skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I look at it as an argument over what "free" and/or "open" mean.

Suppose Alice releases some code under the BSD license, and Bob releases some code under the GPL.

Both of them can claim that their code is "free" and "open" and other wonderful adjectives. But Bob can incorporate Alice's code without making any changes to his license terms, while Alice would have to change her license terms in order to incorporate Bob's code.

Thus, to Bob, Alice's code is "free" and "open". But to Alice, Bob's code isn't -- from her point of view she can only use Bob's code if she accepts restrictions on modification and distribution.

And so Alice -- regardless of whether it's objectively right to do so -- probably ends up feeling that Bob's putting one over on her when he says his code is "free".

In other words, it's not about someone saying "I chose this permissive license and now I'm upset that other people abused my code", it's about someone saying "that other dude claims his software is 'free' but it doesn't look that way from where I'm standing".
HN is an experiment. As a rule, a community site that becomes popular will decline in quality. Our hypothesis is that this is not inevitable—that by making a conscious effort to resist decline, we can keep it from happening. http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

How can a site as large as HN motivate people to avoid repeating linkbait titles? If you submit a toned-down, but more accurate title, it often falls quietly off the New page... I don't see a solution.
Yes, I am going to be pissed if we end up with the Massachusetts solution.

Just curious, are you working a job or are you making a go of it with your software biz?
We Found A Schmindle
Are you rewarding good behavior, or just any behavior?
This is doubtful as well, because the standard modern written language is based on the vocabulary and grammatical structures of Mandarin. (I am well aware of this, as someone who has lived for years in places where Mandarin is the official language, but the home language of most elementary pupils is a non-Mandarin Sinitic language.) A fairly detailed response to the claim that Chinese characters provide common literacy for people who can't understand one another over the telephone can be found in

http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...

or

http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie...

For your convenience, I can link a deep look into one of those books through a focused search on Google Books:

http://books.google.com/books?id=fRqKreZFVTYC&pg=PA10...
I seem to be in a huge minority, but I think Zed is right on here (and in many other places).
"The problem is, it's decidedly less open and free for authors who prefer a more permissive license."

GPL-licensed software is Free software that stays Free. BSD software can become closed any time, something GPL software cannot. If you contribute to a BSD'ed project you take the risk of your competitor taking your code and making it a competitive advantage against you.

We may say GPL'ed software is "imprisonment resistant".

As for taking in Lamson code into Django, all that's needed is a GPL'ed fork of Django that can follow trunk very closely. GPL'ing Django is, in fact, turning that "imprisonment" mechanism on its head.

Any such code, of course, would have to be kept out of Ellington, for instance.

edit: second part of second paragraph was wrong
As I said, that line you quote, from this very article, is not true. That makes my point both relevant and correct "Microsoft bashing" and you, on the other hand, are just misled by the very PR spin I'm calling attention to.

Can you show me a link to this "ruling"? No you can't. Why not? Because it's not happened yet. And when it does happen, the EU has been pushing for the installation of multiple browsers with a choice at startup.

Removing their own browser from the Euro version was an attempt by Microsoft to head off that ruling. Obviously they felt that either a) people would be more likely to install Internet Explorer this way, and/or b) that the negative reaction could be skilfully deflected onto the EU.

Sadly, part b) appears to be working judging by our posts relative scoring at least, again I can only hope they're wrong about a) and this leads to a further increase in market share for non-Microsoft browsers in Europe.
Here's one: I don't want to watch my friends and family get poorer as they pay for my (potential) future illness.
A Pictoral Visual of The Bernard Madoff Fraud
I liked one of the comments on the OP, "Tight coupling is often the proof you are not unit testing your application".
Setting aside the bureaucratic monster this would necessitate, it just seems completely unAmerican.

How can you square fines for failure to exercise with "life, liberty, and the pursuit of hapiness"?

And where in the Constitution is the federal government given the power to perform these things? Even if it were a good idea, I can't see where it's legal for them to do so.
He talks about not crossing an ethical line and then says he's going to post the documents!

To posters drawing a comparison to newspapers like NYTimes, Wikileaks etc: ask yourself what public interest is served by these documents being made public (afaik none). And then ask yourself what public interest was served by the leakers of the Pentagon Papers.
If I change the number variable in this line in the script:

VisTrac.SetAccount(number);

to a different number than what was assigned to me, will I be messing with other people's stats?

Other than that, it looks good. I like it. I think I may use it.
How would you go about finding such coverage (for 3 founders)?
Not my own personal experiences.....but nevertheless:
http://www.paypalsucks.com/
Google's Chiller-Less Data Center
We don't know what would have happened if it had been BSD-licensed.

Maybe Apple, Nokia and Google would have contributed any changes they make anyway, because it makes merging easier and any competitive advantage they have does not come from their rendering engine.

Maybe more companies would have used it, possibly instead of licensing Opera. Maybe some of these would have contributed their changes back as well.

Possibly the tradeoffs involved in BSD versus (L)GPL can be measured, but pointing out examples of successful/failed projects using one or the other is not helpful.
Last.fm is/was British
Guess no one likes my sarcasm. I still feel like an alien in the US and I feel like an alien in Canada when I go home.

It's lonely being an entrepreneur.
Software Testing Categorization
Post interesting articles? If they're any good, you won't have to change the title.
"He didn't get famous from writing Mongrel"

His whole rant is because he didn't get famous for writing Mongrel. In fact, I (and just about everyone else) never heard of him before he called Rails a ghetto.

And yes, I also find him very predictable.
Argh. I understand why they're doing this, but unlimited undo was at least half the reason I picked Dropbox in the first place:

1. Put file that I probably don't need in Dropbox
2. Delete the file after the sync
3. Never worry that I just deleted a file I might actually need

Of course, I could upgrade my account to keep unlimited undo, but I don't need the extra space, and their price is pretty steep just to get this one feature. I'm probably better off versioning my Dropbox directory and sticking it on an external drive. Except I can't get at deleted files that are more than 30 days old that I previously put in Dropbox for the very purpose of not having to worry about them. Man, this sucks. I guess I have some extra work to do before August 1.
I think its partially due to the size of the market.

Most British startups start out building products for the British market. So they have a 10-20 million target. Once they achieve major success, they figure they'll go overseas.

U.S. startups start out building products for the American market, so they have a 300 million target. And since our version of English is much more prevalent online that target is even higher.

Since growth rates are more or less the same, you have British companies at a disadvantage. While a US company might have 10 million users after 5 years, the same exact company in Britain would only have 100K users.

The market share may be the same, but due to the sheer size of the market, the U.S. company has a lot more customers. And once those customers start paying, the U.S. company has a ton more $$$ to play with to grow even further.

There are obviously a number of exceptions, British companies doing well in the American market. But those are the culturally aware companies, that realize that the British culture is different from the American one.
Can you elaborate more? A (cursory) google search didn't really come up with anything about US wage freezes. there was a bit about price controls for 90 days when we came off the gold standard... that doesn't seem like the kind of problem you're describing.

fwiw, it looks like white male lifespan went up a ton in the first half of 20th century, 48 to 66, 37%! vs 66 to 74, just 12%. I'm pretty sure each 1 percent is exponentially harder than the last though.
I made a lot of fireworks asking the Fedora channel folks on Freenode for help on extracting the current Fedora look and feel for usage on Ubuntu.

In the end, they proved very helpful, but the initial reaction was less than enthusiastic.
The change came from wage controls during the Second World War. Ever since, employer-provided care is paid with pre-tax dollars while most private insurance outside of the workplace is paid with after-tax dollars. That's a huge penalty.

http://books.google.com/books?id=_TRBtKwBr4oC&pg=PA261&#...

It is also illegal to buy health care insurance across state lines, so it isn't a competitive national marketplace.

We need to make health care more market oriented, not less.
I'll bet this is the reason: http://lwn.net/Articles/301959/

The FSF changed the libgcc license to try to ban proprietary GCC plugins, so Apple decided to stop using libgcc.
J2ME Mobile Development Series 7 - Adding Items
I am trying to figure out why would I care...

(burn, karma, burn)
If you figure out a way to stop this kind of drama, you will have made a key discovery about managing online communities. Let us know if you do.
(In general, people notice response time not throughput. I think thats a bit difficult to capture in benchmarks.)
Top 3 Reasons People Buy Virtual Goods
To be fair: that's a little spun. He certainly didn't refuse to share it.

To extend the metaphor past the breaking point: he offered it only to those willing to bake pies for others. But the partygoers just wanted dessert, they didn't want to be stuck baking for others. If you like pies and think people should bake them for each other, that's hardly a crisis.

But you're absolutely right that this is about social issues, and not pies or licenses at all. What people are really angry about isn't the pie they have to bake, it's that Zed showed up with a blueberry pie, when everyone had agreed that they would eat only apple pies. And even though that blueberry pie looks good, it marks Zed as one of the enemy. So he must be shunned.
"Minimize harm" except for the public good. Watergate, WMDs in Iraq, etc. These are all worthy topics where the general good trump the protection of individuals. These are news.

I have no disillusions that this is not real news. Twitter internal memos are not headline news. But how much of TechCrunch really is? Sure we get some headlines about upcoming features in Apple or Microsoft or Google. But in the big scale of things, it's never going to replace CNN, Reuters or BBC.

Arrington wrote that they are not posting ones that are tabloid-esque in their nature to embarass. So he is attempting to manage the damage while still doing what he does - generate revenue by utilizing what information he is given.

I don't know what files they withheld. My point is that, had the hacker sent this to a real news agency rather than TC, they would have published docs too.

And I wager the discussion on the forums would be more centered around the content rather than the fact that TC dared publish papers.

Lastly, my main thing is this: How is publishing this information different than beating the other sites to news about Apple's big announcement the next day? The information was acquired from an unauthorized source (as most leaks are.)
If I can sidetrack this for a moment, could someone explain (or, far better, point me to a thorough analysis) the ramifications of if somebody were to "study" a GPL-licensed program's source for its algorithms, formulas, etc., and then completely re-implement the package from scratch? I don't think I've seen this addressed in license FAQs.

For a specific example, there is a book called _Calendrical Calculations_ which collects algorithms (and source, in Common Lisp, IIRC) for doing numerous time/date-related conversions. The authors patented the algorithms and the formulas as presented in the book. This seems a bit odd to me - it's not like they designed the Mayan calendar; while I respect that they did quite a bit of thorough research, that seems like the epitome of prior art. OTOH, the algorithms are also released under the GPL, in the form of the Emacs calendar mode.

The book's license: (http://emr.cs.iit.edu/home/reingold/calendar-book/first-edit...)

I'm a bit confused about the ramifications here - must one just ignore all of his research if you want to release date arithmetic code under a non-GPL free license? (I prefer the MIT/ISC and LGPL licenses) I thought the GPL only covered the implementation, but the apparent issue with the book's license really confuses me. I'm interested in writing a date arithmetic library in Lua or C, since having such a library specifically inside Emacs is of limited use, and my background is in history.

In that specific case, the authors are probably willing to negotiate (and I may just be misunderstanding things) - I'm more interested in how that situation plays out in general.
In my own limited experience with brits I've found that culturally they love creativity but only within conventional constraints. If you try to do something that is really subversive I've gotten this "who do you think you are?!" kind of attitude. They just generally don't share this American sense of "you can be anything you want to be!" Just a contributing factor.
Sorry. While you were asking, I was editing my OP to include a reference.
here's a bit on FDR's wage freeze and its effect on health insurance: http://faculty.smu.edu/tmayo/health%20care%20timeline.htm

Google "roosevelt wage freeze" for more on the freeze itself.
I have been the sole developer working on a enterprise web project (jboss/spring/hibernate) with extreme decoupling: 400k LOC and 48K of XML tying it together, rampant OOP and patterns du jour. First problem - too much code. Second problem - difficult to debug, because the flow of control often stopped at an interface. If the original developers had done decoupling as needed, the code would have been 50% smaller, more if done in something like Python, maybe 80% less.
Looks really smooth!
But Alice did release her code under BSD...........so she should not really care what Bob does with her. After all, she does not care what Apple, Google or other do with it.

So in this a case of double standards by Alice?
Ask HN: What do you use to extract user feedback?
Wondering what widget/service folks find useful in extracting direct user feedback. Not as interested in polls / ratings of pre-described elements, but rather a free text comment / suggestion box. Would love to know whats work or hasn't for everyone.
Apollo 11 in Pictures
Existing discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=705568
Anecdotally, I can't see how it could not be the case that universal healthcare will promote startups. In '05 and '06, we routinely lost candidates because they were married and required health insurance. If you've never tried to buy private health coverage for a family of 4, you may be laboring under the delusion that it's possible to actually do that.

Is there a difference between starting a company and joining a small startup? Sure. But the same obstacle confronts any family that wants to start a company. How could removing a huge obstacle to entrepreneurship not help?
Sure, this is the approach I try to take.

But there are chaff articles that get more attention than I (personally, yes it's subjective) think they deserve, because the title is flashier than it could/should be. In an ideal world, this wouldn't be rewarded by the group dynamic. With a smaller community, people will learn to deprecate a 'flashy' submitter's titles but that can't really happen in a community as large as this one's. I think it's an interesting problem.

--

edit, here's a recent example I participated in:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=704348

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=704664

The flashy dupe got 19 points, vs. 8 for a deeper bunch of information I posted in response. I'm not saying this because I care about the discrepancy on a personal level -- it's just an easy-to-recall example of what I'm talking about, because I participated in it. In fact, in this case, hey, maybe people want the quick fix: "Ooh! Graphene! Cool!" Upvote, and move on.

But this verges on falling in this category:

The worst thing to post or upvote is something that's intensely but shallowly interesting. Gossip about famous people, funny or cute pictures or videos, partisan political articles, etc. If you let that sort of thing onto a news site, it will push aside the deeply interesting stuff, which tends to be quieter. (http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)
Ziipa.com - Find web 2.0 apps and sites
Legal might be part of it. UK/EU libel laws, etc.
Flagged, no reason to post here rather than contact dropbox directly.

We already have enough 'Tell YC/PG/HN' posts, let's not open it up to other sites now.
Unfortunately, there just isn't anything you or anyone else is going to be able to do to combat people's "selfishness".

It may not be the way we want things to happen, but nobody is going to be able to convince every facet of the population to give up portions (however small) of their livelihoods to "build a stronger community" for exactly the reason you mentioned: nobody can see that they have anything to gain.
I think your link between wage freezes and the rise of health insurance is tenuous at best. I was born in an Asian country that traversed a similar path from self-pay to health insurance to (now) public health care - and wage freezes were simply not an issue there.

This has nothing to do with meddling, and everything to do with the fact that self-pay health care bankrupts people, creates sick populations, and insurance is unaffordable to anyone but employers.
Then why do not BSD folks change their license to: free and open for all except that no one can GPL the code.

This will resolve the issue once and for all.

But it will make BSD folks sound like hypocrites to the world.
Can't speak for the UK. In the Netherlands we have Hyves instead of Facebook, Marktplaats instead of eBay, bol.com instead of Amazon, and even the most popular search engine was Dutch for a long time (ilse). The problem is it's hard for these companies to enter foreign markets with such a limited base.
Twitter pillaged: Hacker accesses email of Twitter employees, and tells all
It depends on what you're trying to get out of it IMO.

If you're looking for early-stage active feedback on your site I would have to suggest my own app, http://www.launchly.com.

If you're looking for more passive/general/long-term feedback, idea, or problem reporting, then I would say the top contenders in that arena are getsatisfaction (which I use on launchly), uservoice, and kampyle.
Dude, come on. You're actively ignoring his point, which is that that it makes no sense to bitch about the viral nature of the GPL and then complain (sorry, lament) when a project doesn't choose to use a BSD license because of what you're then prevented from doing. That's just a lame attempt to substitute a legal requirement with a social one.

And just because he didn't surround your tweet with its full context, that doesn't mean he misused it. He responded to the exact point you made. Funny that this is basically an analogue of the point he's making about the license: you say something in public and then lament that someone goes off and uses it in a way you didn't want them to.
I'm not really sure it is a minority, or at least not as much as it may seem here on Hacker News. I recall reading that the GPL is by far the single most popular open source license. Can't seem to be able to back it up though.

Either way, something like 25% of projects listed on ohloh are licensed under the GPL, so its hardly a small minority of the free software community.
It sounds like you might be confused about what GWT is. It's not a replacement or alternative to FireBug. They do completely different things.

GWT is basically a set of widgets and controls. It allows you to write Java code that generates a slick HTML/Javascript/AJAX frontend without having to worry much about things like requests and HTTP. It's a web development environment that feels more like a desktop environment.

In any case, it also solves the debugging problem because the whole thing is now in Java. Just use your Java debugger.
Of course we can never know for sure, but we can certainly draw very educated guesses and conclusions.

For starters, the argument that "perhaps some" of them would have behaved the same is no where near as nice (in open source terms) as "absolutely all" behaved this way and will continue having to behave this way.

We can also analyze the behaviors of some of these companies. Just look at Safari for example: the open sourcing stops precisely where the licensing requirements stop: the engine is open source but the browser itself is closed source. Apple has unquestionably contributed the most to this web engine, and they are unwilling to contribute any more beyond their legal requirements.

Additionally the effect this has created in the web world is pretty powerful. Companies are now in a position where their choices are investing a tremendous amount of work in creating a new web engine or using the best existing web engine to be competitive but having to contribute all their changes back. This is particularly true in the mobile web space where WebKit is essentially the only engine that has proven itself capable of providing a desktop caliber experience. In terms of open source goals, there could be no better situation. You basically have to use an open source engine to be competitive, and the most competitive of these engines requires you to contribute back to the community in a space that is dominated by commercial investment.
That's a simplistic view of crowd behavior. Greatest common denominator link bait headlines will outperform interesting articles as the audience gets larger.
There was never any doubt about what "Universal Coverage" would mean, not to me.

The popular view is that health care reform was about taking care of the American People. My view, health care reform was always about taking care of the health care interest groups (insurance at the top of the list).

I don't have a job, but I pay the bills from contracting, not from Homeschool Day Book. (So far I have not marketed it very well and don't have many sales.)
You would still be welcome to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of hapiness". No one would be forcing you to use said healthcare system, but if healthcare was totally free, what's to stop people from totally trashing their bodies then asking for organ transplants on the public dime?

In such a system, checks and balances need to be in place to keep people from 'gaming the system'. IF you wanted to use the public healthcare, then you should be forced to make some compensation back to the public if you are willfully (by using your right to not exercise, or you want to be a smoker, etc.) causing harm to your body which is then causing you need to need extra medical procedures and costing everyone money!