skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The thing that I've found ironic as I've been spending more time with duck-typed languages is that all of the supposed concision and rapid development games are pretty much wiped out by the necessity to write unit tests just to assure even basic functioning.

Is my Ruby code more concise than my C++? Yep. But the C++ is smaller than Ruby + unit tests.
The fundamental problem is that the US dollar loses value at such a rapid pace that riskier and riskier investments are required to maintain a decent rate of return. The way to prevent this is to stop inflating the currency.
This is the answer: http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/10/importance-of-license...

Basically organizations that are putting money and work on MySQL absolutely require to get licenses, or in other words, the GPL is not good for this guys because they have to do their stuff with parts of closed source software and so forth.

The problem is the GPL clearly: it allows you to earn money selling licenses, but I don't like the model:

1. You start a GPLed open source project.

2. Then start to sell licenses to make the software like if it was BSD only for paying customers: PROFIT

3. The you get in troubles... like MySQL.

4. You ask for help to the community...

Edit: I'm claiming the GPL is always a bad idea, but it depends on the kind of project. For instance it worked very well for Linux, but does not work so well in other contexts when it's highly likely that companies require to use the code in ways not allowed by the GPL for legitimate business needs (that is, not just to create a closed source version of the project).
It looks like they should have released it with an MIT or BSD license.

I guess they could always take the Billion dollars they received for it, and create a new database company and completely rewrite a new database engine. Or use that money to fund an organization to maintain development.
Once you have the constraints, or contract, in place, you probably don't even need the unit-tests because the function will not work at all unless the contrainsts/contract are met.
Hmm... your idea is starting to sound suspiciously like a statically typed language with automatic type inference.
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Yep. There's nothing that prevents unit tests from being used in a program written in a statically typed language.

The difference is that in a program written in statically typed language you'd have to write fewer unit tests than you would were you to use a dynamically typed language, as in the former much of that testing is going to be automatically done for you by the compiler.
(my current one is one of the best I've had)

Isn't this always the case when posting non-anonymously? :)
Indeed, and wasn't he running a very healthy business anyway? It's a shame.
The difference, and he spells it out quite clearly, is that Oracle already has a database and that it wants to sell its database and that MySQL interferes with that.
The good Dr. also appears to believe in Dowsing: http://www.randi.org/hotline/1998/0012.html
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To get it into the enterprise, I guess.
Like any software product, MySQL has bugs. You might not run across them in day to day use, but they're there. If development stops, those will never get fixed.
Groklaw, a well-respected blog that deals with open source legal issues, seems to have a different take on it, namely that Widenius, as operator of a competing database company based on a fork of MySQL, pretty much just wants to strip the GPL from MySQL so that he and others can develop completely closed-source databases based on it.

Article: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20091208104422384

His blog post sounds all pro-open-source until you get down to the suggestions, where it several times references forcing Oracle to relicense more permissively (removing restrictions against closed-source derivatives) while also denying Oracle the right to make closed-source modules. It sounds like the guy sold MySQL for a billion dollars, and now wants to be handed the rights to use the code in a closed source program while denying Oracle (who paid for Sun who paid for MySQL) the ability to do the same.
You clearly didn't RTFA.

I'll give you my personal reasons for liking GWT in a few short bullets.

1. Better tooling - IDE refactoring when I need to change things. Red squigglies when I make a typo or reference something thats not there. A real debugger with breakpoints for finding bugs. Auto completion and auto style formatting so I dont have to type so goddamn much.

2. Compiler optimizations - Your code gets faster and smaller. Write maintainable code, have it turned into performant code.

3. API's and libraries - easy client server RPC, discoverable wrappers for the DOM APIs. Reuseable widgets that have predictable structure/side effects!

4. Maintainable code base - If you worked with more than 4 engineers on a non-trivial product, you would understand the appeal of a Java code base. UIBinder lets me not worry about CSS name collisions.

I would go on, but you seem like a TLDR type of person, so it would probably be a waste of my time.
A while back in a reddit thread I put together what -- I believe -- is a full explanation of the various bits and their status as of that moment:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8wgub/why_free_...
There is a similar line of thought in how tech people always seem to think their startup idea has to be something completely new. It usually goes like this...

Person A: I got this great idea! If you do X to Y you will get Z which is of huge value for people working in M. Great, huh?

Person B: Yawn. Company SomeCorp did that in 1974.

Person A (spirit broken): Darn...

The idea that a new company has to come up with something completely new must be unique to our business. Even so, the number of successful web companies that did not have a unique idea when they started should be enough to kill the argument, but it lives on.

Probably because of the reason mentioned in this post: smart people just don't think it's smart enough to do something someone else has already done.
I'm pretty sure he doesn't read Hacker News :)
And thus creating a monopoly in the database market? No. There is plenty of competition, both open source and proprietary.
Of course there is. But Oracle may feel it makes no sense to compete against itself.
The performance that GWT is able to get is impressive. There are all kinds of optimizations they can make because of the assumptions they have, especially that you will run the code through the compiler.
The only person I know who has one has just retired her iPhone. The ability to say "tacos" and have it bring back the nearest places to get tacos, and the ability to take pictures of things and have them explained (Goggles), a much better GPS than the iPhone or any other phone I'm aware of, and an extremely high res screen, pretty much had her convinced within minutes of firing it up for the first time.

It is a very nice device. I'm now waffling on whether to get this or the Droid as my upgrade from the G1; kinda leaning toward this because of the unlocked nature of it.
I think the underlying point of his comment was that it was silly to consider the dog an officer...having a silly idea enshrined in law doesn't make it less silly.
Their money, their call is how I see it, as long as they aren't removing the only competitor from the market.
Selling TV wall mounts online is not a very great contribution to human progress

It doesn't seem like it is, but it may very well be a great contribution. If you make it easier for many people to find something, what do they do with the aggregate free time they now have on their hands? If you make it cheaper, what do they do with the aggregate 'unused' money? If the time and money enables yet another 'simple' contribution to freeing up time and money, then how far does this snowball roll? Perhaps it will end up freeing us to do humanitarian work, because there is really nothing else that requires our time and money?

It's a similar question to: "What most reduces human suffering? If Eliezer keeps doing what he is doing or if he goes to Africa and helps people survive in a refugee camp?" It may turn out you are wrong about everything and helping in a camp would have been better for humanity. Hindsight is 20/20 here and the scale of effects does not allow one to properly estimate them.
That's another can of worms. If it were BSD licensed, they would not have made so much money, because they couldn't have done the dual-licensing trick.
Depends on the expressiveness of the language type system.

Duck-typing may save quite a bit of code when dealing with generic functions without the complexity of a sophisticated type system (See "Scrap your boilerplate" for the Haskell approach).
So they agree not to do battle "in cyberspace", whatever these bigwigs think that is, but does this mean communication systems will be off-limits for attacks in wartime? I can't really figure out what this actually means.

Many countries, including the United States, are developing weapons for use on computer networks that are ever more integral to the operations of everything from banks to electrical power systems to government offices. They include "logic bombs" that can be hidden in computers to halt them at crucial times or damage circuitry; "botnets" that can disable or spy on Web sites and networks; or microwave radiation devices that can burn out computer circuits miles away.

Next thing you know, they'll talk about outlawing war.
I went pretty far (for me, anyway) into the Microsoft bubble last month when I did a small demo as part of a PDC keynote and I noticed that there is a love that dare not speak its name, and that name is iPhone.

I met one guy who would use an old crappy phone during the day and swap sim cards into his iPhone when he knew nobody was around. Another guy wanted to snap a picture of something and send it to me, but was hesitant to take his iPhone out of his pocket, not knowing who might be around to see him using it.

I'm sure some of it is joking, some of it is half-joking, but there is some anxiety around being seen internally using a competitor's winning product.
Was the personal attack at the end necessary?
Back when I used to work with Sriram on Microsoft Popfly (now defunct) I was a huge believer in asking 'stupid' questions. No matter how dumb or obvious your question might be, odds are someone else in the room has the same one. Plus, admitting that you don't know everything pays its own dividends in terms of not seeming like a total jerk.

You're absolutely right. There really isn't a stupid question. Only fearful meeting participants.
Ebay has been high handed and mean in the last couple of years.

Go, CL!
Pinboard.in crawls and stores people's bookmarks as a paid service.

A number of Pinboard users had bookmarked articles from Atwood's site before the data loss, so I had a stored copy of all the page content and dependencies for those articles.
Google to produce, sell own Nexus One phones (bypassing wireless operators)
The funny thing about Microsoft is it has always looked to me like a great environment for a developer to enjoy his work and life. It seems like a good place to have a career.

But at the same time... I would almost never use any Microsoft products. So I have this weird schizophrenic attitude towards them.

The only MS products I can stomach using is Word and the XBOX. Everything else is yucky compared to the competitors. It makes me wonder how the Microsoft devs can stand it.
Why ask this forum when the article explores this in detail?
From personal experience, I feel reduced amounts of gratification from doing mundane things. Mental stimulation is reduced, therefore I'm driven, in some cases like a motor, to find more stimulation. Activity in the brain , in the form of thoughts, is one way to increase stimulation. Stimulant drugs satisfies this need for stimulation, so we don't need to keep on thinking about stuff, like the meaning of life. My theory is that this need to race through thoughts is the mechanism for bad short term memory. Running through more thoughts means old thoughts are forgotten.

There are also different types of Adhd by the way. There's inattentive and hyperactive. My explanation probably fits inattentive ADHD since that's where my personal experience lies.
Indeed, this is surely a price to pay, BSD will hardly make you rich even with a very successful product, but the project itself is much more protected probably.
I'll bite: Your unit tests might be wrong.
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Actually MySQL last stable version was released with at least two critical issues left unresolved...

I've mostly moved over to PostgreSQL by now...
So, when will they implement the Open Micro Blogging spec, so they can interoperate with identi.ca and Jaiku?

http://openmicroblogging.org/
GWT always sounds interesting, but I am underwhelmed by the application gallery. Every app looks like a draft version of gmail, google maps or google wave. Any links to impressive interfaces (non google-built)?
Twitter feeds aren't news, especially when the content has already been submitted here by the owner. Flagged.
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Does it, really? Most of the optimizations mentioned in the article (compression/obfuscation, module system, yslow integration) or in these comments (debugging, refactoring, auto completion) are all available/possible in javascript alone. What tangible benefits require Java's type system?
> pretty much just wants to strip the GPL from MySQL so that he and others can develop completely closed-source databases based on it.

So what's the problem with that?
But as soon as you've sold something, isn't it up to the new owner to decide what to do with whatever it is you've sold?
Nice idea, very timely. I like the simple artwork. You can collect a lot of work emails this way. If it were my site I would:

1. Have some more cute simple Santa, snowman, gifts artwork in the header area so it sets the mood for the customer when it pops open in the browser.

2. "Maybe" try for a more green and red holiday color theme vs the light blue which seems frosty but not so holiday like to me personally.

3. Put something on the right sidebar above the ads like a flash movie that is holiday related and funny enough and cute enough to get this passed from user to user via work email with a hey look at this video title to the email. Something people will think unique enough to pass around at work to their email list. Then try to get people to email it as a link. Like a silly Rudolph the red nosed reindeer telling a joke or something that people will think is clever enough (and clean enough) to pass around to their email list.

4. Put in a hook to use it, free giveaway to someone or some work group of something small to medium sized. 10 $50 gift cards, etc...

5. Brand it at the top proudly with a logo, so people will remember the brand and come back to your site year after year.

6. Maybe think about moving the Google ads horizontal below the packages for better flow on the page.
You use the word "computer" like it should be limited to general-purpose devices. There's no good reason for televisions/other media devices – traditionally supported by advertising – not to include more substantial processing as time goes on.
Are you saying that ordinarily I'd be wrong to keep an open mind about Rolling Stone?

Or that in this instance I'd be wrong to prejudge Matt Taibbi's ability to write a fair story, given the breadth of criticism his earlier work has drawn?

Also, Rolling Stone's ability to do good investigative journalism is orthogonal to its willingness to challenge the political worldview prevalent among its readership.
Banks make a bad analogy.

Sure, it should be the bank's responsibility to keep accounts safe. However, the fact that bank accounts are considered to be "safe" is in a large part due to systemic factors like the existence of the Fed (as lender of the last resort), FDIC, general political climate of "too big too fail", etc. As mentioned above, banks actually do go under a lot; it's just not as noticeable to the clients as before [the central banks], but the cost is there. (And there's a whole discourse there of whether it's a good idea for monetary system to have this kind of environment in the long run.)

In any case, nothing of the sort applies to the hosting providers (or even can be applied, as insuring unique data is not the same as insuring amounts of money) -- so assuming that keeping data there is as safe as keeping money in the bank is not a viable comparison.
Yes GWT 2.0 is impressive but haven;t we had 3 submissions on that in the last week.

Surely nothing new is being said here.
Guided code splitting and type tightening (with associated devirtualization) are serious optimizations that can't be done today in JS. GWT can guarantee the immutability of JS object shapes - something you can't do with bog-standard JS.
"vi" is missing.

Also the two handed "vim".
Just a play on words..

PG wrote in How to do Philosophy:
"Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language."

Here the author fiddles with the word 'cyborg', bending its definition in a fruitless philosophical argument that benefits us not and humors most of us not.
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Awesome! If only creating UML diagrams was this easy...
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Refusing to subsidize proprietary work is the purpose of the GPL. It's only a problem for vendors who become dependent on buying non-GPL licenses and will not open their own work.

And decrying a problem only after he stopped getting paid for perpetuating it? Wow. That's like selling your house and then urging it be condemned.
blueprint by lombardi is pretty good

https://blueprint.lombardi.com/
The more I read about this, the more it irritated me, so I finally wrote something up. I hope the sale goes through as-is.
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Technically, Postgres has always been more or less superior, outside of a few things like replication. But that's another argument for another day.
Broken links on that site too (e.g. to "Bryce's Laws", none of which he can claim to have originated).
f you have 100% code coverage you don't necessarily have 100% path coverage

That is an absolutely crucial point in languages where side-effects are not controlled.
Track #2: LFSAW, sums the answer to that up in 140 characters, I think. :)
Those who like statc-typing will always find it ridiculously great. Those used to dynamic-typing will find the idea of writing JavaScript in Java ridiculous, but not great.

There is wisdom in the middle.
3. Tim Walters... maybe I'm not hip enough to realize how avant garde this is, but that is noise.

Some examples of what might qualify as music, but oh god, wading through the cacophony of noise was difficult.
The author makes a couple of assumptions that I don't agree with.

The first is that success is measured by the amount of money you earn. For me it is much more rewarding to work on interesting and inspiring problems than having a huge income.

The second is that people that are good at hard science problems are good at solving the "stupid" problems. You need a different set of skills to solve the latter.
If they had, they would have competition from day one. MySQL enjoyed the monopoly of selling proprietary licenses to their clients.

So much, in fact, Monty still wants it after having sold the company for an obscene amount of money.
Actually not.

When it's GPL'ed, there can be no proprietary forks. Companies who depend on the product will continue to maintain it and all source will still be available as keeping an internal fork is costlier.

If a program is BSD'ed, there is nothing to prevent a company to close it and start selling it as proprietary.
Our DBAs once walked in and asked how to handle all the rows where most of slaves have different values than the master. That this is even possible, I think says it all about MySQL replication.
There is no 'Undo' for selling your copyright.

Has Widenius offered to buy MySQL back?
I will send one. Since I like MySQL (although I like PostgreSQL better) I will write a letter asking Oracle not to change the license and keep it GPL. If possible, to move it to GPLv3.

I like my software completely free.
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Horrible horrible horrible set up!

Firstly, they're preventing browser caching of the images, which means they get reloaded at every single page load. These are the headers I'm getting:

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 2009 11:09:59 GMT
Expires: -1
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Server: gws
Content-Length: 0
X-XSS-Protection: 0

Note the lack of E-Tags too.

Also, why hotlink from another domain that will need another DNS lookup? Add enough of those and you'll slow down the page load significantly.

Finally, this doesn't seem to be a CDN so it's unlikely users around the world will actually see fast download times from this single server.
I think doing 'stupid' stuff to gain a first successful venture is a good strategy because it may a)make you financially comfortable and therefore can focus on difficult stuff b)give you better access to capital when doing something more difficult
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So you write unit tests for all possible scenarios and you write unit tests and unit tests and unit tests ... most of which you wouldn't have had to write if you had used a statically typed language right away.
Legally nothing. But he used to have to right to do that (the MySql dual licence), but he sold it for a large amount of money to Sun. Now he's arguing that if Oracle buys Sun they should give away for free that same right he sold.

If he truly believed that it should be free, he could have made it free when he owned it. He wants the benefit of selling it (money) and the benefits of not selling it (ownership) at the same time. He's trying to use the open source community for his own commercial self-interest.

That's why people are finding it objectionable.
In my opinion, we need to split 'statically/strictly typed' languages further.

I love pythons dynamic types, and I love haskells typesystem, because once you get used to it, it becomes pretty much as painless as having dynamic types.

On the other hand, I utterly hate Javas typesystem, because it tends to be pretty obnoxious and in the way (probably I am not enough of a type theorist to actually understand why this is the case, but I can see that there are a lot of cases in the java type system which are just annoying roadblocks).
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