skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If everyone adopted the free software maxim of not using proprietary software, it would be inevitable that society would become extremely computer literate, and/or we would develop a way of compensating people for working on free software projects.

Almost every freedom you enjoy came as an economic incentive first.

This is also an oversimplification, but implementing shit without understanding the impact on society historically has led to disaster.

Saying that it would be better if the world did X or Y is very shortsighted without having stats to back your claims ... especially without first demonstrating a sustainable economic model that can survive X or Y (like selling shit and receiving money for it).

More likely would be that software development would be a true commodity OR software would evolve to make Free Software irrelevant.

And it is already happening.

Every interesting application that happened in the last 5 to 10 years is a web application. Web applications are services, not products ... with web apps, people aren't having access to the binary of that application and it doesn't even run on their machines anymore (with the possible exception of distributed systems, like Bittorrent ... but you can see how well Chandler worked out and compare it with the Google Apps).
I also was in Bill's class and have only great things to say about the whole experience. It's a tough process of learning and self-discovery, and sadly not everyone made it to the end. This is the sort of resource that increases your probability of success tremendously.
The same attitude is effaced on HN about persons in liberal arts studies. A hacker was brilliant enough to see that the world was headed into computers, or their parents were, and they were led down the right path.

People are bound to want to claim that people deserve what they get, it justifies their wealth, and comforts them in the face of another's misfortune.

Anyone who had access to a computer at 8, whether their parents worked hard to buy it, or had flows of wealth, was damn lucky, and needs to recognize that they are damn lucky. Anyone smarter than the average has to recognize that they're damn lucky. And if there's any posthumanists in the crowd, they should figure its quickly in their interest to view society from a perspective where the weak get supported: we're all of us quickly falling into the category of the weak.
I updated my comment to remove the "No offense". Somebody has to call this for what it is.
For anyone who might be interested in readin more about FP, whats its good for and when to use it here are som reading.

Why functional programming matters, by John Hughes(This one is recommended all over the place :-) ). Its really fun to read and he writes in a natual and easy to understand way.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.63....

A comparison of an Quick Sort implementation, C# vs Haskell. For problems involving large amount of data and the need to operate over it functional programming seems like the perfect choice.
http://shunsuk.blogspot.com/2008/02/quick-sort-haskell-vs-c....
What's Wrong With the American University System
I am not stating my point clearly, sorry. My point is no business could be built around search if all the implementation was "free" (in the FSF sense) because how would any business have an edge which allowed them to be competitive. Perhaps I'm being naive but this is just the way I see it.
Here's a partial list of speakers at least: http://angelconf.org/
The Intangibles of an SSD Start-up Disk [w/ Video]
Ok, what if Baidu started openly campaigning against the predominantly two-party system in the US? Is that going to change a thing?

No, because there's no pent-up demand within America to overthrow democracy.

There's actually a way to affect change in China, believe it or not. Unfortunately, it's not by the usual methods Americans believe to be effective (protests, marches, general upheaval, etc).

I'm not sure what the best way to overthrow the Chinese dictatorship is, but looking at the models which worked in Russia or Argentina or Spain or Indonesia or... well, any of the other dozens of countries which have transitioned from dictatorship to democracy. Has any country ever made the transition without some kind of mass protest movement or an external invasion? (The latter option is off the table.)

I don't think the present system of back-channel polite tut-tutting is working very well.
Looks like they need to do some work on Safari support: http://i.imgur.com/OJJkU.png
Also, "love to learn knew things" has a typo with the word new.
but there is no such selector 'isChild' that can be paired with :contains as far as i know

Maybe you can use $.children()? Something like:

$('div').children(":contains('apple')").each(function() {
var html = $(this).html().replace(/apple/,"<b>apple</b>");
$(this).html(html);
});

example: http://www.fillerspace.com/apple.html
Thoughts to keep in mind before hiring a graphic designer: The Artist's Dilemma
Or put it in the bathroom.
I think he secretly watches DRMed videos on his MacBook when nobody is looking.
How's that, exactly?
I'm not preparing for an outdoor run.

I just think this would be a cool way to track my progress, in addition to the other cardio metrics I already maintain.
Yeah, it would be a really hard sell for me to hire someone without a Github profile these days. I'm sure there are field where this may not be feasible, but it's a great and easy differentiator for us.

You get a few false negatives, but virtually no false positives.
Yes, there are lots of people who make money doing support or hosting. Those people would still exist in a world where writing software was unprofitable. There are also people who make money baking cakes and painting pictures of flower fields, and those people would also exist in a world where writing software was unprofitable. That still wouldn't make it worthwhile in general to write software except in-house for a specific business.
The US Government is too chickenshit to stand up for democratic principles when it comes to China, but Google has nothing to lose any more. I say go for it.

I don't care about democracies, but I do care about liberty.
You may well be right about the idea that greed and corruption are not natural to humans, you've obviously done a lot more thinking about that side of it than I have and your logic is reasonable.

I really like the application you built. I need some more convincing on the model and how it would work, without reading the entire manifesto, do you have a document that explains it in much shorter form?

Great job on the design, it LOOKS like you spent about a year on it :)
I think the list is too long. You can do 99% of things with 3 knots. The ones I use in order of frequency:

1. Truckers hitch - for tying anything to the roof of my car or the bed of my pickup.

2. Bowline - for attaching anything to the end of a rope.

3. Fishermans - for tying two ropes together, for backing up a bowline.

I also like the following knots.

Clove Hitch - provides an adjustable anchor. I use this rock climbing and rafting. For rafting I use it to tie the raft to shore. I can easily adjust the length of the anchor when the river level fluctuates.

Double Figure 8 - the standard for rock climbing. I prefer the bowline because it is easier to untie.
Chris is allowed to be flip. He's a Googler.
I'm not looking for anything at the moment. I'm working on a contract which should keep me busy for the next couple months.

I prefer telecommuting but would move someplace cool if the opportunity sounded right. I prefer big cities or somewhere in Asia. Currently I'm living in Victoria, BC, Canada.

My portfolio: http://mattmccormick.ca/portfolio
Ask HN: Do you use more than one programming language?
Would like to find out if it is common nowadays to use more than one programming language. I mean using the language professionally for work or projects, not just knowing how to use.
Thankfully Steve Yegge is popular, and there are enough mentions of him online in a positive light. If such an article mentioning someone's full name in the Title and URL was published about someone less famous - regardless of how baseless the content is - it might be slightly damaging.

If you didn't know who Steve Yegge was, and found this article, would you go explore the back-story to make your own judgement, or just assume that he's an idiot, as claimed by the article?
At least they aren't redirecting the dns to baidu . . .
Sandal! Let me thank you ever so much for writing that amazing book! I learned so much about Ruby, and just coding in general. Even the appendices were great. Great balance of good examples and humor. Thanks!
I'm an interface designer and web developer looking for part-time or short-term gigs, based in NYC (for now).

Portfolio: http://mdolon.com - Blog: http://devgrow.com
There's nothing racist about his comment. He didn't say anything about the Chinese people. Going on about white supremacy and the Ku-Klux Klan is just ignorance on your part. Quite frankly I find your comment to be the racist one.
World’s Ugliest Dog Contest
Take a look some photos of the World’s Ugliest Dog. I hope will you enjoy.
Not to get us off track, but has anyone ever asked a prospective employer to see a sample of their code? Taking a job is a big risk, and I'd certainly want to know what I was getting myself into code-wise.
I don't care what this guy has to say anymore. After he pulled his sock off, picked his foot and ate whatever the fuck it was he picked off, all in front of what appears to be a lecture class sized audience - I lost all respect for the guy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ

No wonder computer people have a brutal rep for social interaction. WTF.
First, I don't think there's a pent up demand to overthrow the Chinese government. There are disgruntled factions here and there (China is a very economically uneven country, unlike the US), but overall, people feel their lives are improving and there's an immense sense of optimism in the country.

Second, China doesn't have a dictatorship.
They're rewarding their educated people to leave the country? What's the rationale?
Google's bicycling directions automatically highlight bike paths. You should try and integrate that.
500-horsepower and top speed of 198 miles per hour while still getting 78 MPG
in this particular case, for the most part also be fulfilled by the more versatile iPad

I understand your point, but all I am saying is that in this case "for the most part" is not good enough for many people (eg. me).

I do, actually, have the urge for an all-in-one device, but I also have certain things that I don't want to compromise on. My reading experience is very important to me. On the other hand, my wish to take a quick photo/video is not a big deal. So, I carried a sub-compact camera with the iPhone 3G, but if I get an iPhone4 I won't bother - it's good enough. On similar lines, I have more or less ditched my portable game devices in favour of the iPhone/iPad. Other people have different priorities.

So I think people do want to converge on one device, but not at the expense of their convenience.
I'm a final year bachelors student (CS major) from Karachi, Pakistan. Moving is not an option for me right now, not for a year anyway.

I'm primarily interested in working part-time on a project that would give me more experience in web or game development, and more crucially get to work with people who know how to get traction.

I obviously don't have a lot under my belt right now, but I'm a quick learner and avid reader of HN. I have PHP, Python, C++, Java and web designing skills. I made a web app for local sales and events in Pakistan a while back (http://www.itaaza.com), though it's a bit dead at the moment.

I've also worked a bit on mobile game development. Made a game for the Nokia Calling All Innovators contest, and working on an android game right now.

contact me at taha.rafiq@gmail.com
Do they openly advocate for the end of free software?
Forget technical terms - whoever gets the most developers wins... period
This letter is framed on my wall thanks to an OP on HN:

http://old.nabble.com/Re%3A-TM2-p28707277.html
The insure.com acquisition is wholly unrelated to the valuation of the Insurance.com business.

Similarly the public or private status of Quinstreet would also play no significant role in the valuation of insurance.com

What is fully unknown is the general cashflow and cash position of Insurance.com before this sale. It might be possible to find some record of their past VC investments, but I don't feel like looking that up.

Insurance.com was likely unprofitable, burning cash, and unable to raise any additional funding on favorable terms. The investors options were likely A) Bankruptcy of the business or B) Sale of business assets and IP to a 3rd party. It looks like they chose B.

If the business was unprofitable in its current state, then it's not surprising that Quinstreet wasn't going to keep a dozen dozen employees continuing to operate in an unprofitable manner.

Your comment and your headline editorial indicate that you're probably not familiar with how a lot of of the cash/sale transactions usually work. A firesale is generally a situation where a business is sold because there is an impending financial disaster, and in startups/venture backed businesses it is often when the sale is done at a 1x (or lesser) of investment value amount. You could have a $1MM or a $100MM sale be deemed a "firesale" depending on the circumstances.
What about App Inventor
I subscribe for a copy of app inventor beta and nothing, What happend?
I'm a big fan of JavaScript: The Good Parts, but it doesn't appear on the list of books for sale.
> there aren't any manufacturing costs

WTF are you talking about?

Are you saying that all these nights I'm not sleeping, working 14 hours per day, not spending time with my family ... don't have a cost?

Is this not manufacturing?

> under a free software model you'd have to make money by continuing to make improved versions under contract, or offering support, hosting or other things like that

Yeah, that's called consulting or selling complementary products that are proprietary.

It sucks.

I prefer to exercise my freedoms that I have in the quasi free market I'm operating in and decide for myself how I want to sell my work.
I don't agree. I've been working for a company for the last five years building the Software alone that could of taken perhaps one year. The company has no debt and a great balance sheet, however any big company could catch us up in six months because they have the right resources. So I believe VC is great to get your product to market A.S.A.P before you lose the edge.
You can waste a lot of bytes on a bar-bones design if done poorly. A couple of years ago there was a blog post (can't find it now) about a designer redoing slashdot.org using css and that redesign had a pretty large % change in size.
If you include Javascript, it's very common.

Beyond that, I've pretty well stuck with one language in production work for about five years. But that's only because I've mostly done modest-scale web app development, which really only requires one backend language. If you stick to web apps, you can go a long way with a single backend language.

But my current startup is about 50% web app and 50% Linux app. So we're finding more and more need for C.
New York, NY. Freelance gig; 20 hrs / week for one month. I need someone who has done something in HTML5. Working on a very cool media project.

(If you're a friend-of-a-friend in the NYYC scene, that's ideal.)
Well, I use one language primarily at work, that being Java. For my startup project, I use Groovy almost exclusively. But, particularly on the startup project, I can easily see the situation where different parts may be written in different languages. I could see trying Scala for some backend services, as it has a reputation for dealing with concurrency well. Erlang could be a possibility in the future as well, for similar reasons. I also won't rule out dropping into C or C++ for performance reasons if the situation arises. And since there's a heavy element of statistical analysis / machine learning / data mining in some of this, I may be incorporating R and or Clojure (for Incanter) at some point as well.

Also, if you count SQL as a language, then I routinely use SQL (and/or HQL) for data access.

And as somebody pointed out in another reply... if you include Javascript, then yes, definitely.
Agreed. There have been some good articles here lately about email newsletters. Try searchyc.com to find them. Mixergy also has some good interviews with people running successful newsletter startups.

Could also use it as an upsell product or free value add-on for people/companies using your game platform.
They have a "government" which wasn't elected. If you claim sovereignty over a bunch of land and its people, and you haven't been elected by those people as their representative, then you are not a legitimate government, you're merely a bunch of armed thugs who happen to control some territory. (I have no interest in debating whether your definition of "dictatorship" varies from mine.)

Getting rid of folks who claim sovereignty over a nation without the expressed and open consent of its people is, as I see it, the great moral challenge of the 21st century, much as ending slavery was the great moral challenge of the 19th.
Convert your emails to actions in one click
I use Python for work, for my startup, and for my personal projects. In the same capacity I use JavaScript when doing web development. I even use VB6 for legacy code upkeep at the day job. I like to use C++ for certain projects and I've had to pick up Java for Hadoop's MapReduce (which I use for my startup).

It's always good to use the right tool for the job.
I'd love to know of anyone in the Denver area who is hiring product management or other strategic-level positions. I'm in Chicago now but interested in the Denver area.

Finishing my MBA in March, strong technology background with programming experience. I do not want to code full-time however. Very strong interest in sustainability, green, and similar businesses.
United States Files Complaint Against Oracle Alleging Contract Fraud
I would love to find an internship somewhere in the Bay Area, specifically San Jose if possible as that's where I live.

I'm 23, great humored, and a very quick learner. Looking for a part time internship where I can get my hands dirty in programming. I have basic experience with linux, OSX, python, and ruby. I would love to find someplace where I can contribute and learn with others.

Contact info in my profile. Lets get creative!
I wonder how many Hacker Newsers really remember what it was like back before the GPL and the FSF. The availability of a high-quality open source unix system is pretty much the defining quality of modern computing, and it took us out of the dark ages of a half dozen mutually incompatible proprietary OSs, compilers, and commandline utility packages (sometimes broken - with fixes impossible).

Stallman's contribution is much greater than that of cheerleader or discussion framer - the ecosystem that exists in large part because of him is, I suspect, tremendously important in the day to day lives of many of the people reading this.
I like it a lot. One thing: I like how this site:

http://www.mappedometer.com/

Links two points by actual roads. It would be a cool option.
ESR is far more radical than RMS will ever be but few measure themselves by him, probably because ESR look like and act like a pragmatic man.
Apple is pretty active in OSS for someone you'd call the polar opposite of RMS.
From the release:

Under the contract, GSA used Oracle’s disclosures about its commercial sales practices to negotiate the minimum discounts for government agencies who bought Oracle software. The contract required Oracle to update GSA when commercial discounts improved and extend the same improved discounts to government customers. The suit contends that Oracle misrepresented its true commercial sales practices, ultimately leading to government customers receiving deals far inferior to those Oracle gave commercial customers.
Indeed. I'm a Debian user, so it only took a minute to get the agent running which I appreciated a lot.

It seems like the only piece missing is graphing and alerting on bandwidth usage with the agent. Linode provides a nice set of hypervisor-level views of IO/CPU/Bandwidth but they're really only useful historically and from a billing perspective. On second thought, this sounds like an awesome way to get familiar with the plugin interface ;)
As I see it, democracy is both a means to the end of ensuring (relative, in fits and starts) liberty, and an end in itself.

Nobody can rightfully claim to be entitled to make and enforce laws for a group of people unless they were chosen by that group of people. Claiming otherwise is like claiming that person A is entitled to own person B as a slave just because person A is a relatively good slavemaster.
The counterpoint: http://danweinreb.org/blog/rebuttal-to-stallmans-story-about...
Requiring a code-sample will increase the false-negative rate quite a bit. A lot of employees can't provide samples of their work because of NDA, contract, or other legal reasons. In a perfect world, everyone would have some side-projects, but not everyone has the time for side-projects or is permitted to contribute to open-source projects. For instance, my employer requires that I can't admit that I work on (well known) open-source projects.

Granted such companies are pre-lithic in nature, but none-the-less, employers will miss out on great people because they think publicly available code samples mean anything at all.
Your comparison of the microwave to the iPhone is just false. The point is that if the software is simple enough that it's pretty obviously bug-free, and you have no reasonable need to tinker with it, there's no reason you should need the source for the microcontroller. If the controller isn't working, the source is probably not going to help you. You just need a new microcontroller. On the flip side, there's no reasonable need to extend the microwave's software.

The iPhone, by contrast, has millions upon millions of reasons you might need/want to tinker with the software. Hence the demand for source. Seriously, RMS is not the one with a logic problem.
I've probably been to a dozen. The best tech conference I've been to was FutureRuby. Single track, two days, great content, well-planned parties. Those guys know how to throw a conference. Too bad it was a two-time event (more of less).

Beyond that, I'd take the annual local Bar Camp over most national/international conferences. A strong local tech community is really important.
Because comments are like chain links: the strength of the best is limited by the worst.

(Facetious, obviously; while I disagree with your parent comment because Google has far too little influence in China to effect any change, a response declaring the whole of HN rotten is nothing more than a non sequitur; "Good riddance!" I say.)
> Maybe GNU will finally see a rebranding.

I'd be happy if they just dropped the hard 'g' pronunciation.
It is not currently financially viable for all software to be free. However, A society in which it is viable for all software to be free is not terribly difficult to imagine. (There are numerous possible scenarios, state funded works, high literacy and citizen programmers, maybe some sort of programming by the job system.)

In this situation, monopolies like Google and Microsoft probably wouldn't exist at all. I think search is an excellent example, actually, of something that is required for the proper functioning of the web. It is practically a public good. If we found out Google were biasing its search results, it would be a very big deal (but how do you know it isn't?). If it were open source, we would know.

I guess the question then is 'who pays for the hardware to run open source Google,' and that is a good question, to which I do not know the answer, but seeing as anyone can download the software, it seems anyone could.