skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They're violating the license, which means they no longer have the right to distribute the GPL'd code. In some cases, they may have to pay damages. However, in the US (laws may be different where you live), the violator can't be forced to divulge their source code; the author of the GPL'd code has no right to it.

An analogy might help; say I distribute CDs, with 6 songs I wrote and 6 songs by the Beatles, without a license. A judge can place an injunction to stop me. The copyright owner might seek damages. The judge might put me in jail/prison, if I continue infringement or don't pay. But they can't force me to give up the copyright on my songs, merely because they're distributed together.
Reminds me of interfaces in Google Go. No rigid class hierarchy to cram our objects into. Just implement a list of methods and you're good.
As a tech evangelist, you could say he's just doing his job very well. (sarcasm.)
Lost In The Crowd: Social Media Clutter Problem Part II
I just don't believe him. If someone in tech says they have never used Gmail, they had better spend some time explaining _why_.
Nice, codinghorror has audio ads for Mastercard which cause Safari to hang and then finally crash.

I loooove it when a site justifies my use of AdBlock.
How Can We Define Stickers?
A message no longer has a "shelf life", but a "wavelength".

For those struggling for ideas, you could build a "has this prize expired site, tracking these very RTs".

A lesson learnt which they failed to mention is increase the time of your competition to greater than 16days ( or whatever it was originally )

That said, for people who are not pushing competition and are using Twitter and RT's to generate leads or help users find content from them. It gives a slight indication that many many trickles might not be harmful to you. ( Well thats at least what I have come away with. )
We are, under the name of Microsoft. Under our own name we can say anything we want, for the most part.

Microsoft employees generally get divided into two camps: those who will only ever use an MS product and never consider the competition no matter what, and those who will use whatever product they deem is best for their needs. Considering most MS employees are relatively new to the company, more people tend to fall into the latter. It's generally only the people who have been here for a decade or more that tend to be the former.
Kim Stanley Robinson slams Republican climate change 'denial'
the thing about this post that really irks me is that these re-tweet contests only contribute to the noise on twitter. pot/kettle...
Samba's great, but bear in mind that if you do the "fixes" listed on the last page to make Windows 7 and Windows Vista clients work with a Samba server, anybody who happens to be sniffing on the wire now has all your authentication credentials.
Having sued people in small claims court, I can tell you that it will take up a lot of your time just to fill out the paperwork.

Also, small claims court has caps on what you can sue for. More than a few grand and it's not an option.
Usually they say the future belongs to the kids. I see a lot of kids that live in Facebook these days. They don't read books, they don't buy music online, they don't care much for mail. Facebook definitely has a place among these three.
I believe Scoble at least waited a few weeks to make his conversions seem organic.

I think this would have less of a bad taste if we thought of these guys as being particularly conniving salespeople rather than "evangelists".

After Goog prevented Jon Skeet from getting his MS MVP award, this post might also have been internall encouuraged by Google. Nothing would demoralize MS more than seeing its ex-girlfriend sleeping with its hated rival (even if they initiated the breakup).
I'll usually do 5% discount for Net15 (15 day turn around). More than 10% is pretty steep...
Ask HN: Learning 2 Hack - For the very first time. With a deadline.
Dear HN,
This is a plea for advice. I've recently decided to take the plunge and learn how to code. I have my own startup that I foolishly outsourced, and I've decided that there really is no other way around it then sitting down and learning to hack myself, and then iterating the product once I have a better handle on things.

Items I submit for consideration:

1. I have a site already running (more or less, it will be at least within the week) on rails. I have no idea what is going on, but I'd like to figure it out and be able to change functionalities as I learn about my customers.

2. I have never coded before. Not even once. I still don't understand what a hash is, really. Aside from taking a class, I really don't know the best way to learn. I've been reading books, but reading hasn't been doing much for me, since I'm not really absorbing the material. I want to try 'testing' things out...I don't know if that makes sense, but I feel like if I have exercises to do, I will understand concepts much faster then simply reading.

3. I have availability to take courses. But, I do not know what courses to take. I am based out of the bay area, and am open to suggestions for classes for beginners.

4. I have a self-imposed deadline of four months. Is this enough time to be able to handle simple, workable functions on rails? (The common answer, my guess is, is that it's completely up to me. But I'm just looking for perspective. what can I possibly get accomplished, if I am starting from scratch?)

Also, supplemental 5: Would there be anyone out there who would be willing to learn with me? I think having a partner would help tremendously, but I don't know where to find people in such a situation.

Please let me know your thoughts.
USPS 25 Billion Less Pieces of Post Last Year
Mortgage interest tax deductions were certainly an accelerant, as they were designed to be, but that alone wasn't to blame. Packaging mortgages into investment vehicles was a horrifically bad affair which was at least the number two ingredient. How do you manage to take 10,000 mortgagees that on average represent 7% 30 year loans and end up with a packaged investment that rates at 20% return? This involved some loose and unregulated mark-to-market math and relied on home turnover in a superheated market. Once leveraged instrument after instrument has been added into this unregulated space, you end up with an enormous unmeasurable structure of debt that has little to do with houses.

So it may well be true that mortgage tax deductions were a necessary ingredient, this alone did not cause the debt explosion.
Seriously. They could have fixed this themselves by ...

Option #1: add "(ends Nov 1)" to the tweet.

Option #2: be cool, roll with the publicity - "We've had such a great response that we've decided to have two prizes. Thanks for the support!"
Online business model revenue gap
I found Skiena's:
http://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Manual-Steve-Skiena/d...
to be much more readable, but Cormen's is still considered THE bible algorithms anyway.
Generally good advice, but a year is a long time in the startup world and what do you do if you get a really good job offer that won't wait? Seems like this is a pretty common occurrence as it has already happened to me and I am only 6 months out of school. Without going into a lot of detail, I started at a company shortly after graduating and two months later got a job offer at another startup that was better in almost every aspect and decided to bail.
Here's a guy who for years has been dreaming about how to build computing power into the real word of physical gestures, object recognition and intuitive responses. The standing O at the end of this demo is deserved... and that was even before he announced he was going to open source it.
Accounting for Sweat Equity
(as are the TDD revolution and the functional renaissance).

I hope not. TDD might work for some people, or for specific problems, but it seems a shitty way to develop to some other ones. It just it is not a panacea.
Clearly Microsoft sponsored FUD. I can't even open my wide-screen laptop in an economy-class airline seat, and if I could it would be dead in 2 hours anyway. I love my Eee PC 1000HE for traveling. It is easy to carry, and it gives me a Ubuntu desktop that lasts longer than I can on trips from California to Beijing.
If you want to get a handle on the basics, especially ruby basics, try out ruby koans.

http://github.com/edgecase/ruby_koans

They are simple exercises that you can work through without prior knowledge, its a fast and fun way to get your feet wet. Then its important to read some books and get a good foundation under those wet feet, but we all know books can be boring, try to find one that has an actual project you work on throughout, seeing concepts come to life in front of you can be really helpful.

Then try to look at some code, since you are using rails I would highly suggest railscasts ( http://railscasts.com/ ) they are short videos, but there are 188 as of this writing that show some cool stuff about rails and get you in the hacker mindset.
Talk or Control Wheelchair With Your Thoughts
All I am saying is Automotive engineering doesn't have a must speak German to work clause just because the first modern automobile was made in Germany. French mathematicians don't have to speak English to be taken seriously. Software development shouldn't have an English requirement. The only reason the vocabulary of CS is English is because speakers of other languages haven't taken ownership of their work and instead contribute it in English.
To match your btw: I am an English native, and a resident of any English-speaking country. I find it kind of sad that people are trying to kill off their native tongue by not keeping it up to date.
I became aware of MBTI about fifteen years ago and it's been an ongoing fascination. I see it mainly as a useful conceptual framework upon which one may build a set of intuitive tools that enable effective interpersonal understanding. I've always felt it somewhat loose and inexact but unlike many of the posters here (borderline trollers actually) I don't have a problem with that looseness. And it's perhaps unsurprising that the type I seem to prefer to manifest is an extreme minority type both in the context of this site and in the context of the general population.

You seem to have a more rigorous and holistic understanding of the psyche than I do. I have a set of intuitions built from this framework. It seems you have understandings of additional surrounding frameworks, and probably a more clear understanding of MBTI itself than I do.

Do you have a reference (ideally a published book or books) that could help me expand my understanding of MBTI and the enveloping aspects of the psyche?
Many of those quotes are 2-3 years old. Google has been consistently improving their web offerings and the speed of web apps has been getting better and better.

I have changed my opinion of products and companies over a the span of years many times. I think we should agree that he can too.
Thanks for the reply. Do you have any resources you can recommend where I can learn more about programming in general? There seem to be a lot of things that people talk about that just go completely over my head.
if anybody wants to vote on these companies, i've put them on pikk:

http://www.pikk.com/stories/stories_by_tag/Asw3
FSJ is the tech industry's court jester.
I was surprised to see AOL called out as having brilliant network engineers. On the other hand I suppose they must have some competent sector of the business.
DEA and US Extradition Corruption Proof « UK Citizens Extradition Fight
Linkbait riddled with spelling errors. Skip it!
Wow, yeah. No one who actually uses OWA on a regular basis could say that with a straight face. Gmail was far superior, right from launch (or at least as close to launch as I got an invite).
That game is like Euchre. It seems like it has a lot of strategy, but then you get into it and learn that optimum play is fairly simple. With a group of experienced players it's mainly just die rolling.

I greatly prefer Dominion.
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5 ways VC firms can stop shooting themselves in the foot
Settlers is so last year. Dominion is the new Settlers.
StuffIt (formerly StuffIt Standard) is shareware and has been able to create encrypted Zip archives for many years. If Zip encryption is enabled, StuffIt uses AES 256. You can also optionally exclude Mac-specific content (ie: resource fork data and DS_Store files). With the 2009 release, you can make custom droplets, each with its own unique compression settings.

http://download.cnet.com/StuffIt/3000-2250_4-10151590.html
Hunger in U.S. at a 14-year High
Webmail is, I think, a substantially "easier" problem (with the caveat that this is mainly for technically proficient users)

I use gmail for email hosting but it all routes through a domain I control, so if Google one day goes crazy, I can switch out of gmail. (And IMAP is well understood so I could also copy it off), whereas things like my facebook friends are much harder to migrate.
Sarcastic, yet insightful
Supercomputers with 100 million cores coming by 2018
This is the third Twitter related, content-lite and nothing new being said, story within the last week on HN and in this case the poster doesn't even know how to "use" twitter.

Surely, there are more important stories out there.
I would start with these books:

http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Ruby-Novice-Professional/dp/...

http://pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-with...

With your deadlines, you're going to have to skip over some CS basics just to get everything going. That's okay though, there is enough to learn to keep you busy for a lifetime. The most important skill set that you need to learn right now is how to determine what's important this second and what can wait until later. Deadlines are a fantastic way to learn that skill :D
I cannot stress how much I agree with this article. At work our corporate apps are all IE6 only, and even new machines purchased just last month were imaged with Windows XP. Outlook E-mail boxes were limited at 90mb. Speaking with the IT team proved fruitless - they were not interested with catching up with the times, or doing anything that required work on their part. As far as they were concerned, every XP machine came with IE6, and that's all they needed to ever support. Aggravating.
The ruby koans do a pretty good job giving you a quick overview of programming concepts in ruby. If you have any trouble getting up and running feel free to send me an email ihumanable at gmail dot com
Why is this on here ? An example of scratch my back and i scratch yours.
Perhaps I wasn't sufficiently clear...I agree with you entirely. And, I don't see much evidence that he's actually changed his opinion much over time.
Glyde Aims to Simplify Online Sales of Used Media
Sure, if you have an urgent opportunity, sometimes you need to take it. But I had an employee once who suddenly quit to go to _med school_ - to which he had applied over a year earlier and never told us. It was devastating to the project he was on, the team, and to me personally since I had vouched for the hire.

In his defense, he was fresh out of college and thought it wasn't that big of a deal. So I sat down with him and explained that it WAS a big deal for a company our size, and he was super apologetic.
Free for HN: Blipr iPhone Sound Messaging app
Wasn't part of the Warcraft and Starcraft bot's technique that they cheated effectively and often knew things that a player couldn't have known (and executed on things that a player couldn't have?) in order to stand any chance at winning?
I know, I know. It blows your mind. I think we're feeding the troll.
"It's not quite that simple, of course"

No, it isn't, or else every language with map and reduce functions would have a trivial, one-liner version of Hadoop.

Does anyone have any familiarity with the MapReduce package?
Misleading title at best as Hadoop is a framework for the management and execution of map/reduce while the article demonstrates a map/reduce operation in R. I guess Hadoop has been ported to Clojure as well since I can just say:

(apply + (range 10))

And get an answer of 45. Hadoop must have been ported to MySQL as well:

SELECT type, SUM(price) FROM products GROUP BY type

It's not that I mind people pointing out the obvious (map/reduce style constructs have been around forever), but I'm accustomed to a port meaning something being migrated from one platform to another with a comparable feature set.
I suppose when someone sues him for the contest not being legal in their state/province/country/planet, that'll be twitter's fault too?

Basically, the guy didn't just not know how to use twitter, but he doesn't know how to run a contest, or probably how to run a legal contest.
What I Wish Someone Had Told Me (about starting a company)
There are pockets of the latter approach in larger industry. I was fortunate enough that my frustration at truly ignorant policies caught the attention of our CTO, who happened to value openness and honesty over legalistic relationships.

I've found the freedom to be unabashedly open about my search for fulfillment in my work to be an incredible source of inner peace and job satisfaction. It's humanizing.
StuffIt is $50, making it neither free nor inexpensive... Marketing your product is fine with me, but if you're going to post at least read the original post and contribute something helpful.
Just a general bit of advice: You will learn more iterating through "change the code, save the file, execute the code, repeat" than any amount of plain reading. When I learned Python, I sat down with Dive Into Python and the command line.
And you'd have to release it under that same license (or a GPL compliant license), which means that anybody can do the same thing to you. If you improved the engine in some way, there's nothing stopping the makers of the original game to take your improved version, bundle some resources with it (sound, graphics) and release a new and improved version of their game.
You've confused me:

> Google ... looking again like the out of
> touch GIANT that they’re perceived as.

You're saying that Google is perceived to be an out-of-touch giant?
Currently ranked #4 on the homepage but #26 on http://news.ycombinator.com/classic. I think it's time to switch over to classic.
well, my coach told me while pointing to some "optimistic risk taker" like this with such mental self-confidence:

- Regardez, ce qu'il fait, c'est très dangereux, il ne maitrise pas du tout ce qu'il fait: il fait ce qu'il peut, et non pas ce qu'il veut. Il va finir se casser, ce n'est pas comme ça qu'il faut faire...

...and the real trouble is, is that he puts others on the slope into danger as well.
> I've been reading books, but reading hasn't been doing much for me, since I'm not really absorbing the material. I want to try 'testing' things out...I don't know if that makes sense, but I feel like if I have exercises to do, I will understand concepts much faster then simply reading.

OMG of course, this is how everyone does it and you leave me amazed at why didn't you try to code something yourself?
The whole point is to talk during the activity. Holding a conversation while biking would be difficult. Between more than 2 people it would be all but impossible.
Does that mean you read comments in source like
free verse? Certainly, effortlessly reading text
with hard line breaks is a skill a hacker should
have or develop.
When someone is deciding what language to learn, though, surface details are the main thing they have to work with. It doesn't necessarily make it justified, but it's the reality of the situation.
You're probably right. I was thinking maybe millions of 0s and 1s (if those count as tokens at the lowest level) but that's getting silly.
The author wasn't very good at communicating this, but the point of the article is NOT that twitter is useless to him. His point is that it's useless to most other users. He certainly doesn't mind the extra publicity. However, an expired contest being kept alive and well long enough for 5,000 people to enter it begs the question, what good is twitter as a content-delivery system? The individuals being fed information about this contest were not being fed useful information. Beyond the individual user-level, it's also indicative of the sheer amount of noise in the system (the wave analogy makes the claim that the lack of signal contributes even more to the noise).

This assertion is easier to agree with, although I think it's generally a PEBKAC problem (on the community level) and not a problem with twitter as a tool per se, except insofar as it attracts people with 140-character attention spans.
Dear Twitter: Please Explain Your Privacy Plan.
I've been using OmniGraffle to prepare DFDs, flow charts, and UML diagrams for my thesis. The UI is very polished and easy to learn.
Hey there, Though I am a little ahead in building a Rails app, I'm essentially in the same position you are in and (more importantly) have the same mindset of building it myself. Shoot me an email and hopefully we can help each other with our projects.
"twelve months notice" is definitely just general advice, and certainly a long time in the startup world. However, I think it's just an illustrative example. What the author appears to be saying is that in social circles where your reputation matters, don't be a dick. I think the author was just using "twelve months notice" as an explanatory example.

In summary: Don't screw people over unless you work in an anonymous, transactional industry, which startups aren't.
He mentions AOL and UUNET because he has worked at AOL and UUNET. The blog post is 90% strokefest and has no real point.
> You will be forced to choose between work and family - and
> there’s only one right answer.

This guy rocks for having the courage to say this in light of all the advice out there that says you may have to put your family/personal life on hold to start a business.
Anything can useless when you don't know how to use it correctly.
I doubt that people actually bother to lie on the test to get a specific result, especially here. Noone knows anyone else's type, and even if they did, they could always just lie.

My point was that the constant claims that these categorisations were qualitatively indistinguishable from the zodiac are patently false, and there's the evidence.
Agreed. I'd probably be biased towards Google and against Microsoft given my background, but it's even obvious to me how completely transparent this guy is and how little his recent praise of Google matters.
Keep in mind that this will continue to be the case for a while. Sometimes you have to worry less about understanding what's happening to start off with, don't let not knowing how to do something stop you from doing it. Sometimes it all becomes clear once you see how things are used.

One thing I would suggest, it really provided the "aha" moment for me, is finding something that will dump out or print our your datastructures. If you don't understand what a hash is, and there's a tool in language (x) that will spew out what's in there, you will probably very quickly "get" what it is.
Do tell us more about your experience. I'm fascinated with this stuff from afar.

Also, I'm curious how their database stacks up: what's it better/worse at? It seems like magic for a program so small to do so much so well. I'd like to know what the tradeoffs are. (Either that or move to their universe.)
http://dondodge.typepad.com/about.html
What They Mean When They Say They Have No Money
The trouble with schools isn't about the teaching of teachers
I think his blog post was very effective. You can tell because there is a huge thread about it right here.

I really enjoyed reading about him sticking it to Microsoft, and it sounds like they made a mistake firing such a guy.