skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People get involved in free software for all kinds of reasons. I personally prefer the MIT license philosophy (pure freedom) over the GPL philsophy (restricted freedom)... the GPL has done better than the BSD license b/c it's more free, and over time the MIT license will likely triumph, at least to the extent that linux itself being GPL doesn't hinder progress too much.

It's a bit ironic that the whole point of the GPL is to control how others use the code!

My point is simply that Ubuntu is not an ideological undertaking, it's a business. Thus, it should have a simple screen that loads on the first boot that lets a new user avoid ending up with a crippled system, when perfectly good (free as in beer) software exists.

This will only help the Free Software world, since more people using Linux means more support for existing open source code and for new projects.

The real problem with closed source is that it fails to harness the willing contributors who would fix bugs, etc. Even OpenLaszlo uses the adobe runtime... so by shipping Ubuntu w/o a working swf runtime installed, Ubuntu's maintainers are harming at least one vibrant open source project.
These numbers are meaningless. These aren't startup failure rates, but failure rates for all small businesses-- i.e. shoe stores, restaurants, etc.
The He Hormone - Interesting analysis on the changes caused by testosterone.
Preference, yes. Adamant "OSS-only" stance is harder to justify, IMO. And example, I do a lot of technical drawings as part of my work. There is Visio for Windows (don't use Windows, so that is not an option), or OmniGraffle for Mac (which I use almost daily and gladly paid for). What is "the" OSS technical drawing package that runs on linux or OSX, is moderately robust (I don't need "power user" app, but something stable and logical), and has a decent set of icons available? I haven't found the equivalent app, but if you know of something I'd love to give it a try.

Another one is that I do a fair bit of photography and have been known to sell a picture or two from time to time. I use Aperature and Photoshop a lot. I have not found an OSS app with the same capabilities as either of these apps to support .RAW formats, elegant workflows, manage extremely large image caches (thousands of 13MP images and derivatives, etc.). The Gimp is powerful, but it is cumbersome (and I've spent many hours attempting to learn it), and seems (to me) to lag Photoshop by quite a bit. Also it is much harder to build on the work of others (part of the OSS spirit) with The Gimp because while many custom brushes, plugins and tutorials exist for Photoshop, they are fewer and farther between for The Gimp.
A big part of Microsoft's R&D is paying people like Erik Meijer to not work for someone Microsoft is competing with.
The problem I have with those del.icio.us type urls is that I have a really hard time remembering where the dots go.

Way back when del.icio.us was just getting popular, someone told me about it. When I got home, I tried "delicio.us", "delicious.com", "de.licio.us", etc. Had to resort to googling to find the place.

Also, you have "con.nect.us", but who has "connect.us"? I think they'll be getting a lot of your traffic...
Maybe the idea of messing with anything interesting is unthinkable. If you were very advanced the only thing interesting would be stuff that originated elsewhere (and mathematics). The thought of "contaminating" it would be immoral. Even terraforming a lifeless planet or moon would seem like a waste as you would be destroying information.
I've tried Django and web.py in the past, and given up with both. web2py works, is nicely implemented and the documentation is starting to take shape. Good support on the mailing list too.
It depends on your definition of "mundane". You could start a consulting company, take whatever software jobs pay best and make your business grow to the point that it could be attractive to a buyer. This may be boring, but it's easier than creating the next Facebook.

It's also possible to have a mixed model, which is working very well for us. We do some consulting work but only pick clients that are interesting in terms of improving our products or doing work we like. This allows us to be profitable and work on our own interesting stuff without the pressure of concerned investors.
I use Consolas, and it's been my favorite until now.

The thing is, Consolas is beautiful.. but not as functional as Liberation Mono. It's a very "plain" font, but for screenful after screenful of code, fancy isn't what I need.

Liberation Mono isn't going to win any beauty awards, the MS typography team did a great job with their Vista fonts... But I think Liberation Mono is the ideal "productivity" font for hard-core coders.
Not necessarily....hire great team, give them some stock then go on holiday

update - just to be more explicit, the founders of a business need not be involved in its future to make it successful.
The concept of living in emacs makes more sense when you think of it as an operating environment in its own right, and not just another application. You can think of emacs as a framework (that happens to be awesome for manipulating text by hand, and at least adequate at doing it in an automated manner) upon which a wide variety of tools, or, if you will, apps, have been built.

The tools vary considerably in size and in how well they integrate with each other. Often the tools can be swapped in and out according to your preferences or needs: different in implementation but quite similar in spirit to the do one thing and do it well aspect of the Unix philosophy.
Test Driven Development by Kent Beck is a good book to get you started.
Flash as a game development platform ("Getting Real" philosophy applied to casual gaming)
Technology vs. Business. Think Xerox copier: the breakthrough that made money wasn't the dry copy process, it was charging by the copy and not for the machine. Adsense was the business breakthrough, not PageRank.
I haven't really taken the time to analyse that. Most of my work is academic and I fear I may not have enough economics background. I do have an early idea that it sounds more like a myth than a fact.

Let's say a company wants to outsource the development of some software they need. They go ahead and contract your company. You develop it and sell it to them for a certain price. Even if the license is free it's not very likely that they will redistribute it for other companies, and even if they do, it probably won't fit their needs just right. OTOH, they will be able to call other companies (other than yours) to maintain your software. So they have that extra freedom. And it doesn't really hurt business because, if you do a better job maintaining your software than other people, chances are your client won't switch.

There's also the case of the end desktop user. That's probably harder territory for earning money with free software. But I've never seen some company selling their software but giving the user a package with the GPL-licensed code. Sure, after a while there would be lots of other non-official sites to download the program from, but doesn't that already happen with all the proprietary softwares nowadays? And it's not like anti-piracy laws are doing any good against it. This way people may do their own derivative work, for which they might even charge just like you. Now you'll have competition, so things get more interesting and you have to make better stuff. Why can't that work?

You can still charge for constant patches you deliver (though they are all GPL'd). If it's an online game, you might charge for your server, and so on. A big part of software nowadays seem to be services, anyway.

Say google opens the source for their search engine. Why would you turn to a different site other than google.com? It would make great research environment, nonetheless. Even google could gain from it.

So, what I'm saying is that I don't see a reason why people can't earn money while keeping their software free. Even though things might get a little different from what they are today. That's good, though, because today is far from perfect. And I think free software is a move in the right direction.
Uh... could it be that the author copied this comment and pasted it into the article when he realized that the word "deck" isn't commonplace? If I see him, I will be sure to ask him which came first, the comment or the update to the article.
How do I know what the best way to write software is?
New Type of Early Stage Investment Firm
Good read. Comments are interesting as well. Since I started with Python and then switched to Perl, I guess this means I'll have to learn Haskell now. BTW when I made the switch I noticed immediately that I found Perl far more 'comfortable' then Python. I later came to the conclusion that there was a relationship kind of thing; if you liked/loved 'C' then you would feel the same about Perl. If you liked/loved 'C++' then you would feel the same about Python. Absolutely no evidence beyond the intuitive here just something that came to me...
IMO the article is worse than "the basics of presentations," actually doesn't say anything about how to present, it merely explains that it is a skill worth improving.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide whether an article that spends half of its time explaining why presentations and the other half explaining how to present is better or worse than an article that tries to make one point succinctly and stops.
The Rocky Fallacy
very helpful. excellent comment.
DejaVu Sans Mono for me.
Facebook game development
hi...

trying to figure out how to learn how to develop a couple of test facebook games/apps to see what this is all about...

any pointers/tutors/gurus are greatly appreciated!! looking for a-z pointers/information.

-bruce

ps... if this is the wrong place to post, my bad, and my apologies!!
I've found that the specialized tools philosophy to be effective when building a, well a toolkit. Toolkits, if done well, are extensible and interoperable in ways that no 'integrated' system can be. However, There is a certain class of problem that doesn't really lend itself to the toolkit approach. This is the interface problem.

Vim is an awesome text editor, it is streamlined in a way most editors could only dream of. It's a very good text editor. Python is a very good language. One of it's nice features is that it comes with a REPL, so I can program in it interactively. Using a third program Screen, I run both side-by-side and pipe content between them. This is the toolkit at work, and it works very well.

However, there is a slight problem here. Each of these programs has a different interface design. Each has a separate key-binding scheme and different schemes collide. You have to learn three different interfaces and learn them well, to do this effectively. It would be nice if there was a program, similar to screen, that would stand between you and the editor and interpretor and allow you rebind and customize your keys and view ports so that they don't collide and are consistent. This program is emacs. It is the universal interface, a more flexible bash than bash, and people stay in it all day, not because they don't use toolkits, but because they prefer to use it to interface with toolkits rather than bash or some ill-conceived X monstrosity.

Emacs doesn't replace cvs/git, ls, grep, awk, gdb, gcc, python, rbi, cron... It mostly just provides a very powerful scriptable interface to all of them.
If he feels so bitter about open source, he should stop contributing to it. I am up for creating a donation fund to buy him a license of Vista Ultimate Edition.
If hunter-gatherers had such great lives, you have to ask why they took up agriculture. Presumably it made their lives better or they wouldn't have done it.

I think one problem with pre-agricultural life was that it was so unpredictable. You had plenty of food, until you didn't.

Another downside was what hunter-gatherers had to do to their parents when they got too old to travel, and to children born too close together.
Slides can help:

- Add structure in a visual way.

- Provide graphics to illustrate your points (including code).

...and really that's about it. I keep my slides to one graphic or max five words, plus a little flow chart of progress through the presentation along the bottom. Depending on what I am talking about I might use as many as 2 slides a minute, but usually one every 2-3 minutes.

This is the same for monthly reporting (twenty graphs, with a page number on each) through to conference speaking (scripted and learned, lots of pictures, little navigation helper on each page).
Charles Pellegrino/George Zebrowski covers this in _The Killing Star_ (1995). They reason as follows:

1. Any species will place its own survival before that of a different species.
2. Any species that has made it to the top on its planet of origin will be
intelligent, alert, aggressive, and ruthless when necessary.
3. They will assume that the first two rules apply to us.

So any starfaring species might well destroy another starfaring species -- immediately. In _The Killing Star_ the aliens do so at the first opportunity with high-powered relativistic bombardment. The power that they use dwarfs that generated by asteroid impacts and past mass extictions. They blanket the entire hemisphere of planets with relativistic projectiles! The earth is taken out entirely in just two shots.

http://sites.inka.de/mips/reviews/TheKillingStar.html
SQLAlchemy is better than the web2py ORM in dealing with legacy databases. web2py has restrictions in this case. But the web2py ORM is much better integrated with the rest of the framework than SQLAlchemy is integrated with, for example, Pylons or TurboGears. If you do not use the entire web2py framework you are better off with SQLAlchemy. If you do use web2py, you are better off with its own ORM. Here are some preliminary benchmarks (take them with grain of salt)
http://mdp.cti.depaul.edu/AlterEgo/default/show/76
I used this:

http://developers.facebook.com/

That should be pretty much all you need.
The biggest enemy of Facebook
Itself
Me too. I've tried Liberation, but find it a bit smooshed, so I have to have a slightly bigger type to find it as readable (so, while it seems like more code would fit on a screen than DejaVu I end up with slightly less because I need it to be 11 point instead of 10).
Lack of usability for novices and intermediate users should not be considered a bug unless ease of use for novices and intermediate users was a planned or expected function of the software. If an author writes software for experts, one shouldn't expect the software to cater to the needs of novices.

Usability tweaks to ease use for a class of user should be feature requests. So a hypothetical developer of open source software has to choose between spending her time developing software features that have no fundamental use to her, or spending it developing features that are exciting, interesting, or are otherwise fulfilling.
Really? I thought it pointed out the survival rates for businesses started in 1992, no?

And while the sample set probably includes very few (if any) software-based tech companies, I think there are more similarities than differences between the struggles encountered by two kids starting a tech company and two kids opening up a skateboard shop - bad hires, cash flow problems, finding customers, etc.

What am I not seeing?
The proteus effect: Changing the appearance of your online avatar can change your real-life behavior
I got fu2o.com and dr2o.com a few months ago - I'm not using either and have too many projects so if you want them email me
This is obviously old since it doesn't cover Flash 9, Flex, and AIR, but still interesting.
Another Great Presentation by Giles Bowkett at Goruco 08
Interesting...but problematic.

It sounds like the author would like some tool to help him find old friends he can use to further his (or his current friends) career. Personally, I wouldn't want my old friends contacting me just because they have a killer idea for a website and want me to develop it for them, give them money for it, introduce them to pg or other investors, or help them unload the truck when they move to the valley.

I'm always happy to hear from old friends, but if it's just to further their career in a field where they've failed on their own, I'm not seeing how that provides me any value--actually it's a very serious negative value. Why would I want to be on Facebook at all, if they made it easy for anybody I've ever known to know that I might be able to help them with something? I don't mind helping folks, and offering advice, etc. But, seriously, if an old friend I haven't talked to in five or ten years writes me out of the blue to ask if I can hook them up with investors, I'm really not all that interested in reconnecting with that person.
the VMs for Mac are better, and support hardware rendering. You can play games in the VMs on a Mac, but you can not do the same in virtual box. Also the 2-4 times that I tried to use Virtual Box, it failed on me, where VM Workstation worked. VM workstation, however does not support hardware layers yet in Linux. Right now, CS3, and Supreme Commander are what are holding me up the most with linux.
Case-sensitivity was a cruel joke.
I have a sci-fi inspired theory that as a civilization advances, it modifies itself such that it's mental processing speed and speed of communication become faster. At a certain point, species at other speeds have less to offer and communicating would be impractical as emitting a signal at our speed would involve what would seem like eons of effort to them. Due to the speed discrepancies, they'd mainly prefer talking to themselves.

One way or another, the "sends radio waves into space hoping for contact" phase is probably very short. The possibilities for what phases come next are not all bad, but whatever the "usual" is, it probably doesn't involve sending radio waves out anymore. It's possible the next step is to evolve into something that wouldn't like talking to us very much. Maybe that's not bad.
>> after taking several hours just to get onboard wifi working (xps m1330)

I've got an xps m1330 and it's run Gutsy and now Hardy without any issues with the Wifi.

I've got the Intel 3945ABG card in there.

I had the N card in for a while and couldn't ever get it to work well with Gutsy.
The problem is that Paint.NET isn't as powerful as GIMP in some areas.

I've used Paint.NET pretty heavily over the last 6 months (I use it when I don't want to wait for Photoshop to load) and while it's good for casual use, it is no photoshop/gimp/paintshop pro replacement.
"iPod: contracted."

The physical manufacturing, yeah, but I'm pretty sure the hardware designers are Apple employees.

"iTunes: bought."

The basis for it was purchased, yes. It was nothing like it is now.

The thing with Apple is that they tend to take germs of ideas and see them through to full realization. Mac OS, you could say, was just a clone of the OS that ran the Xerox Star. But the Star's OS was crude compared to the Mac's (even in the earliest versions).
Meet the New Imac
Social Marketing: How to Attract Viewers to Your Live Show
well flex = a flash widget and javascript is just output as part of the template/html.

Are you talking javascript <-> flex, flex <-> HttpService in django and/or django with ajax?

Frankly I find ajax/flex/flash with django to be easier than asp.net webforms since you just setup a route (REST-like if you want) and then "post" to it and return some data and use it in javascript.

In ASP.NET it's not all that hard, but I just have to remove any master pages and remember to clear out the .aspx page contents if I'm not returning HTML.

I really don't see how it's any different than any other ajax + some server technology, so if you're used to ajax <-> php, then ajax <-> django is no problem.
The 33 Biggest Corporate Implosions. Ever.
If you drink the network-effect kool-aid, then 'second best' is usually the same thing as 'worthless' ... although I think the parallel existence of things like Facebook and Myspace (and AIM/yahoo chat/MSN chat/jabber) are proof that this kool-aid is probably bullshit.

As for .NET, the fact that most startups don't choose it should probably send a pretty strong signal to Microsoft that there is something wrong with it. On the other hand, the .NET team could simply be happy targeting "enterprise webapps" (non-startups), in which case there is nothing wrong with .NET, and something wrong with their acquisition criteria.

So basically, if Microsoft really wanted to pour that $44 billion into buying every up-and-comer, they need to pay attention to the team, and not the implementation, and then back that up by not forcing everything it buys to be rewritten in some Microsoft-sanctioned technology.

That is why the Yahoo acquisition has never made sense to me. Either Microsoft is going to spend inordinate amounts of time converting Yahoo's LAMP stack to it's own ecosystem (and fall way behind Google/ebay), or they are going to finally run a LAMP stack themselves, which seems to undermine the .NET ecosystem (not eating their own dogfood, etc).

Of course, they could fix this problem if they gave up trying to create a parallel, all-Microsoft stack and made their stuff play nice with everything else out there on the wild wild web (with less effort wasted on duplicating existing open technologies).

But that would require Microsoft to make the transition to providing a service (support/training/_ahem_ ad placement/etc) rather than a product (windows/office). When the product simply becomes a means to get people to pay for your service, suddenly giving the product away and making it play well with others is a great idea.

When Google was spinning out new apps every week a few years ago, everyone accused them of just running a lot of loss leaders to feed traffic to adwords. Well of course that is what they were doing. The fallacy was thinking that the apps were supposed to be individually profitable. In reality they are all just 'products' that get people to pay for the 'service' (ad placement). Of course they are going to provide all these products for free. You don't charge people for business cards do you?

Microsoft is trying to do this I think with their subscription model stuff. The problem is that they just charge too much, so there is still an incentive to get around paying. It's like high taxes provide an incentive to find a loophole, whereas low taxes are just easier to pay than avoid. If they gave away Windows and just charged some low amount for automatic updates and remote assistance, they'd probably have a workable business model there. Whether it'd be as profitable as their current model is another consideration.

Anyway, I'm significantly off topic, so I'll rein it in. Wasn't expecting my train of thought on this to run on so long. In summary, I think Microsoft is hosed unless they open up their ecosystem and play nice, and unless they find a new way to give away products and charge for services.
Nothing left. It's the end of the internet. In a few years every person and machine on earth will have a couple of web pages. A public one for professional use and a private one for friends and family only.

We'll have to address by content, not by name. Search engines are the future, baby!
Seconded. They are the best example of how to do customer support right I've ever met. I love going to Daniel's page on Disqus and seeing all the threads he's active on, it's really inspiring.
When i installed 7.10 on my laptop with a geforce go7700, the nvidia drivers worked right away. If I remember rightly, Ubuntu told me it had to use restricted nvidia drivers, I clicked ok, and then it all just worked (Except for dual monitors, which i had to play around with the xorg.conf file ... but hey, you can't have everything on a silver platter ;p

Since I installed ubuntu 2 months ago i've been into vista 3 times. Each just to get some settings I had to open the program to find. However, I do still use a networked computer to run photoshop. I use it through rdesktop ... which works surprising well.