skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The GPL is a viral license; it's an intentional choice on their part, and "viral" and "infected" are pretty accurate ways to describe it.

For libraries. We are talking user land tools here, which are standalone. Providing a new bash version doesn't 'infect' any other software.

I think the extended (or some would say more explicit) patent license in the GPLv3 is what troubles many companies.
The FSF prioritizes user freedom over programmer freedom. Neither one of them is "True freedom".
People change. Sometimes dramatically and sometimes as a result of trauma. I hope it never happens to you or anyone around you, but it does happen and marriages fail because of it. I do agree that the phrase gets over-used, but I also acknowledge that it describes a legitimate phenomenon.

And people fail, sometimes avoidably, sometimes not. We are rarely tested to our breaking point, and it's easy to be smug when we see others fail, thinking we could have succeeded where they did not. The tendency to believe that anyone who has failed is "making excuses" is understandable, but one of the great things about maker culture is the way it embraces failure: it recognizes that we all can stretch ourselves too far and that there are circumstances where no physically conceivable amount of effort could have created success.

Under such circumstances it's important to fail gracefully, not to deny the possibility of or responsibility for failure. I think this happens a lot in divorce: people blame their partner because they aren't willing to say, "I have failed", and that creates a huge amount of pain and divisiveness, and even worse, it makes lawyers rich.

Failure is always an option. We know this as makers, hackers and engineers. It isn't simply a matter of "trying harder". Some problems cannot be solved under the constraints we are given, and when that happens we have failed, as surely as a girder that has buckled under an excessive load. This conundrum is sometimes known as "the human condition": http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_strain.htm
> It seems you've decided

Nah that's not what I think or believe.

I'm trying to explain broader context. The US is not hacking in a vacuum. It has to make strategic decisions. We can arm chair the US strategic command all we want.

There seems to be a presumption that the US is doing these things 'just because'. What I believe is that the US is making decisions based on incentives, costs, benefits and other tradeoffs. I believe that if we don't participate in cyber intelligence warfare, we'll lose.

There are certain principles I don't want to give up in the process for sure - civil liberties of all people everyone is #1.
21 Fertility Myths Debunked
Sad not to see 'The Black Cloud - Fred Hoyle' in that list..
It works for me using flash player on chrome.
Couples who elope are 12.5x more likely to end up divorced than couples who get married at a wedding with 200+ people.

So this article is conflating elopement with not having wedding guests. They aren't the same thing. I eloped -- got married in secret. No, there were no wedding guests. That does not mean the two things are identical.

Though, Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elopement_(marriage) says:

To elope, most literally, merely means to run away and to not come back to the point of origination.[1] More specifically, elopement is often used to refer to a marriage conducted in sudden and secretive fashion, usually involving hurried flight away from one's place of residence together with one's beloved with the intention of getting married.

Today the term "elopement" is colloquially used for any marriage performed in haste, with a limited public engagement period or without a public engagement period. Some couples elope because they dislike or cannot afford an expensive wedding ceremony, or wish to avoid objections from parents, or religious obligations.

Which gives me pause because, on the one hand, I married in secret. On the other hand, I did not actually go anywhere and our circle of mutual friends all knew our intentions to marry for like a year or more beforehand.

We did end up divorced but we were married for more than 2 decades and the divorce was amicable. I think it lasted as long as it did and fared as well as it did in part because we handled our marriage as a very private matter. I don't think you will ever get me in front of 200+ people to marry. If I ever remarry, I expect it to be a good marriage that lasts for many years.
BSDs haven't shipped with bash historically and the BSD projects do not like shipping GPL software.
Live streaming this is a very nice thing to do. Thank you!
When you find a virus that you have to voluntarily get infected by, let me know. Until then, is just biased language.
Or perhaps you're simply hiding...and we'd all be better off with your full and honest input.

"This is Culture!"
No one has said "The Left Hand of Darkness" or "The Dispossessed"

LHOD is an exploration of what it means to be human, and what it means to love and the imagery of the trek across the ice sheet will live with me forever. TD is deeply political, for me layered and lacquered with nuance and questions.

Written by a woman, a good balance for Rand.
Imagine having a hall where everyone can meet to pitch their startups in front of thousands of other players.
> I'm not sure they've ever published a reason for this, but outside speculation centers around the v3 patent grant and anti-tivoization clauses.

I've heard this more than once but it doesn't make any sense. GPLv2 says this: "Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions."

Ask your lawyer what happens if you license a piece of software to someone and then try to sue them for patent infringement for using that software.

And OS X doesn't stop you from compiling your own bash (or whatever else) and replacing the one Apple shipped, so I don't see how the anti-tivoization clause would affect them either. It just doesn't make any sense.

I half suspect that there are a few IP lawyers (and/or Microsoft) who don't like the GPL for ideological reasons and go around spreading FUD about it to discourage people from using it.
The pro-helmet side in general has far louder bullhorns, regardless of what goes on in internet forums (which is one of the no-budget places you see anti-helmet people.) The anti-helmet people aren't passing laws and running public service messages on TV with their partially publicly-funded nonprofits.
But the "viralness" of the GPL applies to modified versions of the covered work, and this is a discussion of the distribution of GPLv3-licensed software in Mac OS X, which is not a modified work. Thus the "viralness" does not apply and throwing out the phrase "GPL3-infected software" adds nothing to the discussion and only stokes flames.
Yes. This point also highlights the distinction between interactive shell and system shell. You probably want a bunch of featutes in your interactive shell. You probably want a small, readable code base in your system shell. These two goals are generally at odds.
"[A]n emphasis on helmets reflects a seductively individualistic approach to risk management (or even “victim blaming”) while the real gains lie elsewhere."

http://www.bmj.com/content/346/bmj.f3817?ijkey=I5vHBog6FhaaL...
> the perspective of anyone committing an embarrassing or morally unscrupulous act

In this instance it was embarrassing because it brought into question how well the US would be able to keep secret strategic information.

And yeah hacking into allies is pretty unscrupulous. A bunch of the Snowden leaks showed that Israel, France, Germany and others have hacked into us.

It's the way it all works.

> Secrets of this nature have a tendency to leak. If it wasn't Snowden, it could've been anyone else

There were many such leaks, e.g. Binney.

> reporting of confirmed infiltrations of US and allied companies and systems is fine by my book

I agree wholeheartedly with this.
Cherry-picking the BSD ones is problematic for backwards compatibility without making significant alterations. Many gnu tools support options that their BSD variants do not and some have slight differences in behavior even when using BSD compatible flags.
Not happy with the shell quality, code quality, or license. Bash is massive compared to pdksh (what openbsd uses), has frightening code, and openbsd rejects GPL code as much as possible (gcc/binutils is the only GPL software in the tree, and no new GPL software is considered).
My opinion -- as someone whose parents divorced when I was 5 -- is that merely staying together and being miserable isn't necessarily an improvement on divorcing, but getting into couples therapy and working through your issues is vastly better, for your kids as well as for you, than either a miserable marriage or an acrimonious divorce.
It's one of those catch 22's.

Damned if you do and damned if you don't.
From that comment:

>The GPL is infectious; any code that uses a GPL library automatically becomes GPL as well.

Wrong. Developers make a conscious decision to use a GPL licensed library. Their code does not "automatically" become GPL against their will. Licenses are not viral. It's a nasty, pejorative term used to attack copyleft.
CloudFlare Publishes Semiannual Transparency Report
FreeBSD et al seem to be doing fine without GPL 3.
> But the standard view promulgated my many religions (and expressed in some of the comments here) that marriage should be almost non-negotiably for life takes this WAY too far.

It depends on what you think is the purpose of marriage. The traditional view you're questioning is that marriage is a very serious contract that is never to be broken (usually with a few exceptions, like infidelity or abuse). I suspect this view is historically an economic device for raising children: the woman raises children while the man provides for the family (please note, I'm making no normative argument for these roles). Monogamy is obviously historically useful for ensuring paternity, and there's obvious selective pressure for that norm to arise (although I've seen studies claiming that humans have always tended to practice punctuated monogamy).

These days, that view of marriage is less vital in the Western world (at least the economic part), but it still has a lot of cultural momentum. Aside from that, the only modern purpose of official marriage is legal benefits: taxes, wills, medical discretion, child custody, etc. Apart from those, I see little difference in a "marriage" and simple long-term cohabitation other than the notion that the former is a life-long commitment.
The Story of the PING Program (1997)
Adaptive software puts faculty members in charge of course creation
Either that, or the license.
Articles like this remind me that people have a really difficult time wrapping their head around just how mind-bogglingly different the nature of the Internet of Things architectures actually are. Traditional technical solutions to most problems completely break down for this use case. Some specific points:

- A lot of IoT data is passively collected and reconstructed external to a device you own for applications that run on the device. Decentralizing the applications does not decentralize access to the data in practice. This makes perfect engineering sense: it saves a lot of battery and bandwidth on the device to not have the device involved in phoning home even if it is effectively "phoning home". (Few people grok how sophisticated this type of data reconstruction is.)

- IoT data coming off consumer devices is higher velocity and higher volume than anyone imagines unless you work with it. Billions of records per second continuously, petabytes per day, from single data sources. See above: the data your device effectively generates is not limited by the bandwidth of the device. Most applications of this data joins several of these data sources, often in real-time.

- The fundamental operation done on IoT data that makes it uniquely useful for consumer and other applications is the spatial join. If you think you are going to do that on a decentralized peer-to-peer network then you don't understand spatial joins. Doubly so considering the aforementioned bandwidth requirements.

Having physical control of a device will allow some control of where data goes but the architectural requirements of IoT will greatly constrain the extent to which this is possible in practice.
Yeah, the coldest summer I ever spent in Seattle was hauling an iPad around meetings at Redmond. One L69 had this very pointed way of staring at the tablet, then at the big red clock, then back again. Keep in mind, I was part of a team coming in as a prospective customer. Just very weird.

I still have hopes for Nadella -- maybe just because I'm an old Sun warhorse -- but it's going to require a big rethink of MSFT, which right now is basically just a cash pile in search of a market. Changing the burn rate is just playing at the margins (layoffs are not a strategy), and if there's a big plan underlying the Mojang acquisition it's incomprehensible to me on both strategic and financial levels. Likewise, mass-producing Perceptive Pixel displays, while undoubtedly cool, is both fiendishly difficult (PP was basically a garage manufactory, so this is a software company figuring out how to scale up a product that has never been mass-produced) and not something that can push market dominance. Buying Nokia kept MSFT in the mobile space at a very high price, but really only purchased time and space, not a turnkey strategy.

Having said all that, it seems to me that there are two companies on the auction block right now that could give Redmond the germ of a strategy. Both Xamarin and Unity would fit very comfortably in what is arguably MSFT's wheelhouse -- software development tools -- while giving the company a way to seamlessly increase their mobile app ecosystem.
I found the second book of Name of the Wind really badly written and juvenile sex fantasy. Let me recommend the Stormlight Archive instead, fantastically written and imaginative world: http://brandonsanderson.com/books/the-stormlight-archive/
In my field (English / English Lit) one of the motivations for the monograph is tenure. That's likely worth more than any royalties off the actual book sales.
I became a cat. And I mounted a nyan cat. http://cl.ly/image/2G2X2P3j0C3M

My life is now complete.
Well, yes, that was my explicit point.
The First MOOC Applied to Medical Education
Also, Greg Bear has hacked out some dreadful stuff but "Moving Mars" and "The Anvil of Stars" (the Forge of God is a bit of a pot boiler tbh, but it is the prequel, so...).

Both are really big picture sci-fi; about what humans will do with toys that are beyond them, and are doing. Amazing.
I don't use any of the extra package managers for OSX. I'd rather let Apple manage the tools available in OSX. If I need to do work where I find the command-line tools on OSX lacking, I'll end up working on a remote server or use a local Linux VM.

I try to not muck around with the base installs too much - it makes it too difficult to migrate between machines.
If you think we're not trading with Cuba because of the lack of democracy, you probably don't know much about the embargo.
I have a 64-bit machine but your fix works great :-)

Thanks for this, and thanks for sharing your amazing pigshell!
Apple is not an internet based company. Facebook's stock is privately held for the most part. Half of Google's publicly held stock is non-voting. The founder's class B shares carry 10 votes apiece.
I don't think the FSF distinguishes between users and programmers. To them a user has the right to be a programmer on any piece of the software, and the license reflects this.
Why is Chrome haha?
Germany offers free University classes to American students
Nice list but I would definitely include among contemporaries:
- Dan Simmon's "Hyperion" as suggested already

- Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" - this is absolutely an amazing book for anyone familiar with geek culture and the interplay of academia and industry

- anything by Iain Banks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Banks). "Excession" (http://www.amazon.com/Excession-Bantam-Spectra-Book-Banks/dp...) is good, but the culture series in general is very nice literate approach to imagining a post-singularity scifi future that manages to combine deep psychological characters with wacky dark humour, lots of space opera action that is fresh every time and, most of all the ship names... of the ship names are just amazingly ... just go and read it already

- in fantasy (or, dark fantasy, perhaps) genre Joe Abercrombie's "First law" trilogy is an gut wrenchingly entertaining trope-twisting joyride, starting from "The Blade Itself" http://www.amazon.com/The-Blade-Itself-First-Law/dp/15910259... that is worth reading for the hilarious character development (or degeneration?) alone.

- Vernor Vinges "A deepness in the sky"(http://www.amazon.com/A-Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/081253...) is presented as a hard-scifi space opera but actually manages to be a witty commentary on the state of software engineering now and thousands of years into the future, usage of human intellect in the "mechanical turk" fashion in systems engineering and the potential of 'smart dust'. Almost made me want to start learning Erlang :)
Guests with smartphones are subverting their own restaurant experience.
I suspect he is the presenter. But agree totally - the tone of the talk works 100% better.
Which countries have nationalized our companies and gotten away with it since Cuba did it?
> its arguably an incredibly sexist tradition that has its roots in religious and patriarchal control.

I'd like to hear more of that argument. Most specific marriage ceremonies are religious, of course, but I'm skeptical that the concept of (pledged) life-long monogamy and cooperative child-rearing has its roots in religion.

As for marriage being patriarchal, I don't really see how that's the case, at least any more than the entire world is patriarchal. I do suspect that monogamy comes from the selective pressure for males to have confidence in the paternity of their mates' children, so in that sense I suppose you could call it "patriarchal."
Those are definitely some interesting insights and I would imagine that those three categories apply to any luxury item customer. I think the author of this article is more interested in the future of the "internet of things," particularly once they have become commoditized.
This question doesn't make sense -- Paxos and the blockchain solve different problems. You were probably misled by people talking about how the blockchain solves distributed consensus. That's a decent analogy but not a precise statement about computer science.

There are several differences, but the main one is that with Paxos all the members are trusted, and have to be under a single administrative domain. With the blockchain, the whole point is to come to consensus without trust in a central authority.

Other differences:

- Paxos (Chubby, etcd) and related algorithms (Zab/Zookeeper) are used with a small, fixed membership -- i.e. 3 to 7 servers. Everybody else is a client. In contrast, the blockchain is for a huge, frequently changing membership.

- Paxos is expensive and is used within a single data center with LAN latency. The blockchain is used in the exact opposite situation: on the Internet with large latencies and large variance in latency.
Contrary opinion here: I thought the Hyperion Cantos was pretty mediocre. It was full of too much mysticism and hogwash, and even minus those things, wasn't a particularly interesting or thought-provoking story.
Even the thermostat products are disappointing. Nest is cool-looking, but it doesn't really do much. The IoT talk was in a big industrial-type space near the shipyard in SF. The room had openable windows, ceiling fans, and openable skylights with big endless-chain mechanisms, plus modern HVAC. None of this was interconnected.

An intelligent HVAC system measures inside and outside temperature, humidity, CO, CO2, and people presence, and controls windows, fans, vents, heating, and cooling. Such systems can be bought from Honeywell, Johnson Controls, and others. Some big buildings have them. They're great for places like hotels, where big rooms go from empty to full and back throughout the day, with no particular pattern. Smart HVAC systems note CO2 level going up, which indicates more people present, and crank up airflow, regardless of temperature. The main problem with such systems is not that they're expensive, but that they're hard to set up and configure, especially since they're typically run by someone at the janitor level. Setup involves running around with airflow meters while someone at the control panel makes changes to the settings.

Now this is an application for machine learning. Something like a Nest, with control of heat, air conditioning, attic, bathroom, and kitchen fans, and some vents to the outside world, could bring modern HVAC technology to the home. It would learn over time such things as how fast the house temperature ramps up when the heat turns on, how much heat the house loses to the outside when the outside is cold, and how far different parts of the house are from the various vents and fans. When you have a party and the house is full, all the necessary adjustments would happen automatically.

Now that's home automation.
Why role their own live streaming tech when Livestream/Ustream seem to do a pretty good job? This stream is stuttering for me.. cutting out completely every minute or so.
> still stands up well today

Something that amazes me about Bester's writing is that neither book feels dated. Then, you think about how visionary he was in the time they were written, and it blows you away.

Of course, the other thing about Bester that amazes me is that he's so obscure, despite as you point out winning the first Hugo and for writing notable early sci-fi. Someone's knowledge of Bester has become an informal litmus test for me to get a feel for how well read someone is in sci-fi.

Neat tidbit about Bester: he's also credited with writing the Green Lantern Oath.

edit: to be specific, Silver Age Green Lantern.
Unless one is severely underpaid, I don't think asking for a raise without doing extraordinary contribution makes sense.

Mathematically speaking, for someone to get 10% raise above market price, they must demonstrate 10% extra output from market. Granted this is not how the real world works, partly because performance is so difficult to measure objectively without being vulnerable to gaming. So, without rigid metrics and incentive program, this problem degenerates into subjective assessment.

Now how do you feel when you tip someone and they ask for another 50 cents?
As someone in the comments section of the original post put it, "newer doesn't mean better". Obviously software with security, stability, or performance issues should be re-written, but software doesn't "age" in the usual sense of the word; the source code can be re-compiled for brand-new machines/processors. A 2004 version of grep will always do everything I need grep to do.
Actually, it's in Apple's best interests to simply post the sources online and not play fast and loose with licensing as you're suggesting.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#Wh...

Source is not distributed along with their binaries nor is a written offer to receive source code that I've seen. http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1761 & http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.html
This is beautiful and I love it. I think the 8-bit graphics are definitely appealing to early generation gamers like myself. I don't know if it's my personal bias, but I think the cartoonish simplicity makes it more endearing.
Show HN: An iOS app I made for my wife and decided to share: Just Puppies