skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of these things is not like the other.

The AIG bailout was emergency spending to prevent economic collapse. It wasn't an ongoing policy initiative. You can argue over whether it's effective or efficient but it's not anything like the cancer budget. That's like saying that, because of the aid after Katrina, building housing and infrastructure on the Gulf Coast is a policy priority.

Yes, there are ways the government could have mitigated or prevented both of these disasters (funding upgrades to the New Orleans levee system, doing a better job at regulating the finance industry, not encouraging homeownership), but you can't compare priorities by comparing emergency spending to ordinary spending. Remember, Congress is incompetent, not evil. They probably didn't anticipate that trillion dollar bailouts would be part of the cost of their policies.
Hey there Justin,

That's some of the best personal history stuff I've ever read on the internet.

You should seriously consider a writing career, you've got talent to spare. Thank you for all the insights in your life. My gf who has serious anxieties about meeting strangers is eating up your writings as soon as a new episode is posted, and thank you again on her behalf.

j
Because it requires a family member in the firm in order to be able to intern at 15. When you're 17 and up you can be 'on your own'.
The research is interesting, despite the crappiness of the article.
It is Time to Regulate Ignorant Anonymous Guest Posts on TechCrunch
Have you ever been successful in changing your personality?
First a brief background about me.I am 30 years old IT Architect working in the IT Services wing of a large MNC.Almost for the last ten years I have dreamed of doing interesting things like doing a start up,hacking on open source software, learning quantum mechanics, learning music etc.I believe I am most happy when I do creative things.

Now here is the problem.From the time I can remember I have always been lazy and procastinate everything till the dead last moment(I have almost made procastination into an art form).Almost always I find some excuse or another to not do either the regular mundane day to day administrative type of work nor do I ever get to do the more "creative" type of work which I sincerely want to do.

Now a lot of people told me I am just a lazy jackass and should get off my ass and get something done.That does sound like a simple solution but every time I try by planning my day and focusing on my tasks it works out for a few days and if I am lucky even a week or so but inevitably I get back to my old ways.This leads to a lot of stress for me because I am never truly happy - its almost like one part of me wants to do something and another part of me does everything to prevent me from doing it and the vicious cycle never lets me have any kind of satisfaction with anything I do

Now I have started to believe that my laziness is a part of my personality and probably more hard wired in me than I think.

It would be truly truly helpful if anybody out here ever who suffered a similar problem and were able to get out of it can provide some advise or even if they were able to successfully change a personality trait for life.Thanks in advance
Using Readline with mzscheme was the first time I, as a user was made aware of the inconvenience of the GPL. It figures, LISP always shows how everything else is flawed.
Because corporations were using these to circumvent the GPL.

Think of it as an evolutionary process, as the attempts to use the code released under the GPL while violating the spirit of the GPL increased in sophistication the GPL evolved to counter those abuses. This made it longer (bugfixes!).
What if there was a proof-of-concept of a forthcoming replacement for the GPL'd part, and it happened to be vaporware? I'm not too familiar with all of this.
I've found that most of the fear comes from the misconception that the GPL could force your code open against your wishes. In the US, that's simply not possible.

Check out this article on Groklaw ("The GPL is a License, Not a Contract, Which is Why the Sky Isn't Falling") for more: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20031214210634851

I've found it helpful to clear up that misconception, point to past infractions / events, and try to humanize the free software community. In most cases, there isn't a litigious company lurking in the shadows, and a show of good faith will go a long way. It's also quite useful to direct attention to high profile products that are safely using and modifying GPL'd code, like the Kindle.
That's pretty neat.

However, I can't help asking myself if this real adds any real value to the world. Not that it has to. It's like mental candy. Pleasing, but ultimately lacking in substance.
Come on, how old are you? What do you think government agents working in Iran get paid for? Hang out in bars? In this case they most probably amplified the information the world wants to hear "evil Iranian governments attacks poor righteous Iranian dissidents". They always did that, long before Twitter. I want to see the US State Department caring for protests in the US but how come I don't read much about those?

I don't say that the Iranian government are shiny happy people but the primitive binary opposition evil Iranian government, good US government does not work, not even with a nice and friendly Obama in charge.

Just beacuse you don't have a clue about politics does not mean you can call me "insane". I didn't know that this is a flame wars forum.

When you get older you hopefully will start to discern shades of grey. Apparently you still believe in fairy tales.
> I don't know, that probably could have been written a
> week ago.

No, it couldn't have, unless you have a time machine and a friend on the NYT's national desk, because it was in the Times today, not last week: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=In+opening+remarks%2C+a+Democratic+sena....
I've never been to Iraq and I don't know very many veterans that can confirm this, but I do know from my PhD research that this problem is not an easy one to solve.

As was mentioned in another post, these explosive devices are improvised, so once our deployed forces come up with a solution to a problem, the terrorists are quick to try another method. They have infra-red triggers, trip wires, pressure plates, RF triggers, and possibly using other forms of wavelengths. Some wavelengths are particularly hard to jam because they interfere with our troops' own communication systems. Plus these jamming systems are expensive and high powered which is not easily scalable.

The Washington Post ran an excellent series in which they talked about the difficulty of this problem [1]. As for me, I'm doing my PhD research on trying to stop these acts of violence prematurely. So even though this technology isn't immediately deployable, we're looking at other types of sensing technologies that can "see" explosives devices from a stand-off distance, particularly > 50meters.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/specials/leftofbo...
That should have a [spoiler] tag.
Hmm.. maybe, expert focus groups for a non-expert product. That's actually sort of interesting.
Also, now I've worked out what you meant: win left and win right are window management shortcuts to maximise vertically and size to 50% horizonally. Nothing to do with multihead.

It's likely one of the less common window managers implements something similar, but GNOME, XFCE and KDE do not (and to use those other window managers, you'd lose support for freedesktop.org shortcut files and have to recreate your menus).
We'll be waiting! Thanks for the great interview, Brandon.
"Would you buy monitors that ghosted if your programmers typed the "wrong" letter combinations?"

No, but that's not analogous to my experience.

Given that my company had more time than money, the DIY boards worked really well for the time, cost, and effort, and the value we got out of them.

Sometimes good enough really is good enough.
If we're going to go with "spirit", why not use the less restrictive license without the potentially scary legal ramifications for large company X? That is, can you tell me why:

-- Here's this GPL licensed code. Go ahead and use it, and so long as you keep with the "spirit" of open source, I won't bother suing you. When I die, however, and the executors of my estate notice that they now control copyright on this GPL'd code that you might have used to grow your multi-billion dollar company...all bets are off.

...is better than:

-- Here's this BSD licensed code. I'm not going to require anything of you to use it, but I expect you to keep with the "spirit" of open source and contribute back to the community. If you don't I have no legal means to force your hand, but if you die and haven't contributed back, your fork dies with you.
Perhaps people choose the GPL over one of those licenses because they don't want you linking your proprietary code to their library for free.
In summary: There's a very clear-cut answer to #6. The rest are fuzzy.
I guess asking people to respect your privacy means nothing in today's world. Sad to see this on HN of all places.
How to Break A Creative Block
This is just a teenager stating his opinions based on what he observes in his peer group. It does not include any real data.

That said, his argument seems to almost boil down to, "on Twitter you can't choose your friends". There is no way to enforce a clique on Twitter. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of conversation among teens is directed solely at their circle of friends, and not at the world and the common collective that Twitter seems to embody.

The reason it's unsafe is that anyone could start following you! Imagine how terrible it would be if that crazy kid no one likes started following you, showing up at your parties and suddenly people thought you were friends. Or what if that mean jock started reading your twitter feed and made fun of your love of {insert obscure interest here}? The world would absolutely end! Everyone knows there's nothing more important in life than who you take to prom.
Looks like twitpic.com is having some problems...

"502 Bad Gateway nginx/0.6.35"
Heh, as I was watching the images go by TwitPic went down. 502 Bad Gateway.

Hope that wasn't your fault ;)
I've never thought the fear was that proprietary code would be forced to have its source opened. I was under the impression that the fear for large companies has more to do with injunctions on sale and/or distribution as a result of license violation. Try to tell Microsoft that they can't sell Windows for the next week and see what they think of that...
HN is largely anti-GPL. You are being dowmodded for that reason.
"The fact of the matter is this: it is possible to create a mess in every language. Language designers can’t prevent it."

I hate stuff like this. It's not a bool, it's a float. Language features (e.g. type checking) help eliminate some errors, reduce the likelihood/frequency of more, and reduce the cost of finding others. Coercing reduction factors into absolutes destroys the conversation for a cheap debate point.
I worked abroad for 7 years. Being a freelancer will mean that you won't put anybody's nose of of joint by seeking work and experience outside of your country.

To paraphrase a character in Hilary Mantel's, "Eight Months on Ghazza Street":

"It was if by going away we had criticized everything about our own country".

In other words, as an employee, experience working abroad can set employers against you with questions like, "Why did you leave?" This is exactly what happened to me and why I ended up out of tech and in a succession of crappy jobs for 5 years.

I quit a safe, secure job to work all over the world.
Do I regret it? No.
Would I work abroad again? In a heartbeat. It is still a goal of mine to own a business that I can operate from anywhere in the world via a laptop and a broadband connection - to me, that's the ultimate freedom.

So go! See the world, meet people from other cultures, and work wherever you find yourself. As a freelancer you already have the only thing you really need to suceed - resourcefulness.

Good Luck!
In particular, the guy who wanted to be able to make it a compile-time option had a program that would do basically nothing without readline

That's not true. If you read the story you'll see that the guy had a working program for years before he used readline. The use of readline only improved an already working program. Not to mention, the program in question was a language implementation and readline had nothing to do with it. It was a user interface perk.

At one point he said he'd distribute a working program without readline or readline support even enabled by default and leave it up to the user to configure it. It was only going to have an interface to readline without including any readline code. He was told he couldn't even do that.

In the end he chose to GPL the entire language implementation. To him, it probably didn't make a difference what the license was and it was easier than replacing readline. Personally, I would have replaced it with a BSD-licensed alternative just out of spite given the way the whole thing was approached. The line about how a judge wouldn't be convinced the program didn't violate the GPL read like a thinly veiled threat to me.
Like I said, talk with the person/people/org, and understand their situation. I've talked with some people who are real GPL zealots, who are really not interested in the idea of proprietary software at all, and you can take their code as is, or leave it. Others are willing to work with you when they see some potential advantages to a more liberal license. A lot of people, probably the majority, just don't want to feel "ripped off", so if you're using their software, you should respect the license (it's not that hard with the GPL) both in the spirit (which may vary from person to person) and in the letter, and see if there's a way to come to an agreement if things don't quite match. And sometimes people in this latter category don't understand the GPL well either, so talking with them is likely to smooth things over in any case, if what you're using is something important to your business.

And consider that in the worst case, you're no worse off than if you encountered a proprietary-licensed library that was too expensive for you to use.
well you have to be fairly close anyway to make the call (further than a wire I guess, yes, but still)
This may sound like a nonsequitur but take up rock climbing. I spent the better part of 10 years languishing in helpdesk hell dreaming of getting a job as a developer. I just could NOT muster the stuff to get off my ass and make the changes required to change career tracks. Too comfortable with the routine I guess.

I got interested in rock climbing after seeing some climbers in action during a vacation trip to Wyoming. I've been climbing for three years now and I'm employed as a web developer, I've gotten to speak at a major technical conference (used to have hideous performance anxiety), and I'm contributing to open source projects. I'm also in the best shape I've been in my life. Good luck to you.
The farther you get into the gray area, the less of a clear answer you can get, because it becomes more than anything else an issue of which way the judge rules. This is why generally it's a good idea to err on the side of caution with any type of software license.
Yes, good luck with it. A challenging project to bite off without a doubt - but some awesome potential.
Agreed. Deleted.
Think about what you just said: You need to offer something useful to people who pay you nothing.

The people you need to offer something to are the ones giving you money. All the rest you're supposed to be enticing to become subscribed users.
To protect against only a passive eavesdropper if you aren't worried about replay or MITM you only need to do the authentication over SSL (What the writer lists as #2 in the list of "normal ways" of handling the problem at the top of the post). And no, it does not prevent replay of short-term session cookies; It seems to only allow for the long-term "cookie" (which is never sent in cleartext. It isn't an actual browser "cookie") (the mentioned "Persistent Storage") to be used to generate more than one short-term cookie, even without SSL (though with as many SQL hits that it is proposed it would be doing it probably wouldn't perform any better, which is pretty much the point). So you're fine if your short-term session expires by the time your passive eavesdropper cares to try to use the intercepted data.
A couple of thoughts, probably cribbed wholesale from elsewhere since I've read so much on these topics.

1. Set the bar low, and gradually raise it. Make your goal for tomorrow to work on a designated creative project for 30 minutes. If you can do it -- great. Set the same goal for the next day, or maybe a little more. Think of self-discipline training sort of like weight training. You can't suddenly, by dint of will, force yourself to bench press 600 pounds, let alone do a complete workout every day. Maybe your personal max right now is 30 minutes four times a week ... start with that and build from there.

2. [This is from the book Do It Tomorrow, which I recently read and enjoyed quite a bit.] Make your creative project your "current initiative," which means IT COMES FIRST. That might mean it's the first thing you do when you sit down at the computer after work (if you can't do it at work), or whatever ... but whatever you do, start working on it first, before getting bogged down in day-to-day stuff like answering email and reading HN :). As in (1), you don't need to set huge goals ...if you keep blasting away at something a little bit every morning, you'll start making some serious progress.
Greg Vetter, a former law professor of mine at the University of Houston, has written about the pitfalls of 'infectious' open source licenses such as the GPL. I highly recommend taking a look at his paper on the topic:

http://ssrn.com/abstract=585922

Ambiguities in copyright precedent about what actually constitutes a derivative work will continue to vex the GPL for some time. The unfortunate truth is that there are no clear legal answers to many of these questions -- and that's kind of the point that Jacob is making in asking them in the first place.
release the code!
You just argued that slavery wasn't that bad. In your opinion slaves were treated quite well because they had some monetary value, which is simply not true. You rewrite history in favor of slavery and then you accuse me of being dishonest? Not even fascists nowadays support slavery. This is more than disturbing. I simply can't believe how you can actually support slavery while the US has an African American president.
yes. And if I were a customer of theirs I'd work to obtain a more trusted copy of their key. But, FYI, I've had this copy of their key in my keyring for several years, I didn't just pull it off their website today.
At one point he said he'd distribute a working program without readline or readline support even enabled by default and leave it up to the user to configure it. It was only going to have an interface to readline without including any readline code. He was told he couldn't even do that.

Then RMS was wrong. The SFLC says you're quite allowed to do that, a classic example being ffmpeg, which can be LGPL, GPL, or even non-redistributable depending on what external libraries you link it to on compile-time.

People have to learn that RMS is not God and that just because he says something about the GPL doesn't mean that the lawyers agree.
I think that particular area is ripe for further exploration. Especially in the context of Jacob's second and third questions:

Does the answer change if foo.py does not ship with bar.py, but nonetheless requires foo.py to function? Does the answer change if foo.py does not ship with bar.py and does not require its presence to function?

If GPL foo.py is the only library that can fill that void, then sure, once your app runs a code path that takes it through foo.py, it's a derivative work. But what something else could fill that void?

For instance, what would happen if Editline exposed a Readline compatibility layer?
Exactly. This is the way slave holders in the south argued. You should read the actual book. It's very moving, one of the greatest American literary works. I read it in my first semester of American Studies.
It takes 30 days to form a new habit. You just have to get there. Routine is the key. And early mornings are the best, because you never have the excuse to say "I've had a shitty day at work, all I want is a pizza and a beer". For me it was the gym. Every morning (almost!) I roll in there at 6am before I'm even really awake. "Alright, lads" I say, "alright", they reply, it's always the same crowd, they are very serious people, and now I am pretty serious too. And I don't need to force myself to do it now either, because it's what I do, I'm the sort of person now who in the winter when it's dark outside will trudge through the snow then train so hard in an unheated former warehouse that steam pours off me and I like being that person.

So set your alarm an hour earlier tomorrow and commit yourself to playing your guitar (or whatever) for an hour before starting your day. If you're tired and go to bed an hour earlier, so what, you were going to waste that hour watching TV anyway, get some sleep and get up early and do it again the next day. Then soon this will just be what you do and you'll wonder how it was ever any other way.

Also as Confucious said, if a man chases two chickens they will both get away.
$self->data returns the value of the data attribute. The class is responsible for generating the identity of instances.

The digest is only calculated when the object is stored. When it is retrieved and stored again (a no-op, since it's immutable), the ID is remembered and not recalculated. (Creating an identical new object will result in the digest being calculated again, of course.)

The basic pattern for using this, once you've written the class:

my $foo = Class->new( ... );
my $id = $db->store($foo); # 29837a387bffe...
my $foo2 = $db->lookup('29837a387bffe...');

Then this is true (the linker keeps note of the in-memory object IDs):

refaddr $foo == refaddr $foo2
When was the time MS had the superior OS? Windows 2000 vs. System 9? I'm not sure that counts when you put Millennium into the mix.
Maybe _why doesn't care to be famous for what he does. Maybe he'd rather you focused on the art and code than him.
The neglect of what AIG was doing before the crash was an intentional policy priority. The recent bail-out cost was just the deferred cost of that policy.
"The consensus I've seen is that it, in general, it's a bad idea. This is the same kind of cultural proscriptive advice the author says is not present in the Ruby culture."

From my corner of the Ruby universe there's not even consensus about using the term "monkey patching", or when to apply it. (I find the phrase more confusing than enlightening, as most of the time people are not making a distinction between a deliberate coding decision to re-open a class for a specific result, versus employing the technique to hack pre-existing code you cannot otherwise properly alter.)

About the closest thing I find to consensus is, "Don't be dopey when re-opening classes", especially if you are writing code for unknown end users. But I know of few people who frown on ever re-opening classes.
Every year there seem to be new emergencies. So it seems fair to say that curating emergencies and applying expensive political band-aids is a higher policy priority than long-term projects that might actually improve the standard of living.
A course management system which is a lot more flexible than moodle and other software, but requires a lot more work from the school.