skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's broadening in many, many ways. nathannecro in his comment below highlights an intellectual aspect. There are others. Knowing -- I chose that word specifically, as opposed to "speaking" -- a language means knowing a culture. This broadens one's mind, and that in turn leads to acceptance. Acceptance of religions, of gays, and of the Japanese seemingly chasing Americans around meeting rooms. Amongst others. A notable other is that you realize just how insanely silly, myopic and stupid nationalism is.

There are subtler benefits - I speak three languages natively, and the part I love most about that is also the part that frustrates me most. Afrikaans is a modern language and has a relatively small vocabulary. Insulting someone therefore consists of creatively stringing together colourful combinations of everyday words, mixing in the odd English, Malaysian or Zulu word, and then spoken with a religious fervour that cracks you up. It's side-splittingly funny. What frustrates me is that no other language can do that, so I can't share that with my girlfriend, who is French.

German has similar mannerisms about it. It's naturally dry in a way that English, for all it's adjectives, can never hope to be.

To give you another perspective, I've always had a few deal-breakers I look for when meeting a girl I might otherwise be interested in. First, she needs to speak more than one language. Seconds, she needs to have spent a significant amount of time outside her own country. She must either be able to ski or snowboard. Last, she needs to be able to play a musical instrument. Beyond that I couldn't care less about race, job, creed, colour or any other bigoted perspective.

To know another language is to know another world.
Facebook's Sandberg sells another $3.75 million in stock
> I read that you can't distribute code that has no license.

You can. It's just that unless otherwise stated, the owner has the copyright in most legislation. Without the license, if you derive from someone's code, he can sue you stating he never granted you the right to use his work.
Uhm it's more typical in a court to accuse or deny. And invalidation would prove the whole thing a waste of time anyway.
Don't buy the product?
mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa
The Most Creative Lamp Designs
I see a sign in the museum: "Please don't touch the software"
Warning: NSFW pictures.
Not so mesmerising as outright sexist.
First product I see doing this, very powerful !
I think that owning ITA allows them to have more data to mine/predict and better access but it doesn't explain how fast the searches are.
Most airfare searches still hit GDSs which are relatively slow to respond. The only way I can think of Google can deliver such a performance is by intelligently pre-caching airfare searches. Google?
It's been pointless very probably since inception, yet they've kept it around because (official PR comms to the effect of) 'user testing says it's comforting and inspires trust'.

Which is bullshit PR. They meant 'You do a search with Google and the top result is what you were looking for... you can choose to view our ranked results or just go with what we picked as number one'

The fact they're keeping their marketing-PR-goodwill-bullshit around as a frankenstein gimmick of a button instead of good UX is lame.
>> " I'd argue Mono is intrinsically evil"

> Could you explain why this is? I use Mono and I'm genuinely interested.

From the op's profile: "I really don't like Microsoft much."

Apparently not liking MS much is reason enough to dislike an open source project implementing an interesting runtime and languages, which provides options to use aforementioned runtime and languages without being married to MS.
My manager actually liked it :)
A license like this has two red flags. I previously worked in a programme providing corporate governance of open source. It's a fairly big industry with companies like Black Duck helping companies manage their legal risks, and licenses like this aren't popular.

Firstly, it's non-standard. As others have said, it's the author's right to make it non-standard, but I don't recommend people try that unless there's a really good reason to do so. If it's non-standard, a lot of companies simply won't use it. There's no box to check, so you can't have it. Good tracking software will of course allow for exceptions and deltas to the standard contracts, but it still creates delays and management overheads as if it's allowed at all, it will require someone's manual sign-off.

This gets worse when you consider the whole chain of software use. One library inside another library that's used by a subcontractor who added it to a build script that's used by the main contractor to distribute to developers. The whole thing needs to be linked through, which is hard enough with standard licenses.

Now startups don't need to worry about sign-off from some department, but they still need to stop and inspect the nature of the licenses they're using, and a non-standard license causes extra time and energy lost.

The second problem is ambiguity. A non-standard contract can still be precisely written, so developers know what they're getting into. In this case, though, it's not. It hinges around the definition of "evil", which is naturally ambiguous.

Comedy goes a long way, but is not always appropriate. This is a good article on the subject: http://www.natpryce.com/articles/000225.html
"It may be less amusing to the programmer writing the code but, more importantly, it is less infuriating for the programmer maintaining the code." Think the same applies to licenses.
Well that was pathetic. Flagged for blatant sexism.
I disagree. While it //is// unprofessional to joke around with licensing, I think the author of the article (and some of the commenters her) seriously exaggerate the thread of a legal suit.

Who will sue? EFF? Crockford?

I am no expert in "license law", but I am sure a you-are-using-this-for-evil accusations would not stand a chance.
Sounds like you should stay at home and grow your food on your own farm. Lots of cooking tools use hi-tech research, from non-stick pans to heat resistant spatulas. I understand your concern, but there's no need to freak out over technology applied to food. There are more opportunities for less visible man-made technology to become dangerous in non-culinary situations, such as your home's insulation, or materials used in microchip packaging. There's less regulation there and higher chances of "science" having ill effects on you. If you don't live in California, there's a higher chance that you could be buying non-RoHS compliant manufactured goods that can be more hazardous to you than any culinary equipment.
The Latest Long Apple Line: Developers Waiting for App Approval
You're painting a picture of a way out that doesn't exist for most people (reverse straw man?). When it's about a library on which a lot of software depends then the common non-programmer has had absolutely no choice about this and cannot re-implement either.
Sincere apologies if you felt offended. It's definitely designed to be humourous more than anything else.
Off grid energy
the article is misleading ("we could save about one million tons of food from being thrown out every year") because it's using absolute numbers to boost what is a relative saving.

there are a lot of sauce bottles. even an unimportant saving will, totalled over all of them, add up to an impressive sounding number. but unless the fractional amount of each bottle is important, it's really not significant: saving a million tons of food in an industry that produces thousands of millions of tons of food is neither here nor there.

this is the same problem as residual current in phone chargers. if everyone unplugged their phone chargers when not in use we could save some impressive sounding amount of energy. except that, compared to total annual energy consumption, it's not impressive at all - it makes no practical difference to the very real issues related to energy consumption (because your phone charger's residual current is absolute peanuts compared to that vacation you took by plane).

it's a small point, but it bugs me. sorry.

personally, i would tend to prefer a glass container (glass seems like a nice stable chemical that i have evolved in the presence of (think rocks)). and if the world really needs to save ketchup maybe i could just eat a little more healthily and skip a serving once a month?
That was going to ne on the table sooner or later
Being HN, I was expecting an article with numbers and stuff.
That's just being pedantic. I'm pretty sure that the idea of recreational drugs helping you is just wishful thinking.
Next time we'll do something serious. Right now, it's almost the weekend already.
People need to be aware that using childish clauses in licenses can have legal repercussions. This is not about "Free Software" or "Open Source" either, because that same clause can get you in trouble even if it comes in the EULA of a proprietary product.

The article was itself childish, but then again, it's a personal blog, not some kind of official statement.

> it discourages people from contributing

True, but my perspective is different - what discourages people from contributing are ego-driven testosterone-filled spoiled brats. Incidentally that's why we also have so few women contributing.
Debian Wheezy will default to XFCE (I think), so you can use that instead of fallback mode for this use case.

You may find you just like using it....

IIRC the reasoning was that GNOME Shell is too big to fit on the default install CD, rather than any idealogical thing.
Yeah, that's nice. I will, when I need your help. Thx
I don't disagree to this premise. Yes, it could be an issue - but Douglas Crockford is not morally obligated to worry about it. His code, his license. When you use it, you accept the risks that come with it.

The post could have made a sane argument that the license is ambiguous and should be avoided in Free Software. But it focused on the author and made unjustifiable personal remarks. Not cool.

The author also seem to forget that there are advocates of the MIT license who would never use GPL software because of its viral nature. Does that mean Richard Stallman is 'harmful to software'? Criticize the license, but don't name-call the author who has made major positive contributions to the field.
There weren't any claims that Google were unaware of this. And when things happen at this level, resolving it in 27 minutes can only be done when there's direct contact between people that are able to do anything about it.
The poor in America
Hopefully you see this but can you send me an email? J@squid.nu . I am in dire need of a competent CPA.
>It’s fairly clear that the JSON.org license clause goes against both of these, making any piece of software using that license neither Open Source nor Free Software

I'm sorry, is there some definition of Open Source that I'm not aware of?
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. I don't know the specifics (I don't use Mono myself), but I have heard people talking about possible problems in future if Microsoft changes their mind about encouraging Mono.
Yes, that's better. That control was in my blind spot. Maybe you should do something about that.
It just a redirect to google:

< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Server: nginx
< Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2012 11:26:14 GMT
< Content-Type: text/html
< Connection: keep-alive
< Content-Length: 97
< Last-Modified: Fri, 19 Oct 2012 14:01:40 GMT
< Expires: Sat, 10 Nov 2012 11:26:14 GMT
< Cache-Control: max-age=86400
< Cache-Control: private
< Cache-Control: must-revalidate
< Accept-Ranges: bytes
<
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://www.google.com>;
</head>
</html>
Would you feel better if there was a "dudes" version?
This looks to be even better: http://digistump.com/#digispark

Though it's not yet in production (it finished a successful kickstarter funding round in september), which should be sometime in early 2013.
I'm not disagreeing with the message of caution. But it could have been said much better.

> True, but my perspective is different - what discourages people from contributing are ego-driven testosterone-filled spoiled brats. Incidentally that's why we also have so few women contributing.

Ego and Testosterone in the same sentence - that has to be bad! But it is a different conversation altogether.
Not Basque and Spanish? Or Basque an English? Or Basque and some Chinese language?
Guile(scheme) 2.0.7 has Curly-infix-expressions
Linking to the product would have done just fine. No need for T&A.

http://nitrogr.am/

That said, those calling it sexist are misguided. If it had equal parts man, it would be equally inappropriate for HN. Displaying only one gender is not sexist unless there is some reason to expect balance.

If I linked to a picture of three female faces, that would not be sexist. It would just be my preference of pictures to display.

The issue is that it's crass and appeals to sexuality. Guaranteed flag.
There's also the usual engineer estimation: "Oh, it will probably take a day to rewrite the code. We'll deploy it and it will probably work just fine in production."

Any engineer that has live code has made this mistake before.
Design Stereotypes: Masculine and Feminine Design Techniques
Masculine vs. feminine design schemes (look at fonts, colors and language) - usage and examples. Use this set of ideas to determine if the look of your site design.
Not sexist - sexual.

Unless you consider sexuality inherently sexist.
It doesn't work like that. For the code to be part of a Linux distribution like Debian, they have to be able to distribute it to everyone, so such a request would amount to asking can you please remove the clause from the license. And your point about not making demands to things you get for free is not true in general. When someone offers money to the local animal shelter under the condition that it's only used for cute red cats, they're right to refuse I'd say. Bad licenses obstruct the progress of free software, so it's necessary to call them out.
As long as violating one without a profit motive can get an individual convicted to pay $1.5 million dollars, there's nothing ridiculous about taking licenses seriously.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_v._Thomas)
Never heard you speak before, jgrahamc. Enjoyed the video immensely.
If you read the article, it will tell you that once you've created your account, it will then work in offline mode, just as you found. But if you can't get to the activation server that first time, then no settings for you. Braindead design - particularly given how unforgiving and self-entitled gamers are as a demographic.
The GPL self-destruct mechanism that is killing Linux
Why employers are laughing at your resume
Prior art: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen
>The convenience of being on a giant rock versus a sitting duck in space can't be understated, either. It makes a lot of things a lot less complicated, especially supplying the base. The deceleration and coupling that ships to the ISS have to go through would be completely negated on the moon - all you have to do is land something relatively close (within a few hundred yards, maybe?) to the base and you're set. It's like threading a needle versus hitting the broad side of a barn.

Less complicated sure, but much more expensive. You need a whole lot more delta-V to go to the moon (and land something with a hope of staying intact) than to LEO. It actually takes less fuel to send supplies to mars (because they can use aerobraking/parachutes to slow down) than to the moon.

>Fuel costs would obviously be greater, but not all that much, and once there is a permanent mobile presence in near space, the fuel cost will really just be relegated to getting from the surface into orbit (which is most of the fuel cost anyway).

Wouldn't it be better to work on that "permanent mobile presence in near space" first?

Low Earth orbit is a pretty good place to be; it's the easiest to get to from Earth, and it's on the way to just about anywhere.
Honestly, it'd never even cross my mind that anyone on HN would possibly comment that s/he had come up with the idea of a universal translator 12 years ago.

Anyway, my apologies either way. Your comment read a tad snarky with the "grabbed away before you could create a startup" bit. I was left thinking, "Oh great. Relegated to the company of some kid who thinks his startup idea was stolen." My reply could have been tempered a bit more.
I agree with your argument, however I don't agree that the GPL is un-free.

First of all, there's a clear distinction between the GPL and this modified MIT license - the GPL was written with the help of actual lawyers and it's a solid license that can stand on its own in a court of law. If you think that the GPL gives you certain privileges or takes away some freedoms, then it's actually easy to verify that by simply asking a lawyer.

Also, GPL is a license that has restrictions on distribution and not usage. Usage of GPL-software is completely free. Of course, sometimes the usage/distribution boundaries are blurred when you're speaking about platforms, so GPL 3 drew a line in the sand to prevent cases such as Tivo, however to quote Linus Tolvards which represents the other side of the coin in any talks related to GPL [1]:

"""If you're a mad scientist, you can use GPLv2'd software for your evil plans to take over the world ("Sharks with lasers on their heads!!"), and the GPLv2 just says that you have to give source code back. And that's OK by me. I like sharks with lasers. I just want the mad scientists of the world to pay me back in kind. I made source code available to them, they have to make their changes to it available to me. After that, they can fry me with their shark-mounted lasers all they want."""

This is also not a matter of free / un-free. But rather a mater of legal liability. If somebody can prove that you used the software for "Evil", whatever that may mean, then you're legally liable. So what's evil anyway? Is making money evil?

[1] http://www.forbes.com/2006/03/09/torvalds-linux-licensing-cz...
Picosecond Protein Watching
John's a good speaker and has done a few "crazy" things.

However I thought this talk was going to be about the wingnut ideas that really will never work because they defy human nature / currently known laws of physics / principles of good software design / basic logic / etc.
If that's your idea of a "mild" one what would you regard as religiously offensive?
I love simple scientific, experimental responses like that. Thanks :)
Losing access to one desirable program is nowhere near as bad as losing access to being able to use your computer at all (except for the keyboard shortcut gods). The latter will leave a much more indelible impression.
SoftBanks $20B takeover of Sprint - Asahi Associates.
same with Django (Python)
I think the title is misleading for the purposes of catching people's attention. The data is not available to download, and is in aggregate form. The AOL data was not in aggregate form, so it was possible to get personalized details.

They probably constructed a simple decision tree aggregate which is probably less than 10kb of data. I doubt anyone could extrapolate 10kb data into personalized details of an individual.
Pretty clearly outside the guidelines and norms of HN. It doesn't bother me personally (and I don't think it's sexist) but it also doesn't belong here.
Same here. Fallback mode was the only thing that made GNOME 3 usable. The Linux desktop has really died today.
Did it never occur to them that they could just turn the bottle upside-down? Is that not why they designed the lids like that; so you could just stand them up on the lid?
Benoit Mandelbrot | an obituary
just save the settings to a human readable file instead of something ridiculous like The Registry then they can symlink it to dropbox if they care that much
Maximum Flow finally in O(mn)
Early Prediction of Movie Box Office Success based on Wikipedia Activity
You would still need custom drivers to use the cloud mouse.
That's a great talk idea. I really want at some time to do one called "7 minutes to Tranquility Base" detailing all the stuff that happened in the last 7 minute before Aldrin and Armstrong landed on the moon. A lot of interesting technical stuff work and failed in those critical minutes.

And if you can't get enough of me speaking about random stuff, here's my StrataConf talk: http://blog.jgc.org/2012/10/the-great-railway-caper-big-data...
If that were the case he wouldn't be publicising it.
Is the teensy 3(arm) fully compatible with all the arduino libraries ?
To an extent, this is an oddity of the US system, where a lot of the civil service is run by appointees. In most modern parliamentary democracies, the civil service is largely static and non-appointed, and while the government can in principle get rid of, say, a permanent secretary, it's highly visible and would rarely be done. This tends to give long-term projects more inertia; if the government wants to kill one without considerable controversy, it really has to make a case for doing so.
The idea of a second hand mouse makes me gag
Or use whatever advantage you can get to dump the shares in the greater fool.

Having an elite crowd with an unfair advantage is going to make it hard to get future IPOs or companies issuing more stock to generate much interest in their offerings.
New version of Chrome includes Do Not Track option
M-Payments Payleven Signs Berlin Taxi To Chip&Pin Trial - “Needed” For Visa Mob
Don't start with organic chemistry or genetics unless you have a 5-year plan. Basic understanding of molecular biology (structure of DNA, central dogma, etc.) will be enough to get started. Finally, here is a book (1) that describes many algorithmic problems in bioinformatics that a techie could relate to.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Bioinformatics-Algorithms...
I'm getting Humble Bundle fatigue!
Why not just give each mouse a unique ID then, sync the settings anonymously against that ID. Don't even have to log in anymore
Yes and no. Even some arduinos are incompatible with certain arduino libraries. Most of the libraries were written for the most popular 328p chip at the most popular frequency (16mhz), but if you're using a Due or Attiny or even the 328p running a different frequency, you may need to touch up the libraries to get it to work. My guess is the compatibility levels would be similar here.

Most people are probably only aware of the arduino uno which uses the 328p chip, but there are probably 20 other atmel chip models that are also "arduino compatible". I typically use the attiny85 because my one-off projects rarely need all the pins on the 328p.
Mapping Racist Tweets in Response to President Obama's Re-election
What's "human nature"? Human nature, if anything, is adaptability. What feels "natural" to us is largely determined by our socialisation and our environment (i.e., things which we can change).
Well said. And while I absolutely agree with several other posters that Crockford has free reign to define the terms of use of his product, he didn't choose the most effective terms for what we all assume is his goal: spreading the use of json.

A license is like a piece of code that binds to a system of laws at runtime. Effective license terms, like effective code, work within the problem domain and avoid ambiguity where it is likely to cause problems. His license compiles, but can throw runtime exceptions depending on context.
All this bodes well for Xfce, which is already an outstanding effort. Nice to see it included in future releases of Debian as default, for some spotlight.