skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But the GPL isn't really that long; the 2.0 is only 340 lines of 80 characters.

Is that all?!

Out of curiosity, what proportion of people who choose to licence their own code under the GPL do you think have actually read all of that and consulted a lawyer to make sure they understood the terms they were themselves proposing? I'm not even considering the equivalent question for the wider population of users and downstream developers affected by the licence terms yet.

"Freeware" doesn't include the right to modify and re-distribute. Yes, we were certainly worse off for it.

In what way? We didn't worry about offering others formal rights in those days. People shared source code if they thought they had something worth sharing, without making a big deal about it. Such code frequenty came with comments to the effect that you could use it however you liked but please give credit, or words to that general effect, which would have just as much validity in court as a modern MIT or BSD licence for example.

The differences between the three versions [GPL, LGPL, AGPL] are minimal - a clause or two more, nothing else.

Wow. That's a mighty bold claim, and one I don't think a lot of software developers would agree with. The changes in wording may only be a small part of a vast document, but the implications are profound.

It seems irrelevant 'till you get hit by a patent troll, like startups are already getting hit.

The correct solution to patent trolls is not to allow things like software patents in the first place. It's a controversial subject and there is far from consensus internationally or even within some national governments on whether software should be patentable at all.

In any case, I think you are imagining a legal shield that is not there. Patent trolls typically don't contribute to a FOSS project and then go after other people who use it. In fact, patent trolls typically don't contribute much of anything to any project, which is one of the reasons they are... not well thought of. If you're using someone else's code and you don't have some solid legal agreement that they indemnify you fully against all the related IP threats, you're not safe, and no FOSS licence provides such indemnification; many explicitly state precisely the opposite.

For that matter, you don't have any real protection in a troll-friendly legal system even if you never use anyone else's code at all and you write every line yourself. I don't think there's much argument in favour of GPL-esque legalese to be found here. My personal view is that some of the GPLv3 stuff is basically the FSF trying to conflate two unrelated IP issues and leverage the viral nature of the GPL to advance other parts of their agenda. Which is a pretty scummy thing to do, actually.
No, of course not. The reason VCs exist is because the expected return on investment is positive. But the reason the returns on those $250k investments is so high is because so few people have $250k to invest in something that only has, say, a 1% chance of returning 312x.
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You do realize that Dart is not just a new, from-scratch language aimed at solving all of our pain points with current PLs, right? Dart is a product of it's environment, which more than Google is the current web stack and web programmers.

Dart's number one constraint is that it compiles to fast JavaScript. Dart's number two constraint is that it's familiar to JavaScript/Java/C# programmers. Dart's reason for being is to solve problems that arise when trying to write large applications in JavaScript, and to solve those issues faster than TC39 is. Being innovative compared to Java and JavaScript is further down the list.

If you know those things, then you might understand some of the design decisions:

Nulls, and optional typing? That comes out of the first constraint. "Boring" syntax, from the second. Inheritance? Familiar to Java/C# programmers, not to mention that many people mess up prototypal inheritance and many others use incompatible class systems. Not allowing user-defined implementations of num and String? Efficiency.

Also, just because some innovative features aren't there now doesn't mean they won't arrive either soon or eventually. Method cascades are being implemented so every API can be fluent like jQuery. Mirrors are being implemented for reflection. Pattern matching, mixin, and non-nullable type proposals are circulating. The server and browser APIs and libraries seem to be converging as time moves on.

Dart's a fine language for what it's aimed at. It's a huge step up from JavaScript. If you actually try it, you might very well like it compared to your other options.
Startups rarely compete in the same markets. Take an Airline doing 10 billion in revenue that ends up as 250 million a year in profit. Suppose someone discovers an inefficiency say in how they adjust routing based on maintenance scheduling that could save them 1/10th of 1 percent of their operating expenses. Well 10,000 * 1/1000th = 10 million a year in savings based on some investment. Sure, you could try and outsource the whole thing to India, but when every month the system is not up and running they are out close to a million dollars speed becomes important.

Of course that's the upside, the there are a wold of risks and many companies burn millions chasing after penny's.
In the new design, controls are links instead of buttons. It's harder to find them, as they stand out less.

Also, I miss the use of colors to delineate between elements of a different kind. In the new version, they only use light and dark.
Christ, 78 mil for an app that shares pictures. I must be the only one thinking this is money which could be used more wisely developing better medical equipment and generally solving real engineering problems.
You make a good point. I agree that Instagram is a brilliant tool, and its creators should be rewarded. But my concern is the where and how the value of it is attributed. Is $78,000,000 a reasonable reflection of the value and risk of the original $250,000 investment?

I think it's a complex argument, that goes to the heart of how we value things in a capitalist society.
I'd love to see Microsoft respond to this!
Ask HN: Bootstrap Alternatives?
Twitter Bootstrap is an amazing resource for free baseline styles, interface components and interactions. Are there other companies out there who have released their own version of similar resource?
>I started a lengthy reply before realizing you're just going to continue to pick sentence by sentence, ignore the spirit of the discussion

Huh? Was there some overall spirit I missed, besides a general frustration with Apple's direction overall and the latest OS X?

To that frustration one cannot reply anything, because it's vague and subjective. But one can reply to its constituents, or "pick sentence by sentence".

I take a little offense to the accusation, because technical arguments are responded to "sentence by sentence" (i.e measurable issue by measurable issue), not with generic wand having. What could have I said about the overall theme of "Apple's direction"? One doesn't even know what it means until it is broken down into specific actions and problems.

>I'm confused as to what you're trying to win though.

How about nothing? I read some statement that Lion is resource hungry and slow, and I responded to the contrary. It's a technical question, not a competition. I also tried to make heads or tails of what this dissatisfaction with Apple's direction could entail --it seemed to revolve around this Lion is slow thing too.

>* The benchmarks you provide are useless because they're synthentic. No one runs one task at a time (well, unless you use the new fullscreen mode :-P). None of the benchmarks have anything to with the task of programming, which is what the original topic was about.*

I wouldn't call those benchmarks useless. How one app runs should be indicative of how many of them run, on successive versions of the OS. Except if Apple changed the Lion's scheduler so that despite one task at a time running the same or faster, when running many tasks the performance get worse. Well, with Darwin's code being available, I guess we can check this also. In any case, anecdotal evidence with no numbers is worse than a synthetic benchmark.

As for the "task of programing", when you program you normally run "one task at a time". Mainly XCode, or Vim/TextMate. And then, after you wrote some stuff, a compiler or interpreter. Other apps running, like a terminal, are of negligible impact. Isn't programming, 99% of the time, one of the LESS resource hungry operations?

I'm a programmer too --the heaviest thing I use is a VM, in which I test my code. Seems to go along just fine with 4GB (1GB allocated to the Centos VM).

>I'd imagine if you stay under the upper bound on load, the performance is roughly on par. But, I can make an 8 GB MBP start swapping like crazy in about 5 minutes.

Alright, can you share the process? That would be easy to reproduce, or not, on SL.
>Most people are not libertarian, and so they down vote comments that don't fit their ideology.

Libertarianism is an ideology too.

Wikipedia: "Libertarianism is generally considered to be the group of political philosophies which emphasize freedom, individual liberty, and voluntary association. Libertarianism is variously defined by sources. There is no general consensus among scholars on the precise definition nor on how one should use the term as a historical category. Libertarians generally advocate a society with little or no government power."

All of these beliefs reek ideology. You don't get a free pass saying "I'm for freedom". Not only because there are different kinds of freedoms, but also because any direction you pursue is full of assumptions of what society is and should be, what is the best for the individual and society, etc.

But the best sign that you are advocating an ideology, is if you are considering all other beliefs as ideologies and not yours. Like the above comment does.

Politics entails ideology. Presenting your view as some kind of empirical hard science is bullshit. And, as an aside, it's what the so-called "vulgar marxists" did.

(Not only Libertarianism is ideology, it's also mostly geographically and culturally constrained: it's first and foremost an American product).
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It used to be separate from audioscrobbler.com (the charting and recommendations service) and only did streaming 'radio' based on your AudioScrobbler account. I'm guessing that, they realised that while AudioScrobbler is an okay name, Last.fm is a better one (it's short, easy to remember and implies something to do with music/radio) and merged the websites.
I agree. It's quite sad that some of the best and brightest minds of our time are spending their days working to increase revenue per click of advertisements. We could achieve so much more if our focus shifted towards more meaningful endeavors.

I am, however, encouraged by the recent rise of impact entrepreneurship, where for-profit ventures tackle large societal problems. It's something we certainly need to see more of.
Interestingly, my immediate reaction was "well that's backwards" when I read this sentence: "Object-orientation is better for the higher levels of a system, and functional programming is better for the lower levels."

Then I realized that his argument makes lots of sense, so I reframed my thoughts on this.

My recent experience with Clojure has taught me that OO is very well suited for the few low level key abstractions, like Clojure's various reference types. Object orientation is great at maintaining an invariant, which is a key complexity management mechanism for dealing with mutation.

In a distributed system, you can view each node as a low-level mutable component of a bigger system. It's not the top of the entire system, it's the bottom of the communication and coordination system.
I believe most state universities are the same.

In other words, the difference between the athletics budget and the academic budget represents the priorities of Americans in general, not any specific group such as a universities administrators.
TL;DR: Please give us your FB credentials.
This post convinced me to contribute to the project.

I thought it was a great idea at first, but didn't contribute because of the odd kickstarter levels and my own faulty perception that the project was to create a fleshed out version of the initial demo.

Clearly stating that the priority is on your ideals was a great idea:

- You should never have to look for documentation
- Files are not the best representation of code, just a convenient serialization.
- Editors can be anywhere and show you anything - not just text.
- Trying is encouraged - changes produce instantaneous results
- We can shine some light on related bits of code
This is a pretty cynical and ridiculous view IMO. Why does it have to be some nefarious move on the part of Apple? Isn't a much more logical reason that iOS is attracting a lot of attention, and the vast majority of apps for any platform are bad or amateur?

Also, if the WP7 store is any indication it will be sparse and most apps will be of low quality. It's not a choice between vast and terrible and small and focused. iOS has plenty of great apps too.
Facebook's value (cash and stock) 'flowed' to Instagram's owners because Facebook thinks Instagram will be worth even more to Facebook's owners.

It's not like they bought a consumable that's used up, and thus can't buy other necessary consumables.

And a lot of that Facebook value only exists because the universe of owners (and potential owners) believe that Facebook will keep preserving and growing that value by doing these sorts of things.

If that same 'investment' could have had a better 'impact' for the Facebook owners elsewhere, they'd do it.

If you mean some other sort of 'impact', for the good of people other than the Facebook owners, then essentially, no, that investment value can't be alternatively deployed that way. The value exists because of the faith it will be used in self-propagating ways. The equity value would simply evaporate once the confidence in it is broken: it's not transferred anywhere, it just disappears.

And if you engineered a world where this sort of 'wrong' bonanza can't happen, by design, then the big stacks of value either on the Facebook side ($1B), or on the Instagram investors' side ($250K), would never have condensed in the first place. Their existence was conjured up from previous bonanzas, or the expectation of potential bonanzas. Eliminate the potential for such bonanzas and you don't free up value for impactful redeployment elsewhere: the value never even exists.
I believe GK Chesterton cadged this into something like "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly."
It would be difficult to overstate the impact Elon Musk has had, is having and will have on humanity

I can't count how many times I've seen this debate. I think last week there was a thread debating the triviality of web apps and similarly mentioned Musk.

Elon Musk may very well have developed a cat picture social network to gain the wealth required to fund his companies, but he instead worked on X.com/PayPal. Do you really believe Musk would be where he is today if he didn't gain considerable wealth from that venture? He'd likely be drawing rockets in a sketchbook while working as VP of Advertising at Google.

The Instagram founders are only wealthy enough at this point to have great credit, who knows what great investments they could make post-close?

I'm a fan of taking the simplest, reasonable route to wealth, then investing in something of greater importance, something that critics would agree improves humanity.
Tim Ferriss on how to build an app empire: Can You Create The Next Instagram?
SpaceX did not come from nothing. The science, technology and infrastructure that enabled SpaceX to exist was created by tax payer funded programs. I'm not saying he's not a great guy. I'm just saying he's standing on the shoulders of giants.

The taxes paid by people sending cat pictures funds the infrastructure that enables SpaceX to exist.
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I don't understand what "object/functional hybrid languages" means. Smalltalk-80 had functional features, built in to the core. So much so that there was no "if statement"; instead, you would pass a message to a boolean object with two functions, one for the iftrue case, and one for the iffalse case.
The something you refer to is actually two things: luck and technological leverage.
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When you say _linux_, it is so broad. You have choices. You choose Ubuntu / Fedora / Linux Mint / ArchLinux / Gentoo for laptops. You choose CentOS / Debian / Gentoo for (older) desktops and servers.

No one with a sane mind (or with enough Linux experience) would install CentOS on a shiny new laptop.
I'm assuming you're the author of the original post. My comment wasn't meant to invalidate your main argument, since it runs mostly orthogonal to the bulk of what you're saying. If anything, it actually supports it slightly (see below).

I understand what you meant by that example; I was just intrigued by seeing it in this context, and it reminded me of the related example that I brought up. And not to belabor the point with pedantry, but a tiny bit of rephrasing illustrates that your statement can be viewed as completely compatible with my latter definition:

> numbers chosen from a random uniform distribution function appear to be indistinguishable from numbers chosen from a Kolmogorov random function

From the looks of it, it appears that the Kolmogorov example is really just a special case of the distributional viewpoint, in which case your system of partitioning the universe of possible distributions revolves around the Kolmogorov criterion. (And while I made it seem like the partitioning is binary in my previous post, the principle can easily be generalized, so that's not a problem). And we may even be able to equate this statement with an alternate form based on the distributional difference between uniform and Kolmogorov.

I'm familiar with Kolmogorov, though not enough to be confident about this last hypothesis - I'll have to think about it some more.
Jews considered gentile a different species--you guys are retards. God was backing me up. God on the topic of racism said "sports". All psychologists know races vary in IQ.

God says...
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While it is officially advised, as many things in japan are, they are by no means mandatory. In japan you might just as well see a sign saying "don't go out in the rain, it's dangerous".

in japan, i've been to plenty of dark alleys during night time, visibly carrying cameras etc. and i've yet to be encounter anything bad. i think it is fairly safe to say, that japan is a LOT saver than most parts of the world.
Actually on advertising I will have to respectfully disagree. This may be controversial but:

My opinion is that Internet advertising has done an inordinate amount of good for the world.

Advertising has allowed the creation of amazing services that are free to use. Let's imagine a world where search or GMail might otherwise cost you $20/month (completely made up number) to use. You could afford that right? Even if you could you may not pay for it (people are remarkably fickle when it comes to paid services). That's not a lot of money.

But what about to the poor or those in developing countries to whom $20/month is a significant amount of money? They get the same service you do because of advertising.

Consider that the next time a text ad at the top of Google otherwise offends your (and I'm talking the general "you" rather than you specifically) aesthetic sensibilities.
> Object orientation is great at maintaining an invariant

i don't follow, can you say more?
This is a Google Chrome extension I wrote that automatically mutes Hulu videos if profanity is detected in the closed captioning...

The source code is at https://github.com/jacobwg/clean-hulu (mostly written in Coffeescript).

A bookmarklet version can be found at at http://tmfdb.org/.

I'd love to hear any feedback you might have - thanks.
Anyone trying to learn to work in LSOs, should read the Political Savvy book first: http://www.politicalsavvy.com/docs/book.html (ignore all the colour scheme and additional monetization junk, just borrow/buy the book itself)
Site is nice, except I don't see any way to get started. It says it is for "developers", but don't see any documentation, APIs or anything like that.
This studio is fictional, right?
This deal absolutely stinks. It sure seems like someone said, "Hey Facebook, you just got paid. Why don't you buy instagram for an amount of money that we made up so that my buddies and I can get even richer?" And they made 78 million dollars behind that.

1. If people can make up money, then it lowers the value of money for everyone.

2. If people can make up money, then it destroys any semblance of fairness in the system. Why are we working every day when some people can just invent tens of millions of dollars for themselves?

This isn't how markets are supposed to work. An asset isn't worth one billion dollars just because someone you know has a billion dollars to spend. The last thing I expected to see was a blog post bragging about it.
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The problem with the syntax isn't that it's weird. It's just ugly. Even Perl and C++ look nicer. It's the 1998-geocities-site-full-of-animated-gifs of programming languages.
Capital is just society's rough, imperfect proxy for wealth. Wealth is just things people want/ascribe value to. Wealth doesn't just flow, it can be created. Making new things that people want increases the wealth of the world. With software, wealth can be created extremely quickly. That is a good thing.
I agree wholeheartedly with your comments on SpaceX and Elon Musk. What I don't understand is how you're relating SpaceX to the Instagram acquisition.

"Yet we're using all this power and the brightest minds on the planet... to send cat pictures."

So you're suggesting we have a problem because intelligent people don't always find the "right" ways to contribute to society? I think you should be directing your anger at those who spend their time sending cat pictures, rather than those who enable millions of people to do so simultaneously.