skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Qt license questions
Hi,
I'm working on a commercial software in c++ a Qt with other two developers.

We need to sell the software and distribute it with closed source.

We have just some doubts abot the Qt license. The commercial one costs just too much for us, so it is excluded. The GPL require that we distribute the source code.

What about the LGPL?
Are we able to keed the source closed and sell the software?
Which are the restrictions?
I've read something about static linking, but I'm not sure what it means.

Thanks for your help,
Carlo
This has a own section in the book The Pragmatic Programmer.
Chapter 3, Debugging, Rubber Ducking.

However, even if I agree with the great use I really use it more for code reviews than for actual hardcore debugging. (This could be my fault because I use distributed async processes in my work)

I think the rubber ducking has more advantage if you use a high level dynamic type language to code in (rather than more low-level C with pointers).
Don't ban it, but I wish people would stop posting Codinghorror articles. The writing quality is low, and I don't learn anything from the articles. It's just a big waste of time.

Edit: modding this up to 11? Give me a break. There are much better comments than this.
Report of a talk by Ben Schneiderman. Great examples of information visualization for getting insight from Data. Treemap, shapesearcher, and more...
It's cute.

Will I employ similar technique in my own code? Absolutely not. It hinders readability and byte comparison instructions in consecutive memory addresses are so stupidly fast that I'll probably save less CPU time combined in all executions of my program than the total amount of time it took me to think this hack up.

If you're a maintainer of glibc though (which is known for its exceptionally clear and straight-forward code,) then I might consider accepting a patch from someone who thought it up.

edit: I thought similarly of DJB's loop unrolling when I saw it in qmail. It's cute, but will it make any noticeable difference today? Probably not.
And then there's Kendall, which feels young, expensive, somewhat dilapidated, and miserable in the winter.
for comparison: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/lib/libc/string/st...
On the upside this could make Bloody Marys a more effective brunch cocktail.
If you're literally just looking for code that appears in two places, then there is an obvious polynomial time algorithm, no? (Check every substring against every other substring...)
I do learn somewhat from reading stuff online, but it's often because I'm inspired to play around with something on my own. Like a lot of people, I learn the most by doing. So I think the point that a lot of people are making is a good one: write more code.

There are some concepts from practicing music that might be interesting to consider in the context of coding:

1. Play music that's beyond your current abilities; playing the things you already know won't help you improve. This is pretty easy to put in the context of writing software: don't write yet another little ruby app, write it in Haskell or Io or Clojure or Erlang...

2. Isolate weaknesses and focus on specific things to improve. I think this is tougher in software than in music, because a good musician is always listening to good music to benchmark against, but it's probably not as common for developers to constantly be reading good code. So, maybe go find some good code to read and find ways in which it's better than what you're churning out.

3. Don't practice music with mistakes; it's better to slow down and get it right than to learn it incorrectly. So maybe a test suite for that weekend hack isn't a bad idea...

I should do more of that... in both music and coding...
I don't think it could have made a critical difference. Oracle and Intel have been leaking their bureaucratic corporate culture all over Silicon Valley for decades.
In fact you could condense all of these into "know your tools extremely well", and you can take it further to "optimize yourself/your environment relentlessly".

I've known great hackers who used Eclipse, sam, acme, Brief, UltraEdit and everything under the sun.

Working with someone who doesn't know their chosen tools (people who use menus to work their editor, hand edit things instead of using sed/awk/perl, etc) is extremely painful, and seeing someone profess to use a tool but not operate it well is a huge warning sign to me. Same with slow typists: pair programming with such sucks.
With the LGPL, you can keep your own code closed-source, but you must dynamically link the QT library. That means that your program must require QT's DLL file to run. If your program still works without QT's DLL file present on your system, you've statically linked it, which you cannot do with the LGPL.

The rationale behind it is that your end-users should be able to use a different QT DLL instead -- e.g. if they wanted to recompile QT themselves and use their compiled version with your program.

(IANAL)
There needs to be a third choice:

No, don't ban it; But I don't like seeing Codinghorror stories on News.YC.
Quick Tomcat https SSL Config
It's sad that I get sent that enough that I know which comic it is just by the URL :(
I'm one of the unwanted new people driven here by Coding Horror and you are making me feel very welcome.
Complete Beginner’s Guide to Information Architecture
Marriage and Object Databases
And this is why I read (free|open)bsd's cvsweb repo when I'm curious as to how things are implemented. I used to visit that repo in university when I was bored just to read some clear, concise, well-documented code.

I used to use and love FreeBSD (Since switched to OS X as desktop os, still run FreeBSD servers), but OpenBSD source code just looked more approachable.

McKusicks' wonderful book and video course helped.
Just because we post some Codinghorror articles doesn't mean we have to post them all, you realize. He's not "saturating the channel," we are, and we can stop if we want, without having to ban anything.
As a community, we will become what we become, with or without Jeff Atwood. This poll doesn't help things.
I don't particularly like Codinghorror, but I'm not in favour of having it banned.

I would however like a mechanism to filter out stories from certain domains.
It really depends on what your userbase is doing. If you aren't concerned about users who don't have javascript enabled, then sure.
There's also the other issue of SEO though. Google and other search engines increasingly are attempting to index the "dark web", basically the data behind the <form>.

Usually Googlebot will find a <form> and run a series of queries against it to try and see what it pops out. Kind of like a safe cracker with his ear to the safe, slowly twisting the nobs and listening for a click.

If you aren't concerned about this, and indeed if you don't want the search bots to do that, then using javascript-based submissions helps with that too.
Nitpick: Valleywag is already banned.
One minor but significant difference between these two programs is that Lightspeed requires that you have an engineering student on your team, while Summer@Highland will accept any student. If I am a law student and my hacker co-founders are not students, then my team can apply for Summer@Highland but not Lightspeed. I wonder why Lightspeed has that additional requirement.
Yes, his posts are not always well thought-out. Yes, he tries to be incendiary. But the good part about exposing these posts on HN is that this is exactly the group to dissect his drivel. You may not think the same way he does, but many people do, and one day you may have to deal with them so you better be prepared to counter their lunacy.
The elevated highway it replaced was such a complete disaster that it's a net win to have it gone even with all the corruption.

From what I've heard, though, the old highway was designed the way it was because of corruption too. The palpable aura of corruption in Boston probably doesn't help it as a tech hub. Corruption tends to yield low quality of life, because so much of the money that goes into the government goes to political supporters rather than into beneficial projects.

I've noticed practically all very corrupt cities (Syracuse was a striking example) are economically backward, though it's hard to say which is cause and which is effect.
These findings might really be about module-size, not function-size.

For Java/C#, objects and packages are module units that were not available in the languages in the studies, that would naturally share the role of modularity performed by functions.

My opinion: what belongs in a module, and its size, is determined by the problem and its domain. The crucial criteria is to make things clearer, and uncluttered by irrelevant things. A module is a way to combine some things, and separate other things. There can be several legitimate ways to divide up a task into modules, though it will make more sense if you choose just one organizing principle and stick to it. This makes your choice of modularity predictable.
Don't feel like that. I think the community aspect of HN is a bit overstated, it is not as if all HN users are speaking with one voice. Besides, it is all about good content, not about personalities.
That makes the X86 assembly version look straightforward: http://www.int80h.org/strlen/. I think it is just a fallback implementation that is used when no optimized version has been created for the target processor. Every time I've looked my compiler has used a hand-optimized version for every platform. Quite possibly, this is 100% dead code.
How many did you send? If it was less than say, a dozen, that seems reasonable. Otherwise, I think you are right -- some kind of adwords type solution is appropriate. They probably aren't quite ready to monetize like that but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.
> the author of new module foo is the one talking about it. It's not some pundit that thinks it's cool.

The author of foo might not be able to explain foo very well. The HN crowd is used to reading the blogs and discussions of "hackers"--people who both program, and think/write/talk about programming. However, there's this huge set of programmers who aren't hackers, and have no idea how to communicate to you why you would want to use this thing they've built (or perhaps just don't care whether anyone beyond them uses it, now that they've scratched their itch.) That's what pundits are for.
Can I sort comments chronologically?
I want to see the latest comments since I last checked and I am forced to read through the entire thread to find the new ones.
Greetings! I'm one of the regular readers of codinghorror who had never seen news.ycombinator.com until just today. With respect, the original poster (pollster?) is painting with a rather large brush. Could we please at least be allowed to get in here and see what's going on before the assertion that we will "contribute very little to the website" is leveled?

On the other hand, it's refreshing to see the comments of someone who doesn't think that a simple count of users is the be-all and end-all of a website's worth. That attitude is intriguing and makes me want to learn more about this site.
Sure, but... you're not writing glibc. How many computers run that code? At some point, if it's faster and correct, it's worth it.
Not in each post, but the "comments" link at the top shows new comments chronologically on the entire site.
They should call Apple and offer $20,000 to review the app immediately.

They say they have a call center of trained people waiting. That's expensive, so this would save them money. And it's a (small) win for Apple too.

When you want special service from a for-profit company, just do the obvious: pay them for it.
I don't see why the list is deeply interesting. Maybe some analysis on the list would be more valuable than the list itself.
Apple and Google to replace GM and Citigroup on Dow Jones?
I agree, but I'm sure a gigantic portion of developers never have to worry about this. Also, most architectures have efficient SIMD instructions to handle things like strlen.

I'm just curious if the speed-up of this hack was ever benchmarked. Or if anyone spent a while tracking down a source of bottlenecks, and found it to be an inefficient strlen implementation.
Could we please at least be allowed to get in here and see what's going on before the assertion that we will "contribute very little to the website" is leveled?

Don't worry, all they're talking about is banning links to Codinghorror, not banning people coming from it. We would never do that. Not that we would ban CH itself either.
I sent about 25. It was to anyone who was checking out new search engines over the past few days.
Gah - when I was out of school, they could have paid me minimum wage and I'd be thrilled to take a job to be a great hacker's "hands." I can't imagine many better ways to see a master work.
I wouldn't be surprised by this. MS is in a real bind in this case. Many of their cash cow corporate customers are reluctant to upgrade to anything past IE 6. So MS is essentially putting effort into subsequent browser releases largely used by the less-profitable part of their user base. Those corporations are going to cling to IE6 and XP until there is no other option because they just don't want to go through the upgrade pain.

MS can't really use the browser to force adoption of Windows the way they wanted to before. They're not in a position (like Apple and the iPhone) where the browser is critical to their competitive advantage in a new business space. So really, what are they getting out of it?
I'd love to hear more about your voting system...
Yeah, I think you are right, which is the part of the TOS a quoted in the post, i.e. "updates consist of duplicate or repeating links and/or text."

And thanks!
When I lived in Kenya for two months, this is one of the things I found fascinating. People would face immense daily challenges (compared to what is faced in the "West") and yet they would still go about their business without a hint of anger or complaint.

It's sad though because you just have to wonder what bigger things could be accomplished if infrastructure was more stable so people could put their focus towards bigger issues rather than smaller ones.
Re-using showering code is less error prone than maintaining separate copies of showering code!
Must admit that #1 grabs my eye straight away - I still miss DejaNews (but I still have to respect Google for keeping this information alive and accessible).
I doubt West, LexisNexis, or any other legal aggregator will sell the information to Google. Those companies make a lot of money selling it to lawyers on a monthly subscription basis. They also do some value-add to the materials. What I see on West or LexisNexis is more than just the publicly available decision. West and Lexis employ lawyers to create summaries and other helpful things for the legal researcher.

There certainly is a lot of legal text. Lawyers certainly are good at creating volumes of paper. For example, the Supreme Court just decided a case, Wyeth v. Levine. It will be recorded in volume 555. So to date the Supreme Court decisions have filled 554 volumes of 1000 pages each. And that is just one court. Every state court, state appeals court, and state supreme court, federal court, land court, etc has similar volumes and page counts.

And all of this is just the primary sources. Once you add secondary sources, aka books and papers written by learned scholars on individual topics or cases, the number of books and pages increase by orders of magnitude. And we still haven't archived any statutes (those go on forever, for each state) or any administrative law. And each one of those has comment sections that go on for pages whereas the actual rule is only a paragraph.

I wonder what percentage this is, too. I bet it is still extremely small compared to what the rest of the world has produced. There are so few law writers when compared to all other writers.
The Not So Bad Bank
Let's not overreact to a few recent anti-YC posts from Jeff. Wait a month and see if you are still this angry.

Also, banning a site for generally worthless content is one thing. Banning a site because they made some incorrect but interesting criticisms of Hacker News is another.
What is PIFTS.exe?
Now we're accusing Jeff to be the thought police. That's definitely not Redditish.

Plenty of people on this site get all bent out of shape about copyright violation or ad-blockers, but obviously not illegal drug use, crude swearing, or pornography. If you're just going to shout "censorship!" and "thought police!" at anybody who thinks differently than you and get upvoted for it here, then I am also questioning the mission here.
Edited to note that. Also, the spamtrap on your site rules.
Michael Jackson vs. Jackson 5

http://webdemo.pittpatt.com/recognition_demo/view.php?id=N56...

It needs a threshold of -3 to detect it, but it gets the right face (I think).
The Guardian Tries To Save Newspapers With An Open API
Actually, there are reported cases of petite women being able to lift cars if their child is trapped under it and in danger. The body will redirect all its resources in moments of desperation to accomplish what is otherwise not normal. According to one report I read of such an instance, the woman said she was sore for weeks after as her body needed to recover.
I absolutely love the irony of this post, as it's a duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=509212

But that one's been marked dead.
So... clever hack or premature optimization?
You are not suggesting consorship. This a clearly well beyond suggestion. You want Codinghorror banned but you do not have the spine to say this outright, so you propose a poll to make yourself appear reasonable.

Even your second point is baseless, "potentially bringing a new mass of users that will contribute very little to the website". Note the use of the word 'potentially', you know you have no evidence of this but you don't like Jeff so just throw any shit around and see what sticks.

What next, CH causes cancer, CH makes you homosexual, CH promotes liberalism?

(I am no longer bothered by having negative karma)
It's been about 50 years since we discovered the "[commercialized] never-ending serial"; we still haven't realized that it's a bad idea. TV shows (and soap operas especially), MMOs, blogs; all should really have definite endings and closure, but they continue, after having done all they've set out to do, based on brand alone.

It's not like the same people can't make something else, something new--for example, you could put all the writers, artists and actors of the Simpsons on a new project, if you like--but they don't need to do the Simpsons any more. It's done. Every possible angle, every single side-story, every inter-character meeting has been explored.

1000 posts is enough to say what you came to say. If not, maybe go back and delete a few, distill some points to free up room for new expression. Perhaps blogging software should have a million-character limit on the total aggregate length of post body columns; it seems to have encouraged tweets to be more well-thought-out (though some of that is also probably from the fact that the ones sent from phones cost money.)
Agreed. Some of Coding Horror's material is certainly worthwhile. For example, I know I found out about the HttpOnly flag in cookies from him, and I'm pretty sure I've learned of some usability improvements from his articles as well. However, there are a lot of his articles that I don't think really belong on HN, but they end up here anyway.

I'm actually a bit suspicious that the following may be happening:

1) Karma-hungry users submit all of his articles as soon as they're posted without checking whether or not they've been submitted already.

2) Since submitting a page that's already been submitted results in an upvote, his articles make it to the front page and RSS feed without the usual oversight of people reading things in the new submissions list.
I would however like a mechanism to filter out stories from certain domains.

The human eye can serve as that mechanism if the parenthetical label of the submitted article's domain is unique to one author or group of authors. (E.g., google.com as a source domain doesn't help me at all in filtering articles, but techcrunch.com does.) I read HN selectively, depending on what the source of submitted articles is. For the record, I like reading some of the codinghorror.com articles submitted here.
I think the bigger story is (if true) why it was rejected. Apps being rejected or put on hold no longer surprises me, but if the tweet is accurate, that is a pretty dumb reason to reject the app
This should just be titled "Tools used by people with great hacker egos but may or may not actually be great hackers", because these are not predictors of great hackers.
when you think of how many non-web-search-related things google does, this list shows that so many of them were created by someone else that google just swallowed up, and are not the result of the many smart employees at google.

how many google services were completely created there? pagerank, gmail, and orkut?
So if I learn these things, will I miraculously be transformed into a great hacker? Or will I have wasted my time, while others spent the same time launching several profitable web sites with Ruby on Rails?
Yeah, it's annoying and karma-whoreish at times.

On the list of shit that I care about, this is currently somewhere around 997th.
I totally misunderstood what this is. You recognize and match two faces across two pictures! I thought you just identify that a face is there. You REALLY need to explain a bit clearer what it is - for you it's obvious, for a random person clicking through, it's not obvious at all. The Michael Jackson picture would be the best sample of this.
Aardvark: A Better Social Q&A Than Twitter
Forcing yourself to write short methods forces you to design your solution cleanly. I wasn't a fan of short methods, until I observed a master programmer's (who was also a co-worker) work for a while. After I adopted this style, I've found my own code improving. Ymmv.
I'm prepared to lose some karma points by saying this, but I really hope articles like this are not what Hacker News is going to turn into down the road. Sure, the experiment is humorous if not interesting and perhaps could even be thought of as 'hacking' but I don't come to HN to read about stuff like this. Still, post on and let the community decide I suppose.
For it to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, Google would have to acquire you because they saw their own Wikipedia page.
I used to read codinghorror regularly. I'd like to think I've "graduated" (since some time ago now). Welcome all visitors from codinghorror.

Also, I sort of find it hard to believe that Jeff's posts are as bad as all that, but I can't say from experience b/c I just don't click the links anymore.
Well some of us might not want to just surrender like that.
And since this is the internet "whining" is pretty much all that can be done. That and continually moving on to the "new" place.
There are also working "dude" ranches where you get to work like a real cowboy. Some are probably more authentic than others. Not sure about that lamb castration thing though, but I have seen it done in person. I guess that's one benefit of growing up in a small rural town.
WebInno21 in Cambridge, MA
Impressive. What's the implementation language? I assume C.