skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wrote a simple compiler during uni, and a syntax highlighter for a commercial product in 2002. I consider myself competant with grammars. Yet I hardly ever deploy my parsing skills in everyday programming, even though I know most protocol interpreters, file readers etc. would befitting from the readability that grammar and parsing separation achieves. I never use parsers because the "compile the compiler" then "compile the generated code" is horribly cumbersome. Also, the time taken to remember grammar syntax and get back in the mindset of grammar writing takes a 10 min regular expression hack stretch into 2 weeks of dev time (I am constantly switching languages so its not like ever use the same parser generator twice).
^^ was true a month ago until I met peg.js (http://pegjs.majda.cz/online). You can try out the grammar live, without compilation on example data! This now means you can rapidly prototype a grammar and even logic within it (in JS). Even if you are not targeting a JS embedded parser, it still lets you work out your grammar ready to translate into another language.

Since discovering peg.js I have applied proper parsing technology twice in a month for relatively trivial tasks. I would have never bothered before. I really recommend this tool for programmers who find the inertia of getting out the parsing big guns too much to bother.
Tell that to the tens of thousands of researchers who make use of the human reference genome daily. I don't even know what the guy is talking about there - imagining modern genetics or genomics without it is pretty much impossible.
+1 for sparklines, autorefresh would be cool too
Any technology on the web that's not supported well is due to IE not supporting it. IE always holds back the web.
In fairness, any computer that has been physically compromised is no longer secure, period.

Every attack against an otherwise secure system requires these two steps:

1. Compromise a computer or environment by gaining physical access and changing something about the computer/environment (e.g. creating a false passphrase screen, or installing a hidden camera).

2. Trick the user into giving up their passphrase/private key after step (1) is complete.

Once a machine or environment is compromised, it's just a matter of time before (2) happens and your security is broken. Physical access to a machine or environment where a passphrase is entered is required because network security is (effectively) perfect with modern crypto.

If you are truly paranoid, you'd have to constantly secure your environment and physical hardware, and whenever either went out of your physical control, not use your passphrase/private key. Full stop.
Python metaclasses demystified
The app is free! Check it out and let me know what you think.

http://www.frontpageapp.com
Slicing a list is not the same as taking subsets, the examples he provides are also misleading in this context.
I've worked for an asshole company that did that. We reached a stalemate after I managed to use my code ownership clause against them - basically "fuck off or I'll open source all your code".
Originated at Berkeley vs MIT I guess
You'd have to check if the block is solely based on the extension. If so, what about disguising it in a videofile with instructions on how to set it up?
I like ESR's opinion on reciprocal licensing like the GPL and that is the market punishes those companies that take the source closed. In-house forks are probably hacks that contain specific business logic or minor enhancements. ESR best explains it in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEPg2M1qbEs
Antirez, how would you feel about a company that forks redis, renames it, removes all references to you and sells it successfully to some enterprises as next-gen super database, making a lot of money? Maybe even enhancing it, fixing bugs, or doing some other work in a closed-source manner (documentation, translation stuff.).

In your post you say that you appreciate when people make money out of your work but you also seem to have the faith that people contribute back because forks are inconvenient.
You have to include the N or they will all be like 314159...
Overall its a really nice concept, I like it.
Here are just some general questions to you: How would you handle "buying orders" or general availability?. Can you extend the "two week period" to other time frames, is it negotiable?
It seems odd to accuse someone of Malthusianism who specifically went out of their way to mention the mass-farming techniques that have stalled Malthusianism.

On the other hand, those farming techniques rely on heavy fertilizer loads--which then rely on either hydrocarbons (which we will run out of) or large masses of animal waste--which requires large numbers of animals--which requires feeding those large numbers of animals. And what do they eat? The majority of the mass-farmed crops. Just because it's stalled now, doesn't mean it's stalled forever. :)
And so you assume that the author of the article doesn't know how to optimize his or her blog, ignoring the possibility that he or she does, but didn't do it for intervening reasons.

Still has no bearing on the veracity of statements made in the article.
... and there is certainly no shortage in the supply of autocrats, I mean what?
Indeed it is not valid in most places, as things become public domain when copyright expires but you cannot give up your copyright. Carrying round eg a BSD license declaration is more useful for this reason.
I have to know: What do those Americans who only know him as House think when they see his earlier stuff? Is it a bit of a mind blow?

While people are recommending stuff, yes watch J & W, and Fry and Laurie's comedy shows, both are brilliant, but do not miss Blackadder. (Well, skip season 1 until and if you become a hard core fan as even us UK fans find that one a bit hard going.) Worth watching S2,3,4 as not only are these two in it, but you're going to see Rowan Atkinson (Mr Bean and Jonny English) at his arguably best, and many other brilliant UK comic actors. (Actually, IIRC, S3 and S4 are the ones that bring him to the fore. In fact Im not sure he was in S2 at all. Cant remember.... Im old!!!!) Blackadder S4 is truly an awesome comedy series. Its worth watching fully and properly just to see how they ended it. Do not skip the series for the ending, you will ruin its power. Let it build up, then tear you to pieces.

Personally speaking is cracked me up when House first started and the US treated him like a proper normal actor, while we in the UK knew his comic roles. But, brilliant for Hugh as he could almost start a new career as a serious proper actor with out the "baggage" of comedy. You guys, if you haven't already, now have the sheer delight of checking out his back catalogue.

I was going to add some YouTube links, but as I was going through the site looking for some gems, I realised I would end up adding so many links I would look like an automated spammer. So, you know, hit YouTube, search, and loss a few (un)productive hours laughing :)

Oh and thank you America for giving him a chance to be a proper actor. I don't think it would have happened in the UK. Type-casting and all that.
I should have waited [0] for this discussion to submit my licence chooser [1].

Also, I assume he meant BSD 2-clause, not the 3-clause variant.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5118241
[1] http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/licences/
The Secret World developer shuts down Beijing studio..
Literary History, Seen Through Big Data’s Lens
The most successful sites balance JavaScript-driven UX with HATEOAS.

It's funny you mention Google Maps - its great success has largely been due to its rich linkability and embedability.

That's the point of HATEOAS - your site is one island in an ocean sized app called THE WEB.

There's a reason Twitter abandoned hash bang URIs and even adopted a traditional full page refresh design for the first load of the site - it was faster and more flexible than routing everything through a JavaScript wall.

There is a reason that big monolithic Flash sites never felt right. They were fortresses of isolation in a sea of interconnection.

Now, I'll completely admit the "linked data web" is a much more infantile version than the HTML web, but it holds plenty of opportunity for great UX that is completely separate from the HTML page refresh model while expanding interconnectedness of data and actions.
Well can you help design the landing page for http://www.nodemesh.net
ibm thingi was called "project zero"
btw i hear facebook is also looking to move to the jvm to ease some troubles with their hiphop approach
> unless and until there is a significant and tested base of case law, in every jurisdiction I care about, these licenses are just contracts between happy parties. Angry parties define case law.

There is a significant and tested base of GPL case law. Large corporations regularly find themselves with no option other than coming into compliance.

The beauty of the GPL as a license, I think, is that there's no way to contest its validity -- if you're distributing GPL-derived code yet you don't think the GPL works, then you're distributing someone else's code without any valid copyright license, and you have lost.
For example Libre Office and (now Apache) Open Office, where kind of exactly this has happened (well its a bit more messy).
Not particulary fond of Flash myself, but:

> Flash was installed with a bit of vomiting involved. If you don’t use ClickToFlash you are insane.

Flamebait.
I consider the GPL a declaration of user rights (the right to source code, for all users, in perpetuity). I like freedom. I would actually prefer the BSD license if my experiences hadn't convinced me of a different human nature. It's an unbalanced equation. I would happily go with the BSD license if everyone else did (or at least "mostly everyone" else did), for the same reason that I would support gun control if it applied to everyone, including police. I don't consider either practical for users/netizens. Thus, the GPL guarantees certain "rights." :)
Previous submission with discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4535417
The Genius of Arab Civilization
Actually the comment is spot on.

It's a stinking shit crock from end to end. Just because it has a few celebrity developers like Rasmus, doesn't mean it doesn't fuck you in the eyeballs the moment you see it.

Just sit down for a couple of hours with tmux fired up, and vim with bits of ZE source code on the left and on thr right, Python.

You will see. It will make you sick looking at the ZE source code.
I don't understand. Why would the developer who wants his code used "anyway you see fit" suddenly care how you re-licensed it? You have used it in a way you see fit. The original BSD license didn't evaporate. This situation looks no different to me than a company taking a BSD-licensed project and putting it inside their proprietary systems.

If his downstream users are savvy enough to know to use this "forked" project, they're savvy enough to search for the original author and discover that they can get the same code under a more permissive license.
I've seen libraries in-house that are open source but have been abandoned years ago by their original community. Those libraries are pretty much lost to the general public but live a happy live as closed source libraries which are maintained and fixed.
I don't think this has to be a problem: it's actually rather straightforward to write some XSLT to process incoming XML and emit only whitelisted elements and attributes.
oops, sorry yes, I realised later.
nice list, agree with the other comments that the Fizzbuzz example is cool, but can be confusing to work out what it does, especially since this post is aimed at beginners.

I would also mention `getattr` similarly to `get`.
An Alternative to Achievements
Missing http://www.gazelle-parser.org
"Maybe it would surprise you to realise that yes, child-rearing culture can be and is a cause of persistent poor educational outcomes and a large part of the poverty cycle."

I realize this. I don't think having kids in school for more hours per day is the right way to change the culture though.
BSD 2-clause = MIT (aka X11)

The BSD 3-clause and 4-clause variants are a little bit more restrictive, though none of them have this "viral" character of copyleft licences like the GPL.

I would advise MIT, because it does not have this "how many clause" confusions.
That's true for almost any hosting service - it's usually quite easy to encode other information in whatever wrapper is possible. Virtually all image formats (for instance) allow arbitrary metadata, and usually of arbitrary size. And if meta-data isn't allowed, a lossless format like PNG can easily be reinterpreted as a simple byte-array (e.g. 8bpp greyscale image).

Of course, why would anyone bother? It's that hard to find hosters that will host anything, so why do through the hassle to encruft your data with some somewhat unwieldy wrapper?

The fact that it's XML is in some way a "protection" here since for no particularly good reason some character codes cannot be represented by xml (not even encoded), meaning you'll need ugly workarounds to store arbitrary data.
Thanks! Yes sure, it can be extended depending on multiple parameters (the interest I have, the time I have, ...).

But, if I can't continue the development... well, I use Javascript technologies. It should be easy to find another developer to continue the project ;)

In other words: Yes, it's negotiable.
The thing here is to have three or four really good fall back ways of sharing, overall I thing it's a really neat idea, and I'll start using it and sharing the concept/code as much as I can :)
It is frequently said that Linux doesn't have photoshop, autocad, pro/engineer and whatever else there is for expensive professional software.
Cool, btw, hablas español? deberías tener una pagina en "eng" y otra en "esp", muchas suerte con tu proyecto, saludos!
Fox shamelessly steals Still Alive composer's song for Glee
I didn't say: "Two weeks to materialize any idea". My challenge is to extract the MVP of the client's idea. If it can't be done, I just refuse the deal.
Or HN News
I'm not suggesting that the other people aren't fuckwits either. TBH Rails is just as bad - it's the same culture of incompetence.
Right. If you want "least restrictive", then use MIT.

Apache Licence (version 2.0) is also interesting. It is just as "least restrictive", but additionally includes a "patents grant". Unfortunately, it is not as short and simple as MIT.
http://essays.backintyme.com/item/58
our company recently expunged all LGPL code from our product. The cost of that license outstripped the usefulness. We wrote or got around the need for any of it; it wasn't too hard. Generally we were after a fraction of the IP, and there were alternatives.

LGPL is fine for non-commercial folks. For business I need a license to do as I please with the code, with no futzing around.

<edit: LGPL>
If those libraries were abandoned by the community then the significance of taking the library closed by some company that needs to maintain its legacy codebase is probably minimal or irrelevant.
الضوء الأحمر في غرفة النوم
Simple slideshow for iOS
You make an excellent argument for dropping the GPL and adopting the Affero General Public License. After all, the GPL doesn't force commercial web apps to release their modified source.

Note: I typically use the Apache 2.0 license for my personal projects, but I don't have strong opinions on the matter.
Functional language != ML-family language.
SQLite is so obvious, and in many cases it's just enough.
Or, hsqldb if you're into Java.
You make it sound like FreeBSD's code got all closed off and hidden away when it got wrapped into OS X. FreeBSD's stuff is still available openly and can be studied. No, you cannot see how Apple interfaces with it, but that's the nature of proprietary.

Code licensed under BSD has the chance to affect more of the "world" because it'll end up in more systems because there's no requirement to keep those derivative systems open. Those interested in keeping their own work proprietary (but using the BSD-licensed code) can do so. If the code were GPL, it just sits there while Proprietary Corp. re-implements that library (perhaps in a poorer, less-secure manner). The GPL code did not contribute to humanity as much as the BSD code did.
It's not the first time the US lobbyists have managed to get to a committee, that doesn't necessarily mean they will win the parliamentary vote. In fact, this could all be part of the game. Up until recently the EU parliament favored even stronger privacy protections.

The more worrying issue is they got to the EU council of ministers (i.e., representing the individual governments). The current Irish presidency seems to be completely bought and paid for by the US, they really don't give a flying fuck about the rights of EU citizens, and have put the council on a direct collision course with the parliament.

Personally, I find it utterly disgusting that US companies and the US government are lobbying EU politicians to surrender their voters' civil rights.
Clearly you are not a BDS license advocate, exactly because you see a problem with this. Those that use that license do not have your hangups.
Systemd: The Biggest Myths
Redis is a poor example because it is licensed under BSD which you can do exactly what you're describing. If you think there's something wrong with a corporation (likely a few hackers) selling open source software and making money off of it then, well, you simply don't belong in open source.

This is exactly how Redhat operates.

But there's obviously a difference between making money (re-branding) and then attempting to re-license (or break the existing one, assuming GPL, by not contributing back).
> the OS X kernel's closed source

It's not, actually. http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/

> To put it another way, I think the BSD license can result in "tragedy of the commons" scenarios where maximizing individual freedom has worse total consequences than would have resulted by applying regulation to maximize societal freedom instead.

An ecosystem argument can be made as a rebuttal; GPL disincentivizes corporations and other large open source contributors from adopting a project, thus not allowing the code to perpetuate (through dependence) and be adopted by other businesses who have an interest in improving the software, and so on.

That is, the individual freedom ultimately results in more participation, not less, at the expense of more selfishness. BSD/MIT licenses dominate now, don't they? Does society ultimately benefit more from an open license than one with legal burdens attached, as noble as they are?
Why would I use your thing over just making a spreadsheet?
HN didn't catch it because one has a trailing slash and the other doesn't.

(http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/4th-amendment-chest...)

(http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/4th-amendment-chest...)
Actually no. PHP has many fundamental flaws which do not exist in Python or Ruby.
The problem with open source is it's poorly documented making it difficult for a new person to join the effort. Someone should make an open source project to document all other open source projects.
In my opinion instead what the open source does not get back in a fair amount is money

I'm not really sure what the problem is. I don't know the numbers, but I expect there are thousands of full-time open-source developers. (I was one of them.) Meaning that anyone who has made a substantial contribution to an important project could probably find a decently-paying job to work full time on the project.

There have also been a number of very successful startups based on open-source efforts from the founders.
Interesting, thanks for the point of view. If you'd be interested in getting a beer or a coffee at any point, let me know - contact details in my profile.
Is Ken Thompson's compiler hack still a threat?
if you have a lot of them, plain dict may prove faster.
> But like I said, caching comes with a coordination cost.

And what? It's the reason to not use caching? ridiculous
Just installed it and it is AWESOME! I love the auto indent and auto complete!
http://pryrepl.org/

also don't miss

https://github.com/nixme/pry-debugger

https://github.com/pry/pry-stack_explorer

and

https://github.com/pry/pry-exception_explorer

amongst others.
Seriously - just find another language. The people upstairs are crack smokers.
How would you feel about someone taking pictures of you while you are using the restroom? clearly we should ban cameras from restrooms and remove all sorts of windows. In fact, we should demand all pictures taken with a camera to be submitted to a public archive, just to make sure no evil deeds are done.
Will your college go out of business?
I agree that most clients don't have that sort of semantic understanding. that's because we are still at a stage where most of our APIs are just custom media types and a moderate improvement over yesteryear's WSDL. The improvement is the use of URIs and HTTP GET to mash data.

But the point of HATEOAS is that it doesn't have to be this way. The number of generic link relations are increasing, as are the numbers of useful generic media types. We are getting smarter, as an industry, with how to describe semantics in a machine readable way. It's a slow process because building generic designs is really hard. Today's HATEOAS advocates are trying to progress the state of the art, I can completely understand why a individual API author might ignore that constraint though.

Perhaps it's futile but I'm not certain our future 10+ years out is eternally building hard coded mashups.
Child of the 90s - Internet Explorer Ad
If the title didn't say PIN number, I might have thought it was about sharp pointy things. Language is about communication, not words.
FYI, I find this site useful for this ...

http://www.tldrlegal.com/browse

It shows all of the licenses on one page, where:

Red = cannot
Green = can
Blue = must
The xbox hardware is notoriously flaky - both the console and the controllers break regularly and have to be replaced. Unlike the PC, it is not easy to open up and fix - you need a veritable constellation of star keys and various other tools and special training. If the xbox hardware was as robust as the casing there would be no problem at all.
Who is a dinosaur
Language Learning is Broken
Twitter’s Speech Problem: Hashtags and Hate
Hey Gimp isn't so bad. But either way, you're right. Is there anything close to an opensource equivalent of Logic? Absolutely not.

But great closed-source software doesn't preclude a great opensource equivalent. It may not be available right now but there's nothing stopping someone or some group from making it available in the near future.
Show HN: Built RealTime Search for Google Chrome
In a non capitalist world where everybody codes for fun GPL would sound great, but in the actual real world there are decent and acceptable use cases where it makes sense not to "contribute back", e.g. a business might not want their competitors to copy-paste the code of its core product.