain pointer"? That IP address serves up a seizure notice no matter what hostname you request it with.
I doubt IBM is interested in running a general purpose web-scale search engine. They seem pretty focused on selling stuff to businesses for internal use. If there was any sort of interesting connection between them and Google on something like this, I'd think it might involve Google licensing IBM's technology. But, for all we know, Google already have - or are developing - have the same ability. I mean, they don't employ Peter Norvig and people of his caliber for no reason.
My first thought when I saw this was that it wasn't possible to bring civil claims against the federal government.

But looking it up, I found the Federal Tort Claims Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTCA) which changed that in 1946.
Well, note how the article said "naive" memory allocation and even then it was specific to a microbenchmark. I've written very high performing memory allocation routines for multi-threaded scenarios and if you know the types of allocations you will be making you can leave any GC or standard memory allocation routines in the dust!
You have it the other way around. It's not so much about apple wanting to monopolize the marketplace as it is about apple defending its own platform. The discussion is platform-centric.

Today Amazon's application on the iPhone sells books. Tomorrow it may sell music and maybe some day even applications (if I am to believe that jail breaking is now legal in the US).

Apple wants to the be "front platform". Any platform that sits in front (or "top" if you prefer) has the upper hand. Browsers sit on top of the operating system and Microsoft tried hard to dwarf browser growth as it threatened the OS itself. In fact, Java's ambitions were similar. Flash is just that. Adobe AIR has already made minor inroads. This is also in line with Jobs' decision to disallow Flash and Java. If Macromedia sold iPhone applications, iTunes would lose gravity.

The case here is a similar one. If vendors build their own stores through their application, iTunes will inevitably crumble. Apple is making a really long term bet that will without a doubt encounter a lot of resistance. But in the long term it wants to perfect the business model.

It will be a first if it works, but it's tricky. Platforms need to be open enough to allow others to build on top but Apple has developed a very unique platform. Unlike Flash or Windows or whatever else, Apple is the gatekeeper for the entire ecosystem. That means it can regulate the platform while others cannot.

Apple has been architecting it's platforms strategy for quite some time now. It is trying to build the perfectly sustainable platform. I am almost certain that they have secret discussions on "platforms architecture".

Exciting stuff.
the true.
Fair point, but the merits of the book banning system: are that it appears to be relatively difficult to implement or enforce, and that it's restricted to localities instead of a whole country.
In imagined ones by Java fan boys. ^_^

Repeat after me: java.exe is mere an ordinary user-level C++ program.
You haven't cracked root on your Android phone yet?
I've never seen this site before, some very /informative/ articles on there... I particularly liked this one;

http://founderdaily.com/2011/02/09/headhunter-struggles-to-f...
Which is sad really. Tcl is a nice language and the community is great.
You make the alternative pay? That's what the angry birds guys did.

But in the more general case, this is where it would have been great to have somebody with a business degree. Because they probably know the answer to your question.
HTML5 – Are We There Yet?
Your system is broken. Opening a new tab in IE8 takes well under a second on every machine I use, regardless of Windows version or even, within reason, age.
I see no public good served by an author being allowed to decide what other people do with their characters. Should Tolkien have the right to constrain what people imagine with his characters? The right to constrain what stories I tell my friend? Never mind physical possibility - if Tolkien had left a note saying that nobody was ever allowed to imagine Legolas/Eowyn, would you obey that note in the privacy of your imagination, because you thought it was his right?

IMO copyrights, like patents, should have a mandatory licensing rule - it should not be possible to say "you can't do that", only ever "I get a cut of the profits." (This wouldn't fix either system, which allow for copyright and patent of many things that just shouldn't be patented, but it'd be an incremental improvement.)
Yes, but it's too premature to think about it.

Even if API changes do happen popular plugins will either get patched to support both APIs or some parallel plugins will emerge.
>I haven't diagnosed the problems in detail. I'm just getting bored of waiting several seconds for my browser to start up, one slow-loading tab holding up all the others, horribly slow scrolling on pages with certain CSS styles applied (usually some sort of fixed background), and other obvious delays during routine use. Neither IE nor Chrome exhibits these problems, and Firefox never used to.

Ah, I think the disconnect is that this isn't the UI that's at fault it's the application. For me all the browsers work equally crummily and that appears mainly to be Flash's fault.

I didn't realise IE8 had independent tabs because I've only ever had the whole app go down. Similarly Chrome locks up for me as much as FF. FF does seem to have gotten a little slower up to FF3 but I think that FF4 is an improvement.
Does your post have anything to do with the subject of the article or the comment you're replying to (Microsoft banning GPL'd apps on its platforms), or was this just a convenient opportunity for a generic anti-GPL rant?

It seems unlikely that Microsoft's decision has anything to do with objecting to restrictive licenses, anyway, since proprietary apps are not being banned, not even proprietary apps with restrictive EULAs.
I just tried to download a 44mb podcast over 3G using iTunes on the iPhone, it told me it was above the 20mb over the air limit. I normally use the Podcaster app though, I just tested the same podcast and it downloaded on 3G without problems.
You can hire those pre-experienced in that from your vendors.

Just how loyal and committed are these folks one is poaching from vendors?
Pity for Nokia!
5 Years ago, I worked in Maemo (now Meego) platform for 1 year as a subcontractor. I was in charge of one application on the official Nokia 770 firmware. There was lots of fun but the device release was still months later then scheduled.

Nokia's been missing on the web. It doesn't have a real online product. Its browsers on different phones really do not work as I wished, they crash quite often. And this is a huge miss!

Nokia didn't create a software community that are inspired by something|someone. I get inspired by Apple stuff because I admire Steve Jobs. I would have developed Android apps because of Google search engine and lots of stories on how Google succeeded

My 2 cents
I wasn't referring to any third party developer ecosystem with the word "fans". They could involve their fanbase in more fundamental questions like openly asking "which path do you want us to take?".

No, I don't expect any company born in the 20th century (or before) to ever do that. But maybe they should.

> To say they sold "their soul to Microsoft" is unsupported by the facts.

And yet the things you mention are exactly what the soul of a technology company consists of. The nitty gritty OS, the vision of the future.

Of course there are many benefits in joining forces with Microsoft and no, Android is not necessarily a better choice. But the fact is that the software _is_ to a high degree the soul of the devices that Nokia sells.
"All we require is that, if a publisher is making a subscription offer outside of the app, the same (or better) offer be made inside the app" -- http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/02/15appstore.html

By this rule, all apps that offer subscriptions must additionally implement Apple's subscription mechanism.

This is what the OP (and everyone else) is reacting to.
Apple has suggested that if you offer subscriptions (or purchases) outside of your app that you need to do it inside your app. At the same price. Hence the whole drama over Kindle--the purchases are done on the Amazon website but Apple has stated they want 30%.
The reason is super simple: Google demanded that if you index content on a page, that content must be freely accessible. You can't index what you don't show. EE made the hack to the layout. It was not always like that. I remember searching google help for ways to block domains (ee) from their results. Apparently that was the only reason anyone wanted to block domains :P
Google Launches One Pass: Micropayment system for publishers
Is Ubuntu a fork of Debian or a polished package based on Debian? I ask because the Ubuntu update schedule is based around the Debian update schedule in such a way that new Ubuntu releases remain synchronized with new Debian releases.
Yes it's pretty simple. If enough people are committed to it, it will work. Which can only be driven by neccesity.

This might not be the case in western countries, right now, but once governments start to mess with communications infrastructure really badly (like happened in Egypt), people will use other, non-centralized ways to communciate.

Also, don't underestimate innovation, back in the 80's many people would think a global computer network that could be used by everyone, and is a big part of daily life, was a pipe dream.
That's not what is happening here. My company makes all of its money from subscription services that we sell directly to customers. Now if we provide a IOS app to access that content, we risk losing 30% of our revenue if the user happens to sign up via the app instead of via our website.

I'm not sure what "open alternative" you are referring to. My website -- built on "open" everything, other than the subscription cost -- is doing fine. I would like to provide a native IOS app to access that content. But I can't accept a 30% revenue cut.
> You are being pedantic and defensive about the politics statement.

I prefer accurate, but OK. You seem to be making a "slippery slope" argument, and I don't agree with it.

> Sure, you not have said it in those words, but it is impossible to come away from these comments (a huge percentage of which are yours) without the belief that you think IE9 is better (and perhaps I'm wrong for conflating "better" with "good")

I have been fairly careful about what I have said in this discussion, and I have clarified in very simple terms and I think more than once now that I am talking about the direction Microsoft is heading vs. the direction Google, Mozilla and co. are heading. I can't help it if people who don't like Microsoft or do like $ALTERNATIVE_BROWSER choose to reply to what they would like me to have said instead of what I actually wrote. :-(
Hitechpedia technology news: iPhone 5 Release Date
> Don't like the terms of an author's library? Go write your own then.

I really hate this attitude. Isn't one of the advantages of the Internet bringing developers together to work on things? Can't we put our collective capabilities toward improving things instead of rewriting them from scratch simply because they're not our favorite license or favorite language? Gnote springs to mind.

Edit: Wow, three downvotes within 30 seconds for appealing to working together instead of segregating computing into those who agree with your license and those who do not. This comment wasn't even about the GPL, it was about the OP's demonstrated attitude (and, importantly, not about the OP himself). If you're voting me down, at least man up and disagree with me with prose. It's things like this that make me wonder why I spend so much time contributing to HN.