skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 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).

That validates my concern about quality.
As far as I know uTorrent has hundreds of millions of users, it's not going to be amazingly profitable, but still significant revenue. (I don't see any recent figures, but they were at 150m monthly users over three years ago.)
I confess I've never paid much attention to copyright law, and when I think about this I find one particular reason. I don't understand the harm. What bad thing happens when copyright law is not obeyed? I think I understand that the answer is that someone's generously written code (like, perhaps, VMWare's) may then be taken into private hands without payment and used to benefit a commercial company or private individual. Is that harm? But if so, what's the harm? You wrote your code, didn't you? I'm asking in all sincerity: what specific asset or benefit has VMWare lost when someone takes their code and uses it for a commercial product or for private use without paying them?

Some people seem to get upset about such events: "The lousy crackers copied this software/game/movie and removed the copy protection, then distributed it for free no the internet. Nobody paid us!" So that's the harm? But how is that harmful? How does that hurt VMWare or anyone else whose copyrighted material has been reused without their permission?

Perhaps the answer is: "The author of that worked so hard on it and gave such expertise and so much time and now their work is providing benefit to others with no further benefit to the author." I would certainly agree in general that if you work hard on something and someone copies your work and benefits from it instead of you, then this is a clear and deplorable harm. But if you sell your work for money so that people who pay can benefit from it in general, then you have agreed that your sole benefit is not at issue and that you don't mind if other people use it. If someone then uses the work for their own financial benefit, what has that deprived you of? Where's the harm?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

To state it plainly, instead of simply using parody, Christoph wrote some code, and under copyright law has a right to control how people use it for at least the next hundred years or so. Some people who write code like that say "I'll let you use it if you pay me money." Christoph said "I'll let you use it if you let ME (and everyone else) use any modifications you make or things you build from it." Allegedly, VMWare used Christoph's code and DIDN'T pay him (they did not pay him money NOR did they adhere to the specific behavior that Christoph had requested). It is "harm" only in the sense that "stealing" software or music or movies is "harm".
Thanks Alex, I think that's a great point.

Please do feel free to follow this up by raising an issue on the repository - it'd be good to talk through some specifics about areas to improve.
Just leave, do your own thing. Ask for 83b elections. Lawyer will cost more than your tax bill
Non-paywall link: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-06/apple-to-j...
$104 and 8 hours of Amazon cloud computing is all it took to hack NSA’s website
I'm not especially well-informed on these matters, but from the outside looking in, raising property taxes looks to me less like punishment or force, both of which are kind of indulgent as terms, than like a community of people using democratically-created and democratically-approved non-violent means to align resources and incentives. Being a property owner doesn't exempt someone from democracy.
Dunno if this is an alpha version, but personally I think the visuals are a mess. Papers, Please (since you cite it as element of comparison) was very charming from this point of view - as every grapahic element of the game fell within a precise style and was presented very cleanly.

Here we have stereotypical green light terminals, OCR Font mixed with Mission Impossible strikethrough font mixed with bitmap fonts mixed with serious fonts: cartoon portraits with flash-style-shaded body illustrations with real life pictures.
You should talk to a CPA [edit: sorry, Canada - CGA], not an attorney, first.

You are upset about something that might not be an issue. You haven't mentioned what type of stock options you have (in the US there are ISO and NQSO, and - upon a quick check - it appears there are different types in Canada as well, with differing tax treatment). Omitting that detail in addition to the ... unusual way in which you exercised them makes me think you may have more of an academic familiarity with the process.

It would have been nice if the founders told you about the investment, but your reaction is completely out of proportion with what happened. Lawyering up [edit: distinct from a consultation] will be the equivalent of ending your career track with them and burning your bridges entirely.

And really, if the market value of your options has increased, consider the positive side of that news if you own 3%.
I always wondered why Google didn't spin off some of this as open source projects.

It seems to me that the bottleneck wasn't the hosting, but the man hours being wasted on them. Google could have reduced their involvement to providing an API and the development could have been managed by community.

It's easier said than done, obviously. Maybe the bottleneck was psychological and focus related, and they wanted to wipe the slate clean?
I don't really see how it is awkward or hurts relationships with consumers (especially when most all products and services are free) -- it's a form of market research and product testing. Who needs focus groups when you have the world?
15 CLEVER TIPS FOR THE BEST ATTORNEY WEBSITE BIO
The impression I'm getting is that he's going to have to pay taxes on the difference between the strike price of $0.0001/share and the investment price that's now established, to the tune of paying $10,000s of dollars for what are likely worthless shares if/when he stops working for them.

If that is correct, at this point nobody wins. At best from his viewpoint, the company covers his tax bill (or I suppose establishes a new investment price a lot lower through bankruptcy or whatever). Much more likely is that he's going to have to weigh whether suing them and the likely payoff of that will be higher than the tax bill; hmmm, he'd better get a reading on whether he can pierce the corporate veil and go after them directly. Heck, he also needs to see if he can arrange a payment plan with the tax authorities, as others have mentioned; that bill will be due very soon, whatever the final outcome of a lawsuit is.

They're indeed snakes, the shares are indeed almost certainly worthless, but not for the purposes of his 2014 personal tax year :(. ADDED: unless, as others have pointed out, the investment was structured as debt instead of equity.

Yet another example why non-founder options/stock is frequently a negative.
with no adware/spyware but simply a lean (in resources) yet featurefull client

I remember when it first came out it was the smallest client available, and that's why it gained a huge following - it was unintrusive and required no installation.

uTorrent 1.1.1: 82KB

uTorrent 3.4.2: 1.66MB

I have a feeling that most of that 20x(!) size increase is not due to any new features in the core torrent functionality. In fact, it appears to be the same size as the official BitTorrent Inc. client... I haven't looked carefully at the code, but just from this comparison I'd bet that it's not really uTorrent anymore but the BitTorrent client with a different UI.
Here's the progress of educational tools:

- Lectures
- Textbooks
- Lecture videos
- Interactive tutorials

It would be great to move beyond videos and build courses around 'explorable explanations' and other interactive tutorials.

(I'm looking for such tutorials on my site https://www.learneroo.com/ .
Email me at ak[at]learneroo.com if you're interested in collaborating)
I volunteer time for a project called The Shotbow Network - it's a Minecraft game network. We've got lots of projects, and there are features etc that we hype up and then either cancel or don't release.

Inevitably, though, everything that went into building either those mini-games or that feature for another game ends up in all of our future projects.

This sort of thing makes it look like those projects are completely dead, despite the fact that they live on either in full or in part under rebranded names or driving Google's next big feature.
Front 2.0 – Shared team inboxes to manage Email, Twitter, SMS and more
> These days, releasing a software with a GPL license is pretty much a guarantee that your code will never become popular because nobody with a sane mind and a minimal understanding of software licensing will want to touch it, let alone corporations.

This is demonstrably false.
I really like the idea of the moss in Minecraft trees! It doesn't sound too difficult to implement, but I never tried something like this. The shadows seam to be more difficult.

My daughter is a fanatical Minecraft player, she made a few skins and easy changes. Perhaps she knows. I also used to show to her the moss in the trees IRL when she was smaller.
Lockheed Martin Laser Stops Truck in Its Tracks
I have heard that before, actually. It doesn't help if they won't tell you who they hired, and why they were better. The fact that they picked someone "better" is obvious if they picked someone at all, and it wasn't you.

Also, when I hear that particular line, I follow up with "I'm glad you were able to find someone you like. Will you keep me in mind the next time you're hiring?" If I get a response at all, it is something noncommittal, like "We keep all applications for a minimum of six months."

Perhaps companies should not focus so narrowly on the current position. I have applied multiple times to the same companies for different positions, provided my experience with them remains positive.

But if, for instance, a company like SAIC schedules an interview with me on a military base, sends an escort to the gate to bring me to the work site, and only then tells me that no one is available to interview me that day, because the supervisors are all halfway across the country, that company lands itself on my blacklist. Later experiences with employees of that company moved them to my permanent, public blacklist. Not only will I not apply for any of their positions, but if they appeared on my doorstep with an offer letter in hand, I'd order them off the property. And I would recommend that everyone else do the same, for both SAIC and for spinoff spawn Leidos. They are the sole reason why I ask "Who's the prime contractor?" whenever I interview with a contracting company.

When you create an energy potential by posting an opening, candidate-anticandidate pairs don't pop into existence to interview with you and then self-annihilate after you reject them. Actual, persistent people stick around, remember how you treated them, and talk to each other about their experiences. They stay in the industry, and may one day be customers or competitors.

As it happens, Fog Creek is not on my blacklist, either temporarily or permanently. But I do feel like their interview process would be a waste of my time if I had to endure it again from the beginning, and I don't expect them to ever pick me up again from where we left off. So I ignore their job postings now. It won't hurt them any, because they get plenty of candidates anyway.

But it doesn't surprise me at all that anyone who doesn't believe that they are good enough to top the 99 other people all applying for the same position wouldn't bother investing all that energy to compete, especially when that won't help them in their search if they fail. With no feedback, no referrals, and no helpful suggestions, it really is a lot of effort for a high probability of no reward whatsoever.

There may be something embedded in our tribal caveman brains that makes high-risk behaviors more attractive to men than to women. If so, Fog Creek might be able to attract more female applicants just by guaranteeing something of value at the end of the interview process, regardless of whether the candidate is selected for the next round.
The worse thing is that when one of the developers tried to write a non-GPL version of BusyBox they were criticised for "taking away the only relevant tool for copyright enforcement of the Software Freedom Conservancy group" - they're as bad as patent trolls.
Code Search searched a lot more than just what was stored on Google. What's your point?
I agree that it's terrible and that its use is mandatory only compounds its failures.
Some of their projects were, see "Google Wave" (now "Apache Wave") [1]

[1]: http://incubator.apache.org/wave/
Ask HN: DIY Sit/Stand Desk
I've assembled a simple standing desk. It's a table that sits on top of my current desk and supports the keyboard tray and monitor risers.

Can you suggest a way to make it adjustable, so that I cat sit for some of the day? It should be able to adjust 16".

I don't think I can support the whole apparatus while adjusting the legs (by folding them in or loosening a knob on each leg). I'm imagining something that I can crank, like some windows, but I'm not sure how to find hardware that works like that, if it exists. What should I look for at my local hardware store (where the employees are historically useless if I want to use something not for the intended purpose), or what would such a thing be called so that I can search online for it?

Maybe there is something I just haven't found that will just work, but I look forward to some creative suggestions that will be fun to design and test out.
Searching for "list of star trek characters" will give you a comprehensive result on Wikipedia though. As would many similar searches.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Trek_characters
Exactly. Online education in general is going to see these terrible course completion metrics improve dramatically the better certification they can offer, imo.
In a certain way one can say the society has not allowed them to participate in the labor pool, to take "jobs" away, but they are tolerated if they are compartmentalized as servers of exotic foods. In other words they can't be seen as equals, they have to be servants making and serving food.

That is not unlike the anti-Mexican sentiment as well.

Also, remember my mother-in-law's comment a while back. She is the typical American, grew up in the 50s, white middle America. She said to me she felt pretty adventurous and liked exotic foods. And I asked what those food are and she said Chinese. I thought it was interesting. It kind of made it seem like Chinese food was this exotic unusual food one ate to be adventurous and feel like they are experiencing other cultures in a way. (Nevermind that the American Chinese food, often doesn't taste like real Chinese food)
"That was their entire spec. That is their job. They've done their job."

The 25 exemplars say otherwise. They're about process re-engineering, technology modernisation and legacy integration. And they're also nowhere near complete (only 9 are live[1]).

[1] https://www.gov.uk/transformation
There isn't much of an anti-Mexican sentiment but a sentiment against non-American Hispanics plopping down here illegally and telling American people how their immigration policy should be while straining our systems, brazenly breaking laws, etc.

How does one proclaim to be for American citizenship when they can't speak the language? Or know of its history? Or rally for a free American citizenship while waving the flags of their home country while demonizing Americans who disagree with them? Why should America be the only country that should forcibly open up its borders to third world opportunist?
Might refer to 18-year old female, a common trope in dating sites and porn.
Well, sort of. It takes a lot of free oxygen to overcome all the various reducing agents usually found on planets (iron, hydrogen, aluminum, lithium, silicon, etc). The only process we know of capable of generating a continuous long-term flow of oxygen is (aerobic) life. The presence of an oxidizing atmosphere (rather than the standard reducing atmosphere) is thus considered an indicator of life.

Happened that way of Earth, anyway. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event

While it's possible, I suppose, that there could be places with such naturally abundant oxygen that there could be free oxygen left over to create a static oxidizing atmosphere, even in spite of geologic churn, astronomy and cosmology says it's unlikely.
Why not closet and documents?
GDS claim to be 'leading the digital transformation of government'. If their spec is to perform routine modernisation of websites, then this hype is completely unwarranted.
I found this in an article:

> The name 18F refers to GSA headquarters building, which is located on 18th and F streets in Washington.

I agree that 18F is a bad name. They should have just called it "Government Digital Service" like the UK version of the same.
You have some guarantees of access to the present source code (and as jdjb points out, not necessarily), but you're certainly not guaranteed access to changes made in the future by that or other parties like the GPL does. That's the whole point of copyleft and why I prefer it, I don't want to worry if I'll be able to access the features and fixes that will be made by others or if I will be left in the dust. And fair's fair, if you benefited from the work made by others then it's only fair to them to benefit from yours.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but I have the feeling that many -of course, not all and I'm not saying that you do- think that their precious code is so amazing and it will give so much competitive advantage that they need to leave open the option for a closed source version that will make them rich, and that's why they defend "freer" licenses very passionately. Newsflash, it almost surely -like 99,99%- won't happen.
Many pirates and now days politicians do ask this question about copyright. Where is the harm when someone who would never have paid for the product downloads a copyright work for private use. Its not like someone lost anything, and there is by definition no lost revenue. Where's the harm? Surely that's not taking away anything that would have been coming to them had someone not pirated it.

I think a future which this is universal understood by everyone will be one which GPL won't be needed. If there is no copyright or patents to protect, the argument against releasing source code evaporate like a bad idea. Until that day, the answer to "Where's the harm" is two legal words: Copyright and patents.
1. Go encourages short variable names. I personally think that the names used in the example you pulled are a touch shorter than I myself would use, and "prevRune" is a little bit ambiguous, but I don't really mind it since the context makes it more clear.

2. Yes, int64() is a cast to an int64 type. The bare "int" type in Go is architecture-dependent, so the compiler will complain if you try to assign an int to an int64 without the cast.

3. Rune is a number representing a UTF-8 codepoint. It's an alias for int32 the way "byte" would be an alias for in8. (http://golang.org/doc/go1#rune)

4. copy() is a built-in function. There's only a small handful of built-in functions defined, and they're all documented here: http://golang.org/pkg/builtin/

5. The last return statement doesn't specify any values because the method signature has already assigned names to those: n for the int, and err for the error, so an empty return means "return the values of the variables n and err", which default to their respective type's 0 values (0 and nil for int and error). Returning the values explicitly still works as seen in that example, and is slightly shorter than "n = 0; err = io.EOF; return".

Go can be tricky to read if you're not familiar with some of the semantics, but once you've ramped up a little bit, then things just start falling into place.
I think you read my comment in a much more personal way than was intended, but I can see why, and I'm sorry for that.

I didn't at all mean to suggest that you (personally) are playing out a "strategy" that you have devised to get ahead, and I absolutely got the impression from your original comment that it is a matter of values for you, which I think is great.

My point was mostly that for many people interviewing for jobs, that authenticity is a luxury that is difficult for them to achieve.
Microservices and Evolutionary Architecture
Have you ever worked in a large C code base? None of what you describe is shocking or bad.

This is not a defense of the code as I have not had a chance to look at it. It seems like Swartz was a bit over the top in his description of its greatness and I am naturally skeptical of such idolatry.
http://google.com/search?q=list+of+star+trek+characters works.
"Ask for 83b elections."

He's in Canada. As others have pointed out, at the very least he needs to engage an accountant to find out exactly what the tax implication are.
That's great. That's the reason I use GPL. I don't want my work to support companies that don't respect users' freedoms.

GPL is not for being a popular developer. It's about giving users rights.

(and it's for users, not for other developers who can then do whatever they want including adding EULAs and DRM to take users' rights away).
Is this website written in Dart? (sarcasm)
Considering Net Neutrality and API Access
At the moment it's on hold - I certainly won't be doing anything with Flask until the Kickstarter work is all complete. I'm undecided after that.

It'd be interesting to get your opinion on what your take would be on using Django/Django REST framework if it had decent built-in support for use with SQLAlchemy.
All important points. If he is financially strapped by a five-figure tax liability (presumably that's the income he'd be taxed on, meaning the actual bill is less than half, possibly quite a bit less), there is no way he can afford to take these two folks to court. Even if it's a large tax bill ($10-20-30k+) it's doubtful he can afford a lawsuit on top of that. If the Canadian revenue system is anything like the US's IRS, I sincerely doubt they're going to let him wait to pay that for the year or two (or more) it would take for this to resolve itself in the judicial system.

Even if he can afford everything, it still may not be worth it, even if his goal is just to prove a point/stick it to the dishonest cofounders.
I'm just going to roll my eyes at that.

Seems like you have an axe to grind for some reason and your complaints are so petty I'm done talking to you about the topic. You want to be unhappy, fine, be unhappy.
Why are you adding an extra level of abstraction in between Rails and Sidekiq? Why not just have Rails push to redis queue and elixir process finishes the job of sending email or doing what it has to do. Why have Sidekiq run at all? It seems adding multiple layers as such will make it harder to understand, debug and maintain in future.

EDIT: Also your example of polling on Redis queue using elixir is very inefficient and makes your article not so credible in my eyes or eyes of other good software architects. Redis is meant for pub sub and not polling.
These are copyright violations happening here and now right before our eyes (!), though probably with tacit mutual (but unverified) consent.

See my related comment here about increasing general awareness about IP issues:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9157590
It's sad to see Sparrow there. It has been almost 3 years and I still didn't find any good alternative.
NASA Probe Finally Arrives at an Icy Alien World
This chain of comments illustrates the reason that companies think the GPL is risky. Even in a highly-technical OSS-friendly community like HN, there are many different interpretations of what the GPL's restrictions actually mean. That uncertainty plus the viral nature of the GPL means that there's no way to know for sure that you won't be forced to open your whole codebase at some point in the future.