skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're comparing apples and oranges, I think. Bill and Melinda Gates have done tremendous good in the world, and anyone who thinks otherwise is either crude or uninformed; but what does that have to do with software? Or freedom? Their being tremendous philanthropists has little to nothing to do with whether or not the way they earned their money is ethical -- and I hope that, in this day and age, it's clear that it's not only possible but easy to get money in a way that isn't ethical.

You can mock RMS's contributions all you want, but the fact is that he has done a good deal for the world. He created the basis and licensing for the operating system that's been on more devices than any other operating system that's ever existed, that's run on more processors than any other operating system that's ever existed. This thing he started is the basis for the bulk of the internet, for the architecture that runs web sites; people don't give it this credit often enough, but Gnu/Linux in many ways has made the modern technological world possible, and without things like GCC and the standard utilities, it would have died a sad death in 1991. Heck, just for his work on Gnu AWK alone, I think Richard Stallman deserves a few geek medals. And finally, his Gnu Public License and its derivatives (the Apache License et al) have been instrumental in filling the world with an open architecture that makes many of the amazing things we're able to do now possible.

It is possible to admire Bill Gates for his humanitarian work while believing that much of his Microsoft legacy has been bad for software and for freedom in general. I know Stallman can seem like a cranky old man, but he's more careful and thoughtful than you're giving him credit for. When people ask him whether Microsoft (or any company) is "evil," he usually says that you can't say that a whole company is evil, and you have to think about particular things they've done. I believe that his argument that some of Microsoft's business practices are unethical is sound; and while I think Bill and Melinda Gates are wonderful philanthropists, that doesn't mean that I have to think that they're great for software, too.
I've always wanted a(n unlimited) data-only iPhone plan and it looks like this is as close as I'll get. Hopefully Sprint prices the service reasonably.
That's R&D. Manufacturing would be the production of discs or the cost of the pipes used to transfer it.
> Is this not manufacturing?

No. Note that this whole conversation started with a car analogy, under that analogy writing software would be designing a car, not manufacturing it. In software manufacturing is distribution, which carries virtually no cost.

Of course making software would still have a cost.

> I prefer to exercise my freedoms [...] to sell my work.

More power to you then. Note that I never said that I agreed with Stallman.

I've was just responding to the fallacy in chc's post where he claimed that just because consumer demand would shift towards free software, that the entire software industry would be destroyed. That's ridiculous.

Software would still be needed, and people would still need to be educated and compensated for writing and maintaining it. To assume that the market couldn't come up with a way to meet the demand and that the clock would be reset to 1920 is naïve.
http://www.projectpier.org/ if you can afford to host it yourself.

Consider joining NTEN or TechSoup for more help in this dept.
When I compare the more calculus of capitalism and propreitary software against Stallman's dogmatism, it's obvious to me that capitalism is utlimately more moral and does more good.

That's what I've always believed - if you want to do any sort of significant and impactful good in this world, you have to have capital. I can't help but give Gates the nod here when it comes to the greater good.
You can always use any of online judge services allowing you to set problem/organize contests (like http://spoj.pl) but how do you know your candidate is really solving the problem by himself?
Which is why the bowline is more dangerous.
You have a good point there. You generally have to think about what you are exposing if the language demands it. And I think it is great when a language guides you into doing the right thing. Guides being the operative word.

Given the choice, I'll choose consenting adults. :)
Hmm. Great idea, truly. But $45 /mnth? Don't get me wrong. I'm not a miser. I buy software, ebooks, audiobooks and online subscriptions without batting an eyelash. But $45 mnth seems to break an invisible threshold for me. For $45 a month, the service better rock my world.

Nirvdrum, have you heard anyone else express that concern?
it's obvious to me that capitalism is utlimately more moral and does more good.

It's a mighty big leap from the charity of Bill Gates to the essential moral quality of capitalism.
The SCO guy, forget his name, that equates open source with communism.
Why? The more options to choose, the better.
They have 1 customer, themselves. They prefer that plan, so it's the most popular.
66% correct:

awk = Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan
Upvoted just for being about someone called 'Andrew Hacker'. Also has worthy and relevant subject matter...
Cool, let me know if you have any questions or feedback!

csytan@gmail.com
Sort of. This article is about the IIPA, which the BSA are a member of:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/feb/23/openso...

They're not as upfront about it as Stallman and the FSF are about proprietary software, but they clearly don't like open source software. From one of their reports:

"For example, in March 2009, the Ministry of Administrative Reform (MenPAN) issued Circular Letter No. 1 of 2009 to all central and provincial government offices including State-owned enterprises, endorsing the use and adoption of open source software within government organizations. While the government issued this circular in part with the stated goal to “reduc[e] software copyright violation[s],” in fact, by denying technology choice, the measure will create additional trade barriers and deny fair and equitable market access to software companies."

Source: http://www.iipa.com/rbc/2010/2010SPEC301INDONESIA.pdf
> Almost every freedom you enjoy came as an economic incentive first.

bad_user,

I'm sorry, I am not quite understanding your definition of 'almost every freedom'. There are plenty of freedoms that I enjoy which are not economically driven. Freedom of religion, freedom to assemble, right to bear arms, freedom of the press, etc, etc.

I mean, are we talking fundamental freedoms?

RMS sees the ability to hack your own system as a fundamental freedom. Computer as an extension of your mind/person. It would be like me telling you that you are not allowed think certain thoughts.

I don't disagree that there is no data to prove that free software would do this, but then again, how exactly are you going to get economic statistics and test cases without going ahead and trying to do it? I also don't disagree that RMS is taking the wrong approach in not having a sustainable economic model for free software (I think I explicitly stated that, in fact).

I see no reason why a web app would not be viable GPL (or massively distributed for that matter). HTML, Javascript and CSS are prime examples of successful open platforms. HTML is so easy to learn because you can take any web page and look at the source. The real secret sauce in something like Facebook is the huge number of users. You have to be on Facebook because all of your friends are on Facebook. Posting some code to the internet wouldn't instantly remove their real advantage. (Similar could be said of something like gmail).
Ask PG: On competing with Google: how about human-powered algorithms?
A couple years ago you proposed competing with Google on design (http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html). What do you think about efforts to compete with Google with human-powered algorithms (like Wikia Search)? Is there any potential there?
I'm not the one who downvoted you, but I do think that casual users aren't quite the opposing goal post to RMS. They are greedy, but more than that, they are short-term thinkers. They can't (even collectively) cause quite as much harm as the guys like Jobs, Gates, Ballmer, and Ellison can when they manipulate the market.

Big corporations led by big egos have the power to kill products and permanently remove innovations from the market: by [ab]using software patents, buying and killing threatening start-ups, or under-cutting competitors to drive them out of business. One of the most attractive aspects of a Free Software ecosystem unencumbered by patents is that ideas don't have to die while they are still useful to somebody.
I think a deep distrust of democratic institutions would be the best thing democracy proponents (and those living in democratic governments) could cultivate.
Los Angeles, CA
We are looking for a front-end developer.
http://organicstartup.theresumator.com/apply/q4Q0uQ/
Work with great people on an exciting and challenging product!
Local applicants only as this will likely be a contract to perm position
Out of the 15 definitions, 5 of them are extremely racist.

Do you really doubt that American people have used the word "niggle" in various racist ways and that I have heard it used in these ways? I don't know what else to tell you, but some of these words have ugly histories outside of their dictionary definitions. I cited urbandictionary precisely b/c it's the best resource to illustrate to someone unfamiliar with street usage of some of these words.

There's really no harm in avoiding it. It strikes me odd that people downvote this sort of thing, but it makes me happy that many folks here have never been exposed to this sort of nastiness.
I always thought it was some clever twist on "grope".
IBM in Canada, from his LinkedIn. Not sure why it would be the case, but I suspect legal/patent type implications.
I work on an ML compiler for my day job, which means a lot of ML but also quite a bit of C for runtime and basis library stuff. That of course doesn't include M4 (blech!), bash scripts, LaTeX, etc.
I'm surprised that wasn't one of the top 25 questions.
Hmm. I just tried to sign up and get a 403: "CSRF verification failed. Request aborted."
Nice talk joshu!
The both produce harmful radiation!
c is probably "change". (Or "convert, I guess.)

You can also preface those with a quantity. As a pretty arbitrary example, 5dwelp* is "5 delete-word move-to-end-of-next-word right paste", or, "move the next five words forward one word".

In Emacs, repeat is C-x z, by the way, and then you can just keep hitting z.
Forwarded to our QA guy, thanks very much for reporting.
It doesn't matter: his employer can fire him for it. Even if they're legally forbidden from doing that, they can find a way to get rid of him without admitting the reason.
Awesome post and very interesting perspective.
How many lines of code did you write for this?
Try Presto 3.0 http://jackbe.com/mdc
Melbourne, Australia (not really able to move). I have over 4 years experience developing commercial win32 C++ software. I like to read programming books like "Programming Erlang", "On Lisp" and "Real World Haskell". I would love to help develop quality software with a small, talented team.
Or you can remap caps-lock to escape. I know that doesn't match the whole 'vi is already everywhere (on Unix)' aspect, but it's an option.
Refactoring could be handled by perl, awk, in theory. Or you could, in theory, right a parser to do it. But I don't know of anyone who has. A simple search and replace, on a big code base simply isn't going to work. You want to add a parameter to a method on class Foo, when 20 other classes have that same method name? What about when Foo is an interface, and you have to do it for the 10 classes with that method name that implement Foo, but not the 50 that dont?

m.foo( bar baz);

Does this foo need to be changed? You can't know without knowing what type 'm' is. Good luck writing an awk script for that. This isn't a debate about whether or not it could be done. Its about whether or not you can do it faster than I type Ctrl-F6.

If such a tool exists that I can run from bash, please let me know. Otherwise you guys have advanced from type-writer to the early dedicated word-processors that existed in the 80s, but no further.

Jetbrains have refactoring tools for C#, Java, Javascript, Python, Ruby, PHP, Adobe Flex, as well as "basic" language support for most others (but no Erlang I'm afraid).

As you say, vi is about editing text. But the author is a member of the Ruby on Rails core team and a core contributor to Ruby projects, and I put it to you that most people using vim dont use it to edit just text: they edit text that happens to be a language with a formal grammar, and structure both with the file, and outside it: i.e. contextual. Hence, a good IDE will always be better than vim.

I also dispute the idea that, given a new language, vim will be better at editing it. My IDE will likely be able to do exactly the same things vim can do, using the keyboard only, and with (on average) the same number of clicks. However, the IDE will most likely be intuitive, obvious, and easy to learn (e.g. by giving visual feedback), meaning that in reality, even though vim could do as much as my IDE for an expert user, for the average user it wont and never will.
I apologize in advance for another short comment, but your reply leads to another interesting point: should entities (individual, companies) be using payback period as a criteria for investments? Everything I learned in b-school pointed us towards using NPV as the best metric, but many entities still use IRR or payback period. I'll try to follow-up tomorrow with some numeric examples so you and everyone else can see the implications of various methods. But the stuff I saw from calculations in France (the most generous market for building-integrated photovoltaic installations) was on the order of 10 years.

Your 6-year payback seems a bit optimistic but I last looked into this stuff 8 months ago and things may have changed.
The product portion I want to use is a web-based interface, however it can only be used for internal network use and we wouldn't be allowed to make it internet-accessible.

I think we should be able to webcam/monitor our users here, have an app gather data on our computers, then have our computers (which can access the internet AND our internal network appliance's interface which we are testing) upload the data to your website to be parsed.
Hi, I took a quick look, and it looks like you were using Opera -- We are spining up people to double check in opera right now, but I'd suggest re-trying in Firefox or Chrome
Looks like a awesome webapp that I'm probably going to try out when it's ready!

Note that the images on the sales page are HORRIBLY compressed. Drop JPG for illustrative images and screenshots, start using PNG instead.
Ya, it's working now.
it's obvious to me that capitalism is utlimately more moral and does more good.

That is a heavy statement, and highly contextual. I expect it to be popular in this forum where people view technology as a way to make life better, but keep in mind that strong control over technology can do amazing evil more easily than it can meager good.

Gates' philanthropy may appeal to you, but only because as individuals we cannot fathom the whole of an industry. Imagine that for every dollar of aid sent to Africa, one thousand dollars have been spent on extravagance and inefficiency. Maybe not by Gates himself, but certainly by the whole of the industry he profited from.

The last ten years of technological progress have largely been run on Linux, mostly as a cost saving tool but also due to the merits of Linux. The efficiency gains are enormous, much larger than if every computer needed a buggy, licensed copy of Windows that automatically updated in the middle of your slideshow (happened in the office yesterday). Compare the revenue that Microsoft would have made to the idea that an operating system could be free-as-in-beer, and you might have a different perspective of the meager billions that Gates has put to good use. We detonate more of our tax money in anger every year than he will ever use to help the poor and needy.
I always mention the open source contributions of the team members to potential applicants and give them links that would enable them to find the source if they were so inclined.

I can see this being more of a problem in closed source places. But, remember that an interview is a two-way conversation. There is nothing wrong with asking questions like "so, what version control system do you use" and running away when they reply "err, tar?" or whatever your personal horrors are.
Why its not to late for Microsoft in mobile
Since 2007 after the launch of Apple’s extremely popular mobile device the iPhone, it seems like Apple killed Microsoft’s windows mobile platform overnight. To make matters worst search engine powerhouse Google got into the game with the introduction of their own mobile operating system Android in 2008. Android since then has been rapidly gaining market share and mindshare.
yep, well guessed :)

I am from the UK and R for thursday is not used over here at all (and I've even been to college too!)
There's typo on http://rm.bettermeans.com/front/features.html "Get things done together, don't just doument"
It's fantastic that Google is developing 2 different operating systems. Even more so that they might compete in the market with each other. That's healthy. That's a company that has refused to impose strategy tarrifs on itself, a company that doesn't view itself as an empire but as a bustling hive of talent and opportunity.

Which is better: the market telling Google which (or both) of its two operating systems are viable or some VP making that decision?

The empire complex ruins big companies. It's the biggest threat to google's ability to remain a vital, innovative company in the long-run. It's good to see they haven't succumbed to it yet.
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20100124
It's not actually blocked! It's a problem with Google's reporting.
I really stumbled in the middle. Missed some good points.
Microsoft's 'Street Slide' takes aim at StreetView
I think that updating the comment to remove the aggressive and insulting tone would be more appropriate.
Don't antagonize or pick on your opponent.

Perhaps fight an equal.
Any programmer worth hiring has time to put together 200-500 lines of example code.
I'm not so sure. Heck, there was pretty mixed reaction to 0% cap gains taxes yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1555363
It will likely have the same plan as the MiFi, which is $59/mo for 5GB data.
>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.

I guess it depends on what exactly you mean by 'society' but:

The view that society would become computer literate is incredibly naive. People have limited time and want to focus on things they enjoy.

See: every other thing in life that is already free. Like your car, your bicycle, your front lawn, your kitchen cabinetry, and what you eat for lunch tomorrow.

People want things to work, and they want them to look nice. They generally want no hand in doing so to the point where they are considered literate on the subject. This is why fast/frozen food is popular, and most people take their car to a mechanic to change their brakes.

Life is full of too many things to become literate at everything in life. On the whole, computers are no different than any other object in life. Most people just want them to work, just like I just want my car's brakes to slow my car down.
a. Use case?
b. Shift-Alt-Arrow Shift-Alt-Arrow Shift-Alt-Arrow Shift-Alt-Arrow Shift-Alt-Arrow Ctrl-X Alt-Arrow Alt-V. So 8 vs 5.

Focusing on what it can do is irrelevant. I've been programming 29 years now. Can't think of a time I've needed to do that.
I'm not fond of the "iGroan", but Digital Restrictions Management is a great clarification of what the term means.
Contact information?
Wow, I can't tell you how much you need this. It's ridiculous how many emails I make a mental note for getting back to and then completely forgetting them. (Sorry if you were a victim of my short term email memory loss, just bother me again)
This decider could decide that you prefer otherwise, couldn't it?
What is that refactoring tool he uses to pull code out into a separate method?
Google 'building social network rival to Facebook'
> Bill and Melinda Gates have done tremendous good in the world, and anyone who thinks otherwise is either crude or uninformed.

Their foundation has done a lot of good, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Why does it have all that money in the first place?

Well, mostly because Microsoft managed to work itself into a monopoly position with dirty tactics, and the proliferation of their own proprietary file formats. This meant that millions of people and organizations had to pay the Microsoft tax, which was later used to start the B&M Gates Foundation.

How many millions of US$ would those people have donated to charity if their budgets hadn't been constrained by purchasing Microsoft software? Some of them were probably African countries that could have used that money to buy vaccines 10 years ago.

Don't get me wrong, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is doing some good work now, but to only look at their current donations is to only see the tip of the iceberg.
Serious question that probably says more about my lack of knowledge than anything else: What does ML give you that you can't get from Haskell?
I'm not sure I follow. Any chance you could elaborate at all?
Wind Drives Growing Use of Batteries
You quickly learn not to stare at the screen, much like you learned long long ago not to stare at the page as you're turning it. Physical books have an even slower response time, but nobody complains about that.
This should be standard practice when you're switching to any new thing (editor, codebase, application, etc.) and is the reason why we have things like continuous integration and Joel Spolsky ranting about starting over from scratch. Going completely cold turkey on the old and diving straight into the new is a really tough way to go.
Anyone here read CouchDB: The Definitive Guide? I noticed it was written in January; how much has changed with the 1.0 release earlier this month? Still a worthwhile read?
Ask HN: What is meant by "execution" of an idea
Good morning fellow HNers,

This is my first "Ask HN" so I hope I am doing it right :)

I hear this term a lot of times, but what exactly do people mean by a good "execution" of an idea?

Take for example, after reading some of the posts here, I want to create something similar to ChatRoulette for HN where we can do pair programming with each other and toss out ideas.

The idea is
1) You log in and join a pool of "wanting to pair program"
2) Select programming language choice eg Java, Php
3) It randomly selects someone who also wants to pair with you based on the language you selected
4) Gives you the Skype id of that person.

With this example, what would make a good execution of the idea and what would make a bad execution of the idea?

Thanks
They wanna see the quality of your code.
Your coding style says much about you.
Google tech talk on Node.js
A use case for "5dwelp"? Teaching my roommate how vi's interface works, six or seven years ago. It was the first example that popped into my head. (I told you it was arbitrary. I switched to Emacs ~4 years ago.) The real point is that almost the entire vi interface sensibly combines that way, like APL operators. [quantity] [operation] [movement].

If I still used vi regularly, I probably could have given you a better example. Actually, I couldn't, but my fingers could have. :) It had all moved to muscle-memory.

Emacs's interface is a bit more cumbersome, but it's also easier to follow it with, "...and from now on, call that X and add it to the interface".