skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you think that is crazy try this hardware related bug that STILL eludes me.

Netgear router -> Linksys range expander -> Netgear switch -> a set of machines.

Problem is that in that set there is a Vista machine that randomly kills the wireless network for some reason. The Linksys connection light turns red and both the router and range expander wireless disappears. Everything has to be powercycled numerous times to get it back up. No other machines (Windows or Linux) do this to the network...

Trying to track down a "problem" across multiple hardware/software vendors is not fun :)

So Im gonna claim the craziest fing bug crown :)
'Ties' helps track down errors from large Rails logs
Correct link: http://measuringmeasures.blogspot.com/2010/01/you-should-was...
You can't see a situation where the JVM can optimize things, inline code, etc at runtime and beat a general C implementation? :/
The Web Designer Wheel
I'm sure Italy has its share of outcasts just as America has its share of well-balanced people.
I'm constantly struck by just how much of a turd the AGPL is -- it's a baldfaced EULA! It takes a huge leap beyond what is enforceable via straightforward copyright law and wallows right into the deep end of clickwrap licenses (the GPLv3 bullshit at least still hinges upon distribution).

With all other FOSS licenses, it's lazy bullshit to use them in the LICENSE field of your installer maker -- I absolutely do not have to accept the terms of the GPL to use your software, it's right there in the text of the license, so don't you dare make me click an 'I accept' checkbox.

With the AGPL it's absolutely necessary to do this, because I don't actually have The freedom to run the program, for any purpose

The RMS of twenty years ago would have never approved of such a thing, that he has lent it the imprimatur of the FSF now is testament to his intellectual bankruptcy.

The AGPL will never ever succeed. It will only ever be used by egotistical idiots and dying companies that wish to sear a scarlet letter into their code -- noone but I may profit directly from this work -- as you still retain copyright by default. Is the AGPL transitive across the network the way the GPL is by linking? It seems to me like either answer would show how poorly considered it is as a license.
They put themselves in a great position for exit all the way from the beginning. Love the slide talking about selling to Intuit to provide Quicken with an "online interface".
I believe multiple "lives" is what makes me happier.

I loved this monologue statement from "The Breakfast Club".
While a bit cute, I feel it is true and meshes with the other quote below from the author of Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk's book on his hometown Portland, "Fugitives and Refugees".

> Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you're crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us...In the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain...an athlete...a basket case...a princess...and a criminal...Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.

> "Everyone in Portland is living a minimum of three lives," says Katherine Dunn, the author of Geek Love. She says, "Everyone has at least three identities."
She's sitting in the window of her apartment in Northwest Portland, rolling cigarettes and smoking them, her long blond hair parted in the middle and tied back. She's wearing black-framed glasses. The radiators clank and a siren goes by, four stories below on Glisan Street.

"They're a grocery store checker, an archaeologist, and a biker guy," she says. 'Or they're a poet, a drag queen, and a bookstore clerk."

In my opinion, observing my sibling's children up close this holiday season - especially the older ones - birth order contributing to assertiveness (my 2-yr old niece saying 'Move!' to tell me to move aside so she can sit next to her Mom - what am I going to do? she's still not in the sentence formation phase. should I chastise her?).. has a lot more to do with life success than high school popularity. Of course, I'm biased.

R.I.P. John Hughes

"Life isn't like college. In fact, it's more like high school" -Anonymous
If you don't know what Balsamiq is you probably haven't been paying attention for the past year or so, or just don't read startup news all that often. Although they're not as well known as 37 signals, anyone that wants to start an internet business should know about them and their model.
Marino and Reiss will present their findings at a conference in San Diego, California, next month, concluding that the new evidence about dolphin intelligence makes it morally repugnant to mistreat them.

It is morally repugnant to mistreat animals regardless of the intelligence of the animal and being a scientist has nothing to do with making such a judgment, since it is not a scientific judgment but an ethical one. Thus, the new-found evidence serves only to dramatize something these scientists want because of their philosophical predispositions, not because of their knowledge as scientists. If the logic suggested in the article were true, the converse might be up for consideration as well (e.g., that we can be cruel to deer because they are so dumb).

Science and advocacy are distinct and should be kept that way. Scientists can be advocates but, when they are, they are not acting as scientists but as everyone else who seeks to further an ethical position they believe to be right.
Some kinds of pedantry may be useful (probably not ever really 'essential' to be pedantic about that word), but linguistic prescriptivism is just tedious. The whole activity depends on a fundamental misunderstanding of language. The schoolmarmish desire to wag your finger at the way someone else speaks or writes is almost never successful and generally just a symptom cranky nostalgia and a false sense of superiority.

There are perfectly good reasons to draw artificial lines around types of language use (formal critical or analytic writing, an email to a friend, a tweet, a code comment). And in such a context, we can make useful recommendations. Good writing teachers will qualify their advice exactly this way. That is, "In formal writing, don't use 'ain't'" rather than "There is no such word as 'ain't'." But blathering on about what is or is not good language without qualification is a colossal waste of time and energy.

The funny thing to me is that most of the people who are really into this sort of thing are such mediocre writers. I suspect it's because they have very limited imaginations.

(Final edit: the bit at the end about 'hopefully' is a complete myth, and it's very well known that it's a myth. People who complain about 'hopefully' or split infinitives in English pretty much prove that they are just cranks. A citation, pretty much picked at random: http://writingguide.geneseo.edu/?pg=topics/myths.html#hopefu...)
I think you are being downvoted for being so rude and straight but I think you make the point here.
Tarsnap is shooting at the wrong target: everything about it seems to be designed to appeal geeks: the webpage style, the humor (the picodollars thing), the code to be compiled (!). Basically tarsnap is targeting the people that will never pay for this service. I am a geeky enough to recognize myself as possible target and therefore geeky enough to setup the same thing using 10 minutes of bash, truecrypt and S3 for half the prize.
The #1 result on Google for "mockups"—that is impressive!

They've truly found a great niche and carved it out themselves.
Both Blackduck and Gartner Group are pushing a doomsday scenario of GPLv3 and the AGPL seeing surging use, respectively.

The patent / IP language in the GPLv3 still scares a lot of larger companies, my employer included. It's in Blackduck's commercial interest to present information in a way that exaggerates the prominence of that family of licenses. Thus, the chart is of the number of projects released under that license, and does not take into account the maturity or market penetration of a project. For instance, a new entry on Sourceforge with nothing but a README in its repo would be included in Blackduck's count.

That's not to say Blackduck itself is all bad, mind you. I've sat through a few Continuing Legal Education webinars that they've hosted, and they've all been quite objective and accurate. In each case, they brought in fairly prominent figures from the Open Source law space (Karen Copenhaver, Mark Radcliffe, etc) for the sessions.
No. Look, it's right there in the preamble. First two sentences...
By that logic Chrome is easier to use than Safari because in full screen mode on Chrome the tabs are at the top of the screen. In Safari they are below the address bar and the bookmark toolbar.
Yeah, really this is NOT anything new. Direct Marketing service companies have been providing this for years. Back in the mid 1990s we were sending one such company reels of 1/2" tape with names and addresses, and getting back reports of age/income etc. distribution.
Why "trending topics" are so spectacularly useless
You are right about the main point.

When I first started looking into this topic, I thought it was that simple. "You just have to tell the world about your work," I told myself.

Then my friend Ross laid the smack down on me: http://measuringmeasures.blogspot.com/2009/12/build-brands-w...

If you read through Hamming's statements, and my reflections on them, you can see that it is not as simple as just promoting - it is specific recipes about how to do so effectively, and how to avoid certain mistakes.
Fx15 Orjinal
"Die Gedanken Sind Frei": Free Software and the Struggle for Free Thought
The most important thing I take away from this: Peldi's success is very inspiring for anybody intending to do their own thing
How we handle real time alerting on large server log datasets
excellent talk on the philosophy and background of the GPL
Being Italian myself, I'd like to commend you guys for your job: this kind of entrepreneurship is really rare in Italy and it's great you are contributing with such a fantastic example.

I have just read on your blog < http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2008/10/14/personal-whats-your-... > how it all started and I found it so inspirational (maybe just because I am in a similar situation right now?!)

Can I ask you if you ever regretted moving back to Italy? It seems to me you managed to separate the good aspects of life in Italy (Bologna and the family) with the bad ones (taxes and servers, i suppose, are in the US).
Tarsnap does block-based differentials, in addition to its fancy crypto footwork. You can't set that up with bash, truecrypt, and S3.
Why Save MySQL Now?
I wouldn't call this a technical "hassle", and I'm not sure what organizational issues would arise here.

Merging.

Hiding your development branches on a shared codebase often incurs either communication overhead, or the costs of lack of communication.

If you're using the limitations of your VCS to manage team communication then you have bigger problems. The obvious analog to the "problem" you mention is people not checking in code because it's not ready yet. Maybe you think this is better because you only want deployable software in your main branch, but for large features that makes the history opaque and leaves your developer effectively without any of the benefits of version control while they are working on the large feature.

Frankly, a lot of the arguments against DVCS smack of the same sort of ignorance that the Java zealots were leveraging against Ruby back when Rails started picking up steam in 2005/2006. There's this fear that powerful features will lead to chaos and are in effect too powerful to be used safely. And the reality is that yes, in environments truly incompetent programmers work, there's definitely a strong argument to be made for limiting the damage they can do. But I think the past few years have borne out the fact that mediocre and merely-competent programmers can make strong use of these tools without leading to disaster.
As far as I can tell this is the "trick" that is the basis for Flowtown's business.

http://www.flowtown.com/
This seems obviously correct. But how do we really measure this? More importantly, how do we value it? What if I click through a link to the book, having heard about it before, and then hear from a friend about the book. It seems like the same problem that valuating billboard traffic - its above the line at some level.
Ciao crocowhile, we have not regretted moving back to Italy at all so far. Our servers are in the US, taxes are split in both places. HTH!
Why Twitter Will Endure
The GPL was invented to leverage network effects to win in the market place, ensuring an exceptionally high entry barrier to non-GPL market entrants (a natural monopoly) should the GPL be successful in this goal.

It hasn't won in the market place -- and it won't -- primarily due to the fact that the coupling between funding and licensing is so indirect -- it's very difficult to earn a high margin on writing GPL licensed code, and most revenue models require an indirect and complex approach to earning money from the software without charging directly for the software itself.

(Yes, you can charge for GPL software. No, that's not a sustainable business model. No, RedHat is not a counter-example. RedHat charges for support and their trademarks, not the software itself, and in doing so appeals to a very specific niche enterprise market.)
Correct version already posted at: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1028536
My reading was that he was presenting the GPL as an inherently flawed dream unable to survive in the reality of the economic marketplace. In succeeding in market adoption, the proliferation of the GPL actually leads to its own failure due to its knocking the legs out of most of the higher-margin business models required to fund the R&D necessary to produce software.

That might also be my own bias showing.
Using Thunderbird 3 for Todo Lists
Mockups is more than just an app that does mockups. It's integrated with other very important systems.

Smart partnerships and good networking are far more important than a pretty product. (When it comes to revenue)
That is startup-as-self-help wishful thinking.
And, ironically, I'm not sure which I'm more paranoid about: Having other people read my backups, or accidentally screwing up my encryption protocol and being unable to recover my backups.

My worst nightmare is securely encrypting everything with a single key and than somehow losing that key to a fire, a thief, a tragic laundry incident, or a filing error (oops, I changed keys and accidentally shredded the new one instead of the old one! Oops, I put the paper with the key in this bag but then I forgot about it for a week, and cleaned out the bag, and the piece of paper got picked up by the office cleaning staff!)

I wish I could afford to use nothing but the Linus Torvalds approach to backups: Upload everything to the cloud in plain text and try to convince people to mirror it.
Why not have a daemon track for file state changes instead of having every editor run the git wip command? That would be much more general and probably better for most projects.

Maybe I'll make such a daemon...
Evaluating Tools for Developing with SOAP in Python
You posted the Tarsnap redesign 111 days ago, here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=820705

As far as I can tell you didn't incorporate a single piece of advice you received in that thread. I'd print out patio11's comment and staple it above my desk.

The homepage still looks like the website for any random, academic OSS project. It doesn't say "hardcore," it says amateur, and there's no way I'm trusting you with my money, let alone my sensitive data.

I just don't understand what that homepage is designed to sell, and why you're so insistent on keeping the "minimalist aesthetic," the crazy pricing, and the walls of text. Is it for your sake, or for your customers?

If the former, I think I know why Balsamiq has higher sales.

For example, imagine I'm a potential enterprise client who, for compliance reasons, needs exactly what you're offering. How much do you think I'd be willing to spend? Does your site even let me spend that much?

You have a beautiful piece of technology. My background is in mathematics so I really appreciate the brilliance that went into building something as comprehensive and innovative as tarsnap.

But that is the first step of 10. The other 9 steps are about marketing and sales, and Balsamiq is better at that than you are.

EDIT: An illustration of your distribution strategy vs. Balsamiq's.

http://www.google.com/search?q=secure+online+backups
http://www.google.com/search?q=mockups
Why we should all get excited for an Apple tablet
Yes, it is. See the point about data. It sounds to me like if you have an opinion about something drawn from common sense or intuition, it's necessarily shunned because you cannot point to some user statistics to back it up.

This thinking in general is a decent idea, but Google I think goes too far -- my data for this opinion is the "utility" feel of the products they create, as you said.

They're useful, but there's no free lunch: this methodology has its own set of tradeoffs. I thought I could be brief in explaining this thought but I guess not considering the downvotes.
Interesting list and some of those look dead on...but no way Android gets as much traction as people thing.. I think Apple stays dominant.
Not sure if he'd thought it through that far, but it seems like a pretty good and calculated risk that's paying off. The fact that he is as open as he is (though hopefully he knows better than to report numbers that appear worse to the IRS), I think makes his customers want him to succeed that much more.

Broadly, it's a tool that enables others to build their own sites but also their own businesses (and I think entrepreneurs like supporting each other as it helps prove that the rewards do indeed exist). It lets users share, in a sense, in the success to be associated with a product they've used while also being inspired.

Of course, there can be a thin line between sharing and bragging/offending his user base, but I think he treads it quite well.
My previous corporate employer engaged in many charitable activities.
I guess their revenue would be in pico dollars as well if you had to download, compile, configura and install the balsamiq software as well.
I think that $25 for posting a link one time is a reasonable rate.
Timberland boots discount, mens timberland boots, timberland 6 inch boots
The intent is to require source contribution downstream.

Any encouraging of upstream communication comes from the difficulty of keeping up with a fork and the knowledge that most code is a liability not an asset. The GPL only pushes you that way indirectly.
The RMS of twenty years ago would have never approved of such a thing, that he has lent it the imprimatur of the FSF now is testament to his intellectual bankruptcy.

I doubt he approves now. I've not been able to find a single essay or even email from him regarding the AGPL, which is interesting considering his standard evangelism regarding other licenses. And he regards SaaS as non-free, regardless of whether the source is available.

Is the AGPL transitive across the network the way the GPL is by linking?

There's no legal precedent (that I know of) for the GPL being transitive across dynamic linking, and if it is, that opens a number of legal problems when linking with Free implementations of proprietary APIs. Static linking is, of course, still covered under standard copyright.

From my non-lawyer reading of the AGPL, it does transit between processes and systems because it covers the output of the application.
The thinking in this article is heading in the right direction; it's not what you wear but how you look early on that determines your popularity.

This is already known to some extent. For example, PUAs deliberately wear uncool clothing as a kind of peacock's tail. ("I'm so popular I can dress weird and still be loved by everyone.")

However, it's not quite all the way there. It's who you are that determines how popular you are. Your character. Note that this will also affect your appearance -- not just your choice of clothes, but your physical appearance. People who are angry or upset all the time will show that on their faces. It is a drain on their health. Over time this has an uglifying effect, especially over the growth years.

Appearance, intellect, riches, gifts, favours you perform, even glamour -- who you are trumps all these when it comes to how likeable you are.

People bully other people by trying to get a 'rise' out of them. They try to provoke a negative emotional response. This is only possible if the target feels ashamed of himself in some way. Nerds do feel ashamed of themselves.

This is why Sheldon Cooper might just be a role model for nerds. He is not ashamed of himself. He values intellectual accomplishment over popularity and sex.

Sheldon aside, however: character is not fixed, so popularity can never be fixed.
I could imagine that this might be helpful to convince a boss or a colleague that git is not some obscure hacker tool ("Look, even NASA uses it").
Perhaps, but then the value of that link is driven down by the fact that anyone can post it, and that it's no special resource that you have. The value is based on how easy it is to get 500 clicks, not on the potential of those 500 clicks.

Hey I could refer someone to popular store, but if they're popular eventually someone else would come by and refer them if I don't. The store's ability to monetize the customer is not largely dependent on my specific referral. Perhaps that conversion at that specific time was, but converting the customer is a commodity in general.
I want a netflix recommendation system, but for friends. I can communicate with anybody on earth, but I only know a handful of people in the immediate vicinity.
where are you located?
'Everybody' in your sentence actually means 'computer programmers/tech savvy people/criminals'.

Considering the overwhelming, and increasing, importance of information technology in basically every aspect of our lives, I feel less sympathy every year for people who are not "tech savvy". Now sure, cue calls of arrogant elitism from the privileged classes, etc. But tell me, where does it end? At what point do we say that people should learn the basics about the things they use every day, and that might harm them?

We teach kids that electricity is something to be careful about. We require drivers to pass tests. And yet the internet is, or soon will be, the single most important thing on earth and yet I know people who could not tell you what HTTP or DNS stands for or where "internet" even comes from. We need to start teaching this shit in schools. It is becoming basic required knowledge to function in modern society and should form part of standardised education. Ignorance is not a defence in law, why should it be here?
If I look at how I try to target these keys (on my MacBook Pro), I hit the top ridge of the keyboard, and then hit the top of the function key. The vertical size of these keys doesn't matter much then.

Same for the loose keyboard, I hit the edge of the keyboard, and then move down.
Michigan. Ideally I'd like to get in a program like y combinator or techstars and relocate, but unless that happens it'll probably be a telecommute initially.
A commenter says that no fork will be able to offer a dual license, and that a fork is only for the GPL portion of the license. Even so, what's the big deal there? Any sizable company can offer to sell a support contract for an open source license of the DB. What am I missing here?