skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And this is exactly one of the main problems of 'free software' as an ideology. It is black & white, as if people who advocate some proprietary software are unethical. Many people in society will agree that programmers should be compensated for their work, and for many types of programs it is nearly impossible to get compensation via support. So, even if you do like free software, it is entirely reasonable to buy proprietary software.

Then there is the issue of practicality. I would love to do all my workflows using free software, but for some workflows it is just not possible. E.g. I tried using Digikam, The Gimp, and Scribus a lot. But for me, they just don't match up against Lightroom/Aperture, Photoshop, or InDesign. Am I acting unethical for using tools to get my work done?

Nowadays, I use the Apache License when possible, because I have got pretty sick of all the preaching, and claims for moral higher ground.
Financing a government usually isn't a start-ups primary concern. "Civilization" is bought by innovation and entrepreneurship, not politicians and taxes.
> The next big platform is multiple cores/multiple CPUs. The next big language is functional and helps deal with consistency across time and across CPUs.

So the popular opinion in the Internet echo chamber keeps telling me, but somehow I don't buy it.

If you do, please try to answer this simple question: what single application of widespread importance benefits on a game-changing scale from running on multiple cores?

It's not office productivity/business automation applications like word processors, spreadsheets, and accounting packages. They could run just fine on a typical desktop PC years ago. Sure, it's useful to run multiple applications simultaneously, but the OS can handle the scaling in that case.

It's not mass information distribution/web applications. The bottlenecks there are typically caused by limited communications bandwidth or database issues. While concurrency is obviously a big factor internally in databases, most of us don't actually write database engines.

It's not games. Most AAA titles today still don't scale up in that way, and one mid-range graphics card with its specialist processor would blow away a top-end quad-Xeon workstation when it comes to real-time rendering. Again, there is some degree of concurrency here, but many intensive graphics rendering problems are embarrassingly parallel in several ways, so again this isn't much of a challenge even for today's mainstream programming languages and design techniques.

I suspect the most likely mainstream beneficiaries of better multi-core/multi-CPU support would be things where there really is heavy calculation going on behind the scenes and it's not always uniform: multimedia processing, CAD, etc.

However, what about the alternative directions the industry might take? The Internet age has emphasized some basic realities of software development that as an industry we weren't good at recognising before.

For one thing, many useful tools are not million-lines-of-code monsters but relatively simple programs with far fewer lines of code. It's knowing what those lines should do that counts. That means rapid development matters, and that in turn requires flexible designs and easy prototyping.

For another thing, data matters far more than any particular piece of software. Protecting that data matters much more in a connected world with fast and widespread communications, so security is more important than ever, and we need software that doesn't crash, suffer data loss bugs, and so on.

So I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that multi-core/multi-CPU is not in fact going to be the dominant factor in the success of near-future languages. I think flexibility and robustness are going to be far more important.

It may turn out that the attributes of a more declarative programming style support these other factors as well. It may be that functional programming becomes the default for many projects as a consequence. But I don't think any future rise of functional programming will be driven by a compelling advantage to do with implementing modest concurrency on multi-core systems. That just isn't where the real bottlenecks are (in most cases).
The comparison is even more useless because of a simpler reason:

Rails people don't search "ruby on rails authentication" they search "rails authentication."

My guess is that Django and asp.net mvc people search for "django authentication."

(My assumption is that google counts a search for "django auth" as a search for Django in trends.)

This means that as Rails grows in popularity, "ruby on rails" will decline, since many many developers now know what it is.

* However, as Django and others grow in popularity they hang onto all the people searching for "django xyz"
Right. I try to help people even if they wouldn't know that I helped them. Why? For the purely selfish reason that it makes me feel good.
Python, Javascript, Ruby, C#.

Functional programming languages, you're soaking in them.
Exactly. You know who ate a raw-food, grain-free diet and still died of cancer? My cat. :(
This. IMHO anyone who doesn't like the taxes that maintain their surroundings, has an ethical obligation to relocate rather than avoid paying. Hell, tax money hired the guys who created the Internet.
UbuntuOne, integrated on nearly every menu of the desktop, ... might help Canonical, Ltd. make a few bucks?

If you don't like it, fork it, right? Isn't that the main strength of F/OSS? For example, CentOS is a white-label fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The same argument could be applied to Canonical's inclusion of Adobe Air and Flash in Ubuntu.

Canonical is targeting a market previous unserved by other Linux distros. To get to these users, the experience needs to be polished and complete. There's a reason that, for example, Slackware, isn't going to be installed by your grandmother...it's too difficult.
With Stackless Python you can pickle (serialize) tasklets (coroutines). I built a Seaside-style web app in Stackless where each response would get pickled and saved to disk. When a new request with that id comes in you just unpickle it back into a tasklet and resume where you left off. You can do this between processes and machines. I don't see why you couldn't put them in a db but I was just using shared disk. What you're looking for are serializable continuations which some languages can handle.
GNU Parallel - build and execute command lines from standard input in parallel
I've heard that South Dakota actually has the most favorable business tax laws in the country.

But the standard state to incorporate in is Delaware, even if its not necessarily the lowest taxes anymore, its still the state most investors, lawyers and tax pros are accustomed to.

But don't forget, you still have to pay taxes where you operate. So even if you incorporate in Delaware you still have to pay taxes where your home office is.
There are many options for that.
Despite all problems and difficulties you will face, saying, you have grown up and need to get a company that will provide you services on a contract basis, many will not even answer you email if they'll see your company is registered in Virgin Islands or god knows where.

But more than all, say you have made it, and it was a great success, and in your bank account there are 2.5 million dollars. Now you live in NYC and wish to buy a house with this money. How would you bring this money into the US? Would you make a wire transfer to your seller? He would then have to go to authorities and explain those 2.5M. Will you go cash it and carry it on your body while flying back home, does this make sense?

This is what my CPA have told me when I suggested to open up a company in Cyprus few weeks before I signed a big contract.
I heard a rumor that Mint.com used open source. Then I tried doing some Google searches to find the details (which I couldn't) and found the Github site listed in a related article (now I think un-related), but no other details...so I posted the question on HN to see if anyone heard the real story and could share it.
I presume that the word 'not' in the title is making the assumption that these changes were made by the banks to reduce fraud.

Why would they do that? I know they say that's what they are trying to do, but they have little vested interest in doing so, because not only are they not the losers in fraudulent transactions, but they actually profit by them.

The loser in a fraudulent card-not-present transaction is, usually, the merchant. If not, the card-holder.

No only are the funds removed from the merchant's account, often including the additional fee that the bank makes for fraud checks, but they are then charged an additional fee for the "charge back".

The system sucks and always has done. The banks have it wrapped up to avoid any loss.

The only way that fraud will be reduced -- and it is easily eliminated, in all honesty -- is to make the banks 100% liable for the losses.

Governments could do this tomorrow, if they chose to.
We're definitely planning to release an iPhone companion app as well. That way you can select your favorite recipes to save onto your grocery list on your iPad, then simply take your iPhone to the grocery store and mark off items as you purchase them.
Right. I meant that the answer to the question 'Question: which numbers can x and y be?' is not necessarily a single unique (x,y) pair.
I'm surprised at how poorly some of the posts here describe the GPL.

GPL - If you give me software, I can request the source. I can edit the source to my hearts content and never show anyone. If I distribute the software to someone else they have the right to request my changes.

BSD - If you give me the software I have no right to the source. You can give it to me or not.

AGPL - If you run a service which someone else connects to (such as a web server) that end user has the right to request the source along with your changes even though you have not actually distributed the modified software to that end user.
Three comments that I regard as incorrect:

Either the GPL is sufficient to keep participants harmonious or it isn't.

This essay embodies everything that keeps the free software movement from greatness.

Alas, the movement is perpetually suspicious of those who want it to flourish.
excellent points. This is why most firms choose Delaware.
Alafasy Quran Live Tv Channel
Scalable System Design Patterns
Most folks who complain about taxes aren't objecting to the very existence of taxes, merely the fact that they're excessive, largely spent on things that they shouldn't be, and disproportionately lumped upon a small sector of the population. Few would complain about, say, a flat 10% tax rate to support basic infrastructure, courts, police, et cetera.

On the other hand, there are folks who genuinely believe that taxes should be zero. They're welcome to move to Somalia.
Can we have a "showdead" option to turn the dead companies on & off? Yeah, you can sort them away, but...
By that definition SAP is open source! Since you get all the ABAP code and can do whatever you want with it, if you buy SAP first...
wow, Scribd has a higher Alexa rank than Reddit?
I'm not a CPA / lawyer so I do not know. You could incorporate withholding company A in the BVI (or another tax free jurisdiction) and then incorporate company B in the states (Delware?) and make some sort of operating agreement (company B 'consults' for company A and only pays taxes on the money company A pays it). Keep in mind that the board of directors of company A can be anonymous, and so can the shareholders. Consult the website, it differs from jurisdiction to another.

Again, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not an accountant, what I described above is a mere guess and depending on state / federal laws and regulations YMMV.
Apparently the wording in GPL2 is a bit vague about hosted services and it can be argued that a hosted service is distribution based on the language used in the license.

GPL3 attempts to make it a bit clearer. AGPL as well.
If you consider that most of the money collected in taxes is paying for shady military operations in the middle east, I'd say taxes destroy civilization.
How to git clone a big project on an unstable connection? - Stack Overflow
Right. So one should only befriend the cleaning staff if one has a genuine desire to befriend the cleaning staff. If one has no desire to do so, then one should not.
what makes a company 'Dead'?

buxfer might or might not fit into this category, the site is still up and functional, but it doesn't seem like it's actively maintained:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/17/buxfers-founders-both-work-...

http://getsatisfaction.com/buxfer/topics/is_buxfer_dead

a simple yes/no from one of the founders would be simple enough.
Hey thanks for the feedback, it helps a lot. :)

* By sending from Safari to Paprika - do you mean Mobile Safari, or from a desktop browser? I think a bookmarklet might work well for that....will have to think about it.

* The address bar URL thing is a bug that will be fixed in the next release.

* Good call on the Safari bookmarks, we'll consider that.

* We are definitely planning on doing some sort of cloud based recipe backup/sync/sharing.
The author has a legitimate beef. "Game mechanics" is the new "Web 2.0" as far as misapplied buzzwords go, but "gamification" still comes out of "video games" and "psychology," both of which have been around longer than the web, and the web likes slapping a new term on something and thinking it invented it.

To truly take advantage of game mechanics properly, you really need to know a lot about both video games and psychology. Like anything else, you may have to design with gamification in mind from the get-go, and you'll probably get it wrong the first few times out, which means you'll need to practice (or have betas).

Instead of completely retooling your software or process or "healthcare issue," perhaps instead you can add a meta-game on top: Office Hero was a game added atop Microsoft Word by Lost Garden writer danc: http://www.officelabs.com/ribbonhero && http://www.lostgarden.com/2010/01/ribbon-hero-turns-learning...

You'll never be able to "let's just add badges!" just like you can't "let's use gradients and glossy buttons!" to move the needle.

There's even the notion that video games and traditional UI interaction design are incompatible: IxD is about making things easy, but video games are about intentionally challenging the user. If your users aren't expecting a game, they may end up incredibly frustrated instead.

I did a workshop on adding game mechanics to an existing product (a calendar/dayplanner) and the results varied wildly. One group (Ray and Nicole) integrated social game mechanics into the application really well. Another group (Cecy and Brody) treated each mechanic as a feature, and by the end of the discussion I felt like it was "missing something." You can read the write-up of the workshop here: http://vi.to/workshop/20100426/

My notes include a lot of references, as well as images of the handouts and my own distillation of these principles: http://vi.to/gmnotes
You cant fork a Company!

But, really, why people bring the 'Ubuntu is polished' argument all the time? Noone is against it being user friendly. They can be user friendly AND upstream friendly.

And their upstream happens to be the free software community. And they claim they respect it. And they dont.
Booki.sh - HTML5 e-reading and Distribution Platform
That is a very helpful description. Thank you.
I wouldn't agree with "but not use it".

I tend to explain the difference as being that Open Source places the freedom of people first (e.g. with a BSD licence, developers have freedom to do anything with a piece of code) and Free Software places the freedom of software first.

(I don't project any moral judgement of either of these goals, I think they both have their place. Also hi! ;)
Suggestions for next year's Startup School
Congrats to Y Combinator and BASES and the speakers (and everyone else who should be thanked) for a great Startup School.

Each speaker was great, and brought something different to the day.

My top 3 + 1 suggestions for the next 'edition' -- these are mainly just logistical:

- Wifi -- pleeeeease have wifi available; i had to drive away during lunch hour to get connected. a lot of us are running startups while attending ;).

- Company names on nametags, would help start more conversations and build more relationships among attendees

- some healthy, low-carb food options for snacks and lunch (bagels and pizza are pretty high-carb)

- here's a thought... could be fun to have a 1/2 hour session (could be during lunch) for a select (crowdsource-selected) group of attendees to each be able to give a 30-second mention of a project they're working on...

Join in... what are your suggestions?
This is great and comes in handy as we are attempting to do an interface in HTML5 with Canvas.
That's nonsense. Open source is defined by the Open Source Definition as published by the OSI. http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd
Read section 3, Derived Works.
Putting a source tarball online with a license that says "you can read this source but you can't do anything else with it" doesn't make it open source.
> an ASP.NET developer is more likely to cross shop something like Java; pick a framework, any framework.

In my opinion, an ASP.NET developer is more likely to cross shop with whatever next technology is marketed by MS or whatever the company they have been working for decides to switch to (be it Java or whatever).

A Ruby, Python, PHP [Name your OSS language/platform] developer is much more likely to switch to Java (maybe not the language, but the platform) than any .Net developer ever would be.
Sad, but so true. Perhaps one day those companies will listen to the free software movement and take it seriously. In the meantime, we need to take care that FOSS doesn't kill itself with in-fighting. We've got to find a middle-ground of agreement.
My personal opinion: if you can REALLY do what you claim then you should get every country's equivalent of the CDC working with you to MANDATE that this be part of every phone, and then of course you get the revenue from IP licensing.

In fact, I would broaden the scope a bit: make it like the "Emergency Broadcast System" for phones, only two-way.

Lots of privacy implications and the carriers and handset manufacturers would hate it, but I can certainly see it doing long term good.
I do my level best to treat everyone with respect and be genuine and polite and all that. I do it because that's just how I am, I don't expect anything for it. And, no, I don't always get it right. I'm human and perfectly capable of making an arse of myself, sticking both feet in my mouth and all that. And I have had plenty of experiences that fit with the saying "No good deed goes unpunished". But I also have found that people in service industries and the like will be wonderful to me because I treat them like a human being instead of a doormat to wipe my feet on. (People in positions of power seem to divide up between those who are offended that I don't grovel and kowtow and those that are charmed.)

Some actual experiences of mine:

Long line at a crowded mall food court eatery. I'm a regular and I tend to order the same thing most of the time. My order is ready and waiting for me by the time I get to the cash register. I walk off to find a table and eat while other people who ordered and paid ahead of me (and still don't have their food) stand there with their mouth's hanging open, fuming and apparently wondering "who the fuck is she???!!!"

Long line at an eatery. I am brought the cappuccino I typically order with lunch well before I get to the cash register. While other people stand around looking at me funny, I sip my cappuccino and guiltily wonder if the person who brought it to me might get in trouble.

Last few minutes before the place is closing early on a holiday and I slip in to get something to go. They toss in a free cup of their new soup for me to try.

I have also been given free sodas, discounts on my meal, had sides/other extras tossed in for free, and have been given a stack of promotional coupons when other people are being given one coupon with their order. At the grocery store I frequent, it is common for someone to open an extra register basically just for me, so I won't have to stand in line.

If you are genuinely nice and respectful to people who routinely get crapped on, there are tangible benefits. I don't recommend you do this with some expectation of tangible benefits. I think people can smell it when they are basically being used in that way -- it might pay off initially, but will likely come back to bite you later if you are just being a smarmy manipulative charmer. But if you are genuine, yes, this does tend to pay off -- though it doesn't magically protect you from people randomly being asses to you or some such. Some people seem to behave more badly towards me because I sometimes wind up with a reputation for nice, polite behavior. They seem to be either jealous or trying to provoke a reaction to prove I'm not that nice ....or something. So it's not all upside. Still, I find the benefits I do get out of it are pretty valuable to me. It seems to routinely pay off the most under the worst circumstances, when I most need a little something extra. For me, this is frequently a saving grace in a life that can be pretty tough.
There used to be a list of launched companies in the YC faq, but there started to be so many that it was always out of date. We have a list ourselves of course, but we couldn't publish that because it's full of stuff companies don't want disclosed. And it would be a lot of work to tease apart the stuff that's secret from the stuff that isn't. Often I'm not sure myself. So making a publicly viewable list of all the startups seems to fall into the category of things that might be interesting to do, but wouldn't actually help the startups much, and would be a significant amount of work.
Could you recommend a credit card processor? and how 'expensive' are they usually?

Right now we are using PayPal Website Payments Pro with my 'other' startup and it works like a charm (incorporated in the US with a US bank account / US paypal).

Also, how did you incorporate in the BVI? Any recommendations?

As for HK, you're right, however I'm not keen on incorporating anywhere near China for business reasons. If it wasn't for that I'd have incorporated there in no time, especially since HSBC allows you to open a bank account there, which means PayPal access + easy credit card processing (you do need to go there and meet the bank representative in person though, a one time thing).

..and oh yeah, I must add that the main problem with tax havens such as the BVI is that you will most probably run into problems with PayPal. You could incorporate / open a bank account in Luxembourg or Switzerland (see website above), but that will cost you $250,000 and $500,000 minimum deposits, respectively.
You don't have to have non-open-source components in order to make open source products attractive to consumers, enterprise, etc.

"Open Core" is not the reason why Ubuntu is "making headway in the UI department". It's the work of a large community of developers, many of whom do not work for Canonical, and indeed, work for competing companies.

"Open Core" generally involves a single controlling stakeholder, which almost always means no properly enfranchised co-developers, no developer community, no collaborative innovation, etc.
That's a fairly simple and straightforward format, thanks for sharing it.

My main worry is that people will have recipes saved in all sorts of random formats, and won't understand why the importer doesn't work when they try it on their files, and won't want to reformat them.

Not sure if I can think of a clever workaround for that, though...