skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is exactly why the GPL (and other copyleft licenses like CC-SA) exists. I can’t find a reference, but I recall reading that Richard Stallman initially considered using a permissive license, but decided not to, because he did not want, and he assumed others also not to want, to be a “doormat”.
"Love for sale"
So much this.

Normal non-technical people understand that you click a bold 'B' and you get bold text, you click an italic 'I' and you get italic text, you click a little list icon and you get a list, and so on.

contenteditable has its quirks, sure, but modern browsers mean it's no longer the brainmelt it once was. Real WYSIWYG entry is achievable and almost easy. Markdown has one great usecase (producing documents that are viewable both as plain ASCII and as 'compiled' rich text), but it's not a tool for Joe Normal.
- Using secret OEM agreements to prevent preinstallation of alternative operating systems such as BeOS

- Making 3.x versions of Windows crash when run on DR-DOS instead of MS-DOS

- Using undocumented Windows APIs in other MS software that let them do things third parties (like WordPerfect) couldn't do as easily.

- Running FUD campaigns against Linux

- Funding SCO to run FUD campaigns against Linux

- As others mentioned, bundling and integrating IE in a way other browser vendors could not match (e.g. as explorer.exe), then stopping development

- Railroading useless standards like OOXML instead of using and improving the OpenDocument standards.

- Running for years on WMA instead of MP3

- etc.

Some references:

http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2007021720...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents
Epigrams in programming (1982)
It is much easier to be nice when you are successful in the sense that you don't have to work as hard to benefit the people around you.

Yet when it is actually measured (by which I mean more than just considering what you think of your wealthy friends) people who are less well off turn out to be much kinder. This has been measured and isn't speculative.

But regardless of the evidence we can just appeal to how people actually behave. How many successful start up people are 'nice' or even good when considered against the world net and the potential they have. We all have the opportunity for radical redistribution, but the ridiculously wealthy even more so. To talk as if they are somehow nice because they help other people of similar privilege is in very poor taste.

The remarks about needing safety come off as particularly horrid in the context of the vast wealth inequality the article is describing in such a joyful way.

Like fuck do successful start up owners and investors need security more than someone working a temporary contract for minimum wage to support a larger family in worse conditions. They are the people that need security and safety.
I agree. This seems like a no brainer. Barring any legal barriers that might arise in the implementation of such a scheme, it seems like the main bottlenecks would be

(1) verifying that the current occupant was indeed the original title holder
(2) transferring the purchased title to said previous occupant without incurring substantial fees

From a the technology standpoint it seems to me like everything else could be fairly standard CRUD. There might be a bipartite graph between lenders and the foreclosed upon, simplified by averaging the resources of the former across all nodes.

Can anyone keen on the Detroit scene pipe in on the legal aspects?
Yes, I meant to say "The simplest way I can put this ruling from my non-lawyer understanding is..."
How about smaller libraries, that might not have mailing lists? i.e. packages on pip, npm, or projects on GitHub that have made their way into your application?
Microsoft was declared a monopoly and ordered broken up as punishment largely because Gates held firm that a web browser was an integral part of an operating system. (It was only the switch in US Presidential administrations that prevented the "remedy" from taking effect.)

Seems so fucking silly in 2014.

The laws around antitrust are complex and this is a huge oversimplification -- but I have a hard time believing anyone here thinks that shipping a computer with a browser pre-installed, and in no way preventing access to downloading another browser with it, deserves government intervention into the structure of your company.

Remember, this was an era when software came on many, many floppy disks and a 28.8 modem card cost $299 and required a screwdriver to install. Off by one CSS bugs and allowing both VBScript and JScript and OLE controls to run in the browser wasn't exactly the roadblock to an open information nirvana.
You don’t even need the “NC” (no commercial) clause to get this effect. There is no need to restrict commercial activity without cause.
"You can't sleep, pg, until you implement these changes!"
Are parents on iPhones endangering their kids?
So let's say you're at this fork in the road:

On the left is a [edit: ethicial, i.e. not based on insider info, or other motivations that most people would think of as "cheating"] choice that you think will lead to more success for your business and more certainty of keeping your employees employed and maybe even hiring more. As a consequence, your competitors may lose some business and have to lay off some employees.

On the right is a choice that you think will not benefit your business, maybe this choice is just doing nothing, carrying on as before. Your competitors are unharmed, nobody is laid off, but maybe your business will not be able to hire anyone new this year.

Which choice "applies the golden rule." If this scenario isn't representative of what you are talking about, I apoligize; I am not trying to find any fault in what you are saying, just trying to clarify what you mean by what "allows you to sleep."
Is the Toshiba CB35 the same as the Toshiba Chromebook 2 with the highish resolution 13" display and 4GB of RAM? I went Googling, and found some ambiguity as to whether this model number refers to their first gen or their second gen chromebook.
This feels like a post-facto explanation that gives way too much credit to Gruber as a language designer.

I find it hard to assume that Markdown is extremely well thought-through considering the fact that we didn't even get a grammar for the language, just an implementation that would be considered super broken in any other language.
This sort of vaccine engineering is well understood. The very step of substituting material tends to make the virus non-viable outside of the specialized environments in which it's produced, e.g. they've perhaps knocking out something essential for its normal function in chimpanzees. In a presentation I found from obvious Wikipedia pages they showed how they chose the starting virus out of a large galaxy of candidates, it's safe to bet without further examination it's not very bad for chimpanzees or us, to make development safer and easier.

The genes that code for Ebola glycoproteins (proteins with sugars) or critical, outward facing and therefore immune system alerting, parts of them, can't get very far without the rest of the Ebola virus payload.

At a very simple level, view it as poking at the immune system with a stick who's end is shaped in the way you want it, have with some precision engineered it. The immune system is going to react if you've done it right, you do expect some fevers and such in some people, but no more.

"Fortunately" Ebola is ultra lethal to all primates, so animal models are easy to find, and it could be thoroughly tested on them before trying it on humans.
What if you can't bring it home? What if your home environment is arranged such that you're at a significant disadvantage or there's toxic situations happening that keep you socially anxious at home?

Obviously your social anxiety stems from 'being at home'.

Maybe there's actual tangible external reasons causing it at home that you're not even aware of....
Okay, so what's a normal person to do?

This is obviously a BS patent, given the utter scads of prior art out there. Is there a way to file a complaint/challenge or otherwise point this out to someone at USPTO?
Just like today's "mean people" essay, PG was likely wrong in that essay as well. Firstly, regarding the "shadow that was cast", let's look at some data rather than rely on what "everyone knows", shall we? Here's a relevant paper that looks at some data (caveat - it only covers events up to 2000, but then that's the period PG talks about as well):

"Did Microsoft Deter Software Innovation?", Josh Lerner, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=269498

Spoiler: It follows Betteridge's Law.

And of course Microsoft is not "dead" or "irrelevant" and does not produce "crappy software", as much as the Silicon Valley hive-mind would like to think so. This is trivially disproved by looking at 1) their revenues and 2) their ranking in the top brands worldwide over the last decade and a half.
Titanic, created with Unreal Engine 4
This is a good definition of "pension" and "401k" but it doesn't explain why the former is unsustainable and the latter is sustainable.

Why is it sustainable to shift all the risk of bad investment, mismanagement and unexpected longevity away from institutions and onto individual workers?

Are workers in a better position to shoulder those risks than institutions are? Or are they in a better position to minimize the risks? Do they have better access to the investment market or greater ability to choose good and trustworthy managers? Are they in a better position to pool longevity risks?
In case there is someone out there who never saw MIT's entry into the RegEx competition: http://rampion.github.io/RegHex/

This is the web incarnation of that hexagon puzzle.
I think it is more than a fair statement to say Microsoft held back the web[1] for 6-7 years, but we settled on the web browser as the delivery for internet services and are still trying to shoehorn everything into it.

Microsoft had a monopoly in the OS market, gave IE away free, and provided tools and incentives to develop for IE and nothing else.

From a company's point of view, it makes a lot of sense. Cost and 90% of customers don't have any problems. The company has a standard development and testing platform. Cost is an amazing motivator and having that OS monopoly was an easy leverage point.

1) there are still issues with using educational / testing sites in any browser but an outdated version of IE. The college textbook with integrated websites could really use some disruption
I'm not sure why you're ruling out Mac laptops, perhaps you think they're too expensive? I was a long time Thinkpad user but converted to a MacBook Air a few years ago and haven't looked back at all since. You can run Linux in a VM perfectly, and OSX itself has some nice Unix features.

Right now you can get a 13" MacBook Air with good specs for $800: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/apple-macbook-air-latest-model-1... IMHO this is the way to go. No $800 Windows laptop is going to come close to the build quality of the MacBook Air.
I think this is probably because hackers in younger generations never experienced the beast that was Microsoft in the 90s and have seen the progression of MS as one from "company that makes boring and/or bad OS" to the embrace of FOSS that's been happening recently.

I'm personally super interested in tech and hacking history, so I've read all the war stories, the pleas on FOSS homepages, the rants on sites like jwz's, books like Microserfs, etc. But even the most talented hackers who are 16-24 right now probably see Microsoft as "the Xbox company."
At first,

|-----+-------|
| Key | Value |
|-----+-------|
| 00 | foo |
| 01 | bar |
|-----+-------|

becomes

|-----+-------|
| Key | Value |
|-----+-------|
| 00 | foo |
| 01 | bar |
| 02 | much longer |
|-----+-------|

but as soon as I hit TAB, it turns in to:

|-----+-------------|
| Key | Value |
|-----+-------------|
| 00 | foo |
| 01 | bar |
| 02 | much longer |
|-----+-------------|

There's probably a way to make org-mode dynamically resize tables as you type, without requiring the use of TAB, but I'm not sure if that's always desirable.
The containing Wikipedia article the chimpanzee virus was attenuated, and that it doesn't replicate in humans, evidently either from that, or the modification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_vaccine#cAd3-EBO_Z).
Dynamic HTML is not "aka the DOM", nor is XHMLHttpRequest an application platform.

Microsoft developed function calls and API calls which were only available internally, and for preferred enterprise customers, that would fail on Netscape.

In addition, "IE has recently caught up" is hardly the truth and you can visit HTML5test.com or CSS3test.com to test your browser; or visit caniuse.com to browser around to find large gaps and inconsistencies between IE and any other browser (and not just HTML but the web APIs that work everywhere but IE).
No, this is not why the GPL was created. Richard Stallman has said repeatedly that he is fine with companies making money out of other people's GPLd software. The issue for him was whether derivatives were libre or not.
I liked the writing and even agreed with some of it, having met Bintang guy. Couldn't stop one thing jumping out at me though: this guy is basically railing against travel becoming more affordable and approachable so that it is no longer the pursuit of the elite and stubbornly adventurous.

I guess that's annoying in some ways as you run into the people from home that you're trying to escape by travelling to foreign destinations. Haughty elitism aside though, more people experiencing more of the world doesn't strike me as a bad thing.
I remember, about 20 years ago, when some people started making and selling Linux CDs (Walnut Creek or some others). Some people on the Linux mailing list (or newsgroup, my recollection is only approximate) were upset that some people were making money with their work (or with other people works, here again my recollection is approximate).

Then Linus said: that's fine. And then, over the years, a billion dollar industry emerged.

Except for the fact that I don't expect a billion dollar photo printing industry to emerge from the CC-licensed pictures hosted by yahoo, 500px and others, I think we have a similar situation here.

Maybe if Lawrence Lessig wrote something about the situation, this would help a bit, though I don't think Lessig has the same aura over the amateur photographers (after all, he is only the guy who wrote the license) than Linus over the kernel afficionados.
Most of the English population didn't even have representation in parliament.

Its very convenient how this wasn't an issue until America owed England a huge amount of money. What about all previous import/export taxes up until the revolution?
No, traveling can be fun and exciting and novel, so many people long to do it. Travel has very little to do with narcissism. The thing that should be criticized here is the page of angry, useless nonsense you wrote. It doesn't help anyone. Stop complaining. Or, so I can say "to each his own," continue complaining, if you so desire, but keep it private.
What you said is true for by-nc-sa, but not for by-sa.
Ah. Trolling with a disclaimer attached. That makes it all right then I guess...
seriously? Out of all crowds I would think anyone here would immediately get the terribleness of IE and how it had a huge impact on keeping the internet back. And IE's (diminishing) dominance has everything to owe to the monopoly Microsoft imposed on that space for a long time.
Now it seems ISPs have been holding back the Internet (in the US). There's almost no competition on price, bandwidth, latency, etc. Nobody is pushing the envelope.
how come people don't upvote this answer? Yes, it was in MSFT own interest to curb the development of the web, but there were also other factors involved.
There is something religious about this. Like in Calvinism where wealth is a sign of salvation.

If you keep this belief it is important to remember that it is not the case that that everyone that fails is mean.

Regarding the truth. It seems to me like the underlying claim that mean people fail is sadly false. However, it's likely that there are a lot of entrepreneurs that Paul and other investors turn down that get upset and fail for lack of support. I'm sure they aren't mean people in more favorable circumstances. Also, those that are funded generally are appreciative and nice.
Microsoft is also the reason why people expect good browser technology to be essentially free and embedded in all things; the world as run by Netscape looks nigh-unto distopian in 2014 :(. They cared about CSS when Netscape didn't (who instead added a ton of proprietary extensions we now hate: the massive pile of presentation styling we now consider a dirge on HTML), and for that the W3C looked upon them very favorably. It also seems hard to blame them for letting IE6 stagnate when they were coming out of the anti-trust lawsuits, the ones where Netscape fought hard to defend their business model--which they lost. Microsoft is not a company that internally works on things because they are mission critical, but because they are fun and motivating to engineers. They backed CSS, invented AJAX, and forced JavaScript to be a multi-vendor standard rather than a competitive advantage of Netscape; they then had the gall to integrate it as an API and use it in their OS (something we now just assume any reasonable development environment will have), because they thought the web was the future. For more information, and some evidence, in case you don't remember all of this playing out at the time, I will refer you to this older comment thread :(. The world just isn't this black and white: none of these players come off very well; but if you want to measure impact to the world in dollars of agony, Microsoft's moves in the world of browser technology don't seem all that bad. (If you want to complain about Microsoft, complain about Office or DOS or something, not IE.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5716596
Netscape was NOT a POS except in the eyes of those trying to get web sites to work in it that worked in IE. Microsoft created IE with various APIs that only worked in IE but would fail in Netscape.
Google Play Store in Numbers. Open Source Crawler for Mobile Apps Data
the correlation between sociopathic behaviors and business success is very well studied and documented, and lies in absolute contrast with this rather odd essay by PG

For that to be true, you need to point to a study that shows that the founders of highly successful tech startups - including the ones YC has funded like Airbnb, Dropbox and Stripe - tend to be sociopaths.

In fact, probably the only people in the world who have the hard data to find such a correlation are the psrtners of YC; the success of their organisation relies on it. Aside from being incorrect, it would be counter to the commercial interests of YC to write this essay if it were false.

To my knowledge, the research you're referring to is based on large bureaucratic corporations like banks, in which it pays better to be a shrewd political operative than a skilled practitioner of a craft and a hard-nosed-but-ultimately-well-intentioned innovator and leader.

But as this and many other PG writings explain, modern startup culture, at its best, embodies a transition away from that kind of corporate culture.

With that in mind, even if it were true that people like Gates and Jobs did mean things 20-30 years ago, it doesn't mean it's the optimal way to be in the startup world of today and the foreseeable future.
I think many free content creators would disagree with you on what the spirit of cc-by is.
The current top comment, and a lot of the discussion here seems to conflate "mean" with "rude" or "dick" or "evil" or "unethical", or "does illegal things", and from there we get things like "This essay is crap because Bill Gates (because of IE) is mean and successful".

"Mean" has a very particular meaning. At least it seems to in this particular essay, if I may speak on behalf of PG regarding his use of it. He even hints at what it may be without explaining it directly:

Children (especially children of PG's age - both under 7 or so, I believe), when fighting with or teasing or blaming each other, are not usually described as "dicks" or "evil" or "unethical", or even "rude". They are too young to have those properties ascribed to them. It is common, however, for children to call each other "mean" while fighting, and it is also common for parents to tell their children "don't be mean" (as opposed to "don't be a dick", which is what teenagers tell their friends, or "don't do illegal things", which is what courts tell everybody). So when PG uses "mean", he uses it to describe behavior in adult-ish YC founders that is isomorphic to little kids being bad.
The MIT puzzle (from the 2013 Mystery Hunt) was called "A Regular Crossword" and its credit says "Dan Gulotta, based on an idea by Palmer Mebane".

(Just so it's not credited to MIT in general; each year's Mystery Hunt is written by a specific puzzle team, and indeed each puzzle is written by specific puzzlers!)
I'm seeing those "invisibles" in Chrome/Win7, too. It's as if the display engine has run out of sprites. Is there some limited display resource here?
Coming from python and not knowing VB I found the Do Loop syntax tricky at first. I am used to a loop explaining how long it will run for at the top (similar to the for loop here).

Being pseudocode I found it odd to mix loop syntax. One loop has its conditions at the top and the other at the bottom. I guess that is just taste though.
Additionally, many enterprise web applications developed in the early 2000s solely targeted IE and often used ActiveX controls, which made many companies standardize on IE6, and in turn made IE6 support (and dealing with its limitations and bugs) a requirement for most web applications. The result was that even as other browsers started to innovate, it wasn't practical to leverage those advancements in many web applications.
> There's no point in arguing though. People will continue to believe what they want to believe regardless of truth or evidence.

I have no stake in this argument, but this tactic is kind of weak. "I would argue with you, but you suffer from a cognitive bias that makes you irrational (which, by the way, I do not)."

That might even be true, but you can't accuse someone of being irrational before they've actually done it.

Someone could just as easily accuse you of being blind to the evidence that goes against your own anecdotes and personal experiences. In other words, your personal experiences of these people could be positive but not represent other parts of their character that you haven't seen.

(For what it's worth, I think that a "mean people" / "good people" dichotomy is far too reductive to actually have any meaningful conversation about).
You're probably right. My anxiety at home even manifests as eczema, such that it completely disappears when I'm traveling but reoccurs the day before I fly home.
Now here's a puzzle where the "post your solutions in ROT13 to avoid spoilers" conventional wisdom wouldn't help!