skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reading the comments on that NYT article makes me wonder what's wrong with humanity. It's like visiting Reddit - nothing but whinging and jealousy.

I know a couple of the people mentioned in that article, and they certainly haven't gotten a free pass because of their family backgrounds - they have the same problems executing on their ideas and building a business as the rest of us.
have you every made an exception when a startup came very well recommended by YC alumni, other YC partners or colleagues in the market you respect very much? Or if the startup had the right hockey stick growth curve?
No linux version? gosh!!!
Fiona is not for realism. Emmy Rossum
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Obat diabetes melitus alami xamthone plus terbuat dari ekstrak kulit manggis, di produksi dengan melibatkan para ahli di bidang bioteknologi, buah-buahan tropis dan nutrisi dan di ramu berdasarkan standar kualitas yang telah di tentukan
You do understand how there are people who would disagree with your characterization, and thus the more neutral term 'copyleft' is the most… let's call it politically-safe term to use. Let's not even touch lumping the copyleft licenses with non-commercial-only licenses.

The gradation of rights and privileges goes farther than "Public Domain, Sort of Public Domain, Restrictive".

The best way is to just have a dropdown that lists the name of the license.
Teaching and Coding
"What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody? What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself."

Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Maybe something like this:

https://vimeo.com/8569187

A less cynical version:

https://vimeo.com/14294054
Yes, all you have to do is hire more lawyers than Apple/IBM/Microsoft or whoever.

Go to court in East Texas and persuade a jury that a bunch of damn Yankee judges up there in Washington know better than an honest American corporation.
Not necessarily. There are an unlimited number of algorithms available to implement any particular concept so people are always looking for faster, more efficient algorithms for implementing the same mathematical concept.

However, the marginal value of doing the R&D to find additional algorithms diminishes as more are described even if they all are patented. This is not a side effect of patents per se but a side effect of how algorithm research works.

Companies often spend millions of dollars on the computer science R&D required to generate a new algorithm so there is a return on investment calculation. For the R&D to be worthwhile, they either need to produce an equivalent new algorithm for less money than licensing it or believe that they can find a materially better algorithm than the current licensable algorithms such that they have a market advantage. It is very similar to chemical process R&D.
I'm usually in favour of modified BSD or a similar permissive license; but whenever I read someone who is bitching about the GPL because it is too restrictive (i.e. it forces them to give back as they were given,) I consider only adhering to the GPL in the future.
I hadn't considered that. I guess Google could be planning to license their "Android-for-glasses" to OEMs. Then Apple can easily step in and make a unified user experience/hardware platform that will out-do Google's ;)
Site does not render without JS enabled. At all. You get a flat white page. Enabling JS lets it render, but also scrolls crippling slowly. If I could downvote right now I would.

But it gets worse.

Nothing in here is about graph theory. It is a massive over complication. He is just trying to resize to a new aspect ratio by cropping the least amount. While dragging in calculus? This is really very simple and common. Imagemagick even has a dedicated option for it:

-resize <size>^ -gravity center -extent <size>

That caret does all the heavy lifting. (see http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/resize/#fill for more)

To add insult to injury, he then uses Imagemagick to do the resize! The article is misleading, poorly written and hosted on a horrible platform to boot.
Google Refine + Flickr to enhance data - National Library of Ireland
Where do we go from here?
Blogs, laziness and THE FUTURE: good post by @hmans.
Take your business elsewhere is step 1. Your information/service is not guaranteed if they aren't willing to protect it.
I can't include code under GPL in my own code without changing my own code to GPL. That's why it ruins my day.
You know, if I ever quit Google and joined Microsoft, I still wouldn't write crap like this, even if my boss tried to force me.

Although, maybe if I quit Microsoft, and then joined Google, and then quit Google, and re-joined Microsoft I would. :)

Is it a job requirement for Microsoft that you have to write cheesy bash posts against Google?

So, what, Siri doesn't do search, even though you have to ask it to find stuff for you in Apple's commercials?

And somehow, by magically watching my search history, it will eliminate the need for me to search for a plumber?

And please, the idea that Google is trying to maximize the number of failed searches to display ads (no way, no how) or that Google is not researching ideas for guessing what you want before you search (something they've been saying for years in public about the ideal search engine) would be something Whittaker knows having worked at Google.

Did his boss at Google kick his cat or something?
I don't understand why are you being downvoted, as GPL does actually impose some restrictions in comparison to BSD/MIT.

These restrictions may be for copyleft, for benefit of end users, pro bono, for whatever else, but there are restrictions, and the term "restrictive open source" captures the essense of this license.

Also, these restrictions won't disappear no matter how low your (or mine) comment is downvoted here on HN.
Curious why that would be?
MePlus2 is a resource for PHP clone scripts, only at 19.95$
Before the Internet: The golden age of online services
Very much so. I like the idea but the author's snarky remarks are really off putting.
tl;dr: the author dislikes the copyleft nature of the GPL, and shoehorns his dislike into what could be a useful feature request.
If they can build iPhones in Brazil, why can't they build iPads in the US?

That it's not cost effective to do so now doesn't mean that this will always be the case. The US has high import taxes on lots of stuff, if they raised them on electronics we would have US made iPads in a flash (not that I'm saying this is the right approach).

I think Apple's "tell us all the details about your cost structure and we'll talk business" approach to their suppliers combined with their enormous cash reserve and history of pre-paying for parts (and even factories) should enable them to make their devices pretty much anywhere.
Startup Idea: A Search Engine For Recent News
Apart from privacy policy bullshit, if google can save my searches and behavior securely and show me when I need it, it will definitely save me couple of hours a week.
Spinnakr Takes #1 Place at Data 2.0 Competition
Many people don't know what "copyleft" is, so "restrictive" makes more sense.

I could see that holding true among the general population, but among developers? What developer who's going to be browsing Github doesn't know what copyleft means?

There are more restrictions.

Yes and no. Even licenses like the Apache License do impose restrictions of sorts, and the whole "permissive" vs "restrictive" thing is hardly a binary proposition. It's a continuum... and that's not even considering that saying "restrictive" raise the issue of "restrictive for who?" Yes, arguably the GPL is more restrictive in terms of how a developer can interact with GPL'd code, but from an end-user perspective the GPL is "more free" in a sense.

All of that said, I get the point behind a simple binary "restrictive/permissive" flag, and I think most people would intuitively grok the general sense of it. I'm not opposed to it, but I think we could do better.

Hmmm... that raises an interesting point... does Github have any sort of notion of explicit support for DOAP[1] files? Encouraging people to use DOAP files might be a better answer anyway.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Description_of_a_Project
He needs to lighten up! All day long I stare at screens solving problems. A beer often serves as a great way to relax and de-stress. His abhorrence of alcohol is perfectly within his rights, but he shouldn't act self righteous and judge others. The post reads almost like a temperance movement column from 1917 and is equally ridiculous.

There's also a big difference between a beer in the company fridge (like Pivotal, ZocDoc, iCouch, DPL, etc,) and doing keg stands next to the pairing stations. The absolutism of the blog was my biggest complaint. Moderation has a place between the extreme of binge lunacy and strict teetotaling.
Quantum Computer Built Inside A Diamond
Thank you for that. Now I understand sort of. I didn't think my comment was any less than a few others. But the way you put it makes me figure that several of the other comments that didn't add any thing were also voted down. But anyway... thanks for not just being a... oh wait... I've said too much already... I should just up vote your comment in silence. :)
I'm not sure this a correct explanation: if this is correct then Foxconn would never starting making iPads in Brazil (http://www.webpronews.com/foxconns-brazilian-ipad-factory-to...).
From Apple, Mac OS 9: How to Check For Viruses:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=50569
Only if you are distributing the combined work and not giving the source code along with it. Preventing that is the whole point of GPL.
I love the article up until the lame political statement at the end.

GM / Chrysler bankruptcy != Business disappears and all suppliers go bankrupt. This is the straw-man argument of the left.

The American auto bailout was a purely political play to save the unions who supported the Democrats. With billions in hard assets and a huge intellectual property base, the auto companies would have made great investments to potential buyers. Does anyone actually believe that no one would even attempt to pick up the pieces of the auto industry, sans-unions, and try to come out ahead?

If you agree with the media/government spin, then you believe that the auto companies would have fired all employees, sold all of the manufacturing equipment and plants, and closed shop forever.

The reality is that the company could have used existing bankruptcy law to get rid of some of the union/pension overhead and return to profitability. This is exactly what American Airlines is doing right now. Only in the extreme case would they even need to sell the company.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how is this a danger of SOAP? You could misconfigure any endpoint.
Software Engineering at Prismatic
Pretty good article. I'm a technical founder who is working with a "not-so-technical but getting more and more comfortable" founder and I've found a couple things to be useful:

0 - Speak in dead simple terms at first. Once they understand what you're talking about, feel free to get more detailed. This is key when you're pitching your product to other companies too!

1 - White board everything. Drawing diagrams and visualizing flow makes things much easier for me to explain to him, and for him to understand. When he comes up with an idea, and I break it out step by step it definitely makes him appreciate what's going on. We just released an api https://github.com/goodkarma/gk-api and because I had drawn out all the steps, he already understood the whole process and was able to pitch the technical details to developers the day I finished. I thought that was very impressive.

2 - Explain the different components of the system to them. Not too in depth, but talk about how web proxies work, the underlying web app, the notion of templating engines, the code structure and organization, queues and workers, apis you use, and cron processes. They don't need to see all the implementation but it gives them a huge appreciation for the complexity of the underlying system and when they come to you with ideas, they will have some sense of how it can be accomplished. They may be off at first but they get much better when you provide them with what they need.

3 - When you run into a problem, accomplish something interesting, or do something that you believed to be outside of your core competencies, let them know, and explain what you did. Even if it's something simple, they will generally appreciate it.

4 - Don't get wrapped up or annoyed with them getting too far ahead of themselves. A lot of the time you will be working on solving a current problem, and they will be thinking of other things to do in the future (Not that you aren't doing that too). Either hear them out, or ask them to table it until you finish what you're doing. For me it's not ideal if they do it in the middle of a super productive hacking session, so I often have to tell him, "not now, this needs to get done first".

5 - When you aren't in hacking mode you should hang out and talk. Little bursts of banter often turn into disruptive ideas. The number of cool tweaks and iterations that have come out of seemingly random conversations is surprising.

6 - Bond over things that aren't directly related to your company. Right now, our thing is "Drake and/or Lil' Wayne lyrics" because they are about hustling all the time.

Communication.
Rackspace Startup Program Spotlight On Wavo.me: Linking Friends & Music Online
Sourceforge and Google Code have had these license options available to show on project pages forever. I think it'll be fine.
This seems incredibly out of touch with reality. I can buy that there's a better model out there than search, but what is that model? Until the author can give me something better, search is still the best model for this, even if we accept the author's problems with search.
The problem is that these are all jobs that require a few years of training, which the US system isn't very well set up for.

Automation is also making the skill/demand curve look more step-like I believe, where your value stays near zero up until you cross the "better than a machine could do" threshold, instead of scaling in some more smooth way. That makes it harder to get training on the job by just taking low-end jobs and moving up.

From what I've read about welding (e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/business/24jobs.html?pagew...), highly skilled, experienced welders are very much in demand. But, since low-end welds can be done by machines nowadays, there's much less demand for a welder with <10 yrs experience than there used to be. Consequently, there's no obvious path to get that first 10 years of experience.
The (Ice) Cube Ontology
Clojure Programming Book from Oreilly now available on Kindle
I'm not so sure about the energy side, we've got a number of folks who are making real progress in both solar efficiency and energy storage. We have new nuclear processes that were once derided (cold fusion) being quite durable (while most folks don't have a good explanation about what is happening, more and more of the community is convinced that something we don't know about is happening at these low energy levels) We are getting hints of some of superconductivity's secrets which has the potential to eliminate distance constraints on energy transport, and we know how to build nuclear plants that are walk away safe and can consume their own waste leaving behind some easily manageable and easily containable waste products.
I think they are just trying to influence the spin right now. Try to give the less imaginative (or too imaginative) journalists something to write.

The "firestorm of interest" can wait until they actually have a product.
10 Startups to Bet Your Career On
Chuck Moore on push-down stacks
I knew a guy back in college we called "6-8" because he was 6'8" and we weren't terribly creative. He lofted his bed, but found that he couldn't sit comfortably under it... so he put a winch on it.

When the project was finished, every single member of our chapter could stand underneath his winched to the ceiling bed, except for 6-8, who was two inches too tall.

Eventually, he dropped out of the engineering program and went for a business degree. When we went into the attic one day and saw his winch was attached to a hole drilled into a diagonal roof support beam, we remembered why you shouldn't let non-engineers build housing enhancements...
I left a PhD program a few years back (technically graduated, but I don't think of it that way). A year or so before I did, I remember very clearly being out to drinks with my professor and fellow students, and mentioning that I had no intention to continue a career in academia. In fact at the time I was thinking of translation (I've since drifted to web development, but languages and translation are still central to much of what I do).

The response (in Japanese, but I'll translate) was "what a waste" ("mottainai"). What a waste. All that potential I had, and now I was just going to waste it on "work", like everyone else. No doubt my supervisor, who said it with a genuinely disappointed look (echoed with a nod by a fellow student and friend sitting beside me, which only made it worse) meant it in a positive sense, but I never forgave him for it. It stuck with me, somewhere very deep inside me, first as something confusing and distressing, then as a kind of symbol, something emblematic of everything that is wrong with academia.

To anyone who is hesitating: if your only reason for staying in academia is the fear of what will happen if you leave, then it is time to leave.
Oh dear me looks like the OP desnt get out much if he think programmers drink a lot he shold hang out out with Civil engineers or Squaddies or goto a Political conference where you know your feeling your age when you can't stay in the bar till 4 go back to you room write three speaches and win your motions.
What you're saying is awfully short-sighted. Technology is here to enable a better life for us - make things easier for us. What's so wrong about having software tell you the exact route you need to take?
Well, for really old money the money comes from land and the land came by stealing it by force of arms from whoever had it before.
I wasn't ranting at all. And certainly not the first time. I asked a simple question. Then a follow up question for clarity. And rather than help me to understand... people just kept down voting in silence. But now I know. Be brilliant or be silent. Got it. And I do care about Karma a little because that is the only way I will be able to go around down voting in silence like a coward. ;) j/k
As a friend reminded me, if Google is lying about trying to minimize searches, then 1) Why Google Instant and 2) Why "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.

If Microsoft wants to convince people they have better tools than Google, there's more classy and informative ways of going about it.
From the article:

"As demand for developers increases, developer salaries will shoot through the roof. Remember, it will be easier than ever for startups to raise money, so they’ll spend a lot more of it on tech talent. I can see salaries for lead developers climbing upwards of $300k a year (in many cases they’re already getting $150k-$200k)."

Hey, why is that a bad thing???
Move on, work on something new.

I recommend two shots of wheatgrass and a smoothie.
Robot band performs "Come Together"
I can't wait for the day I can scoop some of this sand into a lunchbox, shake it up, and then reach in and pull out a fully formed mechanical part
Red herring. Brazil has some massive import duties, and cut a special deal with Foxconn for local manufacturing. The economic analysis is severely thrown off.
If we're playing line-count-golf, how 'bout in "about 50 lines" of F#? :) http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ashleyf/archive/2012/04/04/notch-is-...
It is indeed the whole point of the GPL. It also makes it impossible to use GPL code in a wide variety of situations. OP was asking what the problem was with the GPL, and that's what it is.
1. This only kicks in if you're distributing the program. If you're building a web service, you're good to go. It's only an issue if you're using the Affero GPL.

2. You're using free code off the internet. If you don't like the license terms, don't use it. It's within the author's prerogative to set his or her own license to his or her own code.

(The most you can do is send them a politely worded email on how you want to use their code without being obliged to the virality clause - I imagine a lot of people would be okay with moving down to the LGPL at least. If not… deal with it.)
The new tech landscape
How do you take breaks? Try singles Bughouse
Siri is nothing like in the video, either. But saying "is nothing like" is exaggerated anyway. I'm sure it's not 10x worse in reality, but pretty close.
I would love this, but there are at least a thousand open source licenses. Even if you limit it to licenses that have at least 1% adoption rates, you still have at least 40 (there are more, i just stopped counting).

My personal take would be to limit it to: 1. licenses that are certified by the OSI, and 2. licenses listed as "GPL compatible" by the FSF, assuming that (2) isn't just a subset of (1) anyway.

That would include by far the majority of popular and widely used licenses. Maybe have an "Other" field for anything else?
I absolutely agree with you! But "note why someone doesn't want to go to conferences any more" is not what this essay did. He systematically painted everyone involved as a bastard, simply because they like doing something he doesn't. He didn't even give any examples of people pressuring him to drink or treating him weirdly for not drinking… probably because there weren't any.

There's a huge gulf between "This turns me off, here's why" and quoting your wife, who is not involved in the situation, calling programmers terrible, as bad as bankers, based on your completely editorialized and unfounded comments about programmers who said something positive about drinking.
I agree. This could happen in any web service, SOAP or otherwise, that pushes back the endpoint URLs as part of a capability discovery mechanism.
where is the f dislike button ?
It is like volunteering to help someone and then just being glad they didn't beat you up in the end.

I didn't publish the hyperthreading vulnerability to help Intel. I published it to help Intel's customers.
Slightly offtopic question: I re-read Odysseus a couple of weeks ago and was wondering about the name Telemachos. My rudimentary knowledge of etymology tells me that he's a "far away man". Given your username and the fact that you have a PhD in classics: what's your opinion of how the name/etymology of the character relates to the role that Telemachos plays in the epic?

Obviously he's far away when Odysseus is out and about, but he's quite present in the beginning and end. It seems like there's more to it than that.

(For those who don't remember / haven't read it, Telemachos is the only son of Odysseus in the epic. He's pretty much a younger copy of Odysseus.)
Seriously? Learn web development?
No one hires PhDs for web development skills. It is only useful if you want to be a pure software developer, not a quant or a data scientist. It might even be a negative when applying for some jobs.
I thought about that a lot before my last laptop upgrade. If I hadn't been buying a new laptop, I would have done it; but with a new laptop at play, I decided a MacBook Air would have roughly the same weight and far better ergonomics than an iPad with a keyboard.