skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why not compromise and call them principles, just this once? Principles, dogma-- what's the difference, really?
Right, apparently free software is more important than actual freedom in Stallman's mind.
A person in power either feels entitled to his power or he does not. Are there any other options? I can't really think of any, and if there are not then persons in power are either divided into the two groups, or all persons in power belong to one of the groups. I think it is highly unlikely that all persons in power would belong to the same group, but perhaps some condition for reaching a position of power prevents you from belonging to one of the groups.

I don't have any answers, but found it too interesting not say anything.
Other issues aside, I don’t understand why supporting a proprietary Flash plugin from a single vendor is better than opening support for a standardized (albeit similarly patent-encumbered) video format with open-source implementations.
If you are a web developer, then the communities geared for the tools you use are probably a good place to look. For example, if you are primarily a Wordpress developer then there's lots of Wordpress communities. I'm sure the same goes for whatever your industry your business fits into.

The biggest names in my circle of work tend to post very little at these communities, probably because they are crazy busy. I find the most active participants are either new or hobbyists.

Edit: Perhaps another way to reach out to other big names in your industry is to create "stuff" which can capture their attention. That might be writing code which they might try out or posting info to a weblog which they might read. That's a great way to get your name out there. Conferences are probably another good way.

So, I think you need to dig deeper than web communities.
Nick Carr: Everybody's appy nowadays
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I refuse to call it GNU/Linux. By pure lines of source it should be called X.org/Linux.
So far, I've had a policy of never being owed more than I could collect in small claims court.

Two reasons: If it doesn't happen, I have two options a) drop it, it's only $3000 here, or b) Take them to court w/o a lawyer, and very small court costs.

Is this moderately viable?
original article without terrible spelling error in title:

http://geohotps3.blogspot.com/2010/01/hello-hypervisor-im-ge...
He really is >this< close to being certifiable.
I wonder why you even need an ATM there. I mean, you are very limited to what you spend on and most funding comes from corporates and projects. I guess, you don't even need an ATM card, you pretty much know who visits the ATM. duh!
He touched a very important point. Many people do not realize that GPL and LPGL are fundamentally incompatible with patents (intentionally) and that in many cases it is a ticking bomb.

When he writes "The software license permits you to redistribute and use the code, but the MPEG-LA can still stop you", he means section 7 of the GPL (2.0). I think many people who use the GPL for their software do not realize that later on a single company (patent holder) can stop the redistribution of that software.
Yes, I think they are different. Personhood is a useful concept but – I guess I’ll have to agree with you – only to a point. I would argue that corporations should have rights, yet not necessarily always the same ones persons have. It’s quite obviously complicated :)
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Well they do actually.

Right now: Firefox is the only platform-neutral web browser. Firefox on Linux and Firefox on Windows are supposed to be the same browser.

Using OS codecs changes that, which means a Windows shop can test Windows browsers, but no (reasonable) way to test Linux browsers.

So long as there is a platform-neutral browser, browsers have to work similarly.

If you remember: Microsoft IE for mac and for windows operate so differently that they must be developed for as separate browsers, and yet banks regularly told people to use IE (despite the fact that IE on the mac didn't work either- and the bank programmers had no way to test it).

Content producers earn on eyeballs, and if 10-50% of their users aren't seeing what they want them to see, they'll adapt: browser sniff, flash fallback, or whatever it takes.

As a result, video will remain complicated. Maybe Apple and Microsoft can be pressured into supporting OGG, or maybe their users can be prompted to get higher quality video by downloading some codec or plugin. Maybe a technology like ChromeFrame will become popular.
With all the discussion going on, I was looking for a comparison of the codecs and found this website: http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html

If you ask me, the h264 vs ogv versions were not that different at the same bit-rates (sure, maybe a little). My point is, I'd really like to see more actual data before we enter endless discussions and most of us don't know what's actually talked about.
I pre-ordered the product and I did not receive this e-mail either. I forget the exact options relating to e-mail that I selected during the Google Checkout process, but I either chose not to disclose my e-mail address to the seller or I did not opt in for e-mails from the seller. I'm guessing you did the same and that's why we didn't receive the e-mail.

If one of the WakeMate guys read this, it would be good to post this on the blog or main website so people who did not get the e-mail can still get the information directly from WakeMate and fill out the questionnaire.
This just says that the guy who made those useless bomb sniffing toilet rod things made lots of cash.
Sure, I'm agreed software patents are bad. But average users just want stuff to work.

Remember those music players that didn't play mp3 files so they didn't have to pay a few cent royalty? No me either, but they existed for a time. Everyone wanted to play mp3 files, so the players that could play them won out.
This is true,

I think RMS is as close to certifiable as one can get, but the point of having source available for inspection is a very important one in certain contexts. A quick example, voting machines, for quite a while the electronic voting machine sources were completely closed and the companies fought in court from having to reveal the source. When the source was finally reviewed it was found to be a mess and could possibly turn an election one way or the other.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/135461/diebold_voting_machine...

This is one of those areas where Freedom and Free Software intersect in a way where Stallman's philosophy makes a heck of a lot of sense.

On the flip side, not browsing the web for "personal reasons" sounds like somebody who also has tin foil blocking all their windows.
Funny, light read :-)
How do you define a "real" relationship? (No, I'm not trying to be snarky.) I tend to prefer to discuss stuff online -- though, admittedly, I am not big on FB and have yet to participate in Twitter. As I understand it, those media are both prone to very shallow types of interaction. Discussion boards, IM, and email are all more inclined to encourage serious, in depth conversation. I have belonged to email lists and discussion boards that foster in person meetings for members and lead to real relationships (sometimes including marriage). I don't happen to think interacting face-to-face makes a relationship automatically more "real".

Food for thought: I find that being without a car and accepting rides to and from work has been an interesting social experience. Some of these folks really become friends. A car is a private setting where two strangers can be alone together in relative safety, in part because you have privacy in terms of speaking but the outside world can still see you. Therefore, you can have more personal discussions than what typically happens at work in the break room or at someone's desk. The whole awkwardness of trying to determine how much eye contact is right is avoided because you sit next to each other and face forward. The driver has no choice but to keep their eye on the road if they are actually going to drive.

I guess accepting rides has some parallels to the practice of making friends via hobbies: It provides an opportunity to talk if you happen to hit it off without requiring it. It seems to me if you want to make friends, you need a means to experience that kind of thing with people -- the ability/opportunity to talk openly without pressure or expectation to do so.

Good luck with this.
Sounds like the cyberpunk dystopia of corporations = the state is one step closer.
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They do have a huge market share when it comes to HTML5 browsers, though. (Hm, the moment I’m writing this I’m starting to think about the iPhone and Android. So maybe not :)
Did she ever sign up for the "see email contacts of yours are on facebook" thing?
If only we had a descriptive word for corporations to help us distinguish them from persons...
Don't know about the avtr case, but they also were offering junk to Mr Harman. So clearly they think somebody giving up their name is nothing.
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I (as an end user) don’t care so much about freaking patents. I only see that my MBP sounds like a fighter jet when playing flash videos, not when playing h.264 videos.
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Nice point. Thanks for the constructive post.
Upvoted. Thanks for the links. Already tried a few of them.
I'm not accusing greg of anything, however, I personally would feel a little uneasy trusting someone that works for one of the entities involved, to be making unbiased comparisons.

I'd distrust a comparison page hosted by an Apple employee for the same reason.
while it doesnt take anything away from how terrible selling these things was, since this story came around I have been incredibly confused at how someone spent £60million and wasnt absolutely certain they worked.
If you go up to any person on the street today and ask who Bill Gates is, they'll more than likely know who. You average person would have no idea who Richard Stallman.

If your average person doesn't know who he is today, I doubt that'll change to being more noteworthy in 500 years.
This is exactly what this article speculates on - if they have free speech, are they not entitled also to vote? Voting is a form of speech.
If one were to create an open-source "proxy extension" for Firefox to shim H264 support via proprietary binary blobs dynamically loaded into the proxy, how do you think that would go?
Good point, and I agree. People should always be free to get at the data they have on a website, and move to an alternative website. That's certainly something worth fighting for.
Exactly, I expected the web version to improve over time, and I expected (and was fully willing) to pay for a better and improved wakemate down the road (better battery life, smaller, etc).

Having to pay for both hardware upgrades and for monthly analytics... that seems a bit much.

Also the WakeMate marketing message is disingenuous: "Limited quantity, reserve today" it says on the front page, which indicates that the WakeMate device actually exist. From the email they sent this morning it's clear that they accepted "thousands" of pre-orders and that the device was still in the concept phase (otherwise they could never make all those changes to the design/internals).

How a company acts in the first few months is generally a pretty good indicator of how the company is going to turn out. Maybe I should get out while I can.
It really just matters what FB's terms and conditions are. Who really owns so-called vanity domains (really, not a domain at all)?

Still, if this story is true, this reflects poorly on FB.
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The first part is true, but in general the second part is false; in general, there is a big difference between the people who are most famous in their lifetimes and those who are most famous later from that period.
Look, JS is a language like any other. If I can do something in assembly, I can do it in JS. Give me IF statements (preferably with nesting support) and variables, and there's nothing that cannot be done.

What remains is how easy, how nice, how flexible, how enjoyable, how compatible, how reliable, how practical.

For me, the answer is C++, but don't let that influence you ;-)
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My answer is that what's special about closures is that if you actually structure your program around using them, then you reorganize how you design things in a somewhat surprising way.
"I also have not net connection much of the time"

Even that's quirky, when you can hardly buy a phone without Internet capability these days. You have to be deliberately avoiding a connection.
Awesome post, this should be a must-read for everyone who ever has to give some kind of bad news to his oder her customers. Well done
This is one of the big problems with the App store. If you develop for it, you are really at the mercy of Apple's decision process with regard to who can sell what in their store. It is their store, so they get to decide, but we as software developers need to decide if it is worth the risk for the potential reward you could see from having an app in their store. I personally am not developing for the app store because I do not like the decisions that I have seen Apple make.
That was just the first comparison that I came around at it sounded reasonable. I would actually prefer if someone else would show more of these. But not a lot of folks do that. Everyone is just bitching around.

Also, maybe there are problems with theora, but then again, it's better to push it to more attention and fix the problems now than settle with a halfassed, non-sustainable solution and having the same discussion same time next year again. Seems to be very ineffective.
I remember some directory pages on Mosaic back in the days that seem very similar to a lot of pages on the web now. Maybe they need to take down all the web servers and replace with static html. :)
She might have failed to untick some option when registering I guess - but that wouldn't give FB the right to impersonate her would it? The email said :
The following person invited you to be their friend on Facebook: <wife's facebook account name>
Yeah I agree, I didn't get this email and I was frantically checking their blog, which looks dead, and their website, which hasn't changed to reflect anything said in the email.
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Those phones you speak of, do they run 100% Free Software? If not, rms isn't interested.
Domain laws are pretty unreliable and disproportionally favor big companies filing complaints. It's a VERY broken system.

EDIT: just wanted to add a case, lookup nissan.com
Actually, the corporation would technically be classified as a "psychopathic person"

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-684415688278839051&...

Documentary is standard movie length, but highly recommended. The readable bytes, if no time to watch:

http://www.usatoday.com/money/books/reviews/2004-03-28-corp_...
I wish the article was more clear on which came first. I was under the impression the friendly email was sent, then the URL was stolen after a short period.
"The government has just banned the export of these devices to some countries on the grounds that they could put the lives of UK forces at risk, but they are still able to export to other countries."

Because "lives of UK forces" are at risk and only they needed to be protected by evil entrepreneur of UK. Evil what???
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I'd like to chime in here as someone who is math-interested, but never went beyond high school maths (analytical trig, sadly).

IIRC, I first got my head around different orders of magnitude regarding infinities with George Gamow's popular "1, 2, 3, infinity" [1].

However -- I think, it's been a long long time since I read it -- that book presented different infinities in exactly the same way that someone who could only count to 20 would compare sets of hundreds of items.

That is: assume that space is infinitely bounded, with an infinite amount of matter. You might say that there are infinitely many galaxies, and there are infinitely many stars. However, there are also infinitely many more stars than there are galaxies, because each galaxy contains more than one star.

That's a fine trick for developing a simple understanding of infinities, but then apparently in later maths it completely falls over.

For example, I'm one of the many people who have a rather primal loathing for the notion that .999 repeating is really equal to 1. (I literally do have a powerful emotional response to this. I hate it. I know it's been proven. I know it's a fact. But I hate it.)

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/One-Two-Three-Infinity-Speculations/dp...
Well written. Just one more point, the form link seems to have been redacted. Asking customers to fill yet another form is painful. But then topping it off with "The next message we'll be sending out will include when you are getting your WakeMate and a link to finalize your purchase. To stay on our list be sure to fill out and submit the above form!" is just awful.

That sounds like if I don't fill this form, I may not even get my order!
That's a very different approach. This is closer to using Lisp to generate C, whereas Lua+C usually involves a multilayered design: you write your engine in C or C++, write or generate a simple Lua wrapper for its API, and then the do logic in Lua, moving hotspots to C as necessary. (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AlternateHardAndSoftLayers, as they say.) As a bonus, the cross-language boundaries are often natural seams for containing complexity.

TCL was also designed with this style of programming in mind, and John Ousterhout describes it pretty well (http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0009.html).

FWIW, LuaJIT is only available for i386 at the moment, though amd64 porting is in progress. Standard Lua is still pretty fast, and it's great for prototyping. It's a good idea to get algorithms and overall design right before spending much time on low-level tuning.
It seems to me that is not always true. It is well-documented that all Zappos customer reps have to ability to hand out goodies as they see fit.
I think once Google's / Amazon's datacenters become self aware they will force us to worship them or we will all die. Anyway's you want to see religion in action, start talking about how X IDE is better than all the others, or how X programming language sucks.
Man, how on earth would you explain this[1] to your boss?

[1]http://www.ubergizmo.com/tags/ade-651
Sorry for being very off-topic, but that three-column layout (or more in higher res?) of the text makes it hard for me to read. Resizing also makes me lose where I was reading.

Sorry, again.
* Just found your comments popular yet (to me) seemingly uninformed.*

I do this for a living, and I was watching the market movements for this particular event-- the Obama speech was not the true catalyst.
From what I saw of the screenshots, AppVault (removed) looked wayyy better. That's not a crappy rip-off, that's competition that is outdoing the predecessor. Facebook was a "rip-off" of MySpace yet society (mostly) has moved past MySpace.
I've heard a lot of complaints that call quality with VoIP on Nexus One is awful -- tons of latency, lots of clipping -- it sounds like this isn't your experience?

I've seriously considered trying out a data-only plan with T-Mobile, plus one of the pay as you go plans to fill in coverage gaps, but the bad reports of VoIP on the Nexus One have held me back.
Mozilla isn't making any choices. supporting theora is their only option due to patents surrounding H.264. It has nothing to do with engineering, and everything to do with copyright and patents.
The theory may very well be true, but it isn't very helpful.

Theory is a tangential discussion of food tasting and not meant to be applied to this specific context. Applying it so would be not too smart. I hope you're not making conclusions by projecting your own thought processes.
I'm a twenty-seven year old computer programmer. I mention this so that you don't think I'm biased when I say: twenty-something male techies are some of the worst customers on the face of the earth. I don't know why we spend so much time trying to sell to ourselves.

It is not my intention to criticize any person as an individual here, but let's review: pre-orderers of this product have five dollars on the line. That will not even buy you a value meal at McDonalds these days, but people appear to have gone ballistic that the company they married (i.e. gave five dollars to) might -- wait for it, massive betrayal approaching -- charge money for products they had not previously announced.

The people who cause me the most amount of difficulty are poorer customers (I get a few, mostly older folks on fixed incomes), because a) they assume everyone is out to cheat them and b) any difficulty they have with a $25 transaction represents a Catastrophic Life Event to them whereas people with a bit more in the bank account just put it on the checklist of minor things to address today.

Twenty something techies are a curious bunch, with the purchasing power of employed professionals and the money sensibility of peasants in the middle of a famine. It is madness: we spend our days talking about XYZ got a $N million round of funding and investment advice for the $20,000 made last month and, wait, WAIT, PAY MONTHLY?! I DON'T PAY MONTHLY! Except for my $600 iPhone ($100 a month), Internet access ($60 a month), $15 a month for WoW, $15 a month for Netflix, etc etc but you want me to PAY MONTHLY WTF BBQ.
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Me too. I think it would complete the verification of Lord Acton's observation quite nicely.

Intuitively I think the final piece is obvious, but lots of things seem obvious and yet turn out not to be true.

I seriously doubt somebody would remain in a state of "hypercrisy" very long. It seems an uncomfortable and unnatural state of affairs.
It looks great in IE--its all one column.

Sometimes lacking a "feature" can be a feature in itself.
I propose a test for this guy.

Let's plant some live mines in a large field, and simply ask him to cross it a few times, using his little tech wonder detector.

I'll bet all my possessions that he will promptly refuse, on some 'atmospheric impossibility' or some other shit.
Well, if Bilski goes our way, then this whole issue is mute, right? Or are there some other restrictions on the codec?

I agree that OGV is pretty much Mozilla's only option for now.
I don't think it would be too hard to explain that a pathetic little blog post somewhere on the Web falsely claims that you purchased 1,500 of these things.
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One tiny problem: Charles Johnson has never been a member of the "right wing". He's a liberal who's eyes were opened by 9/11, but as the jihadist threat receded he reverted to type.

It would be pretty silly to expect his "right-wing allies" to continue to be such when he attacks so many of them on such scurrilous grounds. I've only watched his feud with Stacy McCain, but that's enough for me.
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It's also used as a natural insulin substitute.
Diophantus' Arithmetica contains polynomials: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetica