skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Foolish? That covers a lot of ground. So much that the only answer is "it depends."

The first thing it depends on is where one is wandering on a spectrum from Coca-Cola brown beverage trade secrets to full on Stallmanism. People can and will disagree about "the right thing" using plausible arguments based on reasonable assumptions [this doesn't preclude implausible arguments based on unreasonable assumptions or the other corners of the 2x2 grid]. We all decide what sort of person to be.

Since this is a common conundrum, Spolsky has encountered it and being Spolsky has clearly thought about the issue. My understanding, and he can correct me if I'm wrong is:

1] open-sourcing should be done because it benefits users.
2] open-sourcing doesn't always benefit users.

My gut says that Spolsky and Stallman more or less would agree on something like the language of 1]. They don't on 2]. Spolsky takes the philosophically utilitarian approach to "because": if it benefits users, then open source. Stallman takes a philosophically deontological view of "because": Open source always benefits users. There is no 2] for Stallman. For what it's worth, I admire him greatly for that.

Wasabi is FogCreek's VBscript compiler. It performs a specific task. That task doesn't require a math library so Wasabi doesn't have one. The only people who need it are Fogbugz customers for the purpose of using Fogbugz. They don't need Wasabi to have a math library. [wasabi]

The compelling rationale for not open-sourcing it is that it basically sucks as a compiler for the way people usually use compilers. In the very limited use case of Fogbugz, it doesn't suck. It's even good enough for Spolsky. If someone wants to learn about compilers The Dragon Book is better. If they want to learn from example code, there are much better compilers in open source. Is the world better if using Wasabi in the wild just plain sucks and studying the source code leads to poor conclusions about writing compilers? Probably not.

Why not just open source all of Fogbugz? It uses technologies which are licensed under terms incompatible with various open source licenses. The same is true of StackOverflow. They both have free as in beer options. It's a more generous business model than used car lots operate under.

Since you are asking the question, you're in the land of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is hard because it requires weighing potential harms against potential benefits. That's engineering for you.

I think the world is better for what StackOverflow provides right now than it would be if it provided less but was entirely open source. The pace of improvements that not having to patch bugs on other people's systems allows outweighs the benefits of it going the route of PHPbb.

Good luck.

[wasabi]: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html
Of course I have :) I used to use a combination of Trailers, Flixster, IMDB, and Fandango for my movie needs. This is sort of an amalgamation of all that with my twist.
Indeed, artists lose a choice (and get a new choice in its place). But that's a big backpedal from "YOUTUBE is EVIL".
The Relationship Between Coding and Literacy
WhatsApp meets Google Wallet with this social contactless payments app
> But realistically, an unused parameter should probably be removed.

Think about the function if-then-else, which you may be familiar with from your favorite language :)

if-then-else true branch1 branch2 = branch1
if-then-else false branch1 branch2 = branch2

Obviously you don't want both branches evaluated in any given invocation, and obviously you cannot remove the unused parameter. Note that the purpose is not to "save computation", since for example branch1 may be undefined if cond is false!

When using a language with support for lazy evaluation, you encounter this kind of functions all the time.
Yes, I was referring to that section. Eventually restrictions on commercial use completely nullifies the AGPL... no one ends up with anything that's AGPL in the end.

Your alternative approach here would work. Maybe specifically a tri-license: non-commercial, commercial, and plain AGPL. For non-commercial licenses, this list mentions some: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

Also consider that the AGPL strongly discourages modifications directly to it. The proper way to "modify" it is by adding extra permissions. Those permissions can come with strings attached (from the original developer only), but any user should be able to discard those terms and choose the original AGPL instead. So instead of dual or tri-licensing you could add permissions that say, you can bypass requirements X, Y, and Z of the AGPL but only if either: (1) you use this non-commercially or (2) you buy a license. But in that event you basically can't have either one of those people sharing their code or it pollutes everything and might destroy the original project. Meaning, not only could a project be forked, but forked as many wildly different and incompatible licenses with the original author having no control of it.
This works nearly flawlessly for me since 4.0.

So so many Excel files. Ugh.
I would argue that in non-trivial code when variables represent meaningful concepts it is Haskell tradition to use long, descriptive variable names. Sometimes these are even longer than in other languages since that's a tool used so rarely.

The trick is that once you're exposed to short names at the right places you realize that there are relatively few times that variables are meaningful as much more than function-wiring notation. Especially in pure code!

As soon as you add in mutability this all goes out the window really fast. Subsequently, you see "meaningful" variable names all the time in IO or ST code.
my house builder was amish. He OWNED all the equipment (huge tractors, cranes, etc.), he will ride in them but he WONT drive them. He hired someone else to drive. And he would stand on the crane to reach the roof. And he has no TV and stitches his own clothes etc.

So, while I am not against or for their way of life, one can plainly see them adapting to new way of life but still denying something as basic as vaccinations when they feel like it.
I absolutely love Amelie, and I hadn't realised that one of the reasons maybe because it is not just another orange/blue tinted movie.

For me Amelie is a movie I watch when I feel like there is no hope for humanity, it is the one movie that restores it just a little bit.
Great app. Whose API is it? Your top review says you cover more local theaters than fandango, which was my initial thought.
It just says "Loading" on the latest version of Chrome with zero plugins...

And now it says 500

> Error details are currently disabled. Please set StaticConfiguration.DisableErrorTraces = false; to enable.
And this is why i find the whole economics idea, that multiple entities doing their thing for individual profit will produce general social improvements, questionable at best.
Unequal access to our legal system is the shadow problem of our age. It touches so many aspects of our society and we barely seem to be aware of the issue.

Hopefully this technology and others in the same vein will bring costs down and speed up the process so more people can have access to what they should have already by right.
Very nice product! As a sidenote: anyway knows a service that provides human associations? Eg What do you associate with "Hacker" as a person "Computer", "Night", "Internet"
One movie that seemed to play with color to a fantastic effect is Traffic - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181865/
I noticed when it came out that color played a subtle role in setting the mood of each scene and aspect. For instance, near the border towns and where where the "hot zone" of illegal drug traffic occurred, it was more yellow/orange tinted. Then when you head back to the suburbs and see privileged kids doing drugs in their large homes, the color was much more blue and lighting was much softer. I wish that more movies would employ tricks like this without using a "template"...

edit: looked on IMDB and it looks like 3 different films stocks were used:

To achieve a distinctive look for each different vignette in the story, Steven Soderbergh used three different film stocks (and post-production techniques), each with their own color treatment and grain for the print. The "Wakefield" story features a colder, bluer tone to match the sad, depressive emotion. The "Ayala" story is bright, shiny, and saturated in primary colors, especially red, to match the glitzy surface of Helena's life. The "Mexican" story appears grainy, rough, and hot to go with the rugged Mexican landscape and congested cities.
It already works (somewhat) on Android: http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/master/Android-ARM@2...
Build Static Websites
Sure, but that's why you keep it closed almost all the time. For practical purposes, the ribbon takes up less space than the header on Notepad.

I've added my most used Word functions to the quick access bar, and some features are provided by the ghost menus that appear by the cursor, and I know a load of keyboard shortcuts. All of which means I very rarely open the ribbon. But when I do need it, it's orders of magnitude better than the rat's nest of menus and task panes we had before.
The case is different. There isn't a competing conviction about orcas. People are generally susceptible to that kind of information. But once someone has bought into misinformation it seems very hard to sway that person in the other direction. I would like it if there was a silver bullet for misinformation but it seems we haven't found it so far.
I see a lot of hate, but I can't see the arguments.
Does anybody know if this is in the "idea" stage right now or if it is a working product?

If I understand correctly, this is a project by a team of University of Toronto undergraduate students for a competition to receive 100,000 $ seed funding by IBM and continued access to Watson. It seems to me that the stated goals are incredibly ambitious // hard to reach with these resources?
Some nice ideas there. Of course, in the real world we have our distro's package manager as a given. So I wonder how an additional package manager would work with it.
Hardware neural network on the cheap
The poster is not related to the product in anyway
This brought to mind a passage from Stanislaw Lem's "The Cyberiad", where one of the main characters cooks up a one-use lawyer, much like a throw away shell script:

And Trurl went home, threw six heaping teaspoons of transistors into a big pot, added again as many condensers and resistors, poured electrolyte over it, stirred well and covered tightly with a lid, then went to bed, and in three days the mixture had organized itself into a first-rate lawyer. Trurl didn't even need to remove it from the pot, since it was only to serve this once, so he set the pot on the table and asked:

"What are you?"

"I'm a consulting attorney and specialist in jurisprudence," the pot gurgled, for there was a bit too much electrolyte in it.

If you've never read The Cyberiad, you really should.
I thought the current economic theory was that everyone should do what's best for them AND the group?

Case in point, tobacco companies sponsoring anti-smoking ads because talk of smoking increases revenues for the smoking industry as a whole. Instead of trying to advertise themselves individually.
"If you have reason to believe your personal Wi-Fi hot spot has been blocked, ... you can visit www.fcc.gov/complaints"

Right, so if my wifi is blocked, I should go online to report it! Great plan :-)
Is Skype Dead with Firefox Hello?
#11 Did Errol Morris’ Brother Invent Email? – Reply All – Gimlet Media
We're talking about a port from C. Porting from C to C++ is much easier than porting from C to any other language...
Hardly a new phenomenon, though. The deodorant industry, for example, got its start in a successful advertising campaign convincing people they smelled bad. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-advertisers-convin...
I've always liked using the social good argument from the same author's previous work[1].

"I don't mind giving up some privacy for safety. I've got nothing to hide."

"Well privacy isn't something you can just give up. It's a right given to society by our framers, not individuals. A smoothly functioning democracy depends on dissent, which requires privacy to allow alternate points of view to gain traction. So privacy is a social good, not a personal right, and if we reduce privacy, we are reducing our democracy. The Soviets didn't have privacy. Free countries must."

That last part is usually what does the trick.

[1]: http://tehlug.org/files/solove.pdf
I think you're right, the author doesn't cover those collaterally affected by secret information. However, this is outside of the author's main point.

The author is focusing on the principle privacy is not just about secret keeping things secret. Your example of people who may collaterally affected falls under this category. It's just an example of using the word private to equate secret.
I bought Nine for Exchange some time ago and Outlook still is far behind Nine.

The first thing I wondered about was remote wipe and password policy. Outlook does not enforce them... but still downloads your mail to third-party! That's a big no-no. The very nice feature of Nine is ability to sandbox the remote wipe and password policies to app only - very nice, if you are contractor using your own device with account on your customer's Exchange.

Another thing is Calendar - Nine creates calendar provider and the system Calendar app will display it together with your own. Outlook has its own Calendar and you have to switch between them. You cannot see your agenda in single list. Same with contacts.

Nine also allows encrypting and signing messages.

So far, I don't see any reason switching from Nine. It was 8 EUR well spent.
Comcast apologizes for changing customer's billing name to profanity – CBS News
That's a strawman. The actual claim is that playing with computers at a young age has a high correlation with becoming a great programmer later in life, and that generally young girls are not encouraged to play with computers.
So it's better... but from the screenshot, I'd say myself it's design now reaches "barely acceptable", instead of the previous "pretty bad", but not "delightful" either.

Of course, I think I could say the same (or worse) about MS Word, it's main competitor. So.
That's a completely inaccurate description of my reply. But I suppose you'll consider that remark a personal attack too?
Indeed, I think it's been collapsed by default for some time...
How I joined, and quickly left Copify – and how they threatened to sue me
In The Matrix, you could tell which "world" you're in by the general grade of color. When in the Matrix, everything had a greenish overtone, and when in the "real world" it was more blue. I really liked that use of color to be a part of the story telling process.
It seems like a good idea, but to automate it you'd need to maybe scrap websites and create a count of words that appear in the same sentence. Or you could get really crazy and start comparing subject/object relationships, etc.
Thanks, sounds interesting!
BTW, out of curiosity, is there a way to track developments in RStudio like the one you've mentioned?

// Preview Release Notes make a note of "Code completion for C/C++", but don't mention libclang (use of which is interesting on its own, IMHO, since it better indicates the quality improvement to expect): http://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/preview-rel...
How does Managed IT Services help businesses?
One of the most interesting exceptions I've seen on this convention was the 2011 movie Limitless(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1219289/). They still used the orange-blue complement, but switched saturation between them, sometimes every scene. It was used as an indicator of how the protagonist views the world: bright and with an orange saturation for when he is on NZT, dull and blue when he isn't. I thought it was a great way of deconstructing this particular trope.
They generally don't electrify their homes.

That doesn't seem like it is a contrived choice designed to enhance convenience.

(My understanding is that the choices tend to hinge on whether something creates an ongoing reliance on the greater world)
Again (hackernews should just prepopulate my comment box with this text), if you enjoyed this, you'll probably enjoy https://microcorruption.com/ Surprised to see that it wasn't already mentioned, especially since one of the creators, tptacek, was active on this thread.
Currently scraping for now, but we're going to move away from that.
Reminds me of archlinux early days when one of their main arguments was that configuration was done in a single file (as BSDs). Nix is like a typechecked version of that.
Yeah, probably. I thought that was all security agencies. Isn't the whole idea of spies that they assume false identities to try to gather information they wouldn't legitimately have access to?
So I'm wondering, if you just learned the 200 most popular words, you might get pretty far in learning a new language, no?
The media is filtering out the logic from this debate. I would have hoped HN would be more informed.

Its well established that no vaccine has an effect that lasts longer than seven years. This is the reason for booster shots. Every vaccine researcher and pharma company will tell you this.

The reason we immunize children is because their hygiene practices are poorer than most adults and they are a marginalized class. They get more diseases due to poor hygiene which encourages adults to look for easy solutions. And adults are in a position to force those solutions on the powerless.

Adults do not immunize themselves every seven years because the risk/reward profile simply isn't worth it. Every shot, vaccine or not, is a risk. On the other hand, adult-quality hygiene and typical first world nutrition cause people to avoid dying from diseases already. For a recent example look at Ebola. Many people simply can't get it because they are too healthy. This is why ebola never went anywhere in the USA and many other countries.

Adults with poor hygiene that get more diseases are ignored because they are a smaller group and in a position to resist so they are not worth targeting.

Most people aren't aware that the USA stayed polio-free for many years while a live attenuated virus was given to children. It was known by pharma companies that the live attenuated virus would become a full strength virus in the child's stool. Look it up, I remember at least one American woman catching it from changing a diaper and it was in the news. Now we use dead virus because of people like her. But the larger point is that for many many hundreds of thousands of diaper changes, there just wasn't a problem. Other countries with the live vaccine had lots of problems. What was the difference? Hygiene and nutrition.

Vaccines are a great tool. Like any tool they should be voluntary. People who choose not to use them are not a problem because if they were then every adult who hasn't had a vaccine in seven years is also a problem so the blame should be pretty thin.

And finally, please note that no one died and many were hospitalized for precaution, not an actual need. Healthy, first world people die from measles at an extremely small rate. I know it doesn't sell newspapers or get people to read your blog but this was not a deadly epidemic. All of the angry rhetoric around this event could have been avoided if people were informed ahead of time that there would be no deaths in otherwise health people. Meanwhile, heart disease is a deadly epidemic and there is no vaccine for that.
The typical idea is that you almost always want "spine lazy" data structures. So, streams are almost always more valuable than strict lists.

In my mind, I tend to think of this as being true up to the point where the size of the structure is statically known. Thus for fixed-sized vectors (or arrays), spine strictness is very important—it gives you better control over memory usage in the very least.

Unfortunately, no language I know of has a good concept of "strictness polymorphism" so in Haskell you end up with duplicate implementations of Strict and Lazy data structures. This ends up being not so much duplicated code, but a whole hell of a lot of duplicated API.

And I think the stream-cons/cons distinction is trivial. It's a lack of proper polymorphism that you're dealing with there and that can be easily implemented in any language with good polymorphism. In Haskell we have a very nice (very nice if you tolerate lenses, anyway, which you should) interface called Cons which is an elaboration of

class Cons s where
type Elem s
_Cons :: Prism s (Elem s, s)

which works like this

instance Cons [a] where
type Elem [a] = a
_Cons = ... -- more complex than worth explaining

instance Cons (Stream a) where
type Elem (Stream a) = a
_Cons = ...

and then gives you

cons :: Cons s => Elem s -> s -> s
uncons :: Cons s => s -> Maybe (Elem s, s)

which are generic in Stream a and [a].
To be fair, in this day and age, projecting a view of yourself as "sharing pics of my cats" is better than projecting nothing, unless you actually are trying to project absolutely nothing. Which is pretty much impossible.
At least on iOS the company can dictate the security requirements of the device using Exchange. For example because of corporate policies my iOS device is set to wipe itself after 4 invalid passwords have been entered rather than the default 10.
> if you want two versions, you need to ask the maintainers to split the package into two

This is still true in Nix (and Guix I assume), although there are facilities for overriding, say, just the source tarball (to a different version) without needing to create a whole new Nix package (and worst case, creating a whole new Nix package is an order of magnitude easier than creating a Debian package in my experience).

In the "nixpkgs" set of packages, a few packages come in multiple versions (gcc, autotools come to mind), but most are only available in a single version.

Of course, once you've managed to install package-version-1, even as nixpkgs moves to version 2, 3, and so on, your version 1 can remain installed forever if you wish, and nothing can swap out the libpng, or libc or whatever it may depend on, since as you say all these can live side-by-side with other versions of themselves.
I'd like to see a concrete description of the difference between what ROSS gives you versus what, say, LexisNexis does.

If its just giving you a simple answers and not actually producing the kind of research results a research attorney using traditional research tools would -- where the simple answer would be part of the heading, but sources and analysis would be part of the report -- its not going to be useful except as a novelty. In law, its rarely as important to get a simple answer as to have an answer that you can support as most correct and explain why other potential answers are less correct for the specific circumstances.

And, from the vague marketing hype, it doesn't seem like what is really needed in law is what ROSS is being sold as doing.
The surprising history of nitrous oxide
That's not my point at all. Unlike you, I don't presume to predict the behavior of people I don't understand so confidently. I never said that they don't care about privacy. I suspect all humans care. I just expect them to have a different interpretation of it than you do, and I think it's quite arrogant of you to assume that they will naturally agree with you when their backgrounds are so different from yours. Everyone who is convinced in the rightness of their own views believes "time is on my side", but at least one side is always wrong to do so.
I'd say plenty of people today do spend a majority of their time in virtual reality. The screens are slightly further away from our eyes and things aren't as 3D as we imagine them but we're hooked.
I enjoyed Dead Silence, but some of the blue they do was overkill. For example: http://static.yts.re/attachments/Dead_Silence_2007/Screensho...

I hope we get a more natural dynamic range of color in the future.