skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Ambiguities in copyright precedent about what actually constitutes a derivative work will continue to vex the GPL for some time."

That itself is a problem that basically stems from this question: What is the legal definition of "one program"?

If that's too hard, what is the technical definition of "one program"?

I can't answer that. I've thought about it a lot, and it's just unanswerable.

You can only construct one if you make some very limiting assumptions. The GPL itself does a decent job of clearly delimiting its boundaries, but only if you are in a pure-C environment. If you actually read the license, it is basically only applicable to such programs, despite its widespread use outside of that language. Even GPLing an emacs lisp module (staying entirely within the FSF's direct interests) is somewhat dubious.

And the general case is just absurd.
I don't care about Google's market-share but this is a nice push for both searches to innovate. Search still has a long way to go.
For an actual, interesting, scholarly take on teens & twitter, check out Danah Boyd's work: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/05/16/answers...
You answer the first 3 questions quite definitively, however I spoke with the Software Freedom Law Center just this past week about these same questions and was told the answer to all of them was "maybe" as this has never been tested in court.
The Best Bits: compressive sensing slims down data at the source
Yes, it would be more interesting. These questions may very well shed light on ambiguities in GPLv3. If so, then I imagine that the FSF would want to take this into consideration for GPLv4.
I'd be interested in getting more biometric feedback, including my food consumption - but it's a pain in the ass when you make something from whole ingredients, and then on top of that have to find out what fraction of the prepared meal you actually ate.

If I make a stir fry, it would take me 20 minutes just to figure out how many calories I ate, much less other stats. Sell me a widget that'll somehow track if for me, and I;ll just give you my wallet.
How did you get there? Are you with a company or doing volunteer work?
Command-line Twitter with Bash
Ah okay. So it's a safe assumption then :]
... as long as the article has not more than about 3-5 paragraphs. I'm sorry, but I couldn't resist.

We have plenty of news. What seems to have gone missing in online news in general is deepened analysis. So, these youngsters sure have heard of all the news - but do they really get all the information needed to really understand what they heard of?

Personally, I have never heard of a "letter to the editor" that complains about a too long article in print. This is something I first saw and now frequently see on the Internet.
SSL is relevant and in my actual implementation, which I am prepping now, I do use SSL on the login form, but technically, the form it is submitting to needs to be SSL, but the form itself does not.

Since I wrote the article I have made some small adjustments to the AES key dialogue, they key is generated at the login form using javascript then sent as an ssl cookie to the authentication form and also stored into a local persistent storage, which is not accessible (barring an exploit.) Once the auth page is reached the aes and guid cookies are cleared. I suppose that a script could be crafted to cause the user to reveal the key and guid stored in persistent storage, this is something I am still working on securing against.

I will consider your suggestions carefully and attempt to integrate them as I work to code this out.

I have posted this discussion into the comments in the article and will be updating it tonight to reflect this conversation. Thank You.
In one word - addictive ;<)
Would be nice to have a customizable update timer or a way to slow down the stream.

It appears that some users do not fully grasp the fact that twitter (and related apps) is much more "open" than facebook. Some of the pictures seem pretty private.
Microsoft's Craig Mundie on the Future of Software
Search Wars: Twitter Versus Google
I would really like an offline tool where my data stays with me. I do not feel comfortable if someone else knows everything about my life. It is a major privacy problem.

I would not pay for it though (unless it is flawless and <5€). And it would need to be Win & Linux, and easy to transfer/sync (manually). Of course it would need to support custom fields.
My comment is tangential to the actual discussion. It doesn't so much apply to companies with $5MM in funding as larger competitors. But, I'll post it here anyway because it relates a scenario that a founder needs to be concerned about when taking on a competitor with more resources than they have.

Beware of opening yourself up to any kind of legal attack. Many well funded companies will sue a competitor they know has limited resources just to force them out of business. They view the legal expenses that they incur from such an attack as a cost of doing business.

Many years ago (~15) I had a friend who had started a successful start-up in SFBA that provided specialized HA clustering software for large *nix machines. The start-ups funding rounds totaled ~$12MM IIRC, and the company had about ~50 employees, was cash positive, and growing quickly. After a couple years of nice growth, the company reached a size that caused it to be noticed by one of the large players in the HA space. The large player knew that the start-up, even with a multimillion dollar annual cash flow, did not have the resources to fend off a significant legal attack. They also knew that one of the start-ups' employees (not a key employee in product development or a founder) had worked as a software engineer on their HA product offerings before resigning to join the start-up. They sued. They claimed that the employee had walked out of their shop with IP that was used in the start-ups' products.

My friend flat out denied this, and I believe him. But, there was no way for him to prove it. The start-up did the only thing that they could - have their corporate council counter sue and fight back as much as was possible. After a few months in court and seeing the burn rate associated with such a legal battle, the founders realized that they were pretty much done. They didn't have the money to win, even if they were in the right. They laid off most of their staff and directed all of their remaining resources into the legal fight. They found it impossible to get new funding or customers because of the IP dispute. Then, they started to lose existing customers because of the dispute and the doubt those customers had about their ability to survive it. After all the cash on hand was burned through with legal costs, the company closed up and shut down completely.

The moral I got from the story is to be very careful about IP. VC's and Angels (and usually founders) are very good about doing due diligence on IP that is used to start the company. But, you have to maintain vigilance in regard to having clean IP and avoiding any liabilities.
I suggest they fall in groups of four, join together, and disappear :)
Rather than using a jammer I wonder if it'd be possible to use an EMP to fry the cellphone's semiconductors.

I'd also be worried if using a jammer, if the device was programmed to detonate itself, after prolonged lack of contact with a cell tower.
Both are very real concerns; the CTO of our division, representing a large chunk of a 50,000 person organization, was certainly very concerned about the chance that things would be forced open.
No, he's being downmodded for suggesting that the author should have to contact one particular organization to get answers to simple questions about something as widely used and discussed as the GPL.
You only need to sign in if you are NOT referred by Google.
Thanks for the detailed answer. The reason I ask is b/c there are some non-trivial problems which are similar regardless of the language or implementation. For example, what would the $self->data return value look like for a non-scalar? Does it recursively process a hash?

When you say the linker keeps note of the object IDs, does this mean the digests are stored outside of the objects themselves?
Are you trying to spin a conspiracy theory that the government intentionally created the recession? I think it's far more reasonable to assume that the government is incompetent.

There are plenty of government policies (I count agriculture, defense, and healthcare) that seem designed to funnel taxpayer money to crony corporations. But engineering the collapse of AIG, GM, and the investment banks simply to nationalize them seems outside the competence of the federal government.
and WikiAnswers (aka a huge number of seed questions and no answers).
So when I sing along, I'm really just dulling the pain that such music exists.
Good question. I changed "my personality" a few times according to your definition. Your description sounds to me as if you are both bored and not at all challenged.

A person who is interested in quantum mechanics is obviously not the right type to perform tedious IT tasks amidst corporate dullness.

Save a little money, then travel a while and take a book an quantum mechanics with you. The rest will follow. My changes were never complete but they worked.
While I admire the spirit of this, unfortunately I believe it's of limited use: Once word gets out that these guys are LEA "unfriendly", it will start to attract the kinds of people that get LEA attention, and then they'll have to respond to a court order / subpoena / warrant / lawful intercept, and it's all over.

Large ISPs routinely get subpoena requests all the time (i.e. they have teams that do only that). I think rsync.net is setting themselves up for a lot of undesired press when they finally have to do it.
Does everything have to "add real value"?

Anyway, this did add value to the guy who wrote it: He had fun doing it.

I've been thinking a lot about how one can differentiate between art and random shit. Once possibile filter I thought of was: 'Did it make the creator or the audience happy?' But even this doesn't work. Tolstoy disagrees with me on his very first point. http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361r14.html
ya I should probably being using HMAC
Do you have evidence of that? Their site indicates they're privately owned and VC backed.
Ask HN: review my web app, a wiki for code snippets
And then you can set PROMPT_COMMAND to send everything you type at the shell to twitter. "What are you doing?" indeed!

http://www.shell-fu.org/lister.php?id=768
The complexity is a feature. Simply put: if you want to work in the open, noncommercially, with maximal sharing, use something other than GPL. If you ever intend to commercialize your work, use GPL.

GPL's complexities are a problem for downstream developers, not for the author. That's essentially what you want if you're doing the Open Source / Commercial dual license play.
> Software won't do that. Once it works, it will keep working for the most part. Yes, it will slowly lose performance if not designed right, but you rarely have catastrophic failure.

What planet, or more likely, what universe do you live in where 'software rarely have catastrophic failure'? And more importantly, how can I get there as soon as possible? My life would be considerably less miserable in such a place...
yes. I did this myself when I was 15, my mom worked for a bank. Different country though, much the same rules.

It felt really weird being a kid amongst all the 'grown ups'. They all moved so slow :)
You are right and I agree with you, but I believe the point of the blog post was about the language designer saying "You cannot do this because it is too dangerous."

That is different than an application designer saying "Within the confines of this application, I will never do this so flag and prevent if it seems like it is."
Other possible reason sales are slow:

1) The interface on OS 4.x is terrible. Even the most simple app is a frustration to use. Most BlackBerry apps feel like some elaborate e-mail message with extra buttons.

2) Some apps are not compatible with all BlackBerry devices -- even relatively new models. I couldn't use SlingPlayer on my 8330. On the flip side of this there are very few (any?) applications that take advantage of the bigger screen size and nicer UI the Storm provides. It must be a drag to run ugly old clunky 7200 era apps on a shiny new Storm or Bold.

3) IOException() I guess this is how BlackBerry apps crash? I tried a few random apps when the store opened and found this to be a familiar outcome.

4) The games (good impulse buys) are lame.

5) Most of the commercial apps are way too expensive or serve a very small niche -- which may justify a higher price but isn't so good for volume.
Thanks for this link; it appears both credible and interesting.
I'd love to gain a better understanding of these matters; did the SFLC cite any scenarios where those first three would tip the other way? That was really an attempt to lay out my understanding of the situation, not provide definitive answers. Any corrections or refinements you can provide would be awesome. Sorry if I sounded a bit more confident than warranted.

I'm mainly basing my response to the top 3 on what I recall of the readline debate, and the personal idea if those worked any other way, there wouldn't be much of a reason for the LGPL to be around. Or at least, I think the answers to #2 and #3 are clearly defined for an LGPL'd foo.py.
"If Google wants to avoid becoming the next Yahoo (or AltaVista or Lycos) then it needs to think about how it can best serve its users with more relevant results."

They do that all the time.

Plus: Just because Google is dominant right now does not mean that everybody else will be into search. I wonder why people try to convince us that Twitter is about search while it is a social networking platform per definition. It can be used as social news or social bookmarking but even its rudimentary real time search feature can't replace Google.
Hi, I've been there, and seen more than one up close.

You're right - there are a number of triggering methods in use, to include IR, GPRS/"family band" radio, and cell. More sophisticated devices use a combination, like cell arming and IR/pressure plate/trip cord detonation. Simple command-wire detonation begat command-wire with a stand-off cell phone arming unit. This was so we couldn't follow wires to the bomber. For a time fake command wires were set up and boobytrapped. When we stopped following wires, they'd do it again. Or use something really simple like a washing machine timer for a regularly scheduled convoy.

In Afghanistan (at least 5 years ago), "long range cordless" was a popular option in remote areas without cell grids. These are Chinese-made cordless phones operating in the 20-40mhz frequencies with ranges of 10 miles or more. These are also popular in areas of Iraq without cell infrastructure.

It is a cat and mouse game of trigger mechanisms versus detection/deterrent. New detonation methods would show up all the time, with various techniques being popular in different regions at any given time (in both Iraq and Afghanistan). New methods are analyzed, equipment is designed to counter, companies bid on devices, and the countermeasures are pushed into the warzone as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, in my experience, these devices are always behind the curve.

It wouldn't be a good idea for me to go into detail about what these detection and deterrence methods do specifically. Sufficed to say I browsed this article's responses and didn't run into any suggestions or techniques that I hadn't personally used or seen implemented.

There's a wide variety of communications equipment insurgents have access to, because there aren't Iraqi or Afghan equivalents of the FCC. There is access to consumer radios and devices of all frequencies and outputs in these countries. The entire spectrum is game. I don't think there's a magic deterrent or detection method here.

Our best bet was always to schedule movements and map routes as erratically and randomly as possible. If we could, we would mix vehicle movements with foot and air movement. Keeping a good relationship with locals and randomizing movement as much as possible proved much more valuable than using the hottest new gizmo. Pulling over and buying a soda from a street vendor and chatting with the local police generally yielded better information about the road ahead than sitting sealed in an armored vehicle staring at computer displays.
How much have you made off the ads thus far?
Ask HN: Good books on negotiation?
(besides "Getting to Yes", discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=542186)
Then he's being downmodded unjustly, as he listed two specific organizations, included an "etc." in his list of organizations, and prefaced the entire list with a "perhaps".

Regardless of where the answers to these questions come from, it would be good to share the confusion with the FSF, in hopes that they can remedy it. I do not believe their goal is to inflict confusing licenses upon the general public, but they do have rather specific goals and attempt to address those goals in their licenses.
Doh ... "the newer breed of languages". Like Lisp?
Yes, I Suck: Self-Help Through Negative Thinking
The problem is hardly solved.

* Each jammer is different and caters to a specific type of detonator, or group of detonators.

* Effective ranges aren't large enough.

* Lack of proper training for soldiers means most have no idea if the jamming device is even working; many keep them off because they interfere with radios, etc.

* The lag time between new jammer tech and proper fielding is a year+ in many cases. I rarely road in a vehicle with the "latest and greatest".
AIG bet against a complete bust of the system. They were otherwise reasonably hedged. Governments have placed much larger and more harmful bets on continued economic growth in the form of spending commitments that outpace even rosy growth estimates, but I don't hear the populists crying over that.

Bailing out AIG (and their contract partners) was the problem. Creating an environment where bailout was even perceived as possible was the problem. Turning the US into a debtor nation via enormous government spending was the problem (in that it kicked off a number of other distortions).
Too late. Also MS Office is too bloated. Google Docs, Zoho, Think Free dominate the market for years. Microsoft can't just grab it.
The Secret of Power Persuasion is an old favorite.
Systematic incompetence creates systematic failure. There's no conflict or conspiracy here.
Why You'll Actually Miss Newspapers
the form it is submitting to needs to be SSL, but the form itself does not

then how do you guarantee the form is going to submit to an SSL-protected resource? the form and all of your javascript has to be sent over SSL, otherwise any of it can be tampered with to simply bypass your logic and post the form contents to an unencrypted resource.

if you haven't already seen it, watch moxie's blackhat presentation about ssl:

https://www.blackhat.com/html/bh-dc-09/bh-dc-09-archives.htm...
Have you ever lived in a different country? I mean really lived there, not just visited? Radically changing your environment can do very well in radically changing your conception of yourself. Does the large multinational corporation you work for ever give people in your department a chance to relocate? That might be a great growth opportunity for you.
Yes, but we were talking about priorities, not failure. If it wasn't your intention to disagree with me I apologize for the misunderstanding.
It's probably pretty difficult to filter but there were some serious NSFW pics coming across my screen there. Just a heads up for anyone else who's still at their office.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/science/want-...

Maybe it's not you that needs to change but how you fit in with the dominant early-bird culture.

My own experience suggests changing personal behavior, much less personality traits, is an uphill struggle that requires substantial effort. Gaius is right on the 30 days to make a habit theory...
MySpace was both open and had safety issues. Didn't stop teens from using it.
just googled http://legacylocker.com which seems to handle it
It was a joke - my point was that anyone who pays attention to politics would have known that the Democrats would emphasize her upbringing, and Republicans would express concerns about judicial activism.
That seems like viable thought. I will watch the presentation when I get a chance, but for now I will modify the article to consider this scenario and my code already forces SSL on the login page and the authentication script.
While this might be true to some extent, I don't care. I still prefer the ambient positivity of classic self improvement. When you tell yourself that you suck you actually do suck then. When you tell yourself you're great you got at least a chance to become great.
Just because "this is broken" wasn't followed by "...and here's how to fix it" doesn't mean that pointing out the initial flaw was without merit or substance. Still, I too wish someone at a qualified institution (FSF, SFLC, etc) would weigh in.
Agreed. I was having trouble focusing for a while and started biking 25 miles immediately when I woke up every morning. Doing the exact same loop every day started a pattern that I could follow for the rest of the day and I became a much more disciplined person.

In the beginning of the ride I would think about the previous day. If there were parts of it I was unhappy about I would think about how to fix them today.

The middle of the ride was new business, figuring out how today would rock.

The end of the ride was random brainstorming and more focusing on my time and body.

In other words, find an experience at the beginning of the day that you can use as a crutch. The experience should be strikingly different than the beginnings of your previous 10 lackluster years.

Wouldn't it be sad to find yourself writing to us in 10 years saying the same thing?
This way of thinking about language constraints misses a key point: language constraints are not only there just to bug the programmer into behaving better. They also provide a way of reasoning about the program to a person trying to understand it. The guarantees that exist in, say Java code, mean that a new person can say with much better precision what any given piece of code does (not what it's meant to do - what it will actually do). In a dynamic language, it might do anything.

I experience this exactly in the dual Groovy-Java universe I inhabit these days. I am faster at writing the groovy code and I think the end result looks nicer and smaller. But when there's some strange problem that needs to be debugged that I don't understand, the java code is much much easier to reason about. Simple questions like "how is this function possibly getting called" can be answered definitively in a fraction of a second with a key-press in Eclipse for java, while I have to run a virtual simulation of the program in my head to figure out what the groovy code might do.
Yes.

This advice is similar to Jerry Seinfeld's, which I also find to be excellent. http://lifehacker.com/software/motivation/jerry-seinfelds-pr...
Nothing more to add here but fantastic response! - You have just motivated me to get my ass in gear and do some stuff I have been putting off! - thanks
Yes, the class is not responsible for managing any aspect of its storage. It can provide hints, however, and that's what the "ID" and "Immutable" roles do.

It is worth pointing out that no automatic hashing is occurring. You write a function that is invoked on an instance of the class that determines the unique ID. You decide the content-addressibility of your object by choosing the address based on the content.

(If you just want a unique ID per object, KiokuDB assigns a UUID by default as the ID.)