skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, the grandparent is crazy to think the GPL isn't relevant. In certain circles it isn't as popular, the GP must travel in those circles.

It's still wonderful to be on a linux system where I can just "apt-get source <pckage>" and look at how it works, try to work around bugs, etc. The attitude that you should be able to break apart anything you're running and hack on it is the fundamental principal of the GPL.

I have a suspicion that people who dismiss the GPL nowadays are young enough to have never lived through the times where the standard unix server was running SunOS and good luck to you if you ever found a bug in the system. You know, the days where you had to pay for a (sucky) compiler.
The way I see it is that the GPL is inconvenient as long as not everyone is using it. I'd love to live in a world where everything was GPL, but as long as something is not GPL, it's very difficult to work with anything other than BSD / MIT / Apache-style licenses. I work in an almost entirely open-source ecosystem, and find that most customers want free-as-in-freedom software, but (especially in some industries) they're terrified of the GPL because they don't want to restrict their options in the future if they need to use software that isn't "free" but is required for them to be successful.
There are actually cases where Rust is faster than C already, one of the reasons being the compiler emitting better code thanks to mutable aliasing being forbidden.

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/rust.html
Support of big companies is as important as the language itself. If D had a big player to push it or if Borland haven't went bankrupt or java wasn't pushed so hard by Sun, this list would look very different today...
I dunno. I used to feel this way, even feeling that the GPL had outlived its usefulness, but I have had a change of heart in the last decade or so. I think the GPL might be the only hope for long-lived software that serves the interests of its users.

I hope that programmers who sneer at the impracticality of the GPL and RMS's zealousness can take another pass at appreciating it, when you think about what its implications might be for a project thirty years in the future.
> Imagine you make a tool and someone proposes making a change to that tool that would be potentially useful to slavers, people who enslave other people. This makes you hesitate. Pointing out that people already use similar tools for slavery probably wouldn't make you change your mind.

I know you're being hyperbolic here to represent RMS's take on the issue (or at least that's how I'm reading it), but I'm not sure the analogy makes sense.

If I were to reinterpret it using the same terms, the counter-argument isn't that "people already use similar tools for slavery", it is that "slavers" wouldn't care what you did with your tool because they're already having no trouble commiting their crimes with similar tools, and your new tool could be used in perfectly legitimate ways to support your own position which includes combating slavery.
Automatic Algorithms Optimization via Fast Matrix Exponentiation
Huh, yeah, they are two different shades of gray. Completely missed that, so I'm still for more contrast in links. I guess if I'm forced to rate Moxie Marlinspike on presentation, maybe he gets docked a point.

It all feels a bit like rating chef Jonathan Benno on shoelace cleanliness though.
I'd guess he refers to: Clickbait Title -> Page Views -> Ad Views/Exposure -> Revenue
I think the point is that machines are fast enough that being as fast as C++ doesn't matter anymore.
If you think I'm doing it wrong at work, you should talk to my boss. I'm sure you can either convince him that Office (including Project and Visio) runs just fine on RHEL or that all the security consultants should be using Windows. He's gonna feel silly when he finds out he's been buying Windows and Office licenses for nothing.

But there's one thing he does know: sending an OpenOffice document to a client that is going to open it in Word is the fastest way to lose that client's business.
For me, the biggest problem with this essay lies in this one sentence: "Memory safety could qualify as a targeted problem, though historically that’s been a tough sell on its own."

My question is: Who offered memory safety on its own, historically? I think the reason that memory safety has been a tough sell historically is that it always came with performance overhead and lack of low-level control, and people kept using C and C++ for low-level programming as a result. By contrast, Rust tries to go farther than any other industry language in truly providing memory safety on its own—without any of the baggage of JITs, or garbage collection/pervasive reference counting. If you had to sum up the raison d'être for Rust in one sentence, that'd be it.

I think that historically, memory safety "on its own" hasn't been tried, at least to the degree that Rust strives for.
I've never before heard the theory that Richard Stallman is consciously trying to move the Overton Window. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

The Occam's Razor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor explanation is that Stallman genuinely believes his positions are correct.
I don't think GCC is under any threat of being abandoned any time soon.

The intended audience of an open letter is rarely the addressee and I don't think this one is an exception to that rule. It merely uses the name of Richard Stallmann to widen the exposure (apparently successfully so).

If she wants to fork GCC she should go right ahead and we'll see if the dedication to maintain that fork over the next couple of decades is there or not. I don't think GCC has much to fear from such a development and possibly something good might come out of it if there is merit to her ideas or if the fork produces some other useful insight which can then be absorbed by the upstream.

Usually such forks lead nowhere, every now and then the fork will blossom and ends up overshadowing the original, that's the whole power of free software right there.

RMS is perfectly within his rights to decide the way he does (that's part and parcel of being a creative person rather than acting with some sense of entitlement about how others should modify their creation to suit your own intent) and bringing pressure to bear by attempting to gather a crowd that pushes for an issue is a low tactic.
Worth reading:

http://www.gwern.net/Modafinil
SuperGenPass[1] seems to be a much better alternative to this, since it actually hashes your codeword with the website domain. Though it too has its issues (uses fast hash functions, running it as a bookmarklet is problematic too–better to run it offline).

Still, completely agree with this:

> I agree with the replies that this is an unlikely attack considering how passwords are typically compromised

It's always going to be a trade-off. Ultimately any scheme that gets people to use better passwords, even if flawed, must still be an improvement over the alternative of post-it notes and birthdays... there's no such thing as perfect security, as we keep being told.

[1] www.supergenpass.com
You can also persist data either into memory for the duration of your uptime of the ntop process or ultimately into a sql store. This makes longer term investigation possible.
Funny, according to Alexandrescu's definition it is a "systems programming language", after all. Go's memory allocator, garbage collector and runtime are written in Go itself.
I can definitely recommend yerba mate to anyone trying to stop drinking coffee or just people in need of a longer lasting stimulant with no crash afterwards.
"The people posting that have probably made less from whatever they're doing, than PG/YC have from their 21 year old founders."

So it's all about money then, right? Well if you want to take that to the logical extreme then you would take advice from, say, Larry Ellison or Carl Icahn (over PG) because they have much more money than PG does (at this point in time at least).
My point is you have to be very careful about putting people up on a pedestal (which is what happens at HN so often) and thinking that their advice ranks over someone who, by the standards of this community appears to be "less successful".
Proprietary language? You mean like a single platform language? What a complete waste that would be.

Languages can't be proprietary, anybody can re-implement some language if there is a spec. Whether you can name it the same or not is another issue but non-proprietary languages usually don't survive for very long so it would be in Apples own interest that swift ends up in as many hands as possible.

Oracle still doesn't understand this completely about Java, maybe Apple will never understand it about Swift, meanwhile all those non-proprietary languages will flourish.
I am a strong supporter of the GPL and its relatives, and of copyleft free software in general. Clang is going to replace the GCC in time because of the superiority of its design, and I think it's a shame it's not under the GPL.

But I think RMS is wrong here. I would never initiate a free project under a license that isn't strictly copyleft, but I also would never intentionally limit the usefulness and expressiveness of a program I created because that output could be useful for non-free software. If he doesn't want the GCC to be useful for non-free software, why is there language preventing compilation from falling under the linking clause of the GPL? Maybe I just don't have a strong enough understanding of the context here.

That said, this "open letter" is quite absurd! Not even getting into the really dubious substance of it: why such hostility? why such trumpeting? why not respond on the mailing list?
At first glance, I just thought the slightly different shade was for emphasis, rather than indicating a link.
What is scary about this level of censorship is that it shows just how much power these big corporations have over what people can find on the Internet. "If I can't find it on Google, it doesn't exist" is what the majority of users think, and they're exploiting that sentiment.

I think there is no better time than now for the development of new search engine technologies that could be resistant to censorship by being widely distributed, much like how protocols such as BitTorrent revolutionised file sharing.

Oddly enough, if I do the query "site:chillingeffects.org" with Google right now, I get the same single result as shown in the article, but also a "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 1 already displayed." message, and if I click that link there, I see "About 1,720,000 results" (of which a very small number are actually accessible), some of them being notices.
Not quite, I am against the notion that everybody uses Go for one reason. But I also think that the reason you gave would not be true if goroutines and channels, or some other easy to use concurrency abstraction, were not a primary fixture of the language.
It is better than using the same password everywhere, but not by much.

When password databases are leaked, there have been instances of people / groups who take passwords from those leaked databases and try to log in on other sites (for example, to steal money or data, defraud customers, or to plant back-doors to allow future criminal activity).

Suppose that after this becomes popular, there are leaks of at least two plain text databases from popular websites (not that unlikely, unfortunately). These websites might be relatively low value - someone might get permission to comment as someone else, our change their preferences on the site, or something like that, if they had their password. Suppose some people believed this card was safe, and so put a password generated by this card into two of these low-value sites that don't put too much effort into security (since they don't even bother hashing their passwords with bcrypt / scrypt or the like), and also into a high-value site (bank, domain name registrar, GitHub account that hosts puppet scripts, important e-mail account).

Using the two low-value site password databases, I could easily automatically identify likely candidates for these types of passwords that are common between the two databases - they both start with the same 8 'spacebar' characters. I could have a set of likely endings prior to the substitution cipher for the passwords in each database, and this would allow me to use something like the E/M algorithm to work out a distribution of most likely partial substitution cipher table, common word, and space bar values, which I could then combine with likely 'identifier' plaintexts to prioritise the order in which I send passwords to use against the secure site.

All of this would likely be completely automated - and if a significant number of people are using these cards, for certain types of criminal enterprise there is a good chance that it would be cost effective.

All in all, people using this card are taking a very real security risk that is completely unnecessary when there are other better alternatives (like using a password manager, and generating a completely different secure random password for each site). Encrypting the database with a strong password and an expensive key derivation function also complicates other types of attacks (for example, someone secretly going into your wallet and photographing the card) - obviously, they could try to install a keylogger on your phone or computer with the password database, as well as copy your password database, but that probably takes longer and carries more risk of getting caught than photographing a card.
One of the more realistic news feed titles for this event. Yes sir, SpaceX nailed the launch, it was awesome to watch, more goodies on the way to the ISS - I hope the rest of the mission goes well.
It's not why C is faster, it's more about being able to use hand crafted SSE2 instructions and existing libraries with such optimizations. Nothing competes with C when performance really matters.
>five hours of video tutorials by your's truly

yours
The FSF as an window moving org is a view I heard expressly presented at their annual members conference a number of years ago. At the time the discussion, I believe, was in the context of the very active "defective by design" campaign, and in response to some views that a more moderate response to DRM (like that taken by other groups like the EFF) might be more effective.

This isn't incompatible with earnestly believing the views. All of us hold principles that exist on a spectrum and can pragmatically decide how we apply them without necessarily compromising them, in order to optimize for progress of certain kinds on certain time-frames with certain costs.

An example of this, RMS's positions have become stronger as free software as matured: IIRC GNU was originally developed on Sun boxes; but RMS would never use an outright proprietary OS today. Early free software system he used had non-free firmware or other blobs, but he advocates strongly against that today. There are a set of strong ideals, sure, but the amount of compromise someone holding them should optimally take depends on the overall state of the world and their position to influence it.

The notion of software freedom as a human rights issue can be quite foreign to people and without someone taking it very seriously some, especially those who have mostly regarded technology as a black box, can too easily dismiss it.
The "Theorems for free" paper is here: http://ttic.uchicago.edu/~dreyer/course/papers/wadler.pdf
( I guess is the most precise you can get :) )
That's correct, for now--great point. It certainly could--I'll bug it as an enhancement. Thank you!

Future plans are to put a really lightweight backend that facilitates configuration, routing, and authenticity checks (mostly SPF) during runtime but my primary goal is keeping it small. There are good things ahead once it comes out of weekend hack mode and fills out after the alpha release matures. Thank you so much for your help! Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help. I'd appreciate any feedback.
Ancient Roman Fort Was Designed for Celestial Show
Quickly Know W=What Items Are Worth Reselling
I think tagging/subdivision is a bad idea for HN. I believe subdivision is part of what makes the Reddit unappealing. There's a really good quote in The Diamond Age:

“One of the insights of the Victorian Revival was that it was not necessarily a good thing for everyone to read a completely different newspaper in the morning; so the higher one rose in the society, the more similar one's Times became to one's peers'.”

HN is valuable and interesting because of the diverse, eclectic, and elite crowd that reads the frontpage every day. Dividing it beyond basic "semantic" categorization (Ask, Show, Jobs, etc) would destroy that value.
I would love a programming language with first class cross platform GUI support. And by that, I mean native code with a web GUI. I was really excited about Elm for that reason, but the installation process is abhorrent and overly complicated. It'd be nice to write a program that runs on my local machine and presents its GUI through Firefox without needing to depend on a third party library or having to worry about writing HTML, Javascript, and CSS.
Something interesting has been happening in the Open Source world. In the beginning, open source software was developed mostly by academics and free software advocates. Copyleft licenses like the GPL became very popular as a means to prevent for-profit companies from using all this free software without giving back. There seemed to be a struggle between closed source proprietary software, and free open source software on the other side.

The lines have blurred, and now a lot of open source projects are developed and maintained by for-profit companies. Projects like clang, SQLite or PostgreSQL are all developed mostly by profit-oriented companies. These projects use liberal licenses; they aren't interested in "protecting" their code -- for these projects, the situation is actually reversed. Proprietary software vendors make large parts of code freely available to the world!

Maybe this is a result of the GPL; evil corporations are afraid of the GPL and therefore they support projects with liberal licenses.

But maybe the GPL is just not necessary anymore; companies see the inherent advantages of open source and make (some) code available even without the GPL gun pointed at their head.

What a wonderful world this would be! The GPL always seemed like fighting fire with fire. Maybe the world is better than we thought.
How to Use the “Je Suis Charlie” Banner
This post seems to neatly encapsulate a lot of what I feel is wrong with the entire start-up / accelerator scene. I've always felt that capable people with a good idea will succeed 99% of the time anyway - and if that team in particular doesn't succeed, then another group will, and hence no net loss to humanity of the 'idea'.

OTOH, this kind of process seems to rescue half-baked ideas, or throw money at people that can perhaps program but can't actually run a business, or glorifies killing yourself working for hope of a huge payday. Perhaps I'm in the minority, and perhaps it's because I'm old (44) and 'get-off-my-lawny' ... but I am so not down with this kind of approach to making money.
Apple of course has the right to do whatever they please, but the world would be better if their neat new language was available in other contexts than just their system. It pretty much guarantees that the only people who will use it will be a certain class of iOS developer. I will probably never use it unless I am forced to for a job or something.

Swift is currently in the same position that C# was in before Mono. It will probably be popular in certain circles, but it's not going to ever dominate the language field like Java, Javascript, and C do. Microsoft's recent freeing of the .NET infrastructure makes it a real, bona fied choice now. Apple should follow suit early, for the good of the language.
> If she wants to fork GCC she should go right ahead

She doesn't want to fork gcc. She's saying that if people wanted to use gcc in this way so badly, they would fork. But nobody is interested in doing that, because it's easier to work with clang rather than try to fight with gcc. And the argument is that gcc is worse off for having driven those users away.
White House seeks cyber bounce from Sony hack concerns
This is the first book I've ever read three times. Every 6 months or so, I pick it up to look something up and wind up re-reading the whole thing.
CES 2015: With Tiny New Computer, Intel Pushes for More Bearable Wearables
Why are types easier than sets? They are both computable.
Unfortunately the effects that you describe are nontrivial. The method of water simulation that is used here doesn't lend itself to simulating the effects of things like water tension or breaking waves. This is because the water surface is represented as a 2D height-map, representing the displacement from equilibrium (i.e. the z coordinate as a function of x and y). It's clear that it is not possible to represent water clinging to the sphere or dripping off it.

A particle-based system could simulate the effects you describe (by keeping track of the positions of some large number of water "molecules" and exchanging forces between each pair of particles), however the simulation would be far too costly to run in real-time on typical hardware today. It also has its downsides. With a height-map based representation it is trivial to calculate the normal to the surface of the water, which is necessary for the lighting effects, but with a particle system you would need to reconstruct the surface of the water in an additional step each frame, using something like the marching cubes algorithm.
OTOH, if you're TOTALLY into a four-hour MacGyver movie, you may be interested in this book by Raymond Malewitz where he breaks down a recurring theme of "object misuse" in contemporary literature that he calls "Rugged Consumerism." The book looks at things like Apollo 13, MacGuyver, Fight Club, the Whole Earth Catalog, Sam Shepard, etc.

http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=22814

Here's an article just about No Country for Old Men:

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cli/summary/v050/50.4.malewitz....
.NET Compiler Platform Moving to GitHub
This is an old piece but it doesn't cease to amaze me. Well done, creating this must have taken a lot of time and skill.
I think that if Python can be considered a "systems" language according to somebody's definition, that definition is pretty flawed.