skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was only addressing the GPLv3 programs because that was the grandparent was addressing. For Yosemite, lot of the other software, with the notable exception of Vim, seems to be fairly close in version to what the current release is. OpenSSL is an outlier too, but that may very well be a case of the amount of API changes with OpenSSL 1 that didn't provide a clear benefit, but did create new openings for problems.

With Mavericks, the situation is a lot like any other Unix distribution. Unless you have a very good reason for it, you don't want to break working code during a (mostly-)automatic update. For example, RedHat shipped Python 2.6 as the default for many years after Python 2.7 was released -- using 2.7 would have broken user installations.

Personally, I'd like to see Apple volunteer with the efforts the BSDs are making to create good BSD-licensed alternatives to the GPL software that's shipped. However, as you briefly mentioned, a lot of the software has different quirks and design decisions that will cause code to break. BSD grep, for example, mostly Just Works, however, I had to switch back to GPL grep on my FreeBSD box because a few bits and pieces had changed enough to make things a hassle.
No way is putting the Internet into a watch or say a toilet pointless. The data collected from such things will extend and save our lives.

Send your heart rate to your doctor and or the ability for him or a medical staff to monitor via your watch is invaluable.

A IoT toilet of the future should be able to analyze your specimen data, look for irregularities in it's data based on million of records and notify you to schedule a doctor's appointment.

Samsung is presenting the benefits of IoT terribly wrong it seems.
I got absolutely nowhere with Simmons and have no idea what the appeal is, but I cannot encourage Banks enough. Worth reading all, and again.
It's the "fuck the rule of law" technicality. Coming soon, to a police state near you!
I just strongly disagree with jumping through the necessary hoops to get ahead because everyone has to do it

While I agree with this sentiment in general, I think you have to look at some hoops as just part of hacking life. If you aren't finding the kind of success you seek using alternative strategies, maybe incorporating some conventional approaches could help.

I'm somewhat surprised that you didn't take the QA job. Even if it didn't make immediate economic sense, it was a foot in the door and after a few months you'd likely be doing something more lucrative, especially with tech chops exceeding what I've seen from typical game QA workers in the past. It sounds like this company already has a ladder like this in place. And even if "random employee in a game company" isn't your end goal, it's probably a good step along the way. Think of it as a months-long internship; it can't be worse than delivering newspapers. Speaking of non-US citizens, I can't help but think of the countless immigrants to this country who sailed over alone, working until they could save up enough to send for their families.

My overall feeling from reading both of your (well-written and interesting) blog entries is that you have had the misfortune of hitting upon a startup-type "success" early and that has given you an unrealistic expectation about how easy it is to replicate that kind of success in the future. Also, you're entering a stage in your life at which you need to dial down the amount of risk you can assume. It sounds precarious.
I wish I could use 1password as my private key store (~/.ssh, per se). I hope the author reads this.
I think it is because bash is a huge thing, both in terms of program size (functionality) and attack surface.
Astonished to find no David Brin on that site, or in this discussion. The man has seven Hugo Awards for a reason! Otherness (short story collection) and Earth were downright formative for me.
What speed connection are you using? Mine seems to work flawlessly.
While I mostly agree, I first encountered the 'Lobsters' section on its own and loved it for the way it ran with its ideas.
There is no Flash Player for iOS. I know Chrome for Desktop bundles Flash, but Chrome for iOS does not (at least as far as i know).
Um, it's in the OP. :-)
I completely agree with you guys. The tone deafness in this thread with regards to why VB6 appealed to beginners is striking.

No, beginners don't want to layout things in CSS, a declarative XML language, or any other 'text' way. They want to drag and drop components with the sort of ease of use that Visual Studio or Interface Builder offer. And they want a language coupled with that which features the simplicity of Python.

I too did some of my first serious programming in a VB like language in the 90s (RealBasic for Mac). I now develop beginner training materials in web development as a side gig and while we have fun - it's definitely not as satisfying as laying out a form in VB and having a real GUI in a matter of minutes that "Just Works."
Google and ARM already support a mesh networking protocol, so the IoT devices don't have to be connected to the Internet - but can be, though a gateway like a mobile phone.

http://www.threadgroup.org/2014_07_Press_Release.aspx
Thank you! Early on, we decided not to include an asset import tool - there were a number of factors, but mainly we wanted to nurture the in-game creativity, and keep a level playing field. We will keep an open mind regarding future direction though!
Yup. FSF's licenses are rooted in copyright, they say nothing about users, only distributors, because usage doesn't involve copying.
AGPL would be a notable exception though.

The GPL licenses give users freedom by forcing distributors to behave in certain ways.
I would second this advice of staying away from #2. We tried option #2, but it required a lot of handholding. Not to mention the risk of contractors doing the minimum amount of work to meet requirements. Also, after the contract ended, we were left with nobody in our team with enough knowledge of the code to modify it quickly. The process of reading and learning the code (and to merge it into your own thought process) can take as long as writing the code itself.
Can I destroy things created by others?
Also a 2nd generation Cuban American, born/raised in Miami. I think you're right on the money with all your points.

I also believe the embargo has another dimension having to do with stability of the status quo on both sides of the Florida Straits:

-The Cuban government often uses the boogeyman of the United States to justify their policies (and their people's poverty) domestically. The embargo keeps the U.S. strongly in the boogeyman category.

-On the other hand, I would wager that the United States wants little to do with a destabilized Cuban regime 90 miles away from Florida. While they are probably pretty old by now, there are still some Cold War era militant groups in South Florida that wouldn't mind capitalizing on a collapsing Cuban regime (i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_66).

I think the fear of destabilization so close to the U.S. also figures into the government's calculus, which apparently concludes it's best to keep the embargo untouched for the moment. However, as the article says, it is true that the situation is changing as the Cuban government makes some sink-or-swim adjustments to their system...
> And the Linux kernel stuck with GPL v2 for a reason...

...which is that they've never required copyright assignment, so changing the license would require the consent of everyone who has ever contributed.
And I read this as "better writing" is just boring writing.

<sarcasm>Please, lets all discourse in a monotone, with strict rules and public shaming for non-adherence.</sarcasm>

(trying to get my karma below -25)
The schedule is here http://www.startupschool.org/schedule/
Thanks. I thought I remembered reading about this same issue some time ago. Seems like a rather slow response from Dropbox, doesn't it?
Yes, a moderator changed the url from that, and the title from "Kaya: The Future of Programming" in the hope that it would nudge the discussion back on-topic.
Here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8441230
For many people communication in online forums an ego sport. They are here to snipe and crush

Great comment. For an example of this in action, check out this exchange, from yesterday: http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/2ip045/what_happ... .

The problem also recurs periodically on Hacker News: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/commenting-communit... .
And if you open up a number of stalls equal to populationOfCity/2 your lines will go away.
Most BSDs don't ship bash as their default shell. FreeBSD, for example, ships tcsh.
William Gibson wrote a little appreciation of The Stars My Destination:

http://www.loa.org/sciencefiction/appreciation/gibson.jsp

'It is, as Bruce Sterling remarked to me on our first meeting, “a seamless pop artifact.” Few and far between, such artifacts; each one a complete anomaly.'
It also works fine in IE 11.
You're focusing on what's good about the Web and not addressing what's good about VB (that's what this thread is about): a stable API platform, and easy WYSIWIG GUI design. The Web (or at least the tools for it) largely lacks those two things.
For one thing, I suspect that at some point, after the first wave of the Internet of Things, open APIs and root access will become a selling point

Hardly so. I really doubt users would care less. How many people really bother about that iPhone is locked. You can root android based devices with little ease still, people really don't bother or care. People will use things which are easier to use, have a seem less experience.
What I Saw as an NFL Ball Boy
Very cool. This reminds me of Lucasfilm's Habitat, the world's first (?) graphical MMO, from the mid 1980s:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game)

which incidentally is being restored by booting the original servers found in a collector's basement:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/227045/rebooting_the_w...
So how did you evaluate that they didnt try enough? I mean why do you think overwhelming majority comes in that category?
As a non-Cuban, which makes up most of America, I really don't care about issues like these so you're going to have to voice your concern to the government
Yeah the complaint is ridiculous and this coming from someone who learnt on VB 6. VB 6's IDE cost $500+ at the time and even getting the education edition was a huge PITA (it was HEAVILY pirated by students).

VB.net and C# (and F#) are free [legal] downloads from the internet and both just as capable as VB6 was back in the day (the things Visual Studio Pro and above add aren't really relevant to beginners, except the testing framework perhaps).

Plus back in the day I found VB 6 quite limiting. For 101 level stuff it is plenty fine, but once you want to go beyond simple applications (e.g. games) you're left almost fighting the language and libraries itself.

With C# in particular, while it is certainly slower than Go/C/C++/D/etc, that's really the only major limitation. You can definitely access much more of Windows' API infrastructure, it supports unsafe code, the .Net framework is more comprehensive, and the language features are extremely modern (F# more so). There really is no limits except execution speed.

Honestly kids today are extremely lucky. I would have killed to be learning on C# back in my day. Fuck VB 6.
I wonder why the author is so caustic in regard to hydrogen peroxide.

Here - http://yarchive.net/space/rocket/fuels/peroxide.html - second message mentions Clark's "Ignition!" facts, and in first Henry Spencer states:

While there are some storage headaches -- the stuff decomposes slowly no matter what you do, so you must provide for tank venting -- otherwise peroxide is much easier and safer to handle. Its bad reputation is half outright myth and half the result of 1940s experience with seriously impure peroxide. To quote a friend, a rocket-propulsion professional, who investigated the matter as part of a study some years ago:

"As far as we could find out, the stories about problems with peroxide were just that, stories... Peroxide, now, seems to only very rarely do anything exciting, at all. And, even then, it seems to never do many of the things attributed to it in the stories."

Of course hydrogen peroxide can be dangerous - relatively recent explosion in Sweden (peroxidepropulsion.com) reminds us about that. At the same time significant volumes of it with more than 70% concentration are routinely used - so a chemist can calibrate the feeling.
Firstly, I'm glad you found the posts well crafted, after spending hours on the documentation, the videos and having actually had the opportunity to talk to Googlers at I/O, I felt it necessary to clear the doubts I've seen most people have.

Regarding the part about creating a homogeneous look, I don't "completely" agree with that, I can understand that being a worry. Google's been quite detailed in terms of what is right, what is wrong from purely a keyline metrics perspective, and if developers follow them very minutely, I can see a situation arising where several apps look very, very similar.

Having said that, I think the core focus of material design is really going to be how different apps use animation in their experience, as well as how well they scale across platforms. Material Design apps should not be judged purely on the basis of a phone app, or a tablet app, or a website, but how a user who uses the app across multiple devices finds the experience.

Offloading design decisions for indie developers, however, could be very useful. Far too many simply haven't cared enough to get their metrics right, for example. Material Design gives them certain rules to follow, which if they follow, might not give them uniqueness but at least the users would find them easy to use.
Hmm, it might be nostalgia as I was in my late teens when I read "Hyperion" the first time. The rest of the books in the series are weaker, though. Hyperion seems to be an amalgamation of lots of nuggets of story building and elements that the author has lovingly crafted in span of several years and if one does not enjoy pondering, poetic world-building or heart pounding scifi action with time shifting supersuits for their own sake, then there is very little meat in the book.
There's a strong willingness to adopt open source tools in every large company but GPL 3 is poisoning the well, and that's impeding universal adoption of the open source ecosystem. Sure FSF doesn't care, and that's unfortunate, because that stance is actually keeping proprietary enterprise software on life support. Unintended consequences I suppose.
The more people using public transit the less congested the roads become which is a huge benifit.
Shiny! It's like a mature Club Penguin.
Ask HN: So you've found an idea for a startup. What now?
A designer, programmer and marketer found an idea they love for a startup. What should they do now?
The GPL is designed to preserve the end-user's freedom. In order to do that, it only grants other distributors the right to copy it if they agree to grant the same rights to others they distribute it to.

Under copyright law with no license at all you would have no right to copy it at all; the GPL grants you additional rights, but only if you do the same in turn.

Complaining that that restricts your freedom is like complaining that it restricts your freedom to go to a country that forbids kidnapping. Sure, in stateless areas with no effective government, you may have the additional freedom to kidnap someone else, denying them their freedom. But on the whole, laws against kidnapping (or false imprisonment, or the like) are their to preserve freedom.

Likewise, the additional freedom that the MIT or BSD licenses grant you is the ability to deny other users the freedom to use and modify your works derived from the code.

Can we please stop having the argument that BSD or MIT give more "true freedom" than the GPL? The only additional freedom they give you is the ability to apply more restrictions to other people.

Now, you may not want to make the deal that the GPL makes, trading your code for a promise that other people who distribute it continue to offer the same freedoms that you offer. You may not really care what restrictions other people place on it, or on their modifications to it, after you've released it. You may even want to have the ability to collaborate with those who use their software licensing to restrict end user freedom. Or you may not want to deal with license compatibility headaches.

But arguing that "true freedom" comes from license like BSD or MIT, and not the GPL, is ridiculous; the GPL is designed to ensure that the software and all modifications to it will always remain free, while liberal licenses simply allow people to redistribute it with more restrictions, making the ecosystem less free, not more.

The GPL, MIT, BSD, and any other license that meets the requirements of the free software definition, Debian free software guidelines, or open source definition, are all "truly free," they just differ in whether they attempt to preserve that freedom transitively or not.
> I've worked at Microsoft and can attest that while it's OK to use open source tools internally the IP lawyers don't want anyone touching GPL v3 tools to do anything.

That's because they're Microsoft.

> I imagine Apple and other proprietary software publishers have the same mandate to their troops.

I have yet to hear any rational justification for this, yet people keep repeating it.
No problems on 5 mbit dsl for me...
Molecular Origins of Eating Disorders Found in Gut Microbe
I doubt they actually cost all that much relative to the cost of a 40+ story buildings.
-- All good writers are alike; all bad writers are bad in their own way.

I'm not too sure about this... there are many ways to be a terrible writer, but most good writers still seem to have a distinctive style. (Is it just that 99.99% of writing is bad writing? Oh, probably.)
It actually has — Apps can prevent the system from taking screenshots by telling the DRM hardware chip that they are showing important data. Actually you can even prevent users from obtaining the data if you encrypt it with a secure key and store this key in the DRM hardware chip.

Only problem: Someone could still decompile your app, use your API and request the decryption keys.
Show HN: Clustering graph with webGL visualization
We don't roll our own, we use a third party. Regardless, we're sorry for the issues everyone is having! Hopefully, it'll all get ironed out for everyone.
Stack Exchange made the brilliant move of having disparate communities with a defined (and passionate) audience for each. This makes selling targeted advertising much easier. Ex. Stack Overflow is probably one of the best places to reach developers with job ads—hence they can charge a lot more for that than generic display ads.

This is all pure speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised if Stack Exchange's RPU would be 10x Quora's.
Is Mark going to be attending this year's startup school?
Writing serves many purposes. Often we read to be entertained. Other times we wish to be informed. Personal flair is fine and good when we are writing to entertain, but precision and honesty are even better when we write to inform.

One significant thing the internet has done is to allow scientists and engineers to communicate directly with general audiences without journalists, etc. acting as mediators. Where a journalist might make a false claim because it feels stronger or more compelling, a scientist or engineer will usually add honest qualifications so as not to deceive. Perhaps it is from this new, direct dialogue with non-journalists that the general public has learned to write in this style.

Another possible source of this style is politics. The U.S. is far from the only country where partisan politics have taken root. Parties opposed to one another often have very similar platforms and policies because they know very well what appeals to the majority. With few major differences in policy to distinguish themselves from their opponents, they must instead rely on personality. With that comes the practice of pouncing on an opponents tiniest slip of the tongue (or pen) to chip away at their credibility. Thus, politicians must be as careful as scientists to leave no room for deliberate misinterpretation of their words. We no doubt emulate the defensive communication style of our leaders to at least some degree.

However defensive writing has slipped into the mainstream, it combines with the anonymity of the internet to allow anyone to appear credible beyond their qualifications, provided they are careful. The spirit of scientific peer review, the example of our leaders' incessant jockeying for credibility, and awareness of the fallibility of writers have all encouraged the general public to read with a skeptical eye. The written word is no longer above suspicion. If something we read contains even just one error, can we trust the rest of it? People don't just write defensively now, they read defensively too, and for good reason!

Content now rules over style in most spheres of writing. I find myself nitpicking even fiction these days. It sometimes takes conscious effort to suspend disbelief and simply enjoy a good story in spite of the writer's inability to simulate reality without error. Perhaps we have lost something. However, we have also gained much. Writers are becoming more accountable to the truth and readers are less likely to be duped by lies than ever. Perhaps all that is missing is for honest mistakes to become more acceptable so that writers may be free to take worthy risks without paralyzing fear.
In the "politics" section of my bucket list, aka "what political events I'd like to see in the world before I die", this makes a line-entry.
Url changed from http://scroll.in/article/683083/Meet-the-man-who-built-the-a..., which points to this.
Uhm, Android had an API to disable screenshots since forever - see http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/WindowMa... . As soon as you add this flag to the Window, the contents will disappear from screenshots or device will refuse to make them (depending on Android) version.

The reason why Snapchat has screenshot notification is actually due to that API being absent from iOS for a long time.
I'm running Firefox nightly on Linux on a thinkpad x230 and this runs perfectly.
Reminds me of Jet Set Willy in both style and the fact that it's also incompletable;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_Set_Willy#Bugs
I like Mozilla's Persona. I used it for my (now defunct) 2D chatroom.
I'm having trouble parsing this. What is the problem, exactly?
They are public officials and those are public contact details.
So a cyclist crashing their head into a tank would not suffer a concussion?
Have a look at Lazarus (http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/), which is basically Delphi 7 in a cross-platform open source version. It's not as stable as I'd like it to be, and some components are still missing, but it works well enough to be a more than viable alternative to '98 VB 6.
Putin Shows His Hand
> So yes, GPL 3 is hurting open source more than helping it.

It comes at no surprise that Microsoft, a company that vehemently spoke out against Free and Open Source Software for so long, would have these views.

GPL'd code is about keeping that code open source forever. Hence clauses in GPLv3 like anti-Tivoization. Little sympathy for companies that want to take without giving back.
fine here too, dsl, London
A lens to the front
The Meteor Testing Manual book is now available
http://www.meteortesting.com
Agreed. I have a collection of five SF novels - translated to Portuguese - by authors from the Soviet Union (including by the Strugasky brothers, but also by Genrich Altshuller and his wife, and a few others) and as a whole they're easily better than many of the list.

A great advantage of being able to read in a few different languages is that it greatly increases the probability that you can read any specific work.