Ask HN: Please Test my New Project by Voting - <AUTHOR> http://gopollgo.com/do-you-prefer-starbucks-or-peets-coffee

<comment><USER2> Small suggestion... you should make the vote option text a label. Very annoying when you try and click it but realize you cannot, and are forced to click the actual radio button.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good suggestion. I'll add that in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Skipping questions shouldn't be that hard. I don't care for either Peet's or Starbucks, nor do I care for Ke$ha or Kate Perry.

<comment><AUTHOR> So right now there are 3 polls I think. And I have very odd polls that I've made. So that is part of the problem. I hope to make something in the future where you can follow topics and get emailed polls that interest you.

But I think you're right. Skipping should be easier. I'll try to figure out a good solution for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you click vote without selecting any of the options, it looks like it's processing your vote, but never does anything. There should probably be some message telling you to choose something, rather than make you think that there's something going on when you submit a blank vote.

Other than that, cool interface.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, awesome. Nice find. I'll get this fixed. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hey Ben, As i mentioned on FB - I like your design and implementation. One thing that i noticed just now- when i click "vote", would be cool if "take another poll" would appear somewher near so i dont have to move mouse along whole screem. i believe its your major call to action once i voted, right? small thing, but its quite annoying and slows my voting process which i believe is quite fun by itself. good luck with this!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how to best solve this problem without complicating the UI.

I've thought about making everything ajax so you can use your arrow keys to navigate through polls much easier. The overhead for that would take some time.

I believe we may launch publicly launch as is (after bugs are fixed), then go from there. I'll keep you updated though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice app. I like your implementation -- particularly how you encourage users to make their own polls with the orange notification. I recently built a surprisingly similar polling application. Check it out below:

Is Starbucks coffee better than Peet's coffee?

Yes: <http://grok.io/yuc> No: <http://grok.io/nuc>

<comment><USER7> I think the "take another poll!" call to action is a good idea for keeping people engaged, assuming there's content. Grok.io needs that - so far it's more concentrated on answering a question accurately than surfacing more questions for a user. The map is cool too - it'd be even neater if you inferred location based on IP address.

(I've worked with Blake on grok.io a bit.) Shall we try:

Is grok.io's forecasting model going to be more successful's than gopollgo.com's consensus model? Yes: <http://grok.io/yuS> No: <http://grok.io/nuS>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup. Once we actually are public and people are making polls, I think "take another poll!" will be very interesting.

We actually _do_ infer location based off of IP address and a few other things.

Grok.io is cool. I like the look and feel of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I mouse over a state if it has votes then it stays black after mousing over another state. If it doesn't have votes it returns to white.

Let me know if you need more details.

Safari 5.0.2 Mac OS X 10.6.5

Also when casting a vote I'd like it to tell me what city/state it recognized me as. I'm from Provo but there where no votes there, so I'm assuming I'm the one in Salt Lake.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this mouseover problem has been confusing me as of late. I'm using JQuery + Raphael to interact with the SVG map objects. I need to figure out this bug (which I believe is something particular to Raphael) by diving into some docs a bit more.

The geolocation is only as great as your ISP allows. I hope to allow people to change their region if they're logged in. If anyone happens to know a good geocoding service, please let me know.

I'll try to get something worked into the interface to show this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm guessing the map is for me to put in my location. If so, 2 things. 1 the area I live in is labeled wrong (email me and I'll point you to it if you want to fix it), also when I hit take another poll it takes me out to country level, it should stay.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, your location is determined automatically based off of your IP address. The map displays the majority votes for their respective regions.

I'll email you about the misspelling, though. Thanks.

<comment><USER2> Ben, that interactive map that zooms in with all the counties in a state is pretty friggin nifty. Did you make that from scratch with a n ip-to-location data set, or use some kind of location API??

<comment><AUTHOR> I built everything myself from scratch in regards to the maps. This includes all vector paths (you wouldn't believe how much work this is), JQuery & Raphael interaction. There is also some websockets goodness. 90% of everything is handled in the background then pushed to browsers via websockets (for browser which support them).

To get location I do a variety of things mostly based off of the IP address of a user. However, I've built up a lot of meta data around locations which I may release later on down the road. Happy to talk more if you want to email me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks nice, although I'm not in the states...

<comment><AUTHOR> We're adding support for other countries currently. I believe Germany and France are in there right now...but that is something that is definitely on the list.

The maps are made with SVG and I make them on my own so they suck up a good amount of time.

edit:typo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hi, I just voted and your site has been "Processing my vote...." for the last minute or so. The map is blank.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe I just fixed this. Sorry about that. But just to be sure, which browser are you using?

<comment><USER11> It was chrome 9.0.something

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Starbucks edit(+"coffee") isn't coffee.

<comment><USER13> "Do you prefer Starbucks or Peet's Coffee?" implies the following: "Do you prefer Starbucks' [coffee] or Peet's Coffee?" From what I've learned, this title is grammatically correct.

Here is an explanation: <http://www.kerryr.net/webwriting/gpwu_punctuation.htm#q5>

<comment><USER12> Hah xD Didn't realize it could be interpreted that way.

Correction: Starbucks "coffee" isn't coffee.

<comment><USER13> My bad, didn't realize you were joking =]

<comment><USER12> One should not joke about serious matters such as coffee. I meant what I said. Starbucks makes black, coffee-smelling crud and _really_ tasty caffeinated- crud-added super-sugary high-fat drinks.

:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It looks like it's a good idea and the website has a nice design, although I've never understood how online surveys can be unbiased considering the fact that the population of voters is definitely biased. Do you have any plans for making the data more reliable that you're using with the site (e.g. asking users for how they found the site)?

<comment><AUTHOR> We track where users voting come from so you can segment by particular referrers. For example, you could segment votes by Facebook users or Twitter users.

Mostly, we aim to work with larger websites/companies with large amounts of website visitors, Twitter followers or Facebook fans to easily aggregate what their users think.

I'm not positive we'll be able to eliminate bias though. Its on the to-do list =)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Package Diff: compare two versions of a published NPM package - <AUTHOR> https://diff.intrinsic.com/ <comment><USER2> This is great, nice work.</comment>


The MIT License, Line by Line - <AUTHOR> https://writing.kemitchell.com/2016/09/21/MIT-License-Line-by-Line.html <comment><USER3> _Despite the assumption of some newer open-source developers that sending a pull request on GitHub "automatically" licenses the contribution for distribution on the terms of the project's existing license—what Richard Fontana of Red Hat calls "inbound=outbound"—United States law doesn't recognize any such rule. Strong copyright protection, not permissive licensing, is the default._

That isn't quite what I mean by "inbound=outbound". Rather, inbound=outbound is a contribution governance rule under which inbound contributions, say a pull request for a GitHub-hosted project, are deemed to be licensed under the applicable outbound license of the project. This is, in fact, the rule under which most open source projects have operated since time immemorial. The DCO is one way of making inbound=outbound more explicit, and I increasingly think one that should be encouraged (if only to combat the practice of using CLAs and the like). But under the right circumstances it works even where the contribution is not explicitly licensed (I think this is what Kyle may be questioning). There are other ways besides the DCO of creating greater certainty, or the appearance of greater certainty, around the inbound licensing act, such as PieterH's suggestion of using a copyleft license like the MPL, or the suggestion of using the Apache License 2.0 (whose section 5 states an inbound=outbound rule as a kind of condition of the outbound license grant).

<comment><USER4> What does DCO mean in this context?

<comment><USER3> The Developer Certificate of Origin. It's the 'Signed-off-by:' process introduced by the Linux kernel project.

[http://developercertificate.org/](http://developercertificate.org/)

[https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux....](https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/Documentation/SubmittingPatches?id=refs/tags/v4.8-rc7#n409)

I particularly recommend the presentations and writings of James Bottomley on the DCO, e.g.: [http://www.hansenpartnership.com/FOSDEM- DCO-2016/#/begin](http://www.hansenpartnership.com/FOSDEM-DCO-2016/#/begin)

<comment><USER4> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a really good article. There's one part in particular that struck me:

"Despite the assumption of some newer open-source developers that sending a pull request on GitHub "automatically" licenses the contribution for distribution on the terms of the project's existing license—what Richard Fontana of Red Hat calls "inbound=outbound"—United States law doesn't recognize any such rule. Strong copyright protection, not permissive licensing, is the default."

In other words the fork + pull request + merge flow _does not_ work on a project unless you have an explicit step like a CLA, or an alternative solution.

We faced this problem early on in ZeroMQ, that asking contributors to take this extra step increased the work for maintainers (to check, is this the first time person X contributes, and have they made a CLA?) It also scared off contributors from businesses, where this often took approval (which took time and was often denied).

Our first solution in ZeroMQ was to ask contributors to explicitly state, "I hereby license this patch under MIT," which let us safely merge it into our LGPL codebase. Yet, again, another extra step and again, needs corporate approval.

Our current solution is I think more elegant and is one of the arguments I've used in favor of a share-alike license (xGPL originally and MPLv2 more these days) in our projects.

That works as follows:

* When you fork a project ABC that uses, say, MPLv2, the fork is also licensed under MPLv2.

* When you modify the fork, with your patch, your derived work is now also _always_ licensed under MPLv2. This is due to the share-alike aspect. If you use MIT, at this stage the derived work is (or rather, can be) standard copyright. Admittedly if you leave the license header in the source file, it remains MIT. Yet how many maintainers check the header of the inbound source file? Not many IMO.

* When you then send a patch from that inbound project, the patch is also licensed under MPLv2.

* Ergo there is no need for an explicit grant or transfer of copyright.

I wonder if other people have come to the same conclusion, or if there are flaws in my reasoning.

<comment><USER6> _> I wonder if other people have come to the same conclusion, or if there are flaws in my reasoning._

Unfortunately, it doesn't work the way you've hoped. Although there are some licenses (e.g., Apache) that purport to apply automatically to new code submitted to the licensed codebase, the MPL doesn't make that claim, and such clauses are legally dubious anyway.

So just because I write some code that can be applied as a patch to your MPL- licensed codebase, my code is not automatically subject to the MPL. By default, I hold the copyright, with all rights reserved, and the MPL license on your code does nothing to change that. You still need explicit agreeement from me to place my code under a compatible license.

Github, Gitlab, et al., should really put a checkbox on pull requests that says, "I hereby license this code under $REPO_LICENSE."

<comment><USER7> Actually, you're wrong about the MPL. The MPL is a file based copyleft license, the share-alike clause applies to any modifications made to a file already containing MPL'ed code. This is only an issue when you add new files to the project, and any MPL project should be vigilant about accepting patches to ensure new files added contain the MPL header.

<comment><USER6> Yes, there's a good argument that the license would apply automatically to modifications to an existing file, but even in that case it is somewhat questionable. Is the modification substantial enough that it could be considered a new, stand-alone, derived work? If so, the pre-existing license may not apply. Was the modification submitted as a patch in a file format that does not incorporate all of the pre-existing code? If so, it may be a new, stand-alone work to which the pre-existing license does not apply. Etc., etc. Very little of this stuff has been well tested in court, so there's a lot of room for facially plausible legal challenges.

And it's fairly clear that new files are new works. So, really, in all cases, unless you're getting an explicit statement from contributors that they have placed their contributions under the relevant license, there will be a a lot of uncertainty about whether they really have been—particularly if the contributor (or his or her employer) later challenges your claim.

That's why Github and other platforms for projects on the pull-request model should really build explicit consent to licensing into the process.

<comment><USER5> You cannot modify a work so much that the original licence no longer applies, unless you in effect create a new work.

<comment><USER6> Yes, absolutely a code file can be transformed enough that the original license no longer applies. Copyright law in the United States applies the same tests to code as to textual works and works in other media: is the transformation substantial enough to consider the transformation a new (derived) work, copyrightable in its own right? If so, its author holds its copyright completely independently of any copyrights or licenses attached to the work from which it is derived.

The case law on what constitutes a new, derived work is not at all well developed in the context of software. But looking at analogues from other media—and that's what the law does—it is easy to imagine that a very substantial refactor, touching basically every line, or a less substantial refactor with substantial additions, might qualify as a new, separately copyrightable work.

The claims of copyleft are almost entirely untested in court, and it's very likely that many of them will prove empty if they're ever challenged. Indeed, many of copyleft's claims, those which place obligations on users and contributors, are more TOS-style claims than claims that look like ordinary "reserved rights" under copyright law, and therefore presumably have a legal basis of enforcement in contract law, not in copyright law.

Explicit agreement by contributors to be bound by a license, however, covers most bases, whether the license is interpreted as a license per se, pursuant to copyright law, or whether it's ibstead interpreted as a contract under contract law (or both).

<comment><USER5> If you claim that copyleft is almost 'untested in court' you are either wilfully ignorant or trolling.

<comment><USER8> Can you cite any cases where the case has gone to judgement?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > The phrase "arising from, out of or in connection with" is a recurring tick > symptomatic of the legal draftsman's inherent, anxious insecurity.

Indeed. I'm trying to imagine a court saying "Well... there were damages, but they arose _out of_ the software and not _from_ the software, so therefore- oh, wait! The license actually includes arising "out of" the software as well as "from" the software, so I guess the limitation of liability stands. Case dismissed!"

<comment><USER10> Lawyers are rather fond of such doublets and triplets. Consider free and clear, null and void, terms and conditions, and even law and order. The origin of a lot of legalisms is the historical confusion over language in ancient English courts: Latin, French, or English? Most odd legal grammar is actually of French origin.

<comment><USER11> It's one of my favourite lists: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_doublet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_doublet)

<comment><USER12> > A legal doublet is a standardized phrase used frequently in English legal > language consisting of two or more words that are near synonyms.

...

> power and authority

Should that really be on the list? Power is the capability to do something, authority is the permission to do it. Sometimes power and authority are near synonyms, such as in frontier areas with little government, but generally in a functioning, civilized society they are quite distinct.

<comment><USER11> I'd say you're quite optimistic in thinking that _not little_ government implies power =/= authority, and quite pessimistic in thinking that _little_ government does not imply a civilized, functioning society.

But even without getting into political debates which could get really nuanced, can't authority mean capability in this context? I'm not a native English speaker so I'm not sure, but I don't find it odd. It is also possible that these two words have different (Anglo-Saxon vs French) origin, as most of the examples listed, and that their original meaning was synonymous (of course, I'm far too lazy and tired to check that now).

<comment><USER13> Law is old; in Medieval times such redundancy was considered normal - <USER2> triple - and was very common; presumably it was considered a literate flourish, embellishment and arabesque (sorry couldn't resist a go at it myself.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's funny that the MIT license has the reputation of being "The license you choose when you don't care about attribution, or it would be unreasonable to require attribution".

As the article points out, copies of MIT licensed code must include not only the copyright line but the whole damn license.

<comment><USER15> Indeed, for works where I don't care about attribution for binary users I use the zlib license [0] which says "This notice may not be removed or altered from any source distribution."

You'd still have to include the notice in any source distribution, but that's not really as onerous in my opinion, since you're already having to distribute all your source files, so what's just one more notice.

Of course, my projects normally use a language with a compiler that produces binaries. I'm not sure how this would apply to a language that keeps things in source form like javascript. Maybe webasm will become the new binary form? asm.js? minified javascript?

0: [https://opensource.org/licenses/Zlib](https://opensource.org/licenses/Zlib)

<comment><USER16> _You 'd still have to include the notice in any source distribution, but that's not really as onerous in my opinion, since you're already having to distribute all your source files, so what's just one more notice._

But neither MIT nor zlib _require_ you to distribute any source files. With zlib it's pretty clear what's expected, but with MIT, I'm actually not sure what attribution if any is required in a binary-only distribution.

<comment><USER15> Just to clarify my previous statement. I didn't mean to imply that zlib or MIT require you to distribute your source. I meant that if you are distributing your source code (for reasons other than any requirement from zlib or MIT licenses), then it's not too much of an additional burden to include the zlib license attribution, because you'd already be including the files that I had licensed under zlib, and each of those files has a little header saying it's licensed under zlib. Including the zlib license is then not much more work than including another source file from the project.

The way I've seen MIT interpreted most often is that you have to distribute the license and attribution even for binary only distribution, or distribution in binary form as part of a larger work.

But you're right the language does seem kind of vague on what "The Program" actually means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Crushed under load, to get the cache

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://writing.kemitchell.com/2016/09/21/MIT- License-Line-by-Line.html)

I've always wondered about the nuances around the different licenses, it's nice to get a non-lawyer guide to the MIT one.

<comment><USER18> Dang. I didn't get a notification.

Recently moved from GitHub pages to a VPS, for strict transport security and other goodies. Instant karma.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone know if this will be part of an ongoing series, covering many open source licenses?

<comment><USER19> That would be incredible, but if he spends 4600 words explaining those 171 words, I can't imagine the time investment involved in the GPLv2 (2910), GPLv3 (5644), or MPLv2 (2346).

<comment><USER15> Those licenses are very wordy, but not as dense. For example, about a third of the GPLv2 is the preamble that explains the FSF's "four freedoms" of free software philosophy and the ending section after the legal terms that explains how to apply the license to your own product. Cutting those out reduces the GPLv2 to only 2017 words of actual legal text.

I also feel like it might be easier to explain a more legalese license like GPLv3, MPLv2 or Apachev2. Like the article explains, the MIT license doesn't use the "language of the law" and uses more common language and language familiar to academics and programmers. A license written with more lawyer- oriented langauge, actually using the same wording as the original laws use, might be much easier for a lawyer like Mr. Mitchell to explain. I'm thinking it's an explicit vs implicit type situation, where even though some licenses are longer they define more things explicity, which means the explanation doesn't have to fill in as many gaps.

There are also plenty of simpler licenses that would be great for an explanation. And as part of a series, the author could assume that you are familiar with his MIT license explanation so as to not repeat the same things. Other good candidates I'm thinking would be the BSD licenses, the ISC license, the zlib license, maybe even Apache v2.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Also relevant, this free and very accessible book from O'Reilly [http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/osfreesoft/book](http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/osfreesoft/book) that explains the history and caveats of most open source licenses.

<comment><USER18> Highly recommended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> A bit off-topic, but I would be very interested in somebody making a case for why an OS license is better than a simple line like "This code is free for everybody to use as they wish." I've read about it plenty, but remain unconvinced.

The OS software I write is for the good of everybody, not just its own popularity or the OS community. I'm fine with all uses of it, in whole or in part, whether or not I'm credited. The license reproduction requirement therefore feels like unnecessary noise, and I'd like to think that courts are sane enough that the warranty disclaimer is unnecessary too - is there any real court case where somebody has been sued for a defect in free, OS software, without an explicit warranty, and lost?

<comment><USER22> Not a lawyer, but I always thought maybe someone could take your code, modify it to produce variations A, B, C, the three major use cases of your code, and slap patents on those modified versions of your code. So then anyone who wants to use your code with any of those three use cases in mind (i.e., most people who would want to use your code) would then likely be in trouble.

Or something like that.

A second issue would be one the author of the article seems worried about, which is that without a warranty-free clause people might sue you for bugs in the code. If you're distributing your code, with a line like "free for everybody to use," there may or may not be implicit quality guarantees, according to the article.

<comment><USER23> Has any such lawsuit actually occurred?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> These licenses have little flaws upon closer examination. One day I was reading the BSD license closely, in the context of its use in the TXR project, and was astonished to find that it was buggy and required tweaking to make it more internally consistent and true to its intent. I added a METALICENSE document where the changes are detailed:

[http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/txr/tree/METALICENSE](http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/txr/tree/METALICENSE)

[http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/txr/tree/LICENSE](http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/txr/tree/LICENSE)

The main problem is that the original says that both the _use_ and redistribution of the software are permitted provided that the "following conditions are met", which is followed by two numbered conditions, 1 and 2. But the two conditions do not govern use at all; they are purely about redistribution! Rather, the intended legal situation is that use of the software means that the user agrees to the liability and warranty disclaimer (which is not a condition). But the BSD license neglects to say that at all; it says use is subject to the conditions (just that 1 and 2), not to the disclaimer.

<comment><USER25> You shouldn't touch these licenses unless you're a professional.

I'm no lawyer either, but I believe that clauses such as "use of this software constitutes agreement to" change its nature from a license grant to a contract.

I have no idea what the practical difference could be, but I don't want to find out, either.

Additionally, making changes in licenses makes it harder to reuse code. The license may be incompatible or it may just run afoul of procedures in larger organizations who sometimes have whitelists of approved licenses.

<comment><USER24> The point of the liability disclaimer is that if someone, say, uses the software and happens to lose data due to a bug, the authors (original ones or downstream modifiers or whoever) are not held liable. That requires agreement; it has to be spelled out: if you do not agree with this disclaimer of liability, then you are not licensed to use the software. If you use it anyway, it is an unlicensed use. This is exactly how it works in shrink-wrap EULA's in proprietary software; by opening the shrink wrap, or clicking on some button or whatever the heck, you agree to those things. (If that's a contract, then let it be a contract.) I'm confident that I nailed it to the way it should be, and that "constitutes agreement" is excellent wording.

The difference is that I'm covered, liability wise, better than someone just using the original BSD license, which has a possible interpretation that it allows the use of the software without the user agreeing to the disclaimers, since the license doesn't appear to require acceptance of the disclaimer.

From the developer's POV, that's the only part of a BSD-like license that actually matters. You've already given away the code, and allowed it to be used in proprietary code, so you're not going to be harmed by anyone stealing anything from you. At best, your code could be plagiarized: copied in source code form without you being credited, which isn't very significant. The one way you can be harmed, as in financially, is that someone wants to sue you because of some alleged bug in your code having caused some alleged loss.

By the way, here is how we can be certain that in the BSD license, the disclaimer is not one of the conditions which require agreement. It's because the second condition says: _".. must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer ..."_. I.e. the following disclaimer is clearly distinct from the conditions, and not one of them. Since it is not one of the conditions, it is not _a_ condition! The license might effectively not be conditional on the disclaimer.

In contrast, in the GPL v2, the two disclaimers are one of the numbered conditions (11 and 12). There is nevertheless a slight flaw in the GPL v2 I just noticed. It introduces the conditions like this: _" The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and modification follow._" But unless "copying" is construed as use, conditions clauses 11 and 12 are not related to copying, distribution and modification. These disclaimers apply purely to use. A bug in the program isn't going cause harm while you're copying, modifying or redistributing it.

In the past I've seen misinformation disseminated about the GPL like "you don't have to agree with it to use the software", which is complete nonsense; you agree with the disclaimers when you use the software.

<comment><USER11> This reminds me of an anecdote about Godel, not sure if it's true or not, but here goes. When he was taking the Constitution exam to get the US citizenship, he proceeded to explain to the judge how he has a formal proof that the US Constitution is inconsistent and allows for a dictatorship to take over completely legally. Einstein was accompanying him and he somehow managed to quickly shut him up and continue to go through the motions of the exam.

It also, for some reason, reminds me of what Peter Thiel once said about physics PhDs: "Because they know fundamental things, they think they know everything."

<comment><USER26> Gödel predicted Trump. Film at 11.

<comment><USER11> I wish I could share your optimism about political candidates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Licenses like MIT and BSD should be avoided due to the patent risk in favor of licenses that explicitly grant patent protection like Apache 2.0. The patent troll risk is just way too high. As rando said, companies like Microsoft are even open-sourcing code while raking in hundreds of millions from patent suits against open-source software. That this is even working for them shows the permissive licenses need to eliminate that tactic entirely.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is fantastic IMO. More of this.

I also think there could be room for something similar about code (but I haven't had time to read aosabook.org yet, so maybe that is wheree I'll find it.)

A note on the Crockford joke:

I think it is on IBM, not the lawyers: I think he describes somewhere the fun of getting a payment from IBM followed by sending an additional license entitling IBM to use the software for evil.

<comment><USER29> He didn't get a payment, but he did give a license for "IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil."

[http://dev.hasenj.org/post/3272592502/ibm-and-its- minions](http://dev.hasenj.org/post/3272592502/ibm-and-its-minions)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> We've worked with Kyle Mitchell. He's a smart guy.

</comment><comment><USER31> This looks excellent, and I'm going to curl up with it and a cup of tea tonight to read it more carefully. Thanks!

Would love to see the author do one for the GPL. I realize the result would be quite a bit longer.

</comment><comment><USER32> A very lovely article, I enjoyed it very much since it gives insight into the "syntax" of legal documents in the US.

This article brought up a point I find very interesting. The MIT license (and a bunch of other licenses as well) are very US-oriented when it came to their writing, provisions, etc. I'd love to read a similar article exploring licenses like these from a, say, European point of view. Would the same constructs hold up in a German court, for example. What language is missing or superfluous?

<comment><USER33> I can talk for France. I used to work in a lab depending from the CNRS and arriving there I learned about the French version of the GPL, BSD and LGPL, the CeCILL familly (CeCILL-A, -B or -C respectively) ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CeCILL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CeCILL) )

They claim compatibility with GPL, BSD and LGPL and also that CeCILL was necessary for valid open source licenses in France. That made me raise eyebrows on many levels:

\- Does it mean the GPL/BSD/LGPL is unenforceable in France?

\- Does it mean the CeCILL is unenforceable in other countries?

\- The CeCILL allows to relicense a work under a future revision of the license. I know some GPL projects do that, I personally am extremely suspicious of this possibility.

I raised these points but never got good answers from law specialists. The guys I could reach were specialized in "intellectual property valorization" and actually did not know anything about open source. They also made me realize in the french version of the law, the notion that copyright protects a source code is extremely disputable:

In France you can't patent or copyright an idea, and numbers and mathematical formulas are recognized as ideas. It is accepted that a computer algorithm is equivalent to a mathematical formula. Ergo, in a source code, you can't protect an algorithm but an implementation. That is, as I understood when pushing a bit more, variable names and whitespace structure are the only copyrightable things in a program.

My understanding is that an obfuscater or a code formatter would likely remove any copyright claim from a source code when it comes to french laws.

I wish we had an actually active Pirate Party or EFF to try push the limits over that nonsense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Would someone care to elaborate why the "Good, not Evil" clause in the JSON license is bad?

<comment><USER35> a) It doesn't meet the Free Software Definition or Open Source Definition. What if you want to use the software for evil?

b) Who defines what Evil is? What if the author sues you on the grounds that you're using their software for a perfectly legal activity, the morality of which is widely accepted by the general public, but which they personally disagree with? For example, many authors who have written these types of licences are pacifists who disagree with the actions of Western military forces. Are said military applications "Evil"?

<comment><USER34> ah, gotcha

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Huh? I submitted this 23 hours ago with the exact same url, glad to see som discussion though.

<comment><USER17> It happens, at one point there were 9 submissions round the Yahoo story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> > The MIT License is the most popular open-source software license.

I'm fairly certain the GPL is still more popular.

<comment><USER25> Maybe by line count or importance, considering the Linux kernel. By project count, MIT dominates: [https://github.com/blog/1964-open-source-license-usage- on-gi...](https://github.com/blog/1964-open-source-license-usage-on-github- com)

<comment><USER38> The link provides the API on how to poll github repositories for license data, but is a far cry from being a reliable method in measuring usage.

Lets suggest following criteria for a survey:

1#, no duplicates. A survey with duplicate has no meaning. Github data in the blog post do not exclude dubplicates.

2#, no empty projects. A project with no data in it is not actually a project. The Github data do not exclude such projects.

3#, only project with code in them. A lot of github projects is text collaboration, like party planning, discussion around the latests online drama, and so on. Github data do not exclude those.

4#, only project with running code that is useful for at least 1 person. Random data, incomplete or abandon attempts is not actually "a software project". Github data do not attempt to run projects, and very much do not limit its data storage to only code that works.

To my knowledge, only one license survey exist that passes those criteria, and that one was based on the curated repository of Debian. The study showed GPL to be heavily favored (80%), but the study concluded that more such studies (and discussion on research methodology) is highly needed.</comment></comment></comment>


What the hell is going on? - <AUTHOR> http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/05/what-in-the-hell-is-going-on.html <comment><USER2> This article is hilarious. People are tired of the "niceness"? I think they are tired of the bullshit lies they get fed from the established politicians and they also feel that the way current democracies work doesn't give them enough power to affect top-level decisions.</comment>


Training in chess: A scientific approach (2005) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e2dd/31c7db68667f1485f80d0e5a3ebb65fd960d.pdf <comment><USER2> Cool Article.

I played a ton of chess in my high school / college years, progressing to just over 2000 USCF before taking a break from the tournament circuit. In my opinion, if youre not an expert / A - level player and want to progress rapidly, here is where you should focus:

1\. Tactics, tactics, tactics - So many games under the expert level are decided by a tactical slip. A strong knowledge of opening or endgame theory means nada if you walk into a combination midgame and get mated or lose a ton of material. Work on exercises to train yourself to look for tactcial opportunities in game. The exercises on apps like LiChess and Chess.com are good places to start. Chess training pocket book by Lev Alburt is a handy reference too (although this isn't entirely focused on tactics)

2\. Pick 1-2 openings as white and black and focus on them. Don't try to master a dozen openings. Focus not just on the moves, but the key ideas once the opening is over. Also, and the OP pointed this out, focus on the key ideas for both white and black, so you will have an idea of what your opponent is (or should be) trying to accomplish. There a bunch of Opening Explorer type apps that will let you save a few of your favorite openings and walk through the different variations. Practice not just going through the variations but playing and analyzing the positions these openings create.

3\. Run your games through an analysis program or go over them with a stronger player than you. As I mentioned before, frequently when starting out you will win or lose games based on tactics. Having a program or stronger player point out these opportunities in YOUR OWN games is a very effective way to learn to recognize them in the future. Any time you play a close, hard fought game where you arent quite sure what went wrong, you should be looking to run that through an engine or review with a strong player to find the turning point(s)

4\. Play. Just like best way learning to program is to program / build stuff, playing more games will give you that experience to quickly recognize and evaluate a position. Also, one of the keys learning to program is not getting frustrated when nothing works when you start out. Same principle applies to chess :)

<comment><USER3> I have a similar USCF rating and I agree with everything you said. I would also add, when buying chess books, get books of the form "My best games" of top players and go over them. Try the side variations in those books as much as possible in your head. Do not buy opening books. Instead go over master games whose common openings match yours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is extremely interesting. I've been searching for something similar for years.

Disclosure: I'm a class B player.

<comment><USER5> From your perspective, what was the most interesting and surprising thing discussed in this article?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is very interesting. I learned chess almost totally by deconstruction (starting with a well worn copy of "Bobby Fisher Teaches Chess") and then practice. I was a passable chess player since I had an excellent memory, but got sort of turned off both by the community at the time (mostly a reflection of the chess players regionally, not in general) and then by feeling that the problem had been solved. It felt like a race of who could memorize the most games. This shows that a much more systemic approach is really occurring. It doesn't do anything for the feeling that chess is solved, however, since a computer can memorize more games than me.

That said, I feel it's interesting to see how much this reflects training for other sports. Playing soccer is as much about deconstructing older games, players, then systematically attempting to anticipate their actions and your responses in a variety of contexts (i.e. a search tree). Much of this is instinctive in good players, but the same process is taking place.

</comment><comment><USER7> > In this chapter, we have in mind a player who has already mastered the > basics of chess (with a level of, say, 1800 Elo)

Uggghhhh... 1800 is the "basics of chess" ?? Way to make me feel bad about my 1500 rank at Chess.com

<comment><USER8> The author was most likely talking about a FIDE rating. I think you'll find pretty much every on-line site has people rated well above their FIDE ratings. This is partly because people who pay money to join FIDE and pay money to play in tournaments take it much more seriously.

<comment><USER9> That just makes it worse, doesn't it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Spellchecker would be good; findinds in the first paragraph, tut.</comment>


Twentysomething: Why it's smart to quit a job after just two weeks of work - <AUTHOR> http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/03/11/twentysomething-why-its-smart-to-quit-a-job-after-just-two-weeks-of-work/ <comment><USER2> This is horrible advice. Sure, you should always deal with boredom and a lack of motivation in your career, but that doesn't mean quitting after two weeks.

If the job entailed doing something new, for instance a sales job for me since I haven't done a lot of sales, you should a least stick it out. I'd really doubt that you would have the knowledge and experience to be successful at a totally new task after two weeks.

And if the job tasks you hated, weren't new for to you, I question the level of research you did before accepting the job. Basically, quitting before two weeks should only be for huge problems, like if someone with a potentially deadly allergic reaction to peanuts was asked to work in a peanut processing plant. Those issues should all be taken care of before you accept the job.

Also the company is making a big investment in hiring you, so I'd consider it almost unethical to quit a job after weeks just because I disliked it. She should have worked with her boss and the company to improve her job satisfaction.

<comment><USER3> It may seem unbelievable on HN, but there are many shockingly stupid and hopeless tech startups in the Bay Area. Sometimes it's hard to tell upfront how bad things really are until you get hired. I signed up for a job last summer that I thought was going to be really cool. Awesome product, super fun "space," cool seeming co-workers and so forth.

However, it turned out the boss was a sociopath and psychopath. The company was being sued by multiple customers. The boss was being sued by multiple former employees for harassment and withholding wages. The engineering manager was a pathological liar. The software was largely smoke and mirrors. It looked GREAT but was totally rotten on the inside.

I persisted for 4 months but really all I got out of it was poor health and a bad attitude. I also missed a number of opportunities to work with other companies I had previously interviewed with. I really wish I would have quit after 3 weeks.

<comment><USER2> In your case quitting sooner probably would have been appropriate. I was assuming that the company was basically a good company in her case, and that she hadn't done enough research on the company before joining. I still believe that.

Other things like figuring out that your boss is a psychopath and pathological liar can take more time than just one or two meetings. I wouldn't want to work for somebody like that for a few months. But I wouldn't be bragging about it. If I got another job quickly, I wouldn't even think about putting it on my resume.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The author of this post is the same person who created the site to get hired by Twitter. (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510591>) The timing of this post and the visibility of it, really, really stinks.

</comment><comment><USER5> Never give hiring managers a reason to take your resume off the "in" pile and put it into the circular file. Switching jobs "too often", which is ill- defined of course, is a red flag.</comment>


Show HN: CV Boilerplate – Easing the Process of Building a CV Using LaTeX - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mrzool/cv-boilerplate <comment><USER2> I consider LaTeX resumes to be a secret handshake of sorts, something that makes me significantly more likely to be inclined-to-hire a candidate.

If you're preparing formatted text, LaTeX is the best tool for the job. It also has a steep learning curve. Preparing a resume with it says "I have the technical judgement to use the best tool for this job, even if I had to learn an arcane new programming language[0] to do it."

0: The best description I've ever read of TeX in general is that it's a Turing-complete programming language with a compiler that outputs printer assembly code (Postscript) rather than computer assembly.

<comment><USER3> I can't agree. Having used LaTeX for about a year now, it's got all the fragmentation and design-by-committee flaws of Linux, but much worse. There are so many packages, and many are completely incompatible with each other. And while TeX itself is pretty simple, LaTeX is much bigger, and using any libraries on top of it pretty much requires hours of searching tex.so for obscure fixes and workarounds, which are often counter-intuitive.

I'd rather hire someone who would have the sense to pay $20 for a month's worth of InDesign, learn how to use it (which also has a steep learning curve), and make what they need. This shows me they have prudence and can prioritize and manage their time properly, and aren't swayed by public opinion on what the best tool for the job is, but make unbiased comparisons for themselves.

<comment><USER4> Personally I've had more success after switching to a résumé based on this article:

[http://practicaltypography.com/resumes.html](http://practicaltypography.com/resumes.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I did mine in LaTeX back in <checks files> 2001, using basically just

      \documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{report}
      \usepackage{url,a4wide,pslatex,times}
      \section*{Experience}
      \subsection* ...

</comment><comment><USER6> As an academic, I have to reformat my CV for almost every grant I apply to. I created a Jinja2/Pandoc pipeline to ease this process:

[https://bitbucket.org/hoffman/cv/](https://bitbucket.org/hoffman/cv/)

</comment><comment><USER7> There's a site that I've been using for a while called [https://www.sharelatex.com/](https://www.sharelatex.com/) which has the ModernCV template which I use for my resume.

</comment><comment> V-2 This sample CV doesn't look all that nice to me - bullet list, italic, small caps, three or four different font sizes on one page... effects overload.

Maybe it's just because it's supposed to be a showcase, anyway it looks cluttered

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the precious feedback. I'll probably revise it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I should really learn latex

<comment><USER9> I wouldn't consider myself an expert in any way, but it takes less than an hour to get up to speed with the Latex necessary to compose a nice CV/resume. Most people spend far more time wrangling with a word processor to get a much uglier result.

<comment><USER10> I learned basic Latex, just the minimum necessary to get started. And now I just Google what I want and use the code verbatim, never bothering to understand the internals. I thought I was the only one who did this until I saw that most other people in my university did the same.

<comment><USER11> Honestly, that's what makes LaTeX great. Formatting is decoupled from content. If you want to make a formatting change, you can Google it and chances are that somebody else has done the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've used [https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/cv#.Vi6Bz2SrReU](https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/cv#.Vi6Bz2SrReU) in the past for my wife. I haven't really looked at any other apps but I like how I can just export PDF directly and not having to deal with exporting/creating the PDF on my own.

I'd like to learn LaTeX at some point but at this point, CVs are the only thing I use it for...

</comment><comment><USER13> Looks nice! I use this one: [http://nitens.org/taraborelli/cvtex](http://nitens.org/taraborelli/cvtex)

<comment><USER14> I use moderncv: [https://www.ctan.org/pkg/moderncv?lang=en](https://www.ctan.org/pkg/moderncv?lang=en)

<comment><USER15> Me too!

<comment><USER16> Me too! It's even on GitHub and has forks. :)

[https://github.com/alanorth/cv](https://github.com/alanorth/cv)

<comment><USER14> I'm working on a small Open Source web based generator for it, writing it in Go. :) It'll be done in a few days, I'll show it on HN.

[https://github.com/tpiha/barecv](https://github.com/tpiha/barecv)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hmm, seems to require Pandoc? I'd like a nice LaTeX CV template as I can't find the one I used 15 years ago so therefore can't make changes, but don't fancy working with (the entirely appropriately named in this case) YAML.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've never seen anything easy about using LaTeX.</comment>


Microsoft's war against Chrome battery life now includes Win10 notifications - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12369326/microsoft-windows-10-chrome-battery-life-notifications <comment><USER2> This is kinda fair play, if you have seen what Google does to Edge users. Every Google website (including Search, Gmail, YouTube, Google+, etc.) has a bar claiming "Chrome is faster" at the top, with Download Chrome and Not Interested buttons.

Of course, the "Not Interested" button only suppresses the bar on that one Google site you're presently on, and only for a couple weeks. You'll get pestered about it more later. This stupid Google Chrome ad bar has been annoying me for over a year now.

So, suffice to say, this is a shoddy notification, but in the war of FUD spam, Google started it.</comment>


Some things you should know about Steam - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@galyonkin/some-things-you-should-know-about-steam-5eaffcf33218 <comment><USER2> The average (Median, according to the author on Twitter) game sells 32,000 copies.

Some people find this depressing, others find it hard to believe the average game sells that many copies.

Personally, I find it to just reconfirm things that I already believed.

This is an important note on sale prices. If you sell your game for $5, you will make ~$150k if you fall under this median sales figure. Which might be enough to break even on your game, but probably not enough to fund your next one. When you put your game into a bundle, you are selling it for under $1 usually and this is financial suicide (unless your other sales have already dried up).

As Jeff Vogel pointed out, you should be charging at least $15-$20 for your game, and avoiding sales until your game is shipping very few units.

The most important thing to realize is that 1300 games got added last year, and this figure is rising thanks to Greenlight. The competition will only become more fierce, unless the bubble pops (if there is a bubble yet). Still, as with any area, success waits for those willing to differentiate themselves from the pack in a valuable way (or in some cases a dumb gimmick will suffice).</comment>


Can e-commerce be reinvented? $1.9M in sales says yes - <AUTHOR> http://intraxio.com

<comment><USER2> And you expect to be taken seriously with a landing page like that?

<comment><USER3> Join up with us and help us build a new one. We're not in web design.</comment></comment>


Live frugally and retire early - happy-go-lucky http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20181101-fire-the-movement-to-live-frugally-and-retire-decades-early <comment><AUTHOR> I am very tempted by many of the messages in this, and as a 57 year old nearing the end of his career trajectory (it is unlikely to be upward from this point, although it may have to be onward..) I've been pointed at 'the barefoot investor' which sells a story of deciding to live on radically less than often promoted by the retirement industry.

But here's the thing: a model of low income sustained living removes you from economic engagement. If we all do this, we remove ourselves from the tax providing side of the equation which drives much of the social infrastructure _needed_ to sustain a socially equitable lifestyle for all of us.

We can only all live frugal, if we agree to the consequences of reduced economic activity. Otherwise, its quite dis-equilibriating to hoard capital, and dribble it out to sustain a life. Thats not actually going to help.

Bit from box A, bit from box B.</comment>


DHH's translation of the MIT License - <AUTHOR> http://www.flickr.com/photos/rooreynolds/243810133/ <comment><USER2> Well it sure does sound like something DHH would say.

</comment><comment><USER3> So we've got a fuck ([http://www.flickr.com/photos/doesrails/128015501/in/pool- can...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/doesrails/128015501/in/pool- canadaonrails)) and a shit... what's next???</comment>


Product video in shoestring budget? Use these tools - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/orgzit/there-is-insanity-in-creating-a-sane-product-video-fb670900e76f <comment><AUTHOR> *This post is directed towards helping digital marketers and DIY entrepreneurs with a shoestring budget to create an awesome product video in less time and set the sales wheels in motion.

<comment><USER2> any thoughts on fiverr.com as far as value goes? I was looking at at outsourcing an explainer video. Just haven't pulled the trigger yet?

<comment><AUTHOR> I suggest fiverr works great if you have a clear definition of your product/service. It's a drag to get the freelancer on board and get the details set straight. So I took the DIY approach.

Best of luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Live videos seem to do pretty well on facebook.

<comment><AUTHOR> For an explanatory one, I think you will want to make something more robust and long lasting.</comment></comment>


PragProg Mag Issue 19, January 2011 is out - <AUTHOR> http://www.pragprog.com/magazines

<comment><USER2> Which was mentioned 4 days ago at HN: <http://www.pragprog.com/magazines/2011-01/content></comment>


Competition to find a new chess rating system - <AUTHOR> http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=6619

<comment><USER2> Well, ELO has been proved useful in various domains (it's used to evaluate product quality in the agroalimentary industry for instance), and compared to various rating systems in different sports. So you can't actually say that "it has never really been demonstrated that Elo ratings are more accurate than other approaches would be."

<comment><USER3> Dont know. It is _useful_ certainly. But is it more accurate than other approaches for this problem?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This one is already way better [PDF, paper] <http://tiny.cc/trueskill> It is now used for XBox Live matchmaking <http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/projects/trueskill/>

<comment><USER5> There's a downside to using such a system for videogames: it is tiring to constantly have perfectly balanced matches, where you must do your utmost to win. I've seen comments about this countless times from Starcraft II players for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The prizes are terrible

<comment><USER7> While prizes are terrible financially speaking, that signed DVD is about as nice a prize as one of the checks from Knuth.

Unfortunately, it looks like the competition will be ridiculously tough since good old ELO has been pushed down about 30 spots.

Also, it seems the improvements are not going to be overly dramatic after the first rush.

Why? Because chess games between human players have some randomness inherent in them.</comment></comment>


How a CEO with Dyslexia and ADHD Runs His Company - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-a-ceo-with-dyslexia-and-adhd-runs-his-company-1494952535 <comment><USER7> As an attorney who has struggled with dyslexia and ADHD my entire life, I can attest to the frustrations associated with responding to emails. While most people are able to quickly, if not subconsciously, craft a well thought out response, I spend countless minutes if not hours, fighting to find a way to transfer the sentence I have in my mind on to the screen. For those who do not have dyslexia, the best way I can think of to describe this limitation is the feeling you have when you are trying to remember a word, name, or sentence that is "on the tip of your tongue." It is frustrating and often becomes overwhelming.

<comment><USER8> I sometimes lose words. Like chair disappears from my mind, I can describe one, I know what one is, but the label for it is gone and even if you say it I may or may not recognize it. I don't have dyslexia, but a mental health issue that causes it. The funny part is names do the same thing, they're labels for specific people.

<comment><USER9> I experience this, too!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In the LD advocacy community, there seem to be two types of arguments made in support of entrepreneurs/leaders with LD (typically dyslexia and ADHD).

The first is the notion that people with LD have certain deficits, and because they are forced to work around these deficits they develop other skills that are important for leadership. The article makes this argument at various points.

The second is the notion that people with LD also have direct advantages (as opposed to the indirect advantages described above). These are often described as creativity, being able to see the big picture, or having superior management skills. Interestingly, this article did not make this type of claim.

As the founder of a startup whose technology improves reading ability and focus for people with LD, I am a bit conflicted about this dichotomy. After all, if my software helps dyslexic and ADHD folks to read more like neurotypical folks, then do they "miss out" on the indirect benefits of LD? If so, perhaps they would be better off without our assistive technology.

On the other hand, if the benefits of LD are direct, then there would be no tradeoff. A dyslexic person using our software would retain all the creative and other benefits of dyslexia, but they would just be able to read much faster than before.

I'm curious to know what folks here (HN + A11Y) think about these two common claims about LD. Do you think the benefits are more indirect (like the article focuses on) or direct (which the article does not claim)?

<comment><USER11> There is absolutely no benefit to having a LD. Seriously, there is NONE - people with LDs who attain success do so in spite of their LD, not because of it. This notion that LDs make you more "creative" or whatever is backed by absolutely no research and is mostly a bunch of feel-good nonsense.

A great reference for this is Dr. Russell Barkley:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Barkley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Barkley)

His Youtube videos/lectures are extremely insightful as well:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzhbAK1pdPM&list=PLzBixSjmbc...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzhbAK1pdPM&list=PLzBixSjmbc8eFl6UX5_wWGP8i0mAs- cvY)

<comment><USER12> You realise Russel Barkley had a brother with adhd who died in a car crash?

He's extremely negative about adhd.

There has been evidence to suggest greater skills in other areas - <USER2> research isn't enough yet as it's only a few papers. But Russel barkley always jumps on any notion of improved skills and smashes it with as much passion as he can. I can understand why he hates adhd.

<comment><USER11> What? What does any of that have to do with anything I said? Why would a trained clinical psychologist be anything but negative about a brain disorder that, when left untreated, contributes to poor long-term outcomes in (1):

-academic performance

-self-esteem regulation

-addiction and drug abuse

-antisocial behavior

-obesity

-social outcomes

That's like saying an oncologist is really negative about cancer. There is nothing positive about a deficiency in executive functions. There is nothing to be gained by having a stunted capacity for working memory, being unable to plan ahead or stick to a schedule, being impulsive to the point that you are disrupting other students and or coworkers, being unable to properly regulate ones emotions, and not to even mention the loneliness, social anxiety, depression, etc that one develops due to being socially ostracized due to the aforementioned ADHD symptoms.

ADHD is a serious neurological disorder that ruins people's lives. There is nothing to be positive about (other than that it's treatable and manageable). A clinical ADHD diagnosis is a disaster, not something to tout as giving you some sort of edge up in "creativity" (because it doesn't).

(1) [https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-...](https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-7015-10-99)

<comment><USER12> Just because a person is a "trained clinical psychologist, doesn't mean there is no bias in their work. ALL SCIENTISTS - are aware they will have natural bias whether they like it or not.

My point: was that using Barkley to justify something "having no benefit" is not a good justification.

Looking at the negatives you've given here - these are all consequences of a lack of help, support and self-acceptance - where a person has fallen through society because of being different. We obviously get this a lot with adhders because we are different - society isn't set up for us at the moment - <USER3> people with adhd are NOT BORN WITH:

\- obesity, addiction, antisocial behavior, low academic performances(don't get me wrong academia is fucking hard as fuck it sucks your soul and takes your life away...it also takes enormous strength of character to persevere)

I'm not knocking Barkley's work - no need to attack me here - he's done incredible things to make sure that adhd is regarded as a genuine condition that needs treatment, help and support - IT DOES.

On Barkley his work focuses specifically on the deficits - even his books focus on this - it focus on the negatives - again for good reason he wants people to take it seriously.

I notice btw - you're fixated on there just being "creativity" as a positive for adhd - and it being some disease (it's not fyi medically a disease) - <USER4> i'm not gonna sit here and start posting the papers which posit the opposite, that humanity needs these characters in order to thrive, or the recent papers that show if a person with adhd is put in a good environment for them - <USER6> thrive - because I think you're someone who will probably respond aggressively. I'm not going to bother posting about the amazing shit i've seen working with adhd kids either.

Because nothing I say is going to change you're mind. You sound mad as fuck and upset about adhd.

And I can't be fucked.

I've seen how bad it is - about 10 of my members with adhd have addiction issues - i'm under no delusion.

My Dad with ADHD died of alcohol, was in and out of prison. However - <USER6> never had help and support or knowledge of adhd until it was too late. :(.

My work: researcher in neuroscience and a software developer, adhd coach, have adhd and dyslexia, have 18 close family members with adhd(Nan had 10 kids, her mum had 10 kids, huge family), worked with kids with adhd for 3 years, give workshops on adhd, volunteer at a charity for adhd, run my own company part- time creating tools for people with neurodiversity and therapies for stroke and dementia patients.

I attribute my struggles to being able to better understand others with cognitive deficits - and it means I run a successful business with it.

If there's anything I can help with - please let me know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What's surprising, and admirable, to me is that he worked his way up with those traits vs founding the company.

As he says in the article, it's a lot to do with picking the right people to support you. Though the cynic in me suspects by eschewing detail and email, he had a lot more time for corporate politicking.

<comment><USER14> The thing about disabilities like ADHD and dyslexia is that some people "suffering" from them succeed. To succeed they pick up a lot of personal strategies that can be used for other things than managing your disability.

ADHD for instance forces you to structure your life. Because you won't be able to get out of bed in the morning, cook dinner or clean the house if you don't.

Being structured is a huge advantage in almost every aspect of life though.

The down side is that very few people actually manages to succeed.

<comment><USER15> What does it mean to structure your life?

<comment><USER16> For me it means being very conscious of organizing and structuring my life. My keys hang in the same place by the door every time. I keep my work laptop in the same place everyday when I come. I keep my bike stuff (helmet, bottles, gloves) in the same spot. I have the same breakfast shake every day, which I buy in bulk and is always stocked in the fridge.

It's all kind of obvious stuff that everyone could benefit from, but my wife can be much more casual about handling details on the fly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Some subtext in this article seems to be that the company was already a healthy environment which allowed him to easily adapt and thrive despite his inherent challenges.

He could just as easily have found himself in a company that wasn't as accommodating or healthy and foundered.

Unfortunately it's hard to assess how bound to processes a company is until you're well past the onboarding/honeymoon phase.

Or worse, in my unfortunate experience, finally land at a company light on procedural, reasonably good at executing, and investing in improvements to the development stack only to have that crushed by a supermassive org acquisition with absurdly burdensome procedural overhead and have that overlay existing practices rather than supplant them while still expected to execute not only as if nothing had changed, but as if we should have improved thanks to it all thus setting me back effectively years professionally and rendering my time investment almost entirely void...

</comment><comment><USER18> That's an interesting take. My shrink is not very keen on that style of outing, his thinking being that unless you have an actual mental illness that makes you disconnect from reality, you have to take ownership of your life, and labels are a way to skirt your responsibilities. That does mean adapting your life to whom you are, wether you have an identified quirk (ex. ADHD) or some kind of non-pathological personality trait (ex. "I want to paint canvas all day long").

Maybe we need more CEOs who never emails, maybe we need also CEOs who do everything by email, so that workers have a range of choices on the kind of companies they work for. The counterpoint, of coure, is that culture tends to uniformise everything.

<comment><USER19> The article is literally all about how Bassoul has adapted his work to who he is.

Does your shrink have the same objection to the label "arthritis"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Paul Orfalea, founder of Kinko's, also has Dyslexia and ADHD. [https://www.amazon.com/Copy-This-Hyperactive-Dyslexic- Compan...](https://www.amazon.com/Copy-This-Hyperactive-Dyslexic- Companies/dp/B001PO64KA)

</comment><comment><USER21> Seems intuitive. You don't need laser focus on details to be a CEO. You need some of the things ADHD people uniquely have, such as a tendency to try new things, or rather to try _more_ things, than others might.

<comment><USER22> > You need some of the things ADHD people uniquely have, such as a tendency to > try new things, or rather to try more things, than others might.

Hm, people without ADHD can try a lot of things too... can you please explain why you feel people with ADHD are better at trying new things? If you have ADHD yourself, do you find this to be true?

Of all the successful CEOs, do you think there is a higher occurrence of folks with ADHD? I ask because in my mind, these are the people who have been good at a _lot_ of things: Jobs, Musk, Thiel, Altman, Bezos -- the most salient examples of multi-disciplinary folks I can think of do not have ADHD (well unless they are keeping their ADHD private).

<comment><USER21> It was explained to me in a talk I went to, which made reference to a study that was done. Alas, it was years ago and I don't know how to find it again. But you can easily reason it out for yourself. Let's say Person A approaches activity X the normal way, does it the "right" way, and succeeds. In the same amount of time, Person B starts on X but soon transitions to Y, and then again to Z.

In the same amount of time, A has tried one thing and finished one thing, while B has tried 3 things and finished none. People who are like A can't stop harping on B for not finishing X. However A didn't even think about Y or Z. Sometimes Y & Z turn out to be better than X. (For that matter, sometimes the reason you're bored of X is not because something's wrong with you, but because something's wrong with X.)

Being "distracted" is also known as being sensitive to your environment. Focusing on X comes at the cost of ignoring Y & Z. And vice versa, too, but that idea already gets plenty of airtime.

In an organization there are people who start things, and people who finish them. Entrepreneurs and executives usually seem to be more about starting things. Technicians, managers, organizers, they're the ones who follow through. So IF there's a place in the firm where ADHD might not be too much of a problem, and might even help, CEO is it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My former CEO had some issues with Dyslexia and focus. He had major issues reading/spelling, and honestly all the employees noticed it.

Also he would kind of zone out a good amount while someone was talking about something and get caught repeating something or asking someone to repeat something.

But he was a very good person and always showed a strong interest in each employees' well being. We all respected him a lot and trusted him with the company. He really came across as a genuine person and we all just looked past the Dyslexia/attention issues.

</comment><comment><USER24> Another dyslexic checking in. Was diagnosed in school but it's relatively mild. My spelling is terrible which can be embarrassing in a business context. Also am fairly useless at coding without a proper IDE - which is another reason I try to advocate against pure-whiteboard style interviews.

</comment><comment><USER25> I can't speak to Dyslexia, but running a medium-to-large company sounds like a dream job for ADHD types.

Rapid context switching in the job description? Sign me up!

<comment><USER26> Agreed, now just need to figure out how to bypass all the other stuff on the way there!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> My COO is amazing and I'm super lucky to have her, she basically runs the business for me so I can focus on the company and the customer. I learned early my dyslexia lets me think about the business well but someone else should operate it for me. Teams are important.

</comment><comment><USER28> > I do very little emailing, no Facebook, no LinkedIn.

I'm jealous about this. I'm a bit neurotypical but there's no way I can just sit in my bedroom with my awesome project - "Build, and they will come" huh?!

<comment><USER29> Ah, but you're not alone without FB and LinkedIn! You have us, here, and Reddit over there, and...

<comment><USER28> Hey social networking for business is no joke! I have precious amount of quota for socialising ... and spending a lot of it on HN, oh dear things are going well D:

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It always encourages me to see other people with Behavior/Learning disabilities succeeding beyond the expected standard. I will say that as many have pointed out, some of these traits do not have to mean a long lasting deficit in ability or capacity. By learning to achieve the same results in the areas that these issues compromise you develop new neural paths that can also be used to be more efficient and generally better at many other areas of life and life management.

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't understand why this is a big deal, people seem to think disabilities (not limited to ADHD nor dyslexia) are barriers.

People learn to overcome all sorts of disabilities all the time.

In my opinion, this article shouldn't single out that ADHD and dyslexia as a limitation, in a way you can say the contrary, that it's what made him where he is. I'm sure Steve Jobs wouldn't have been as successful if he didn't have dyslexia.

<comment><USER32> This is a common trope in the ADHD community. Namely ADHD makes us more creative.

I'm for positive thinking, but I heard about a study that claimed skills like creativity do _not_ go down once you are being treated for your disabilities. I do not know the details of the study, though.

Unfortunately this trope has meant that I've met many ADHD people who refuse to do medical treatment because they don't want to lose their gifts.

My theory has been that people with ADHD tend to end up having lives with rough social interaction, and you end up living a childhood more prone to "creative" endeavors like reading books or other activities you can do alone.

But for those of us with this disorder, getting proper treatment can get rid of a major social barrier almost entirely. I'd recommend at least trying medical treatment and evaluating the effects you feel.

<comment><USER33> I don't understand the medical treatment thing. Why is it so that everything has to be treated? What do you define as ideal? People have different types of personalities and it is necessary in the system. In my opinion it is better to give time to people so that they overcome. We really tend to underestimate the coping capabilities of humans.

<comment><USER34> I struggled with ADHD on my own for years because of this thinking. I lost a job, I lost relationships, I lost time in my life that I could have been doing something productive and instead was flailing around jumping from one thing to another, the whole time feeling more and more depressed as time went on because I must be the only guy that couldn't "figure this out" without needing to be "fixed" by medication.

I eventually came around, and it's a night-and-day difference. The medication is only a part of the system that I now have to manage ADHD, but I wouldn't be where I am today without it. Not everything needs to be treated, but when that treatment could very well make almost every single aspect of your life better, to the point of allowing you to actually live a live, why would you encourage people to not take it?

This is why we try to classify different types of learning disabilities. There's a difference between "can't focus" and "can't focus to the point of it being a significant detriment to their lives". There's a difference between "I can't sit still" and "I've spent the last 6 hours trying to write a few lines of code but I just can't get my goddamn brain to stop thinking about other stuff for 2 goddamn seconds to even get an on-topic thought in, and now I'm meta-analyzing my own thoughts instead of actually working just making the problem worse and this entire thing is hopeless because if it takes me this long to write a few lines what hope do I ever have of actually completing a program". And that thought process continues for another hour or so interrupted by a "okay just focus" and a few minutes of trying to get back on topic before the spiral starts again until I finally start to make headway only to realize that an hour later I somehow got off-topic again but this time while writing code fixing a bug in some unrelated project, only to then curse myself while dropping that bug only to stare at the fucking screen again not being productive.

It's the former which is a personality and the latter which is a disability.

<comment><USER33> Do you have to be medicated all through your life or can it be improved by slowly weaning off of it? Please do not misunderstand but the reason why I am asking this is because of a genuine concern for people like you to be able to control the thinking by yourself and not be dependent on drugs.

Ref: [https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/suffer-the- children/201...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/suffer-the- children/201207/are-we-adhd-culture)

Edit: Added reference.

<comment><USER34> To get the benefits of the medication, I need to be on the medication. It's caused by a chemical imbalance in my brain, and just like someone who has to wear glasses can't be "weaned" out of them, I can't be "weaned" off my medication without seeing the effects of the disability.

I do only take it on weekdays for the most part (mainly because tolerance builds and if I take it every day it can start to lose effectiveness), but I will still take it some weekends if I feel I need it.

And I do control the thinking I do, with or without the medication. It doesn't alter who I am, it doesn't change my personality, it doesn't make me "smarter" or "dumber" or anything like that, it just lets me focus. Even my wife can't tell when I do or don't take it, because externally it's that non-obvious.

It's a medication that fixes a problem. The glasses analogy has always felt like the best fitting one for me, as neither I nor someone who has to wear glasses are really truly "dependent" on the medication/device, but without them we won't be as productive members of society. And we wouldn't be happy.

I understand that you mean no harm, but you come off as someone who doesn't really know anything about the subject and are telling people who do to stop helping. I would suggest you go read up on some learning disabilities, go read up on the studies done and the medications used and the solutions there are out there and the effects they have on not only the individual but their friends, their family, their coworkers, their life.

<comment><USER33> I have seen first hand cases of dissent being suppressed by giving the reason that if the person does not adhere to the majority point of view then there is something wrong psychologically even if the majority is completely in the wrong. By giving strong medication I see them suppressed of their thoughts completely to the point that they are always dazed.

This is why I am always concerned about misdiagnoses or being taken advantage of. For a person suffering from some physical disease it is easy to see and measure but in case of psychological disease it is tough. Here I am not talking about some developed country but in third world countries where medical expertise is limited and hence are regularly cheated.

Hope you understand where I am coming from. I am not against anybody taking medication if diagnosed properly and sincerely hope things improve in the medical field that they can be off the medication and lead a normal life.

Just a quick question. How do you fair in labor intensive tasks such as woodworking or metal fabrication etc? Do you fair better in those tasks than coding? The same thing with physical sports. Does it help you to focus?

<comment><USER34> Almost identically in those cases. It feels like the "mind" equivalent of trying to put to magnets together on the same pole.

I'll start, then I'll get distracted or get wrapped up in some small inconsequential detail which feels like it has the pull of a freight train to my attention. It also leads to mostly unfinished projects that i've attempted to do before.

It also happens even during "pastime" stuff like trying to watch a movie or even just hanging out with friends, and if I don't take my medicine for a while, it has actually kept me awake before (yeah, i can't focus on sleeping...)

It's like my mind is going 60 miles an hour but in the opposite direction I want it to go. I can't sit still, I can't just "stop" thinking, and I can't focus on what I want to do.

I get that you might be fearful of medically induced suppression or something, but do a little research before giving your opinion on if people should be taking medication. Giving stimulants to people isn't going to do anything to help with suppressing them. And just because you are fearful of medical suppression, doesn't mean that people should stop taking their antibiotics.

<comment><USER33> My opinion was wrong and I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Richard Branson is dyslexic too as far as I know.

</comment><comment><USER36> I am a programmer with ADHD. I was dyslexic as a child, but grew out of it as far as I can tell.

I have two patents in machine learning, and have been a critical member of multiple "best of the best" teams at a few large software organizations. I am considered a 10x developer.

The negative effects of ADHD are mitigated by medication and techniques you learn with dedication over the course of your professional life. I take Ritalin daily.

I am more creative than my peers. I also have honed skills in graphic design, scientific research, and management. My passion is for building systems that do things that have not been done before. Some projects are user interface focused, some are strictly back-end processing. All have to do with solving a previously unsolved problem. I work mainly in R&D. I am highly paid.

I not good at repetitive (busy) work, so I automate all of that. Automating repetitive work is not repetitive. This is the only remaining negative that I can't shake. I have an immense respect for manual QA testers, that's a job I incapable of doing well.

The biggest differences I've found between myself and coworkers are my capacity for hyper-focus, superior long term memory, and superior spatial thinking capability.

When I set in on something it becomes an obsession. If I am awake, I am working. I can't stop designing/architecting/debugging/evolving, even if I wanted to. I am working while I brush my teeth. I am working while I'm watching a movie. I dream about work. If I am not challenged, I feel like I start to die.

I generally remember anything interesting I read instantly. I'll remember it for years. When I am working through a problem, I have pretty immediate recall of everything related I've read (which I can apply immediately). I read the code of programmers I respect in my free time. I like to memorize documentation as well. My short term memory is garbage.

I can see any working system I've memorized or written in my head, running. I can try changes or new ideas and see their effects without consulting the computer. There is a limit to this, and I write my code to limit the size of any given sub-system to that limit.

My code has a distinct style to it. Some co-workers complain, some love it. No-one can argue with its performance (or my speed in producing it). I write using the entire language, not just the "normal" subset that everyone memorized for technical interviews. I also use a lot of math. A final polish phase to "normalize" code (minimize fringe concepts) is part of my work-flow to avoid consternation from the maintenance team. I want everyone to be happy. Bugs in my code are rare (I am meticulous and bug-paranoid), and I can fix them very quickly. I do not write test cases, but I do write with the debugging interface in mind.

I don't believe ADHD is a disability, I do however believe that individuals with ADHD have to work differently than individuals without. ADHD itself is just a collection of symptoms, and those symptoms are just differences. I am not aware of a chemically ADHD test. Things that are easy for others may be very difficult for those with ADHD. Luckily, things that are very difficult for those without ADHD are sometimes very easy for those with ADHD.

If you have ADHD, it is important to find those difficult things you do well, and design the growth of your career around doing them as often as possible (so others will forgive your growing pain in areas where you are deficient). Anything you're terrible at you'll have to fastidiously practice, or write your own way out of it (make sure that your way is an accepted solution). I keep my ADHD a secret unless specifically asked about it. There are a lot of stigmas attached.

<comment><USER36> *chemical

Edit feature isn't working for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> there are tools for him if he really can't avoid to write that memo; like this spell checker [http://www.ghotit.com/](http://www.ghotit.com/) (I am a contributor to the project)</comment>


Ask HN: How to report bug on Twitter? - <AUTHOR>

I just noticed that i can not change profile picture of my account. how can i approach twitter to report this ? Thanks <comment><USER2> Try here: [https://support.twitter.com/forms/general](https://support.twitter.com/forms/general)</comment>


Lululemon buys at-home exercise startup for US$500M - <AUTHOR> https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/lululemon-buys-at-home-exercise-startup-for-us-500-million-1.5005041 <comment><USER2> I hope this turns out better than the myfitnesspal-Under Armor acquisition. From what I can tell Under Armor just uses Myfitnesspal to give me coupons I don't want.</comment>