skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> what the goals of the GPL license are besides a warm and fuzzy feeling that no-one is ripping them off

GPL ensures freedom for users of the software, not developers of the software -- a distinction that is missed every single time licensing is discussed. Developers that use the GPL are (hopefully consciously) making a choice to ensure software freedom for their users.

This article did a very good job of tackling this this from another perspective, by addressing the usual (and tired) argument that the GPL offers less freedom than more permissive licenses due to the share-alike clause. Limiting "power" to take away freedom is a nice way to put it.

Not to derail this discussion, but my personal opinion is that the GPL is a bit ahead of its time. With the marginal cost of software being nil, the path of least resistance is just to make software free. The problem is, someone still has to produce this software, and unless we hit post-scarcity, production is going to cost money [1]. So the GPL straddles an awkward tension between ideals and economic reality right now. This is in addition to the more overt goals of FSF/GNU in terms of privacy, control and self-determination, which RMS has proven to be quite prescient about.

[1] "In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the postscarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on required tasks such as legislation, family counseling, robot repair and asteroid prospecting. There will be no need to be able to make a living from programming."

https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html -- a very good read.
I'm sure that if you really stretch your mind around the issue, you'll understand and agree that the rules are a bit different at the CEO level.
I argued politics with a lot of FOSS developers on Usenet in the early 90s. They weren't apolitical. And the internal politics in FOSS were often very highly charged and often bitter. The splits that created OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD, Stallman's politics with FSF and GNU bleeding over into endless licensing flamewars on the LKML mailing list, etc.

You are either highly naive about FOSS or you've just defined all the vicious politics in FOSS as being just and righteous -- and that is exactly the justifications that the lynchmobs and their leaders in this article hold towards their victims as well.
OccupyGPL now redirects to "choosealicense.com", but it's still available on waybackmachine if anyone's interested:

http://web.archive.org/web/20150210203941/http://www.occupyg...
I wouldn't call it quite a bit different. Really just seems to have a few small changes where they prefer [] over (). Otherwise just a different set of standard macros.

Or are you referring to some other difference?
@infraruby

> No, but "set -u" does help the bash programmer to reject incorrect bash programs and to put "test" where necessary, just as the Haskell compiler helps the Haskell programmer.

> Perhaps the Haskell compiler helps more. Perhaps Haskell programs are more likely to be correct. Perhaps. There is only one way to find out.

I think you're being disingenuous. Haskell is designed to be safer (i.e. able to reject more incorrect programs) than bash. There is no "perhaps" here -- I've shown how the compiler helps more. In your example, bash simply fails to reject an incorrect program. The program will NOT run as intended, but instead will abort when it reaches an inconsistent state (such as attempting to access an uninstantiated variable). Do you see the difference between finding out at run-time that your program misbehaves, as opposed to entirely preventing the misbehavior at compile time? You simply cannot write a Haskell program that will attempt to reference an undeclared variable. That's a whole failure mode entirely gone! You don't even need to test for this, because Haskell is comparatively safer than bash.
I think some people are investing not because they want to make a ton of money off of Tesla, but because they want the ventures that company is attempting to succeed.
I think part of the point is that the attractiveness of a contract instructor is that the fully encumbered price is very much closer to the take home salary than for a tenured professor (or indeed, even a janitor).
>>but are more than happy to release improvements to infrastructure, since that's not their core business.

Without GPL companies choose what their `core business` is. I don't want to argue with a product vision manager what to release and what not the release - its much easier for me to remind them of the law.
The Hudson's Bay Company used to be the owner of its nation-of-business (Rupert's Land, now western Canada). Today it's a department store chain in Canada and the parent company of two chains (Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue) in the US.
Are you trying to imply that vaccines being mandatory is the result of lobbying and not just because it's an extremely important tragedy of the commons problem?
> The original link cites corruption at the hospital level, which does seem like the weakest link in the system.

If corruption stopped at the hospital there, then this wouldn't happen at the FDA:

> As David Ross, the FDA official in charge of reviewing Ketek’s safety, put it, “In January 2003, over reviewers’ protests, FDA managers hid the evidence of fraud and misconduct from the advisory committee, which was fooled into voting for approval.”

Corruption goes beyond the hospital level and it extends into the FDA itself.

> As part of the new drug application process, or, more rarely, when the agency gets a tipoff of wrongdoing, the FDA sends a bunch of inspectors out to clinical sites to make sure that everything is done by the book. When there are problems, the FDA generates a lot of paperwork—what are called form 483s, Establishment Inspection Reports, and in the worst cases, what are known as Warning Letters. If you manage to get your hands on these documents, you’ll see that, most of the time, key portions are redacted: information that describes what drug the researcher was studying, the name of the study, and precisely how the misconduct affected the quality of the data are all blacked out. These redactions make it all but impossible to figure out which study is tainted.
ggplot for Python [0] is coming along nicely. My own recent use suggests that for basic plotting, most of the expected functionality is there. More advanced displays, such as faceting, are still in progress. Overall, I've been impressed.

[0] https://github.com/yhat/ggplot/
Dumpy – command line package to get dumps
What an amazing and scary tool (maybe those always go together). I now have a much deeper appreciation for why folks are afraid of Starbucks WiFi.
I wonder how one would go about efficiently implementing such an associative array.

I suppose a trie + glue logic (regexp -> NFA -> DFA) could work, for classic (read: actually regular expressions) regexps at least.
SEDECO: les atouts du prestataire B to B
Yes and no. Yes in theory, using bandwidth-per-source-IP caps like you suggest could be used to solve this. No in practice, because the prevalence of NATs puts many users behind the same IP address, meaning that unfair users can still hog the upstream bandwidth from everyone else in the same NAT.

What we really want is something more like bandwidth-per-end-host caps.
I find it really interesting to juxtapose this situation with the current furor over Brian Williams' not actually having been in a helicopter he said he was in.

It's odd, but not too surprising, that the only job you can actually get fired from for lying is "propaganda mouthpiece."
Redditor explains why games now increasingly require you to be always online
I like this post because it reminds us that humans have a complicated society, unlike rats. Which can muddle the conclusions of this study.

>> I don't know if rats could understand this concept though, which might be why they aren't all living in Afghanistan's poppy fields.

And indeed humans don't.
Well, yeah. I mean, that's straightforward enough, but what people frequently leave out is what "improve on that function" entails, especially when you start getting into really weird codebases.

Like I said, I understand the overall components - I need a lexer/parser to parse the code into a usable data structure that I can then examine to pull out information about that code. I also need some way for that parser to not puke if the syntax isn't perfect (for instance, if I'm typing in a line of code, that line of code isn't going to be syntactically perfect).

I've been a developer for a number of years now. I know how to learn stuff. The problem is that this particular problem is so nebulous and infrequently solved in a publicly viewable way that I don't even know what I don't know, hence the idea of looking at a guide for some simple, imaginary language. If I can see the basics without all of the eventual code rot and cruft, I can go from there. A sample implementation in pretty much any language would also be adequate - I can do without the prose.
That's really interesting. I would've thought it'd be useful trying to understand more complicated texts in college.
Especially considering this very article is about the ways that escape analysis can fall down in surprising circumstances.
AFAIK, scraping is legal under US law because one does not have to circumvent any encryption to access the webpage. If LinkedIn will serve it to Google, Bing and others, then they'd be hard pressed to say "our HTML is secret."

Selling it is a different matter, and one that I don't have enough law background to answer. It may fall under the provision in US copyright law that says that facts are not copyrightable. So long as you are just selling the facts of the graph that they gladly serve to the Internet, ... again, I am not experienced enough to comment.
Just for context my SO is a nom-native English speaker. She speaks and understands English fine in person (her job involves dealing with demanding people from all over the world, who often don't speak very good English), but whenever we watch something on Netflix or such she can't understand what's going on without subtitles. Films are a bit different from an online cause because of background noise, but don't forget how many technical talks you have probably watched that have terrible audio...
> Affero LGPL

Yes, just the other day I was thinking over licensing options and realized this was needed too. The common way around it is to just grant an exception like Mongo did with their driver. Also, the Java world has been granting a classpath exception to GPL for ages.

However, many people confuse AGPL for this non-existant Affero LGPL because they think that they can use an AGPL library in their proprietary code. I believe Mongo has contributed to this confusion but that ultimately the lack of this alternative license is mostly to blame.

Regarding the rest of your post I disagree but more words explaining the value of GPL have been written than code :) so I'll not address that.
R has a built-in Cairo-based SVG output device that allows you to write out any plot in a vector format: http://www.inside-r.org/r-doc/grDevices/cairo. It's great for publication-quality plotting.
US 'at risk of mega-drought future'
> In the strange world of OccupyGPL, that's a “restriction”, I guess because it… restricts you from placing restrictions on someone else? But that's as silly as saying that outlawing slavery reduces freedom, because it takes away some people's freedom to own slaves. Hey, the analogy may be inflammatory, but the logic is the same, and it doesn't make sense in either case. The freedom to take away others' freedom is not a meaningful freedom to have — the proper word for that is not "freedom" but "power".

Where have I heard that before? Oh right, as usual, the FSF said this long ago:

"[O]ne so-called freedom that we do not advocate is the 'freedom to choose any license you want for software you write.' We reject this because it is really a form of power, not a freedom.

This oft overlooked distinction is crucial. Freedom is being able to make decisions that affect mainly you; power is being able to make decisions that affect others more than you.
...
We in the free software movement are not opposed to business, but we have seen what happens when a software business has the 'freedom' to impose arbitrary rules on the users of software.
...
We believe you should decide what to do with the software you use; however, that is not what today's law says. Current copyright law places us in the position of power over users of our code, whether we like it or not. The ethical response to this situation is to proclaim freedom for each user, just as the Bill of Rights was supposed to exercise government power by guaranteeing each citizen's freedoms. That is what the GNU General Public License is for: it puts you in control of your usage of the software while protecting you from others who would like to take control of your decisions."

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.html
Some of it is mental, but ultimately it does get recorded into a record-keeping system of some sort. It's too hard to always pull out the record-keeping system and keep things in it. However, when the record keeping system looks like it's running on empty, I tend to brain dump into it.

Just tell yourself to have a one-track mind and make your list and record keeping system your life. Never deviate, and just always do little steps always. Every big picture should always be made of thousands of little pictures.
'Boyhood' named film of the year by BAFTAs
Decent references. I find myself doing similar, final-draft touch-ups with plots for manuscripts.
His father expressed skepticism about Bitcoin for the exact reason you have said. But ultimately while he supported the gold standard for the USA's official currency, he also supported "currency competition" where people could issue private currencies so anybody could opt out of the dollar. Whether one thinks the idea is stupid or viable, it was actually at least consistent.
I don't think so. So long as they don't seek me out personally, I'm okay with the CxO, etc., being diametrically opposed to me.

I'll put up with an F'ed up president/prime minister with whom I disagree to the utmost, but I'm not going to move out of the country. I'd do what any civilized person would do and avail myself the tools at hand, vote, in the case of president/PM/Chancellor. But I'm not going to get in a tizzy over it.

I think there's a point you come to in life where you realize that no matter how righteous you think your personal cause is, it's your framework which makes it so. Live in another era, in greek times or babylonian times, their idea of what was right and wrong were different due to their frameworks. People who believe that when they are old and frail should go out to pasture to be consumed by nature are no less right than the person who believes in life prolonging drugs, euthanasia or hospice care.

I'm also not saying we're insignificant beings and nothing really matters in the face of the universe. Just that with few exceptions, like murder, etc. we can't say 'this is the righteous way', the enlightened way.

When I work for someone, when I buy something, there is no further symbolism -it's unconditional. I make a transaction for service or product. You pay me, I work for you do do x. I pay you and I get service or product x in return. I don't expect any conditions like, oh, you must say sweet things to your partner, don't think nasty thoughts in your dreams, else this breaks some implicit agreement, etc.
Now how to turn that into a social network...?
> Please explain how it's fair that organizations who are releasing educational materials for free should be forced to pay extra money (which they possibly can't afford to spare) so that their content is slightly more accessible to a vanishingly small portion of the population.

Because they agreed to follow said laws: the ADA. They have options if they choose not to follow the laws.

> Please explain how it's fair that the plaintiffs would rather that everyone lose access to this educational material than deal with the fact that maybe not everyone will be able to use it.

They do not want everyone to lose access. Instead, what they want, is for everyone to be able to use the content. Regardless, they do not want everyone to lose access. Your question is merely based on ignorance of the desires of the plaintiffs.

> Please explain how it's fair to act like a petulant child, screaming that if they can't have it, nobody can.

Because when someone breaks the law and it harms you, you have the right to seek redress in our system.

I've answered your questions. Now, please answer mine, which are written with the same care that you wrote yours.

Please explain why you feel it's okay that organizations should be able to ignore and back out of laws they don't agree with.

Please explain why you feel you have more right to the material than others.

Please explain what it's like being a petulant, self-entitled child?

I look forward to your reply.
I find sriracha to be "meh." Cholula all day, all long
Wanted to wait on my own response so as not to influence peoples' responses. I'm a software developer and I've recently been thinking that one of the skills that I'd like to improve on is writing. Never late to work on, but it would've been great to put a little more effort into it earlier in life.
US poised to withdraw warnings about cholesterol
the only job you can actually get _publicly shamed and publicly_ fired from for lying is "propaganda mouthpiece."

Someone being fired for lying, and someone you heard about getting fired for lying, are very different things.
The comparisons with physical locations are not the same because an owner of a property will not let somebody come along and just build a random alternate access point into the building. As far as I am aware, these videos are released in a manner that somebody else can use them. Somebody wants to add captions? They can. Freely.

If adding captions is really so simple, then the deaf institution needs to make the captions on its own. The information, after all, is freely available.

If this is not simple to do, then we should be sympathizing with the organizations that provide the content for free. Clearly the cost will be higher and the amount of available information will be restricted which hurts the larger number of users who can hear.

Maybe we should shut off the internet because there are poor people in the world who are not able to access it in the first place?
I always wonder about the final conversion to assembly. Do you really need to learn all the instructions, the linking, the binary formats and all that stuff ?
Earlier today Carr moderated a panel with Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and Edward ‪Snowden‬ that's worth a watch: http://timestalks.com/laura-poitras-glenn-greenwald-edward-s...
Going skydiving is taking a risk. Going skydiving without training and without checking your equipment is just being an idiot. It isn't noble or poetic it is just dumb.

The only thing sadder than McCandless pointless depth is the people whose own lives are so devoid of meaning that they seek inspiration from a fool who killed himself.
My Second Hackathon Changed My Life
Show HN: Project Management Tool for Your Wedding Planning
I'm pointing out that pharma can either be treated like every other company and held to similar standards or they can act like scientists if they want mandated use of their products.

And yes, pharma does lobby for laws to mandate vaccinations.

edit: obviously lobbying is not 100% responsible for all vaccinations laws, but it's partly so and increasing.
> the original precise definition (that I will not give here)

I'll give it: the regular expression syntax acceptable to (n)awk. (and Perl, etc.)
> It's probably time to give up on that terminology nit-pick.

Many Perl coders are self-taught programmers with no CS background. If a man page calls something a regular expression, that is good enough for them.

Why drop to that level if you know better?

I don't want to appear "gratuitously ignorant" in front of someone who might be a decent computer scientist.

There are already ways in which I will appear ignorant due to actual ignorance; why go out of my way to dumb down the way I speak about something that I do understand?

If we are going to wreck math terminology why don't we just redefine "prime number". Let's see: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, oh ... so 9 is prime 11, is prime, 13 is prime, 15 is prime ... And, what do you know: now we can use a regular regular regex for primality testing over the binary representation: why, it's just (0|1)*1. As a bonus, we can restore 1 to its proper status as a prime number and kick out the oddball 2.

Say, if Perl called an odd test function "isprime", would you start calling odd numbers prime?
VESA Releases DisplayPort 1.4a Standard: Display Stream Compression Arrives
One thing the article fails to discuss is Evolutionarily Stable Strategies. Dawkins discusses the idea in The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype, and it can show how specific behaviors become resistant to invasion and thus settle in an equilibrium. It provides a much better model than the simple games.
>> its much easier for me to remind them of the law.

Isn't the benefit of open source - to get free updates to your code base - enough?
I was actually glad you brought it up. When I saw the New York Times story, I naturally thought back to my own episode(s) -- and it's been on my mind anyway because it came up on HN as recently as yesterday.[1]

Part of the peril of social media is that everyone becomes a public figure -- whether they want to be one or not. Those who are more traditional public figures (e.g., politicians, actors, athletes, business leaders) often have the personality attributes that make it easier to deal with scathing public criticism (though I don't think anyone particularly likes being excoriated) -- but most normal people actually don't. As a culture, I hope that we will be both more tolerant of mistakes made on social media -- but also more aware that (at some level) we all need to act as public figures when in public. Certainly, it's a thorny, complicated issue -- and one that is decidedly (if not canonically) modern.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9028497
ggplot2 is a very elegant language for describing how to draw your data. Two great books for interested parties: the R Graphics Cookbook [0] which has tons of ggplot2 examples and gets you plotting immediately; and ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis [1] written by the author of the ggplot2 library and providing a very thorough description of this implementation of the "Grammar of Graphics".

[0] http://amzn.to/1AhyEdE

[1] http://amzn.to/1B4OSq9
How much of this could be solved by replication? Some sort of rule where we say, formally, not to take any study seriously unless it's been replicated?

On the one hand, it's very bad that the FDA has covered this up. But on the other hand, there was science before the FDA. I may be interpreting the article wrong, but it seems as though the FDA is merely failing to prevent bad science.

Presumably, journals that cited these experiments didn't replicate that and knew they weren't replicated. Is science too complex and expensive to replicate these days? If so, is it even still science?

(Those are actual questions, not rhetorical ones. I don't know the answers here).

Edit: For some reason, at present my comment seems to be the top comment. I don't want to detract from the story itself. The actual issues at the FDA raised by the article deserve discussion.
For anybody reading Eridrus' comment, it's a bunch of non sequiturs that indicate no understanding of software licensing.

Rather than go through each sentence and point out why it's wrong myself, just read the GPL and a couple statements by Stallman first. Then as an exercise, read each sentence and point out why it's either wrong, or not even wrong.