skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a very strategic and clever move by Microsoft to try to leverage the strong developer communities of Ruby and Python in order to gain grassroots support for Silverlight. If PHP support was also added, as discussed, it would be especially interesting.
writing code is harder than telling people what you think they ought to do

I do both and I definitely agree. Not only is it harder, there's more responsibility. You have to make something work. If it doesn't get done, or doesn't work, that's your fault. By contrast, if you tell someone what to do and it doesn't work, you can always say "well, they didn't do it right". Which of course is exactly what does get said. It's a moot point, though, because there isn't really much accountability to begin with, and because people tend to blame themselves and hide failures under the rug.

Edit: There's also a perception gap. Writing code is a lot harder than most people think it is. Ultimately, I think that's one of the deeper reasons to make one's own product and sell it rather than be a hired code-writer.
CPUShare: allows anyone to sell their spare CPU cycles
Good one! Pretty much same reaction as I had.
I still like the old one better, it stood out and was easier to pick out in my tabs. This one just blends in and I skip over it. The YC favicon has a bold color which makes it easy to pick out.

Oh well this one is sleeker and more apple like, but not everything needs to be sleek, and whispy.
Oh I get it, you hate it so it must ubiquitously suck. That's a great spirit to have about, well...anything; especially a tiny favicon.
Perhaps-- but we need to be able to make a distinction between a mathematical function and the procedure which implements it.
HN isn't a reference work like Wikipedia or the MSDN Knowledge Base, so it's less important here.

But the real reason that Microsoft's URLs suck is that the MSDN Knowledge Base is an older product than Google's, built back when the web was new and people didn't realize that their URLs sucked. And one thing that I respect Microsoft for is actually caring about reverse compatibility.

(Sidenote: This is why you should think about your URLs. They are how your website will be presented to the world.)
Jonathan's blog? Maybe.
Wordpress? No. It's pretty clearly open-source and has the "started as a few lines of code" pedigree that makes it not enterprise.
Can I just say "Thanks" to the Hacker News crowd? comatose_kid asked a fair question about religion and atheism, and yummyfajitas gave a fair answer. No trolls, no painful Reddit-style debates on atheism vs. religion. Let's keep this up.
This site does look suspicious. When you go to the orders page FireFox says:
Secure Connection Failed
www.cpushare.com uses an invalid security certificate.
Poll: Suggestions please, which JavaScript library? 
I am beginning two projects which require a lot of JavaScript work - specifically DOM manipulation and animation. Suggestions please...

Which one do you like and why?
Mochikit
Mootools
Other (Mention it in a comment)
The key is not to remember that Open Source should not be a central business model. It can be part of a broader strategic platform.

To make open source work, you need to either (a) believe that opening up source is not a big competitive disadvantage, e.g. your customers will still come to you for services, consulting etc (the kind of business you can build on top of an open source platform) or (b) have enough of a community where you can go the MySQL route. There you need to be part of the community as someone else has pointed out.
I've been wondering about open source software as a service. Could you make web software, theme it, and offer it as a pay for service. Think amazon or maybe ebay. What would happen if they opened their software.
Anyone care to comment on SugarCRM? They have taken on $46M in funding and have a current valuation around $134M.
Objective J + Cappucino
Typo? Clown with a cloud? What's clowd?
jQuery is fast, lightweight and easy to master.

For more advanced stuff, your best bet is Prototype.

Dojo, YUI (and ExtJS, not on your list) are good if you have a massive team of JavaScript developers and need standards and solid documentation, but are overkill for 90% of projects.
We decided to write our new architecture from scratch as an open source project to support our commercial business offering (online storage and backup). There are several factors to consider, roughly in order of importance (according to me):
* target audience
* marketing advantage or disadvantage
* peer review importance
* publicly enforced project management
* contribution from open-source community

Our target audience is composed of consumers who want a simple product to backup their computers and a more sophisticated audience that wants to design and maintain their own distributed backup service. For the consumers, open-source isn't necessarily a plus or minus (see marketing below) but for the more sophisticated users (enterprise IT folks) open-source is great if they need to make modifications for their special needs.

Similar to above, marketing your project/product/service as open-source may be very attractive to some audiences (enterprise IT, hackers who want their own storage grid), irrelevant to some (consumer PC user), and negative to others (some investors, some potential buyers).

One very strong benefit that we've received is peer review by experts in the field. Because our system must securely and robustly store sensitive information, the more people who read through our design and implementation and comment on it the better. Several design and implementation suggestions have helped us fix or improve our system immensely.

Because our project is open-source the peer pressure placed upon good design, documentation, and code is much higher than in my previous experiences with proprietary software. Though not perfect, it means that our team has worked hard to make the system usable and not pushed off important items that might not be visible to a busy project manager.

Code contribution has not been a major focus of our project, though we have received several very good additions to our project. I believe (but not backed up with data yet) that our particular project does not lend itself to large amounts of people coding on it as it is not (yet) a platform.

Hope this helps,
Peter
Seth loves to broadcast our ideas to the world. Send me an email if you'd like to work with us on something similar to what Seth describes (only much grander). matt@genges.com
This is exactly what Wordpress does.

I doubt anything very interesting would happen if Amazon or eBay opened their source, because their internal applications are likely such a rat's nest of interdependencies. It would take 6 mo - 1 year of full time study (i.e. the amount of time it takes a new hire to ramp up) for anyone to even begin to understand exactly how the systems fit together.

Even with the time and energy to learn how their code works, you'd still need to replicate their internal environments to be able to run their apps.
I don't think they're so calculating that they do it deliberately though. I think the powerful people there just have no design sense.

That's useful for startups to know. Any startup where design is a critical ingredient will be at least to that extent protected from Google.
I've done ExtJS and jQuery for the same project recently.

Ext has a nice DataStore object for accessing remote data. And Ext has all those great "rich" components. But I found it wasn't much more work to do my own components in jQuery. (Tree is very simple to implement in jQuery from scratch)

The sense of control I have with jQuery is nice.

The main code to handle my own trees:

_.fn.toggleTreeNode = function(animate) {
var node = this.filter('button');
if(animate) {
node.siblings('ol').slideToggle(animate)
}
else {
node.siblings('ol').toggle();
}
node.parent().toggleClass('closed');
};

You can see here the implementation is customized to the markup I needed for MY tree. CSS handles the rest, as it should.

My favorite thing about jQuery is it makes doing things the right way very easy.
The source of the trouble is that the uppercase G of their logo font is too lightweight to look good by itself. The Yahoo Y looks pretty good, but the Google G is all empty space. And it's probably not a font where you could get away with cranking up the weight very much.

Basically, they've been hosed by bad design choices they made early on, and which they now (rightly or wrongly) consider to be part of the company's identity.
It's a free cert from cacert.org hence it's not trusted...

The "About" page claims it's a research project which is precisely what it looks like to me. What's suspicious about that?
Mootools is easy to use, and I'm a noob.
Prototype gives you power to develop custom interfaces and supports various idioms - events, cross-platform layout, positioning, classes, not just fancy widgets, use Prototype when you need total control over your interface.
This wasn't a troll, incidentally; it was a spam:

http://www.google.com/search?q=Sensitivity+Training+SD-3082&...
This resonates very well with the 'mimetic desire' theory by Rene Girard.
My vote's on jQuery, but whatever you do, do it unobtrusively (one reference: http://simonwillison.net/static/2008/xtech/ ).

It's easy if you do it from the start, and there's a real savings in maintenance costs.
No doubt - been there, done that.
LiveJournal seems to have done well by open sourcing their product and charging to host it. Even though a lot of baby LiveJournals have sprung up, LJ still has 15 million users. The social aspect has probably helped a lot by making it harder to leave.

Are there other companies that have succeeded with this model?
Actually they are not truly open source - their license is just called "open source", but the open part of their CRM is just a Demo without reports and lots of other neccessary features, so their "open source" is just a marketing, not the reality.
San Francisco: Create something important, shoot for the moon! Once you're done, wear it on your sleeve like the politically correct asshole that you are. Oh yeah - learn a bit about wine, will you?

Portland, Oregon: Welcome to the Garden of Urban Eden. Don't tell anyone though. Just lay low and work on that novel.

Seattle: What? You thought I was hip and happening? Go inside and code something, ya bum. Buy a sea kayak for those "sun breaks" if you're feeling feisty.

Florence, Italy: Walk in the footsteps of creative genius. Just don't forget to keep on walking. Seriously, I'm just a dapper old man now, not worth more than a summer abroad.

Bologna, Italy: (just translate Portland, Oregon into Italian)

Milan: Forget about sunflowers. Get industrial, Italian style. You might want to ditch those sneakers though, capsici?

Rome: I am the the warm, blood-soaked bosom of Western history. You just might get lost and waste your entire life here. Worse things could happen, though.

Montreal: Savor the moment, live life to the fullest and create something beautiful, because Winter is coming. And it's nothing nice, yo.

Tokyo: Get to work and get moving, because we're WAY ahead of you. After work, it's totally OK to indulge your pervy self though.

Los Angeles: YOU could be so great. THIS TOWN could be so great. Where is everyone anyway? No worries, just do your own thing.

Miami: Forget about LA. I'm the real sexy deal. Unless you're looking for work, then get lost.

New York: I'm the biggest poser in the World. Deal with it.
Smanek, the center delegated the task of configuring a system to you because they trusted you to know the interdependencies of the system. However well meaning, what you actually did was take a tested and validated configuration from Dell and screw it up a little while trying to make it a little better. That's a recipe for trouble no matter what kind of software you use.

I think the lessons people should take from your post are

- If you're going to dick with Microsoft software, be sure and research the Knowledge Base ahead of time. The number 555087 tells me there are at least half a million known things you can screw up.

- If it matters that your system is reliable, avoid optimizing a configuration after it's been validated by the vendor.

- Always expect a surprise when you give a customer a configuration with different software.

My mail server is a FreeBSD box. It's been running for 10 years and has been upgraded several times. Uptime shows

12:47PM up 473 days, 18:21, 17 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

However just last week someone screwed up mail on it when they installed a new open source library.
Hillary Clinton ends campaign, announces support for Obama
T-Mobile Sues Starbucks Over Free Wifi
I've written at length about this in the past:

http://inthebox.webmin.com/open-source-and-business-a-precar...

And here at HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=131662

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=81351

And many more. I'm on my second Open Source based business, and I think we've found a combination of factors that's going to be successful this time around: Huge and rapidly growing market, our Open Source offering is uniquely capable of filling niches that have never been served before, and...we offer a proprietary product on top that makes it really clear (to investors, to our customers, to our Open Source contributors) where and how we make money.
There is of course the other option of not using any of them and programming custom things in javascript. I'm not sure if this takes longer or not - I haven't used any of the above libraries - but I think you get a more satisfactory result.

DOM manipulation is pretty simple with the javascript dom functions, as is animation, although it depends on how custom you need it, and how much you're worried about speed/bloat/etc
I've used JQuery once or twice, but I will definatly look into it more, been hearing good things about it, and this poll just backs it all up.

But using a lot of Prototype in the past....
It is hard to be enthusiastic about something which encourages the proliferation of god-awful, low-resolution, blurry cell phone snapshots.
From TFA:

I guess I was subconsciously coining a new term--which I so rarely do--this time, combining crowd and cloud into something new. I think I like it, even if it is a bit artificial
Cell-phone tetris on the street in Palo Alto
In FireFox 3 it makes you jump through hoops to allow you access a site which has self-signed certificates or has one with an unknown issuer such as CAcert.

The FF3 developers regard this as a feature as it may help prevent potential man-in-the-middle attacks or people making false assumptions about sites based on a padlock by making you add exceptions in every case. I personally regard this functionality as an extremely irritating flaw in FF3 that it goes out of its way to annoy, provides an utterly inadequate explanation for the end user and gets in the way of lots of legitimate use cases (think passwords on non-critical sites that would otherwise be sent in plaintext using http where /any/ security even without trust is actually an improvement). What's even more annoying is that I've yet to find a good way of getting around this broken functionality.
Some friends of mine have been talking about building a tetris game that is controlled through a cell phone for about 5 years. The internet says they finally did it. It's on University Ave in Palo Alto, between Miyake and the underpass. Is there anyone in Palo Alto who can verify its existence and awesomeness (or suckitude)?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=210383
That's a new aspect of SugarCRM. In the past, all of their code was available under an Open Source license...and that Open Source code worked well for a lot of people for a lot of purposes. Just because you need or want the stuff that isn't Open Source doesn't mean they aren't building some "true" Open Source software (and some plugins that are not).

Open Source is a license and a community, and SugarCRM has both. It also has some extensions that are not Open Source, and the fact is, extracting money from Open Source fanatics is like getting blood from a turnip...so they will never be a customer anyway. So, it's about the only model that works for a large class of problems.

However, you still get a lot of benefits of Open Source from SugarCRM: Open data formats and no possibility for them to lock you in; as long as the core always remains Open Source you can never be "stuck" with your business based on an end-of-lifed product, as with some of the mergers in that field over the years, because it can fork if SugarCRM stops being developed for some reason; community of helpful users and developers means that the level of expertise available is high and affordable.

Over 10 years of building businesses based on Open Source software, I've grown to be pragmatic rather than ideological about how best to produce Open Source software and make money with it. I still prefer to produce and use Open Source tools...but I also know that a thriving business-backed OSS project can build thoroughly kickass software at a rate that a purely community-backed project rarely can. It's not impossible, of course, but it's rare and requires several factors to converge: one or more smart developers who need and use the software being developed and who can devote significant time to it, small core of useful functionality that can be implemented and launched quickly, and a large community of users to help support the product so the developer doesn't burn out.
He's pushing a P2P benevolent panopticon.
ExtJS is the one we actually use in our products...the widgets are just too awesome to skip. I'm not entirely on-board with the way things work. It's a very OO style project, and feels kinda like working with Swing or some other Java toolkit. A bit verbose at times. But, the library has so much coverage, it'd take us an extra six months to a year to develop those bits and pieces using jQuery, which I find more fun and natural to use.

YUI is a close runner up, and if I were starting today I might go with it. The widgets are fantastic, the documentation is fantastic, and the community is large. It also feels more like JavaScript than ExtJS.

As jQuery UI develops it'll probably become a contender in that space, as well. But, for now, I'm just adding it to our websites in a few places where it is useful--that's the other negative about ExtJS: It's a "drink the Kool-aid" kind of library. I've had a hard time integrating it in little bits and pieces, and it's turned out that everything is going to have to be converted to use ExtJS for it to all work together.
It's not quite "software" (you've already been provided with answers covering that) but Ruby on Rails is open source but still makes lots of money for people, whether in writing books, doing consultancy, and the creator of Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson, could (and probably does) make tons of cash from RailsConf, speaking engagements, endorsements, etc.

Just because Rails costs nothing doesn't mean a big economy can't surround it.. and if you were the creator of the technology, you get first dibs on making that cash.
The thumbnails of the others they were considering are telling...very iPhone-esque.

Google is moving to Apple, becoming a challenger rather than the usual innovator.
To be honest, open source doesn't really benefit the company doing it nearly as much as it benefits the users. Most of them essentially get something for nothing. And nowadays, it's no news story to be open source, so the extra marketing you get for being open is much less than it was 5 years ago.

Unless you reach a certain level, external developer contribution will be minimal as well (compared to what's done internally), so you can't depend on that for benefit either. And as for selling support, forget it. If your product is stable, 99% of people will opt for the "we'll just call you when we need you" option and take the hourly billing rate (even a jacked up one for emergencies), because they'll only need it maybe once a year.

I've run a successful albeit very small open source company for 7 years, and we're gearing up to release another major version by end of summer (www.simian.ca). I really don't mean to come off cynical or unappreciative of certain users (we have a number of users who have been amazingly helpful, and those are the users that make it all worthwhile), but as a model for a new business you have to look at the reality of how well it can work and grow into a sustainable model. Open source is a big risk for little potential gain these days.

My advice, start a company that offers a subscription-based service or boxed product (closed source). You can always provide APIs for 3rd parties to interact with, and you can open source libraries and other useful but non-essential bits. But giving away the central thing that defines your company is a difficult sell.
i think the main reason people use prototype is that it has very strong integration with rails and symphony... if it weren't for that; I probably would have switched to jquery a long time ago
I wonder if a virtual machine is being started? How do I make sure no harmful code is executed on my machine?
Some Sun engineers use the term "clowd" internally, and in the way you've assumed: clown+cloud, because they hate the use of the term "cloud" because the term evolved from a time when the cloud drawing surrounded by PCs and servers in diagrams of the Internet kinda implied "we don't really know what goes on in there". And, of course, at Sun, they like to think they do know what goes on inside that Internet "cloud".
Engine Yard Express
Wow. That guy is really bad at Tetris.
jQuery has been a huge time saver for me, highly recommended. I did look at pretty much all of these before settling on it, and haven't regretted it at all. jQuery is amazingly easy to get started with, very concise, but also amazingly expressive and flexible without sacrificing readability or conciseness.
I've also done a fair bit with Prototype/Scriptaculous, but it just seems clunky and excessive in comparison to jQuery now.
your opinion about sending messages being a very hard problem

I said scaling Twitter must be a hard problem, and that it will involve correcting their implementation rather than any one magic bullet. I said nothing about IM, email, blogs, etc.

You've decided that I'm talking about something that I am not.
Keep It Short, Make It Instant
If you're looking for something along the same lines but not vague and Godin-like, check out:

http://www.amazon.com/Everyware-Dawning-Ubiquitous-Computing...