skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IANAL

I read that you can't distribute code that has no license.

Why can't you do that?

Because copyright law says so - it reserves the right to copy to the author.

Will someone punish you for that if author won't sue anybody?

I believe depends on whether you fall under a criminal or civil violation. http://www.chillingeffects.org/copyright/faq.cgi#QID885

Will his descendants inherit the right to sue distributor?

Yes, it's pretty common for estates (of which the descendants are usually the executors) to sue distributors.
That's why Google Translate is so good. They have tons and tons of data from all the websites they parse, and in many cases the content can be obtained in different languages. … Also for example all documents that the European Parliament produces are translated into the languages of all member states.

This can backfire. I remember hearing that sometimes/back in the day "Baile Átha Cliath" (the Irish for "Dublin", the capital city of Ireland) would sometimes get translated as "London" the capital of the UK. This is due to Google Translate trying to match up Laws in Ireland (in the Irish language) with UK laws (which would be very similar or potentially based on the same original law). However in the Irish law "Baile Átha Cliath" would be replaced with "London".

Here's an example of it: http://translate.google.com/#ga/en/L%C3%A1%20alainn%20inniu%...
Google TV brings music and movies to Europe on November 13th
A key activity in bioinformatics is developing software tools for analyzing and interpreting data. If you have no knowledge of biology, you could still work as as soft engg. in this field.

If you are willing to learn basic molecular biology (structure of DNA, central dogma, etc.), you can get a job as a bioinformatician, bioinformatics analyst, bioinformatics engg, etc. where you could be analyzing biomedical datasets.
Won't this run the risk of causing out of control inflation?
Sometimes I find the cognitive dissonance in the software community to be as entertaining to watch as that in various religious sects...

Software types are famously inclined toward libertarian views. An oft repeated mantra on HN is "let the market decide". Yet, here we have myriad complaints about a decision the market has made.

What I particularly love about the Open Source/Free Software world is that it is a market in the truest sense. Barriers to entry are extremely low and, while there aren't necessarily dollars to throw around, consumers vote with their time and attention, both quantities arguably more valuable than currency. It is interesting to watch this market choose benevolent dictatorship models of governance over more democratic rule. It is intriguing to see reinvented wheels succeed for seemingly inconsequential reasons.

And, in this case, it is rather informative to observe how expediency wins out, even to the potential detriment of the very consumers who have made this choice. Reimplementing the code in question would require work. Clarifying or requesting a change of licensing terms would require work. Instead, the "market" (many, many OSS projects in this case) has chosen the preexisting solution that contains a potential time bomb.

If I didn't know any better, I'd almost say that this article is a veiled call for regulation. It's almost as if the market, left to its own devices, doesn't always make the best long-term decisions when short-term benefit weighs in opposition.

The world of Open Source/Free Software really is fascinating to watch...
On the one hand yes. On the other hand, many people seem to ignore (I'm pretty sure, it's not acceptance) such surveillance behavior if the product is sexy enough. See what happens with smartphones and their apps right now.
This is wrong, see http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/News/2012/20121...

- Most of GNOME fits onto CD#1 again (network-less installation).
- LXDE and Xfce now live on separate images.
In America, the TV watches YOU.

It's another absurd attempt of the publishers to control everything and everyone. Unfortunately, this is technically cheap now. But as I talked to a publisher recently, it's increasingly more difficult to regulate all the copyrights of anything anyone wants to publish. They dig make a trap only to end in it themselves. As publishing any content becomes too hard, publishers themselves will switch to alternatives. I think it's a good opportunity for CC and PD content to expand and become mainstream.
SPORTSFRIENDS featuring Johann Sebastian Joust - innovative game
I was specifically thinking about Communism when I wrote that.
Thanks.

I'm more than happy to speak at people's events on the following conditions:

1. I have something to say. I never give the same talk twice so I usually need quite a lot of warning so that I have time to come up with something original.

2. It's convenient for me to get there.

3. The talk is videoed and made public. Since I'm not being paid my pay is publicity.
Happy to see that a big site is finally starting to support WebM. I hope that they've chosen to not support h264, because of its proprietary nature?
I wouldn't bet on it in the long run though, the way they are murdering through features.
If you change it so that what feels "natural" to you is not what feels "natural" to everyone else, then you are in for a world of hurt when you find that all the resources you were relying on are no longer presented in a way that you're compatible enough to access.
I think you miss the point. Systemically, exiting high school and entering college is the narrative. It is the path students are being presented as the way forward, not an option forward. Culturally, there is a very strong set of expectations placed on people wrt university education, and this narrative determines people's recognized option paths. There are strong social determinants in place, both positive and negative, to which people react and from which they draw their conclusions--even unknowingly.

Student debt has risen in tandem with the codification of the narrative. An entire industry of loan operations has exploited the inexperienced eighteen-year-olds of the last few decades, saddling them with lifelong debt in the pursuit of the supposed "dream" the American narrative has been selling them their whole lives.

Suffice to say, when one talks about options available to people, one should talk deeply of the real viability and potentiality of those options on a person and his/her life, and refrain from rattling off platitudes of the things someone could do other than follow the narrative. Those things typically aren't qualitatively better, and usually wind up being part of the greater narrative as how we ease our consciences and wash our hands of people we allow to systemically fail.
That's the thing. The GNOME project understands itself more as an OS than just as a "window manager".

Most (not all, but most) of the hate against GNOME 3 is not against GNOME, but against gnome-shell and gnome-control-center. These are just a few (though essential) pieces of the GNOME desktop. If you don't like the shell you can still use GNOME's apps from another WM (Xmonad, sawfish, KWin) or even from another DE (like Xfce).
Your example misses the mark as "silly" can be explained in German and Gemütlichkeit can be explained in English.

Language structures our thoughts. It is claimed that Chinese are better at math because of their language structure. How you express things in a different language will help you more clearly see the concept in your own language. I learned more about English by learning German than I did in all my schooling. It improved my spelling as well because it made me understand the words I was using better.
Listen, the clause is so ridiculously vague as to be unenforcable.

However, there is one way of looking at it that might not be legally objectionable. If you consider evil to be contrary to the good functioning of a civil society, then you could say that any act of evil is against the laws if this society. In which case the clause is legally enforceable, but completely unnecessary as no contract can stipulate a party undertake an illegal act.
Real estate speculators who made highly leveraged bets that went bad are in fact the sort of people who should, perhaps, not get the opportunity to repeat their mistakes.
Behind the tech that makes vinyl so special
Eight years since 1.0, though its history dates back a lot further.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Firefox
Actually, when considering things like climate change, these small contributions are important, because they don't sit on their own. Most plans for significant carbon emission reductions that don't significantly change our standard of living rely on aggregating the savings made by many many "micro" reductions in production/consumption like this.
We do!

Computer History Museum http://www.computerhistory.org/ runs Software Preservation Group http://www.softwarepreservation.org/

Software Preservation Group already collected some impressive archives.
Objective-C in The Cloud
Right, but that's not the fault of the original author. He licensed his code a particular way, and everyone else has the choice to either use it or not. I don't like the attitude of blaming him simply because lots of other people came to depend on it without realising that it's less free than some of them might have liked.
This is wrong, see http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/News/2012/20121....

- Most of GNOME fits onto CD#1 again (network-less installation).
- LXDE and Xfce now live on separate images.

GNOME was removed from CD1 due to space reasons, but this was only temporarily (they've meanwhile fixed the space issues). That GNOME didn't fit onto CD1 anymore and that Xfce would be the future was big in the news. That this change was reverted some weeks later, and no Xfce isn't even on the first CD, didn't make the news though. Guess that's not as interesting as GNOME-hate.
Can't believe it's been this long since I ditched Opera and started using Firefox as my main browser.
Today is the anniversary of the settled identity crisis that once was. Firefox has served me great for years though and now I can't imagine calling it anything else.
Current dynamism of tech startups could lead to a potentially exploding bubble?
Yeah. That's right downvoter, OS X and Rails are for casual users. Sir, you are quite wrong.
Detected a malware that steal image files via FTP … Should we be concerned?
Hi John, is there any way you can provide subtitles (in english) on this talk? or a transcript? English is not my native language so it's kinda hard to understand everything you say
Staff emails are not owned by firms, UK judge rules
Funnily enough, Apple seems to be OK with this license, as it's shown on all iOS devices inside that long list of acknowledgments/legal inside settings somewhere.
A wild bottom-up approach to Instagram Analytics [sfw]
"Truth" about Booking.com
i fear the same will happen as with the stagnation or even decline since the late nineties of vertical (and horizontal oc) screen resolution : due to advancements made in other fields of technology (mobile-soon-to-be-desktop-as-well ARM cpu), regular desktop cpu's performance stagnates and/or deteriorates and technological advancement is artificially slowed.

i wish the hd-screen "revolution" never happened, i hope the ARM desktop-cpu-"revolution" will not happen for the same reasons.
On the other hand, pausing a film/game automatically when you leave the room would be a nice feature, if configurable and overrideable.
An IP-over-Gmail tunnel, anyone?
Isn't bioinformatics like biology in that the minimum qualification to be more than someone else's staff/glorified lab tech is a Ph.D.?
Imagine that: we changed the way we store bottles just so that all the ketchup would all come out. Its a simple solution that works, but I think I would still prefer the slippery coating though.
Thanks. This bot is using a old wordpress hack. How can this kind of thing be stopped? I dont mean stopping it after it happens, I mean getting the bot down, maybe like DDOS it or something.
Congratulations to you both! It's a wonderful journey.

As a completely unscientific experiment I just did some colour searches on Google Images. Pink and blue images make up 65% of the results for the word 'baby'. As you've probably already discovered, a trip down to your local baby shop doesn't offer a huge variation from this in terms of baby clothes.
Show HN: Heroku Mobile - web app to monitor and maintain your Heroku account
Listen, the clause is so ridiculously vague as to be unenforcable.

You hope.

If you consider evil to be contrary to the good functioning of a civil society, then you could say that any act of evil is against the laws if this society. In which case the clause is legally enforceable, but completely unnecessary as no contract can stipulate a party undertake an illegal act.

Which countries laws are we dealing with here? :P

e.g. I believe lots of US employee laws would be very illegal in EU.
He complains about the license not being DFSG-compatible, which is different. The DSFG are a set of very simple rules to decide if some piece of software is eligible for inclusion in Debian.
If I had time I'd listen to what I said and write it down for you.
I remember being at uni (UWE Bristol), downloading the zip and exporting to program files. My mates thought I was crazy until they saw tabbed browsing...wow!
I think you're missing the larger picture here. If someone like IBM or Apple, or Google were to accidentally use a license like this (which is otherwise free) they could waste millions defending it in court due to some lawsuit. How would that look for Free Software? Probably even worse! "Google sued for using Free Software" -- Headline on the NY Times.
How Special Forces Mental Training Can Be Applied To Entrepreneurship
Will you use Windows 8?
You might as well say that Douglas Crockford is not morally obligated to be nice. Yes, I suppose he is entitled to behaving in ways that are harmful to Free Software, but we are also entitled to criticize him for that. The post criticizes both the license and Crockford's use of the license, focusing on the latter because licenses, like guns, are not harfmul in themselves.

You might argue that Crockford's contributions to Free Software outweigh the nuisance of his license, but to people who won't use his code because of the license (as you propose they do if they don't like it), his contributions are, sadly, rather worthless.

As for your last point, sure, Richard Stallman is arguably harmful to the Free Non-Copyleft Software movement, if such a thing exists. Is that a bad thing? I don't think there is a consensus in the Free Software community. Some OpenBSD folks certainly hate it...
> I suspect the reason he dislikes it, as many seem to, is that it's potentially legally unstable as Microsoft own IP related to C# and .net.

This has been on the horizon ever since Mono's inception. This is what wikipedia has to say:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)#Mono_and_Micros...

On July 6, 2009, Microsoft announced that it was placing their ECMA 334 and ECMA 335 specifications under their Community Promise pledging that they would not assert their patents against anyone implementing, distributing, or using alternative implementations of .NET.[79] However, their position regarding the non-ECMA components like ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and Windows Forms (which are the bone of contention) remains unclarified.

There are concerns regarding MS community promise, and of course about the components which remain unclarified. If it ever goes to court, it will be a battle similar to Google vs Oracle over Java. MS might create trouble, but when that happens, that isn't going to be easy.

Even considering that, how is Mono intrinsically evil? When MS sues, hindsight will say Mono team was misguided and naive to trust MS, but that still doesn't make mono evil.
Contrary to popular belief, neither ego nor testosterone are absent from women.
I like firefox a lot, it's the browser I use almost all of the time.

I really like the way firefox allows me to sync bookmarks across devices.

I really like the fireftp add on.

I don't like the way firefox makes me wait sometimes while it updates.

It's really hard to figure out some things.

One time I accidentally forgot to press the tab key after entering my username on log-in and entered my password in the username box (in plaintext). It took ages (even after googling) to figure out how to stop firefox offering my username+password
as a log-in suggestion
>> It might make more sense for the driver to allow local configuration, and then sync that to the cloud

I still think that's a terrible idea. Imagine scaling it: every device you have gets a separate account for syncing its settings to a separate site.

If I wanted the drivers I've installed on my OS to be backed up, I'd want the OS to take care of it.
Note that the complaint is not about not being able to rewrite the code. It's done by a Debian maintainer of a piece of software that depends in weirdly-licensed code; and there are many of them. While sometimes Debian packages are modified to remove files that are not eligible for redistribution, in this case the maintainers would have to rewrite larger parts to make them DFSG-compatible.

This only leads to more fragmentation and bad relations between Debian and upstream.
All Xfce needs now, is a compositing manager with sync to vblank support to fix those nasty Nvidia tearing issues. Unfortunately the Xfce developers seem to be ignoring this.
I wonder if food companies will embrace a bottle that ends up decreasing the number of bottles of ketchup consumers need to buy? I suppose if one company adopted the bottle then it would give them an advantage in the marketplace over their competition and possibly increase sales, but if everyone adopts the bottle then the whole industry loses (assuming prices don't change). Prisoner's dilemma!
wouldn't they be referring to http://opensource.org/osd ?
Related to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4762230
Still is where I live in one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

Ironically, with BPA, the only container you know does not have traces of it is a glass container.

Not even that might be safe anymore. No wonder kids reach puberty earlier and earlier.
Although this happened during Apollo 12, I love stories [1] like John Aaron's [2] "SCE to AUX". It is a story of how one critical piece of knowledge in a clutch moment can turn failure into success.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWQIryll8y8

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Aaron
Right, but I don't see "my email" associated with my HN account. That is the problem my friend.
Building a big tent for teaching the web
Otherwise it'd be pretty interesting if you could buy your own debt at a huge discount.
So I guess the projects led by developers that are kind and helpful to a fault, of which there are quite a few in my experience, must have all the women contributers funnelled to them. I haven't seen that that's the case so I'm not so sure about your theory.
So what will people running GNOME in VMware see? GNOME failed to launch?
You hope

Actually, I don't really care either way. If it becomes legally enforcable not to commit evil, I win. If it isn't legally enforcable, then I still win, only to a much lesser degree. By which I mean I lose through winning.

Which countries laws are we dealing with here? :P

e.g. I believe lots of US employee laws would be very illegal in EU.

You merely illustrate my point. Too vague to be enforcable.
Please could you provide more information? What problems are you seeing, what platform are you using?

Why would flash work?
I really hope this doesn't get down-voted because it's a little promotional, but I posted a video interview with Mozilla's chairwomen Mitchell Baker today, she said some interesting things I think.

http://thenextweb.com/video/2012/11/09/happy-eight-birthday-...

Direct YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCWtvtwhFCk
the GPL is un-free

Now that's a contentous statement, depending on one's definition of "free" and "un-free". However the GPL, unlike this "no evil licence", is an FSF approved, and OSI approved, and DFSG approved licence. They aren't in the same category.
Take a close look at the "preservatives" and "coloring" section of most processed foods. They consist of industrial chemicals invented for that very purpose only in the last century or so. We're already consuming an inordinate amount of this stuff (More so in developing countries actually, where regulation is slightly....lax)
You can use Compiz in XFCE, which has reasonably good sync to vblank support.
I can't believe that it's only 8 years since firefox started
Software licensing is already a joke - he's just being honest about it.
Abusing Windows Remote Management (WinRM) with Metasploit
There's more competition for the same users when it comes to things like mice. There's only one Mass Effect 3, and some other game, no matter how good simply won't do if you want to play Mass Effect 3.

Mice substitute for each other much better than games do. If someone replacing a Razer mouse discovers it's difficult to resell because its functionality is crippled, they're not real likely to replace it with another Razer.
Uncomfortably close, but of course abstract ideas can't be prior art.
Don't say "Free Software", please. Because you actually mean "FSF-compliant" license. Some people don't give the slightest damn what FSF or any other crazy institution has determined to be a "free" (as in thought/speech) software license. In my humble opinion, a true "free" software license is the kind of license that lets you do "whatever the fuck you want to do" with it - in other words, "public domain".

GPL (whatever the version might be), in my opinion, is not a true "free" license because it forbids you to, for example, re-publish the source without attribution or using them without being GPL-compliant or any number of other restrictions. BSD is much better, but still has some restrictions. Even WTFPL[1] is not "free" (as in speech/thought), because it requires you to change the "name" upon re-distribution.

So, yes; Douglas Crockford is harmful to "FSF"-kind of "free software", but I think GPL and BSD are also harmful to the more "idealistic" definition of "free software".

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL
You are great guys. I would have never used internet if I didn't get Firefox.
I'd forgotten how cool that was at the time.
i'm not going to argue here because http://www.withouthotair.com/ makes the point better than i ever could.

see, for example, http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c19/page_11... - Don’t be distracted
by the myth that “every little helps.” If everyone does a little, we’ll
achieve only a little. We must do a lot. What’s required are big changes in
demand and in supply.

and, of course, we may be talking at cross purposes - there is some middle ground where a large-ish number of small-ish things can help. i am not arguing against maths, but i am saying that our natural assessment of what is significant without actually doing the maths is often misled by absolute values, as here.

anyway, if you haven't read that book, i recommend it.
I tend to do that to people I don't know. Seems perfectly reasonable.
Beer makes programming way better.
My understanding is that it erases the debt completely.
As the post say, previously they were using Ogg player and now a complete open source player.
Not sexist, Not offending, slightly more boring. Maybe nicer!
"Free" for the FSF does not mean "compatible with GPL".

Lots of GPL in-compatible licences are "Free" according to the FSF. Here's a whole list of "GPL-Incompatible Free Software Licenses": http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibl... Some notable ones: Apache Licence, BSD licence, etc.
If you are using wordpress, install Mute Screamer to stops some attacks. It's very useful.
Tell Amazon: Books and Libraries Shouldn't Have a Kill Switch