skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Well defined subprograms" is key here -- in a mutable language like Go, goroutines are not well-defined subprograms, so exceptions are tricky to use correctly.

Edit: I should clarify that's just speculation/personal opinion on my part. I'm not sure what djb had in mind.
The problem with this is you keep factoring the costs of a computer, or electricity or an ASIC. It's expensive or the user. But for uTorrent, that computer is free. You can't trick people into installing bitcoin mining crapware on their ASIC.

There was a similar scandal[0] in 2013 where the ESEA client (an e-sports league, and the client is required to play in ESEA matches) "infected" about 14,000 users. They were able to generate a few thousand dollars worth of Bitcoins (worth more now) over only two weeks until the miner was noticed by the community.

They have an advantage because most people who maintain a paid subscription to an e-sports league will have powerful GPUs. But compared to the size of uTorrents userbase, 14,000 gaming PCs is nothing.

In this case though, it looks like EpicScale is only using the CPU. And probably not mining bitcoins, as they never mention them specifically. Their terms[1] list "[...] various purposes, including, but not limited to, cryptocurrency mining, data processing, data analysis and/or scientific research and development."

[0] http://www.wired.com/2013/11/e-sports/

[1] http://www.epicscale.com/terms
Note that BusyBox has won every case they've brought. The GPL is pretty well written.
99.9% of the people who do this aren't going to seriously get into mining. It just doesn't work that way and you know it.

Secondly, that's a hell of a cost to attempt to get mindshare.

Thirdly, there's no way for a reasonable person to be competitive mining these days, so the idea that more people should mine is somewhat laughable.
Polyglot web IDE that allows you to mix Python, Javascript, R, Ruby, Scala, Java: http://BeakerNotebook.com work with them all in the same page. As a corollary, you can work with Python2 and Python3 in the same notebook, and share data.

I totally agree that each language has its strength and each facet of your problem may best be solved in a different language.
To those saying the OP shouldn't talk to the founders: why? I'm just curious.
Ooh, I like this idea- cut rosters down to 25 or so. Game becomes less about specific physical abnormality and there's more money to spread among fewer players.
On the other hand if they win it will mean the end of most corporations using GPL code

[citation needed]. I'm very irritated by this FUD "Just think of the jobs!" line of thinking.

Companies are aware of the "license risk" surrounding GPL today. They know what they can and can't do -- services like BlackDuck exist mainly to assess this "license risk".

Any sizable company using GPL is doing so because it helps their bottom line, not because they have their fingers crossed praying that it won't get enforced.
bkuhn is not a lawyer. Karen and Tony are, however.
Seriously? "modifies it without giving you the changes back, what has that deprived you of?"

Uh... it's depriving you of the changes? e.g the kind of changes a big, rich company can afford to pay people to do to free software.
Lizard Squad suspect among 56 arrested in UK-wide cybercrime sting
Romanize: Another Programming Puzzle
The goal isn't to get people mining, this is not some kind of educational scheme or promotion for bitcoin. The goal for uTorrent is to make money off of its users mining, and this isn't doing it. (what it is doing is screwing with its users)

If users get introduced to mining and then go and buy an ASIC that does absolutely nothing, 0, for uTorrent. That's not a business model.
You know, I'm not sure I like this "gamify education" thing. Is the stuff we want our society to learn really so boring that it has to be embedded in a game? That's not the signal I think we should be sending.

> Remember animals which play with each other and learn how to fight or to hunt.

This is a great analogy, because it illustrates so clearly how "play to learn" is being misused. The play here is actually doing the things that are useful later while fighting or hunting. The games need to be the subject matter, not just surround them.
>> isn't the combined works and/or derivative works question a legal grey area?

>We don't think so, but this case will let the court to decide that question.

I don't think a judge is able to decide it. A grey area cannot be black or white.

--

25 years ago I heard a RMS speak and it seems to me the whole freedom movement is unable to move and/or adapt. The same old (now) boring words again and again. And meanwhile we have App distribution models (iphone, google play, SaaS) which are much more closed/dangerous then waht we ever had. Abundant ad spamming and data grabbing. FSF did not help one yota and their extremism made them weak. GPLv3 divided instead of fortified.

What shall I think of RSM which not even uses smartphones? How much more beside your shoes could you be today?
http://newstechnica.com/2013/03/14/spring-clean-google-searc...
> I don't think other companies have to feel threatened.

Many CTOs of large enterprises have, let's say, a less nuanced view of the GPL. Their concern is that "just complying" would mean the complete and total revelation of all of their code, all of their trade secrets, and thus all of their competitive advantage. They believe, wrongly, that there are no other ways to come into compliance than to do something they believe would kill their business. Cases like this are accelerants on those flames of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
Perhaps this comment comes from a position of ignorance, but what's all this about "risk"? Complying with the GPL is simple. If I understand correctly, VMWare wouldn't have been in trouble here if they'd have just put a link in their docs to the effect of "ESX distributes Busybox, the source for which can be downloaded here (link)".

And even if you screw up and forget the link, the lawyers don't descend on you like buzzards - you get tapped on the shoulder and asked to fix it, which is a pretty simple matter too. The lawyers don't come out unless you stall and act in bad faith like VMWare has done.
IANAL. I'm not a GPL expert. But here's my reasoning:

1. Code written under the GPL is value created for public consumption. VMWare is violating the spirit of reciprocity by benefiting from that value, creating more value on top of it, then not releasing their additions for everyone to benefit.

So it's not about Christoph's benefit, nor the company's. It's about our benefit as the people not involved directly in that transaction.

2. I imagine copyright gets really hairy if you write something, someone comes along and modifies it over a period of a year or two, then claims ownership. I imagine the GPL helps clear that sort of thing up as well.
Show HN: Android App: Twitter Version of Quora/AskReddit/Yahoo Answers
Yeah there should be a decision on that this year: http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/
Do you consider plagiarism and/or freebooting to be harms? If so: that's the harm here. If not, why not?
By doing what they did they've already proven bad faith, talking to them now just warns them.

Better to seek legal counsel and have them talk to the founders.
> You can't have it both ways, people.

Of course we can. It's just that companies are now so geared to quarterly roadmaps that nothing has time to gain momentum unless it becomes a phenomenon.

I see this with airlines as well; they launch a route in the middle of winter, or on a business route with schedules that are awkward for meetings, and then can it two months later because 'no-one uses it'. Which dissuades other airlines from trying a more sensible approach.
The best course of action is to just go along with it while you get legal council. The more information you can glean while you're working there will only help strengthen your case. If you simply lawyer up and confront the owners, they'll go into bunker mode, fire you and then lawyer up themselves.

Act normal, and continue to work and essentially collect as much as evidence you can. You can drop hints, talk to people to find out what they know, etc.

The more you know, you can start to build a timeline and the implications that the company was effectively doing this behind your back for nefarious reasons. The more you have documented, the more you strengthen your case so when its time to actually threaten them with legal recourse, you'll have all the evidence you need while they'll be scrambling to build a defense.

Hope this turns out well for you!
That's a good point. What I left unstated, and what I was wondering was if this individual was given guidance by the founders to exercise his options. Thereby effectively reducing his salary further, when he already stated that his salary was an issue of contention. Something I'd be guarded about.

However, you are right, if this company succeeds, he saves some money on taxes by owning stock early.
Developing trust in autonomous robots: Seminar with Michael Wagner
Onyx is distributed and Tesser just uses all the available cores of a particular machine AFAIK.

Both libraries are awesome.
Is the upgrade path from django 1.4.18 / drf 2.4.2 relatively easy?
Republicans have (at least in the last few decades) been the best at this practice. PATRIOT act is probably the most notorious example.
Always on asymmetric encrypted IP could solve all these interception issues.
>they'd make $700 while generating tens of millions in extra electricity costs.

uTorrent probably tens of millions of users, not one million. These users also might have decent GPUs (I know I do in my gaming machine which is my only desktop). I'm not disagreeing that this is a questionable business practice, but I think they're going to make a hell of a lot more than $700. Also this normalizes this behavior so if they switch to Litecoin or whatever coin gets hot next, they have all the infrastructure in place to generate new coins.

One of the things thats invisible to computer users is how much power they use. uTorrent is taking advantage of this ignorance. The same way the stupid "search for aliens at home" crap was installed on every university and corporate PC by irresponsible helpdesk staff. There's a larger issue here about power usage. At the very least your computer should warn you if something is eating up all the CPU and rasing your electric bill and contributing to pollution.

All the more reason to promote Deluge for torrenting duties. uTorrent is user hostile garbage.
It's a shame. It's great for all kind of stuff. Doesn't WoW distribute their game via torrent?
I know right... Even though it hurts a little to be different it's not the end of the world. I think what today's men must do is be strong and proud of being men, and not let the matriarchy's pseudo-inequalities get to our heads or we'll become submissive fem-men before we know it. Some people do everything they can to get attention, even if that's using their gender as a literal marketing tool... Stay strong brother.
A major point of Taleb's black swan theory is that they (for large values of they) are getting the model wrong. They aren't seeing seven and eight sigma events, rather it was never a normal distribution to begin with.
I doubt it's mining Bitcoins specifically, people in the thread only mention CPU usage so far. I found this[0] on the epicscale site, which let's you query for things like the hashrate of a Node, but it doesn't seem to work. So while not bitcoins, I would guess they are mining some altcoin rather than being a botnet or something else.

[0] http://report.epicscale.com/
Molecule in tree leaves helps female mice combat weight gain; males unaffected
My (I believe) great-grandfather was on the Yale football team during their famed flying wedge days and back when the leather helmets were their only protection. As far as my memory of our family records can remember, he died in his early fifties / late forties of some brain related complications I can't recall at the moment. What I remember very well, however, is that the doctors of the day attributed the complications that caused his death to his time playing football on the Yale football team.

I have no idea if the same conclusions would be drawn by doctors today today, but I thought it is an interesting anecdote to share nonetheless.
Deluge works with Windows and has been popular for years. Its what I use.

http://deluge-torrent.org/
There was a dustup a while back between the developers of VLC and Apple. It's since been resolved, but the state of GPL code on the app store (knowing what we know about Apple's arbitrariness) is still murky.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/no-gpl-apps-for-apples-app-stor...
Chrome on OS X using BoringSSL instead of NSS
Early-stage venture capital: More regions get in on the action
Yeah I always saw it as a mix between an instant message, a wiki page, and an email with real time collab.
I really loved Wave because for interactions that were not well defined (such as building a knowledge base) I believe you could start waves from parts of a wave, and playback how each component of the information came together in a form of primitive version control.

Simplifying the interface, inviting more people to the beta when it was originally out, and increasing the ability to federate easily were three big things that were missing from wave for more people to adopt it imo.
Networking the Coffee Maker
This reads like a tea party post from about 2007.
The problem with MOOC's is that there is no incentives to complete a single course at this time. There needs to a curriculum towards some kind of accredited certification that employers will notice
> going to be asked to leave the company

I think this is moot. Such a disaster would indicate bad shit is happening. Lawyer up asap.
Free and Public DNS Server List (Up to Date)
To be fair to the gov.uk team, Universal Job Search appears not to be run by them. They have a form on gov.uk which submits to the job search application from direct.gov (the organisation that was bad enough to convince government to give gov.uk a go in the first place).
You shouldn't be in bad shape tax-wise. I don't know Canadian tax law - but in the US, you only get taxed when you sell the shares. Capital gains would not be recognized if you exercised the options and held onto the shares.

Since you have been exercising your options - you are a shareholder in the company (or a member depending on the structure) and I would imagine that the company's operating agreement would require them to disclose any funding rounds to you. I'd get a hold of that if you can.

It sounds like you're working with amateurs, so I'd pass it by a lawyer to determine the real impact on you - but I wouldn't flip out until you get the entire picture. They may be planning on diluting the hell out of you or they may just not know what the hell they're doing.

I'd say it's too early to tell.
Initially misread as "Nasa's Dawn probe-bears down on Ceres".
This was a great comment, and I feel like I got a great education reading this. Thanks again.
tkmcc is correct, the other big area that people typically want is the ability to easily tune their search results. For example, you might want to give more weighting (or boost it higher in the search results) to an item if the search text is found product name then if you find it is in the product description. Or perhaps boost a result based on the proximity (geo-location) of the item in relation to the user.

Full disclosure, I am a Program Manager on the Azure Search team.
> I really don't like things like this.

Really? Can you explain more why. Is there an article accompanying it that shames Google or says anything bad about it. To me it just looks like a company that iterates and is trying new things.

> A lot of these projects ended up as other projects or built into other projects.

Well it would be bad if they completely threw away the code, and then hired a whole new group of people to work on a similar project. That would make them look worse.
Concussions are a serious issue being discussed in Rugby - estimates are that 1% of players will suffer from early onset dementia. Maybe more than the differences in protective gear, the reduced incidence of concussions in rugby are likely due to differences in tackling techniques - Ruby requires a wrap-up technique which results in players leading with the shoulder and not the head since they have to wrap their arms around the opponent and bring them to the ground.
It's profitable if you use other people's computers and don't pay for the wasted electricity. It's straight stealing though.
Agreed. I can't help but be depressed that anti-GPL FUD dominates convos on HN. I mean, my own work has been disrupted by GPL being "inconvenient" but I will still defend it. My life has been enriched by the great software written under it, and the fact that it continues to thrive under this terrific license.
The practical problem is that VMWare is the best by a ridiculous amount. The VM is better, the management tools are ridiculously better.
Couldn't there be an in-between? Does anyone around know enough about the implementations of sequential download?

I only need the sequential download to proceed a little bit faster than playback. After that, bandwidth should be used to re-assert the (future) health of the torrent, so that segments at the end continue to have enough seeders.
The problem is ownership. Behind the GPL is a (traditional) view of ownership, where if you own something you can do what you like with it. Own that table? Well you can sand it, smash it, burn it or use it. This is your house? Well you can do what you like with it.

Now, when it comes to IP that notion of ownership has all but been thrown away. 'Owning' a song entitles you to some rights, often only valid for a period of time, and subject to arbitrary modification later on.

When it comes to software we're often even worse off - we can't even find out what it does. The GPL is an attempt to enforce a stronger notion of ownership, so that if you have the software in your possession you can do whatever you like to it. The source code is open, you can modify it, or anything else.

So there's the harm. The harm is to you. When you're given a piece of software you have limited, if any, ability to find out what it does, to modify it to suit your needs, to modify it to play around. And yet you 'pay' for this software. You're paying to acquire a set of limited rights, often mutable and on the whole useless (as rights).

You might say that's all a bit theoretical. But all the sony rootkits, Lenovo MITM attacks, credit carf theofts, etc. - they all happen because no one can see what the software they "own" does.

I dislike the way the GPL works - copyleft enforcement - the law should simply be changed. But the principle seems about right.
Is there a way of avoiding to make a PayPal account? I would like to contribute, but I don't want a PayPal account.
Thanks, that article is indeed better, I hope a moderator can change it.
Tesser also allows you to distribute it using hadoop i think. I haven't used it, I only happened to hear about it why @aphyr gave a talk at the clojure exchange in London.
CTOs are not unused to contracts and licenses. I refuse to believe that they are incapable of dealing with outside entities and coming to terms. VMware is just being willfully rotten.
1. This is a problem that hacker culture doesn't have the resources to solve. 2. I'm not saying you need to have empathy. I'm saying if your first reaction to mental illness is to turn it into an engineering question, don't be surprised if you come off as insensitive to outsiders.
I've met some of the guys working for gov.uk and they know the challenge is huge. A government is probably the worst sort of institution to try and change at a fundamental level using technology. They're good people trying their best.

This said, I don't see the point of such a puff-piece unless it's a combination of 1) recent bad press from The Register and 2) national election being in full swing. There is a very high chance that voters will not return the same government to power, so I guess GDS are trying to preempt an inevitable wave of "spoil system", considering they were appointed directly from the cabinet.
I mean, the software exists to allow you to reap the benefits of other people's work without paying them. I'm not sure why this is surprising.
He didn't give it away. He licensed it under a specific license he chose and people have to accept if they want to use his work.

Say that I help you with some endeavour of yours, and that I do that provided you do the same with an endeavour of mine. You accept, so I help you, then you decide to not help me. The harm is that you have extracted value from me by promising to me something you didn't deliver.

In the GPL licensing case, the harm is that he choose to provide his code under GPL provided those who use it would put changes and derivative works under GPL too.

In particular, this means that VMWare choose to use GPL code knowingly they would have to share the result but they didn't. The harm is much bigger in that everybody who is happy with GPL code can't use VMWare's code. That's a lot of people.
How exactly is the unresolved tension keeping things in check? The untested nature of how far the GPL can hold up in court is exactly why we see violations of the GPL so flagrantly. It's exactly why violators of the GPL are willing to let this go to court (if there was ample precedent of the GPL being upheld it is reasonable to assume most corps would choose to settle issues like these before they escalate to a law suit).

If the GPL is never proven to be upheld (at least to the point where most legal corporate accepts it) by the courts then it is a meaningless licence that only matters to free software advocates and geeks.
Great stuff, thanks again!

Just one more question (if I may)--
How do you scorecard these guys? If I find someone, who looks good on paper, comes across well during a Skype interview-- is there anything you look for, probing questions? Or can you only know by giving them a 2-4 week trial run?
I can't imagine writing this off. He's been seriously wronged, to the tune of quite a lot of money. The raise alone (promised in writing, never delivered) is probably substantial, considering it's been about a year since it should have happened. The tax issue seems less clear, but I have a hard time imagining you wouldn't be liable if you hid important investment details from a shareholder and therefore caused him a huge tax liability.

In any case, it certainly seems worth talking to a lawyer to see if there's a case, and if there is a case it's absolutely worth pursuing. If you let people get away with this behavior, you just encourage more of it.
You mean their whole mentality of "we built this half baked product, why the hell isn't anyone coming?"
Not really. Defensible facts.
Yale falls behind in CS
I would've preferred Jeux d'eau.
How I Snuck Through Wikipedia’s Notability Test
Defining and describing the population of ISIS supporters on Twitter
Music to get you into the coding groove
Universal Jobmatch is built and maintained by the for-profit private firm Monster, not the gov.uk team.
Nah, the whole reason it exists, and is linked here is to try and pile on that Google is terrible and shuts down products that everyone in the world loves. But the reality is the minor minor subset of the world that is HN loved some of these projects and were upset no one else used them, thus they were shut down.

I haven't seen any accompanying MS articles like this, mainly because there haven't been angry posts here of MS shutting down products we think they should keep running forever that no one uses.