skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you and I are wasting time. You care about making things easier for software users. Software users don't make more software; software authors do.

Actually, I think "users" should pay for software as that's all they're able to contribute, and I don't think that the GPL dual-licensing model users by some enterprise vendors can actually work for most consumer software.

If I produce developer-oriented software that's outside of our core business -- but perhaps enables our core business -- I am very likely to release it under the MIT/BSD license to help aid in wide adoption and external contribution from funding business interests.

If I produce software that is our core business, then I won't MIT/BSD license it. I might GPL it, but only if there's a clear value (ie, leveraging the 'open source' name, aiding in widespread adoption by hobbyists while targeting enterprise users, etc) in doing so.

The business benefits of the GPL are so compelling that I don't think they need my cheerleading.

The benefits are only compelling for --some-- business models. And this doesn't disprove the author's point.

As for other business models, especially around commoditized software, the BSD license often provides the most compelling business benefits as corporates are free to pool resources on code they are free to link against without having to release the entirety of their products under a copyleft license.
The next big thing will start out looking like a toy
A small web scraper to get my gears of war 2 multiplayer stats.
I can clarify this. It's 250 tonnes of raw uranium, from which we get 35 tonnes of 3% enriched uranium, which give one gigawatt-year of electricity in a typical light water reactor.
Put the comments in a blog. Tweet the link.
Top Things to Know About Amazon RDS
Not just source contribution, but also the contribution of new GPL applications. I've written a couple of apps which are licensed under the GPL, not because I necessarily thought it was the best license for me, but simply because I wanted to use a GPL library. Had the library I wanted to use been some other license, my app might have been some other license. But it wasn't and now there is one more GPL app.

Of course there is the other side of the coin where I haven't used a library I really wanted to use because I couldn't GPL my app.
Since the theme is "escape" and the target is a short, casual game, I'm trying to stick to something puzzle- and event-oriented, and drive the game with the player's curiosity rather than with a strong plot. The theme of the puzzles is frame of reference; you have the ability to manipulate alternate copies of the small, cozy environment in which you find yourself, and move things (and yourself) between those copies in useful ways. I'm still experimenting with different objects and mechanics on top of that.

The narrative and setting alludes strongly to William Blake's poem, "The Tyger," but one wouldn't need to know it to enjoy the game, I hope.
Who isn't selling specific software to specific niches? Your choice of license isn't going to make you any more successful with a new word processor.

It's also not true that all successful open-source companies sell to enterprises. Tenable sells Nessus to consultants. Sleepycat sold Berkeley DB to OEMs and developers. Automattic certainly doesn't sell Wordpress to enterprises.
Good advice.

Minimum Viable Product: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product
Beating the Sunk Cost Fallacy
Thanks for the info. If this wasn't going to be tough, I wouldn't have been interested.

> But here is the problem: most indie developers will either be broke, or they will get funding, and if they have funding, they may not need this site.

You're right. Most indie filmmakers are extremely strapped for cash. So I was hoping to charge very little (in fact beat out existing services in terms of price), and depend on volume. However one indie filmmaker I know is cash-strapped, but had funding. They still had to find a means for distribution after production, which is where a lot of the money goes to.

I'm banking on being open to anyone, and any video content, and having an ultra-low if not completely zero barrier to entry.
Poll: How Much Time per Week on Hacking/Programming Related Stuff?
What with all the familial and social obligations that crop up this time of year (let alone work), I've been hard pressed to focus time on my side projects. It's Sunday afternoon, my friends are out and about, and I'm planning to spend the rest of the day on my computer. (It's a tradeoff, but no regrets for the choice I'm making.)

So...how much time do you spend each week on the computer and reading about hacky stuff? Include work time if that's what you do for work.

(Also, please excuse my editorializing on the options below, it's just for fun. Anything more than 80 hours a week is in the same bucket, as far as I'm concerned.)
0-20 Hours - It's an interest I work on once in a while.
21-40 Hours - It's a full time hobby or part time job.
41 - 60 Hours - It's my occupation and a big part of my life.
61 - 80 Hours - I'm swamped with it, but I have other concerns that occupy my time.
81 - 112 Hours - I"m fully immersed and only come up for air when absolutely necessary.
113 - 167 Hours - I'm obsessed. Every waking hour is spent on my passion.
168 Hours - I'm a machine, always on.
I really don't think that's true. The "average" MySQL user has never heard of Monty -- I used MySQL for more than a decade before I heard the name of its inventor.

MySQL's battle for the last decade has mostly been getting enough brand recognition that corporate environments consider it a serious, practical alternative. The brand IS the value of MySQL: it is a promise that the technology has been worked on by serious people, and will continue to be patched and improved for the forseeable future (however realistic that promise turns out to be).

Starting again with a new brand is possible, but by definition it would be a new company which would have to prove its chops and its longevity all over again.

Losing the MySQL brand would be a serious setback to MySQL adoption in corporate environments, and thereby a setback to the amount of money that gets invested in improving it. It is in the interests of all users of MySQL that the brand remain trusted.
Principles for a Black Swan-Proof World (.PDF)
You're introducing a logical non-sequitur. That there is a niche isn't the issue, it's what the niche is.

Enterprise services.

The fact that they're also not actually selling GPL software (ie, an indirect business model), this all doesn't really disprove my point -- or the original authors.
I'm banking on being open to anyone, and any video content, and having an ultra-low if not completely zero barrier to entry

Then you're a video storage service, like YouTube. Video storage services don't care about content, knowing that the more they store the more people will use their service for various long-tail reasons.

You can be video storage, or you can be an internet indie distributor. But I don't think you can be both.
Victorian Infographics
A custom daemon would be great, but meanwhile you could use inotify-tools from the shell:

while inotifywait -r -e modify .
do
git wip save "automatic save"
done
"All Sun got for their $1Bn was the domain name mysql.com..."

Which kind of bothers me because I really like Sun hardware. Every blunder Sun makes pushed SPARC closer to extinction.

I hope Oracle keeps making the Type 7 keyboards with Control where God wanted it to be. That's not too much to ask...
The problem might just be that the market isn't properly pricing intent generation right now, and because of that companies can exploit that price gap and purchase a lot of intent generation advertising relatively cheaply.

Apple is a good example of this. They seem to spend a lot on intent generation advertising: TV ads, major branding campaigns on nytimes.com, prominent billboards, etc. All this works to make people want to buy Apple products.

However, this can only work for products where the advertiser monopolizes a product that is differentiated enough. For example, no company has an incentive to pay for intent generation for travel to Hawaii, because no company can capture all the profits from more people going to Hawaii. Someone after getting the idea to go to Hawaii will be just as likely to purchase from a competitor.

I think over time, as we get better at measuring the impact of intent generation, we will see more and more spend on that kind of advertising and rates will rise as companies that decide to spend on intent generating advertising do better.
Almost correct.

I am in the distribution business, but with a focus on indie films and web series. This means helping them as much as technically possible with features to aide in promotion (without promoting it for them).

So the focus is to bridge the technical gap for indie content producers looking to distribute via the internet.

Marginal quality videos will be the main focus, because it's the group that will likely have immediate need for this service.

>That means you need to come up with a quick way to vet/categorize indy movies in such a way that the maximum number of people will get to see each one.

Not necessarily. I'd like to eventually have a content discovery platform, with content worth discovering, but with marginal quality content, I think the best way to approach this is to first provide them the means to distribute their work, and work up from there. So they will be able to easily obtain a means for distribution that's more targeted for their purposes, with a low barrier to entry.
Well there is really nothing to enforce when you agree to Facebooks TOS and Privacy Policy upon signing up. Facebook has never forced you to sign up.

Excerpt from privacy policy:
Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available, and therefore do not have privacy settings. You can limit the ability of others to find this information on third party search engines through your search privacy settings.
My experience has shown me that it is very difficult to know where the performance bottlenecks are without measurement. You can't measure it if you haven't built it, and if it is not correct, why bother?

I have always taken this to mean what the original "premature optimization" quote is all about. I felt that making the statement a little simpler helps my focus.
I like the minimal UI and the tree view is interesting. I would be interested in learning more about the background of this project but there's no "about" link anywhere.
What if the Falcon engine comes to fruition?
I admit that the crack about mediocre writing was unhelpful. Also, my whole post was too long. This topic gets under my skin.

Beyond that, I would say that many of the things prescriptivists discuss are not grammatical mistakes. They are often disagreements about usage where reasonable people can disagree, but more importantly many of them are literally myths. That is, many of these so-called rules have never had good support in English usage or etymology or linguistics. In many cases, they are just usages that bothered someone in the 19th or 20th century who made a lot of noise. (For some discussion, browse through the hits to this search: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=5 or here: http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/national-gr... )

For what it's worth, I find poor usage and poor grammar very grating as well. My point wasn't that we should celebrate it, but that cranky rants aren't good ways to deal with bad writing or speech. It helps to write well. It helps to recommend good writing. It helps to point out to people why one way of putting something might be more effective than another. But the Andy Rooney style of complaining (which, I'm sorry, I thought the article belonged to) isn't helpful.
Not sure what you're calling spurious or anonymous by way of blog posts

Your first paragraph, which compares apples with oranges (ie 'don't look at that graph, look at this completely different one instead) and your third paragraph, from someone identified as 'Sachi X'.

As for the reporting requirements, if you go look at the actual CDC report (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db23.htm) you'll see that not only do these (minor) differences have much impact on the overall life expectancy statistics - even when corrected for, the US still lags - but the main reason for the skew is the much higher rate of preterm birth in the US - children are much more likely to be born prematurely in the US, with all the medical complications that usually entails.

In short, the CDC report you refer to still concludes you are medically better off being conceived and born in Europe than the US, and does not support your contention that the inferior standing of the US in tables of life expectancy or infant mortality is the result of statistical abuses by scurrilous foreigners.

As for your additional data point on life expectancy, this is interesting and indeed I agree that some of the US mortality differences have more to do with lifestyle than healthcare; however, 'using death avoidance as the sole criterion' conveniently ignores what this thread is about, namely the abysmal cost-benefit ratio of American healthcare.
You're right. And there's no way of stopping iTunes either. Right now you have to sign a contract with iTunes and your content has to cross a quality barrier to get entrance, but Apple could easily remove that.

But I also believe that Apple and Netflix aren't in the business of selling a service to indie filmmakers. They are more in selling a service to the end consumer. And because of this it's in there interest to not have their libraries polluted with 90 minute long low quality videos.

My focus is on providing a service to filmmakers first, and to simply provide a usable platform for the end users who purchase it (hence the DRM-free videos).
There's a fine distinction. You have to be a filmmaker or web series. And the mechanism for enforcing this is that most teenagers who made their first crappy short for fun, who have no idea what they are doing, probably won't be willing to pay, even a small fee, to have their video on our site. Same thing for cat videos and star wars kids.

The gap between free and 1 cent is long and wide, and this will serve as a natural filter blocking youtube style video content.

So I guess I shouldn't have said zero barrier to entry.
Patented: Resolution of abbreviated text in an electronic communications system
Lessons learned launching our first product
Optimizing HTML
Thank you for this detailed writeup. It's one of those gems that you find on HN every now and then that makes you appreciate this community all the more.
That is a pretty decent idea. Maybe it could be expanded to include everything in the hacker's toolbox - development environments, editors, servers, platforms, whatever.

The trick will be figuring out what to measure, and how to measure it in an unbiased fashion.
That commit is for YARV, not MRI
For me, there's a big difference between "being at the computer" and "doing something worthwhile". Even reading HN is at the detriment of doing something productive. It would be a lot lower if we only counted time getting things done.
Being completely bootstrapped we've been focused on revenue since day 1 and our "trick" of turning emails into social profiles is our minimum monetizable product.

The current iteration of Flowtown is nowhere close to our final vision: helping businesses scale caring.

We launched with an MVP that had even less features than today's iteration (product is just 9 weeks old).
sounds like the Pre and iTunes. haha.
Not exactly latest news, is it
Thank you for the love Matt ;-)

Businesses that care about their customers / users / clients are the ones that will win in 2010 and beyond. I want to be apart of this future and it's the basis for why @danmartell and I founded Flowtown.
What you make of twitter depends upon how you seek value in its application. I run over 50 accounts for businesses and the key opportunity for customers isn't in tweeting endless streams of news links, or building huge follower list, or adding a 100 friends a day.

The key value can be found in the @mention box on the right hand side of the interface. If people are making mentions with your name, that appears in your @mention box. Every time that happens that is an invitation for you to "ask a question".

Ask enough questions and in short order you will establish a relationship with a prospect. Ask the right questions and you will convert that prospect to customer status.

If you do this right, and your honest with the account, i.e. your profile, your twit background, and your tweets openly publicize your business status, you will be rewarded with 5-10 new leads a day who are actively interested in what you offer.

That begins by carefully selecting who you follow. Don't follow more people in a day than you can actively interact with in a single day.

Don't ask questions that are leading. Always ask questions that require a reply.

Don't press anyone who isn't engaged in the answers.

Always acknowledge the answers.

Take your time. Be patient. Offer value when asked.

I tell clients to imagine you have entered a coffee shop and every table is taken. Find an empty seat near someone who has a profile you think would make for an interesting conversation.

Be polite. Ask for permission to sit down. Do not talk about yourself. Ask questions. Learn what you can about your table mate. At some point that person is going to become actively interested in who you are. They will visit your profile, look at your tweets, click through to your site. And if you are providing value at any of the touch points they see, your going to convert many to follower status, and some to customer status.

And the best thing about this approach is that you never spammed anyone. The entire cycle began with them talking to you.

The only part of this method i left out is the step where you get them to mention back to you. I will leave that to your imagination. And if your a bright cookie, you will find a quick answer to that.

For those of you who find this methodology tedious, and too hard to sustain, GOOD. That's better for me. The barrier to entry is hard work. Every day.

And a bit of imagination.
VIA has a writable vendor string which they have used to reveal this type of shenanigans in the past.
Then competitors, and complementary businesses, should stop fighting and come together, market together and increase both their chances at making more money.

Example: Hawaiian rental car companies, hotels and airlines serving the region should have a % of their marketing budget pulled together to promote going to Hawaii.
By the way, I found a typo in your terms of service :
1. You must intentionally and maliciously disrupt the reasonable enjoyment of others using the Service.

This is probably not what you wanted.
Your final comments touch upon a couple of peeves of mine. I would insist:

1) That hosts and presenters supply relevant materials enough in advance to allow review, when said are not already available. Over 75% of internal meetings I've attended in the past some years have the agenda delivered via email less than 5 minutes before the meeting start. It may serve the CYA documentation requirement, but little else.

2) That attendees actually prep for the meeting. Sometimes, with a small and/or tight team, people already know the situation and are ready to put their heads together. Much more often, though, many enter the meeting with little or no knowledge of what it's about. (These are the same people who spent e.g. the previous hour schmoozing at each other's cubes.) 75% of the meeting time is spent rehashing what is already known, in an inefficient verbal format. Is it any wonder that those who are actually on top of things hate meetings?

Working on a good and conscientious team, I've been able to hold meetings that sometimes require only a few minutes and that break up as soon as the questions and information at hand are addressed. (Perhaps with a few minutes extra for a bit of humor and socialization, depending on schedules.) Outside of that context, I just stopped going to some meetings, when I could afford to.

Restated briefly, if you can't be bothered to document the topic, why should I go to your meeting and do it myself with a bunch of idle time and intermittent note-taking? And/or sit quietly while others catch up. (Or worse, I find myself repeatedly having to correct and clarify the host.) If/when you need my help badly enough, you'll start being more efficient (and respectful).

Of course, this attitude does not go over so well, politically. Which is probably a good sign to start looking for the next gig.
if your "backup" is on a single disk, it's not a backup
7 Tools To Optimize The Speed of Your Website
I may be more than a little biased, but this post _screams_ Augmented Reality.
And didn't Leopard's builtin version of MRI have dtrace support?
Building the online store component to my sheet music reader for the iPhone: http://www.wonderwarp.com/opus
It was my (perhaps incorrect) understanding that at some point int he 1.9.1 timeline YARV was merged into MRI and became the the MRI trunk?
Side Effects of Simple
Impact of 'iSlate' Could Rival iPhone
Nope. Ruby 1.8.x is basically in only maintenance mode. The latest version of MRI was released in May 2008 (excluding minor patchlevels).
Is vim just for programmers? - vim_use
New software, it is called LangOver version 5.0.
I want to recommend you about my new software, it is called LangOver version 5.0.
You can download it for FREE from here:

http://www.LangOver.com

Please try it, and I will happy if you inform about.

Have you ever tried to type in one language but the result was in another? Annoying, eh?!

Thats because the keyboard layout was in a wrong language,
and you forgot to use "ALT+SHIFT"... NO MORE!

With LangOver 5.0 youll be able to convert your text quickly
between languages. Just click F10 and your text will be fixed!

LangOver is free and Supports ANY language!

thanks,
Oded
http://www.LangOver.com
Then Twitter is essentially an RSS front-end.
Spectacularly useless may be an overstatement. Even if the twitter topics reflect the mass-media-consensus at the current time, they could still serve as an indicator of a topic being repressed in the media while spreading through new media.
I always wanted an overlay with the bus schedule. Or GPS navigation. Or whatever.
I suspect it patches a jumptable at initialisation time based on CPU type, and all the code used by one type of CPU is bunched close together. The unused code probably isn't even paged into physical RAM.
Churches do more than just spread their message, they also spread their money and effort around their community. I suspect that churches would have an expenditure breakdown similar to the "high administration" charities, with low costs of fund raising.
Yes I think you're right that it should help a little in some cases. But the big issue with the lack of value types is memory usage (not in the case of jGit), which isn't solved by escape analysis.
I checked in with someone from CACert at 26C3. As far as he knows, the audit is moving forward and they expect to make it into both.
it is a promise that the technology has been worked on by serious people

All those people have quit Sun and work for Monty now...
Certainly. These are performance optimisations, they must measure results.
I believe that they are planning on implementing this in the near future. With geolocation support rolled out they have the ability to capture that information.