skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a great article.

One thing I would add to this is that nobody really knows what licenses like the GPL actually do. Jacob Kaplan-Moss published a fantastic piece called "20 questions about the GPL"[0] , and my attempts to clarify a few of them with the FSF and SFLC have so far revealed that not even two developer advocate organizations can agree on even fundamentally basic concepts about the most popular license, so isn't that a problem?

The reason that I contribute to the "projects on GitHub with no license" problem is that I cannot find a license that unambiguously does what I want, after spending many, many weekends on the problem. I could write one, or get my lawyer to, but license proliferation is grounds for expulsion from the cool kids club. Since I have no good options, I take no action.

Fundamentally, I believe we need a new license steward that isn't afraid to update regularly to address 1990s questions like dynamic linking and optional dependencies, and 2010s questions like app stores. Something like Creative Commons for code, where you have some options to choose from.

[0] http://jacobian.org/writing/gpl-questions/
I thought in the EU you're legally required to do opt-in. You're not permitted to do opt-out.

How can the UK Post Office do opt-out?

Is this some UK exemption from the EU law?

Or is it the typical government exemption from its own law (like e.g. how politicians exempted themselves from the US CAN-SPAM law)?
Thank you - I will do that!
So what are estimates of total funding in 30 days?
6 Of The Best: The Ultimate Marketing Mistake List
The thing that stuck out to me the most was the tone more than anything else, really. It felt like his tweets were written in caps lock ...
...so what did you change, if your problem wasn't failure to work hard?
situations that end up with users becoming extremely susceptible to copyright trolling

I worry the trolling is largely extra-legal, and that the actual terms of the license matter little. Currently, anyone can create an account on GitHub and without proof-of-positive-ID can apply any license to any code they choose to upload. Whether they have the right to issue this license is unknown to the user other than by direct due diligence.

Consider: I take a small function out of a piece of proprietary or GPL code, and without permission put it into a library which I publish on GitHub. You use it in your successful commercial venture. Is your legal exposure different depending on whether I chose "BSD" from the drop-down or left it unlicensed? Is my liability different? What about GitHub's?

Does there exist a software equivalent of real-estate title insurance? I like the SQLite approach to this: http://www.hwaci.com/cgi-bin/license-step1
Yes, posting one big ad hominem attack because you got your ego bruised will really help make the tech community a better place.

Nothing more constructive than a nice dose of character assassination.

The author is basically doing exactly the same as Zed Shaw, only using more words and less four letter ones.

Edit: Correction, this is post is more insidious than simply calling someone a fucking moron on Twitter. Both are wrong, but only one of them can be excused as a very human impulsive reaction.
Same on Windows 7 with Chrome (IGP with a Mobile 1st gen i3 processor however)
> These people hurt our communities. They lurk in IRC channels waiting to harass new programmers. These are the types of people who discourage women from participating in classrooms and within our open source communities. These high-and-mighty types that only desire to proclaim their superiority and describe to you the exact composition of your inferiority, even if you are merely trying to learn.

Zed Shaw discourages learning and opensource, rly? You probably missed the Learn X The Hard Way series he puts up a shitload of work in so newcommers can actually learn efficiently to code. And what on earth that has to do with women?! You're seriously barking at the wrong tree.

//edit: btw for your amusement http://web.archive.org/web/20080103072111/http://www.zedshaw... enjoy
If you are using Emacs, I find that having one buffer always open to R, and another open to shell, serves most of this need.
Third party must be opt-in, but first party can be opt-out, that's why they do the alternate "opt-out opt-in" thing.

In fact a lot of companies I've come across do it this way, you see it on physical forms too.
I hope not; It should be an easy task for them to port this to Linux and Windows (and even to publish on the various first-party software stores they come with), given that the app is evidently built using web technologies. Perhaps even something common like node-webkit.
It could be that the pool of operators for your type of loan is empty (i.e. they're all offline or engaged), and the app is set to automatically let you try again with some other department.

Just going with Occam here, but I've seen a couple of callcentre call-routing systems and the potential for misconfiguration is fairly high.
The traditional use of that free time, of course, is to post on the internet (Usenet, Slashdot, HN, depending on your era).
What's the battery life like for these?
Actually it significantly boosts my performance, which is why I do it the first place. (Obviously if you were hiring e.g. a surgeon, whose job requires several hours entirely without interruption, that would be a different story, but few IT jobs have that requirement.)
The post ignores, why there are so many different FOSS licenses, the thing is people have interests and sometimes these interests are not compatible. So there is a place for MIT licenses, namely if you want as much adoption as possible, and there is a place for copy left licenses, if you want to protect the associated rights of copyleft. This is probably most visible in the “anti-tivoization” section, which concludes

The license restrictions of the AppStore, Google's Play Store
and similar distribution systems and the GPLv3 are just not
compatible.

The reason for this is Apple, Google and others have their interests, namely controlling a platform and enforcing whichever restrictions are mandated by their interests.[1] On the other hand, the GPL[v3] tries to protect the freedom to tinker for the owner of the device, the ability not only to see the source code, but also to modify and run it. So the absence of GPLv3 licensed software on iOS is actually proof, that the license is working as intended.

[1] Some examples of these interests are: Enforcement of DRM, trying to create a 'more secure' environment, having a consistent UX, etc.
Two quick thoughts:

1. Swap the burden of proof: couldn't much of these issues with software(!) patents be avoided just by forcing the "inventors" to check for prior arts themselves and prove (somehow) that they actually did do that?

2. Make them pay: What about a (huge) fine when the patent does not get approved eventually or when prior art was found during the approval process?
Zed Shaw is proof online tech communities are not entirely unlike professional wrestling. He would have been another decent author nobody talked about had he not been smart and turned heel with his online persona.

I don't know him. I only occasionally come across something he's written. But I'll be damned if I wasn't angry to see a post about him on Hacker News.
German playwright Rolf Hochhuth asks Merkel to give Snowden asylum
The exact lag time doesn't matter.

If lead was banned at different times in different countries, the bans can't be responsible for a crime drop that happened at the same time.
Somewhat related, Kevin Rose was also born in Vegas.
PagerDuty is hiring an ops-savvy Support Engineer to delight our customers
Scott Hanselman held a session on this at Alt.net Seattle a few years back, called "Why so mean?" At the time, in the Alt.net community, we had some pretty nasty people. The picture of Scott suggesting the session is pretty great: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ExperiencingALTNETSeattle2009O...
Recording of the session used to be here: http://www.kyte.tv/shanselman#uri=channels/240253/361169 but it appears that the service might be dead (or just blocked here at work)

Overall I think Zed is overreacting. It's so easy to do. I would guess he may just be one that may not be able to discern tone through text very well (most people can't, I think). That said, I have a lot of respect for Zed and his contributions, such as Learn Python The Hard Way.
How to enable Google 2-step verification on Wordpress
Is this so uncommon though? Ever since I was in school I've felt like the rare nerd who actually liked other people and wasn't a colossally negative dilweed. They pervade all aspects of our industry and culture, from grumpy neckbeards to mouthy wankers, and I'm honestly not seeing many signs of improvement. Everyone wants to be seen as cool, especially if we've spent most of our lives being dorks. Unfortunately this leads to everyone trying to be edgy and witty all the time and missing out on the human element; though a lack of empathy and social skills is hardly exclusive from the tech world.

We need more strong personalities without the mouthy egos behind them, and without the over-self-promotion I find off-putting in the design-side of the industry. Is it possible to be a popular, opinionated programmer without being a dick? I hope so, as whether we want them to or not; people are often on the lookout for a role-model.

And hell, I got insulted by ZS just for saying I liked a keyboard player. I think his opinion on the matter is wrong, but I'm not popular enough on Twitter to win that argument. Not that I like partaking in arguments on Twitter anyway.
>I'm going to greatly simplify things down for you with this example (so experts out there... don't shoot me :-p). A GPU can execute 1 program, but that one program can do 512 operations at once.

CUDA & OpenCL programs can essentially do the same thing, since there's no penalty for thread divergence between thread blocks. So, as long as you have enough lock-step behavior in your smaller work items, the larger groupings can do entirely different operations. Or, maybe said differently, you can roughly think of a GPU as a collection of SIMD units (in NVIDIA-jargon, these are SMs), all of which are allowed to run whatever vector code they want.
I saw on a post on twitter that the app is based on html css and javascript and can be ported over to other platforms and possibly be a web app. hope to see it on my gasp non-mac platform.
This reminds me a lot of the example that Bezos used in his April 2005 Amazon shareholder letter (http://www.scribd.com/doc/111244354/Amazon-Shareholder-Lette..., page 27).

I'd love to hear from people who know finance better whether the comparison is apt.

The analogy seems to be that when you have upfront expenditures that get paid back over time, you may not have positive free cash flow if you're continually paying up front for later pay back, and you end up with a business that paradoxically generates higher cash flow with slower growth.
yup that seems to be their plan.
Hey, thanks for the feedback! We (MakeGamesWithUs) are just rolling out these landing pages and when building this we were not 100% sure the best way to implement the phone number validation. About half the people downloading our games are outside the US, so it seemed relevant to address international numbers. The dashes don't actually matter, but without forcing the '+' it wasn't clear how to figure out what country the number is from. If the '+' is optional, we could assume any 10 digit number is from the US, but I think this would cause problems for a few smaller countries. We could check your IP and prepend if the correct country code wasn't present in number, but my instinct says this would cause unforeseen issues. Alternatively we could simply give inline feedback (instead of the notification at the top) to specify you need the '+'. I agree it sucks that most people won't get it right the first time, but I'd also like to guarantee nobody gets a success message when the SMS wasn't sent to their number, any suggestions on how to fix this?
It probably isn't necessary to replace the hardware infrastructure if privacy and security again become fashionable in software development. A great deal of important peer-to-peer, encryption and general data-obfuscation research has been done already. The trouble is, as Schneier so eloquently put it, that spying is the business model of the Internet.

But we can take another approach.

If this REALLY matters, we should be directing our attention not to some nebulous and almost certainly unenforceable government action, but rather to the eye of the storm: the very things we are building.

This is good mind-fodder if you have a moment to spare:
http://zeroknowledgeprivacy.org/
Wouldn't a more prudent way of dealing with this just be to ignore it? You could have just not cared and gone back to whatever else is more important than hate spat through twitter, which I believe is just about anything.

I somehow doubt that whatever Zed puts on twitter is going to have any bearing whatsoever on your future employment/ hobbies/ life.
How to hack AngelList distribution and get more money
While I would agree with you that they can be (mostly) ignored, the author says, "[t]hey lurk in IRC channels waiting to harass new programmers. These are the types of people who discourage women from participating in classrooms and within our open source communities."

The problem is that these so-called bullies are hurtful to the community. The concept of computing or technology in general is frightening to most because of the apparent "requirements" in terms of knowledge one needs to have to participate in the scene. Browsing the Github repository of your favorite open source application can be overwhelming to inexperienced people, and if you pair this fear newcomers have with a toxic community, the effects can be disastrous.

The good thing is that these "bullies" are a tiny minority. Yes, they are very vocal, but it seems that no one stands up to them (or maybe just chooses to ignore them). Ultimately it varies from community to community.
It's really not so bad. At least for simple-medium sized projects you can basically ignore the JVM. The leiningen build tool means you never have to tough maven/ivy/ant/etc
Publicly shaming someone because they were mean to you — this is a lot worse than bullying. Zed Shaw is famous because he's good; not because people love his personality. That being said, I enjoy his personality far more than the author's.
I've seen a lot of people say they get nervous and freeze up in an interview, performing far less well than they do on a job. Perhaps for some people this also applies to phone interviews, and perhaps a moderate amount of alcohol might help them avoid freezing up.

To some extent I'm playing devil's advocate, but you did ask for possible circumstances. I suppose in the employer's shoes I'd pretend I hadn't read the Twitter post and go ahead and carry out the interview. If he aces it, great. If he muffs it, I wouldn't make allowances for him being drunk, because he would have demonstrated showing up drunk was lousy judgment on his part.
Where can I find such a job doing nothing and getting paychecks?
> To conclude, we have to come together and accept the truth: the tech community is an extremely unfriendly place.

Zed seems a lot nicer in the videos of his presentations I've seen. Also, he once posted that his online persona is a parody of abrasive tech guru. I was skeptical then. I'm skeptical now. I have yet to quite make up my mind on this. In any case, Zed, by his own admission, writes like he does in order to gain attention. Whether or not you think it's obnoxious and whether you think it's a net loss or gain in this case is up to you.

I suspect Linus only does what he does because he wants to gain a small set of people's attention.

In any case, this strategy works. I think we need to ask ourselves why. I think a part of the answer could be that our the programming field is immature -- both emotionally and in terms of how our culture supports the maintenance of our body of knowledge.

Snide half-truths that tech people say about technology keep propagating, even when they are as useless as the typical ethnic stereotype. It's like we lived in a world where half of all doctors believed in ethnic stereotypes and wrote about them as if they were true in technical literature and openly made professional decisions based on them.

I'll close with a quote: "I'm an old-fashioned guy, & I believe in history. The disinterest & disdain for history is what makes computing not-quite-a-field." --Alan Kay
Great article. My favorite example of these Talmudic complexities is opensim (opensimulator.org), an MIT-licensed Second Life-compatible server that has a twisted, Black Widow-like relationship with Linden's GPL-licensed client code. Before 2011, there was a nutty "6 month cool-off period" before any SL client contributor could contribute to Opensim: http://justincc.org/blog/2011/06/30/announcing-the-overte-fo...
I just started a project that allows teachers, educators, and interested parties to create, maintain, and fork education standards. Basically, bring long-standing software development concepts to education.

After a brief discussion on irc yesterday I went with the AGPL. I want to encourage collaboration, but I don't want some ed tech startup with vc funding to use this code. I did put a note in the readme that if anyone has a good reason to want an MIT license, I'd be open to reconsidering the license. But I can't see a good reason at this point.
It might as well; here's a link: http://www.parallella.org/2013/05/25/explorations-in-erlang-...
Bloody galah scammers still not getting the message
4 year old iframe/YouTube/Vimeo/etc-breaking bug finally being fixed in Chrome
You say

"Lawyers are a waste of money"

and

"Lawyers are an enormous waste of money and in most circumstances a drain on society."

But you also say:

"No one, on this forum or otherwise, is in any position to evaluate whether or not someone else truly might need a lawyer. Every case tends to be full of nuance."

Why the absolute statement as well as the contradiction if in fact you believe that "No one, on this forum or otherwise, is in any position to evaluate whether or not someone else truly might need a lawyer."
technical approaches, mostly, learning not to reinvent the wheel so much, transitioning more towards using well-established techniques in the lab instead of going for broke on a risky project. I think a lot of figuring yourself out is knowing how to properly assess risk (while not becoming risk averse to the point of paralysis), hedge against failure, grab the low hanging fruit, and communicate the above to others.
Would any currently released web server software be able to take advantage of this board?
TL;DR: I'm mad at Zed Shaw, so I'll help him sell a lot more books by complaining about nothing.
Apple profits fall for the second successive quarter, but iPhone sales rise
@zedshaw (16329 followers) "^#%$^#@ you $^#@#@$ moron $^#@#@$"

@wilkieii (552 followers) "Zed Shaw's response was not a very friendly one..."
> According to many, including the FSF, GNU, Stallman and myself, increasing access to the source code for everyone is increasing freedom.

Once released freely, the source code never stops being free, so I don't really know what they're talking about in terms of "freedom". MIT licensed code is almost infinitely free, it will never stop being free, and nobody can take it away from you.

It seems to me that they're interested in forcing other people's source code to be free.
I wrote that article. :)

The concurrency tuning explained in that article has got nothing to do with reverse proxying. You don't need multiple processes either: the article says that you can use multithreading, and especially in the case of I/O-bound apps, that's enough. If you want to leverage multiple CPU cores however, that's a different story, but it depends on your Ruby implementation. If you use JRuby or Rubinius then threads are enough. But that is still unrelated to the question of whether to reverse proxy or not.
Alfa Romero Being Manufactured in Belvidere, Illinois
This guy left a passive-aggressive, disrespectful comment and is now trying to act innocent when he got an angry response? He should just admit his mistake instead of trying to turn this into a broader issue like bullying in the tech community.
I'm a user, and I want to use your library in my product. The GPL limits my freedom.
Show HN: Public voting using Twitter
We recently came up with http://www.twote.io , a public voting system for Twitter ... You can setup a vote by a tweet like this...

"I #twote on #favouritedrink ... Mine is definitely #clubmate"

We made it all OpenSource including the server side, website & iOS app: https://github.com/twote/
> I am not the person you are responding to, but I don't think the point was to understand how compilers parse code, but to know how the compiler implements your code in assembly.

You said it a lot more concisely than I did!
That's why there's JRuby and Rubinius.
This is a great game. I also appreciate your positive attitude as you handle the feedback in the comments.

Do you have any ideas for how to incorporate multiplayer gameplay into Penguins? It's generally harder to do (or not as fun) with puzzle games, but I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Keep up the great work!
Yeah, I was referring to parent comments link to LinuxAdvocates. =)
A company's value is equal to its discounted profitability, adjusted for risk. A company that loses money now but has a 10% chance of making ten billion dollars a year in ten years is worth more than a company that makes a million dollars a year with little prospect for growth. My own primary business, the Ruby on Rails Tutorial, is highly profitable, but I'd still trade its income in a heartbeat for, say, 1% of AMZN or CRM.
I very distinctly referenced the law. It defines what is legal, not what is annoying.

>If you have an account with them, and it's informational, even if it's just about a new service you can take advantage on that account you already have, they can contact you about it.

They can but they shouldn't unless I asked.

> If you don't want that, opt out.

If it's opt-out then the company loses a lot of points.

> If you don't like how they handled the email process, complain to the company.

Even better, I can warn potential customers about the way the company acts.

> If you still don't like it, stop using the service.

See above.

> Anything else just means that they have no way of notifying you about anything unless you visit their site. In some cases, I sure as hell want to know if they are offering free services or other promotions. In others, I opt out.

They can notify me all they want about the actual transactions I am performing with them, monetary or other. But when it comes to solicitation they should have a very explicit opt-in process.
Creative Commons for code would be CC0: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/27081
It look absolutely gorgeous, but when I get to the designer it simply won't let me create any layer, dragging doesn't seem to do anything.

Safari 6.0.5 (8536.30.1) on OSX 10.8.4. With Chrome I only get a "sorry there was an error" message.
I would make it contingent on success. Especially acquiring beta customers.
Their defective mobile site is sure reducing message-deletion rates (since there's no Delete button).
I don't think I'll have enough interest to beat all 1000 levels, but I can crash the game reliably:

1. Slide a block off the board where it starts wiggling.
2. Attempt to slide it back.
3. Press Undo.

Crashes the game every time for me.
> Because go is so simple for a typeless developer to learn, and has essentially no downsides and a massive upside (performance) compared to python and ruby

I think that's a brilliant observation! It's all of the duck typing goodness with far less of the static typing overhead. It's static types "lite" for duck typing lovers.