skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Routine" as he means it is a control structure with an implicit stack with a memory range associated with each JMP. (That is foo(int x) has four bytes on the stack devoted to x). If a language has no routines, they can be faked out if you can make a stack data structure, which would be a little difficult in basic, having no pointers or references. Hence, I'd say pointers are somewhat more "great".
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Post the original story, please, not a linkjacking.
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...and here I was, guessing "recursion".
I noticed the new Google favicon a few days ago, and already hate it. Why use a lower-case 'g'? That would make sense---if they changed their name to 'gooGle'.
Ask YC: What are the downsides of open source?
What is the challenge to make open source software successful in terms of making revenue?

Has anyone from here done it before?
Would you make the same decision again to go open?
What problems did you come across?
The Story Behind Google’s New Favicon
Backspace.
Yeah, the "Adobe Flash" - "flash memory" thing actually made me laugh out loud.
"Amazon.com was taken down by a distributed denial-of-service attack that struck the Web site's load-balancing system, according to a rumor that's begun circulating among security professionals."

Don't know if it's true, but at least it's a reliable source.
Production Delays Rumored for 3G iPhone
Google's New Icon: Why it Sucks
"Skepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic."

This is kinda dangerous. Many times you don't know if a matter is of large or small consequences unless you first approach it skeptically.
I was able to read Taleb in the original English and understand what he wrote and meant just fine, being a native speaker of said language.
JMC gets honorary degree from Harvard
I wasn't bashing on virtual communities. The discussions here are more interesting than the ones with my neighbors. I just think it's good to know who lives on my street, and the folks I don't know are the ones who drive in and out of the garage in the SUV and never say hello. It's their right to do so, but I think it weakens the community.
still prefer javascript... I just cant get into Phython for some reason
1) I have found it impossible to establish relationships with others (seemingly like myself) online. It plain does not work. I'm not sure why... it just won't go. It doesn't make any difference how much you have in common or what your accomplishments are. Try and drum up a discussion or introduce yourself cold to someone in SV or at MIT or anywhere else, on say, LinkedIn. You're a nut, an intruder. I doubt this will ever work.
2) There is an chasm separating intellectualism and ambition that is difficult to understand. When I read Bill and Dave, I was taken back by the ambition of early Stanford engineering faculty. But today? I know too many at universities with stunning intelligence, but still have that profit-is-evil and corporations-are-bad crap from the 70's. It's like some weird religion. Talk about ideas and that's fine, but AS SOON AS YOU MENTION ACTION, it gets ugly and they shut down. That's why most MIT grads still work for Harvard grads. It's too bad, but this is why Cambridge will likely never become some kind of SV.
3) The power and action in SV you describe, is cold and lifeless and without meaning. Maybe exciting like a thrill park, but meaningless. That's why startup successes leave the founders in a panic to hitch the next ride, fast. What you say about the message in SV is true, but if your ambition was to take action and do a startup because you wanted to do something with meaning, better go somewhere else because in SV meaning has no meaning. No one cares about meaning. Ideas are nothing more than pancakes - flip 'em until their brown on both sides. And so in this regard, the message in SV may very well be EXACTLY like that in New York, with the only difference being that value is attached to the means by which the wealth is gained - independently. Have you thought about that??? That in SV all they care about is money like in New York, but gaining the wealth by independent means is what matters. You could test this - offer to help someone free of charge. See how much they despise feeling indebted to someone else, however slight. It's just a theory.
Thanks for your advice; I've been raising rates for development but what I'm afraid, is that sometimes I'm very busy with projects for months, and then I just can't work in other projects... And if other clients ask for development at that time I just can't offer them it then. I'm afraid of slowly losing those clients, of course (that's why now I only "offer" consultancy, because then I don't break any clients' expectatives, and now and then I just start development for some months, in a project for some of those clients).
kinda agree, but a lot of us are intersted on mobile development, and iPhone is the big elephant.
What is the challenge to make open source software successful in terms of making revenue?

In discussions about open source software, I'm frequently reminded of the following PG quote:

To be a startup, a company has to be a product business, not a service business. By which I mean not that it has to make something physical, but that it has to have one thing it sells to many people, rather than doing custom work for individual clients.

Open source is inherently not a product -- at least, not in the sense of being something you can sell to many people. The frequent cry of "but we'll make money selling support" ignores a critical fact: There aren't enough hours in the day to get rich by selling support contracts.

The one "open source" company which was successful at making lots of money -- MySQL -- wasn't in fact an open source company: They made their money selling a commercial product, and they just happened to use releasing a GPLed version as a cheap advertising mechanism.

I strongly support open source software; but a startup which builds open source software? It ain't a startup.
My interest is to keep doing development, not consultancy. But I have to offer a permanent service if I want new clients to contact me both at times I'm busy and when I'm not. I'm trying consultancy as that kind of service, and while I'm not completely sure yet, I think it works for now. 90% of the time I keep developing software for one or other project (but, as I don't offer that as a permanent service, I can choose which projects to work in, and also I can just tell clients "I can't do development now" when I'm just busy with some other project); but I'm always free for consultancy.
The guy wrote a couple of popular "popular science" books. So now he's a lifestyle guru?
Aarg. Not another set of initials to learn!

Even after looking at the article it took me a while to figure out who "JMC" was since I expected his last name to start with a C, not an M, and that James P. Comer guy threw me for a little while.
Thanks a lot for your useful advice. And you are right, hiring promotion / PR / sales people is very, very hard for small companies like this (at least I could never hire anybody for that, and I've been doing business for some years now).
Sounds like a good setup to me, actually, because you can get paid for something with a lot of people, and cherry pick what to work on in terms of development, which is indeed much more time consuming.

Maybe not quite as good as having residual income from an actual product, but pretty good just the same.
You can't do experiments very easily, but it's easy to examine empirically historical events.

As for good business books, I suppose I would "recommend" psychology, probably Dale Carnegie (thought it's the odd one out) and most traditional texts on finance and economics.

I would say business is a mixture of economics, finance and psychology, in that order.
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"So, you need to pare down your problem space/feature set to the absolute minimum that provides real value to people."

This is very useful advice, it's a good rule to have in mind. I'm actually doing development, but I don't do active promotion of that as I can only do one project at a time, and projects tend to go for months. But as I keep developing on projects, I keep very focused on them and only a little consultancy work and some basic business meetings, sales, etc keep me out of full focus on dev. But I don't think I'm in the minimum yet, so I'll really think in what you said.

I also agree with you in prefering the "given this problem, I need more people" angle, for growing the company.

Thanks a lot for your useful and very interesting! advice, and good luck with your new project!
I doubt this story. First, it's not sourced. Second, it lacks details. Third, NEWS.COM went and asked a bunch of actual security people, including Arbor Networks, which operates monitors plugged directly into the backbones of almost every tier 1 ISP on the planet, and nobody corroborated that it was a DDoS.

Who knows, maybe Arbor was covering, or maybe they screwed up. But the evidence for me favors something other than DDoS.
Of course, having residual income from an actual product would be better... I started my business career with a great product sales failure and since then I stayed at (quite successful) high cost services, even in a product-oriented industry like games :) Some months ago I was starting some product development again but a new big contract came and I just couldn't refuse. Maybe some day I'll go the product way.

Thank you for your interesting comments.
FYI: JMC is John McCarthy.
For example, ports go into one repository, the kernel goes in another, documentation into a third, and so on.

In fact, that's almost what FreeBSD has done for years. Until recently, there were separate src, ports, doc, www, and projects CVS repositories; the only change now is that the src repository is SVN -- the others are still CVS. As for why the kernel isn't a separate repository: FreeBSD, unlike linux, considers the kernel to be an integral part of a larger whole -- not a completely separate entity. We find that developing the kernel alongside userland utilities and libraries is a very Good Thing.

CVSup and the related toolchain will probably need substantial changes to support anything which isn't CVS anyway.

Nope. All the commits to SVN-src are being replicated to CVS-src (and will be for years to come) -- SVN is basically being used as a new way of doing CVS commits.
I'm more or less in agreement. The problem is scarcity - what you can make people pay for because it's scarce:

http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-...

Looking at several successful "open source" oriented companies, we can see what kind of scarcity they introduced:

- Mysql, as you say, had their wonky licensing and a commercial product.

- Redhat decided to not license the 'branding' component of their distribution under a free license, so while you can copy the software, you have to remove a lot of bits and pieces (which CentOS has done), and it's not really Redhat anymore... If you want the support, you have to pay their licensing fees.

- Cygnus was relatively successful, a while ago, and were successful because they seemed, IMO, to stick to the letter of the law rather than the spirit: they'd give their clients full source code, but didn't make it public. They did a lot of 'billing' work, too, IIRC.

Still - I think there are a lot of advantages to using open source, and in many cases there are even business cases for developing it, but it is hard to base a business exclusively on open source.
i liked the option#2 - though there are few email services that offers to consolidate all emails a/c in to one (including yahoo, msn etc.) - one of them is orgoo.com - its in beta so dont expect a lot - but they can improve on regular basis ...
I wish it was not a buzzword, but that more people used it. I don't know of any other way to explain what I do, why I do it, and how I do it in just a simpler way than by saying "solopreneur". I'm a little entrepreneur, but not interested in making the company grow if that makes me unhappy, and I'm working solo or with a few people most of the times here, but that's a choice, not just something that happened. That's all what "solopreneur" says in a single word, and that's why I like it.
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"is similar to how things are done in their new favorite programming language."

I disagree. IMO there is benefit to thinking and writing in the "java way" or the "ruby way". The language itself imposes certain restrictions, and managing those constraints is part of the programmers way of thinking. Further, the langauge imposes a certain thought process, functional, OO which mandate that "good" code written in that language follow those, if not for the programmer but for anyone having to read and manage that code base.

Yes, there are some fundamental rules that you can follow like code reuse, abstraction etc that apply across the board, but ignoring the language and platform you are on is a recipe for disaster.

Simplifying an intricate process like programming like this is problematic. Every line of code is the result of several considerations, the problem space, the technologies being used, the language itself, design patterns, efficiency, testability .. I mean the list goes on. I wish there was a simple recipe as described in the article, but then we, as programmers, would be punching time cards in and out rather than treating the process as art than science.
Thanks for your reply. What I found useful whenever I could was setting rates per hour or per time unit (say, month) of development time, in large projects no one can really estimate how much time they will take to finish (for example, these days I'm developing some kind of 2.0 video streaming app for a client, and we're always testing it with people and adding features, thinking of new security measures and so on... we couldn't have written a full requirements doc at the start of this specific project). This protects your budget, but also your client's budget in the end (you don't need to do over-estimations for the costs to be safe).

About parallel projects for products... I have none of them, but I use development work to learn more and more about difficult subjects that would take a long time of research or study to learn well (for example, on an older project I learned some basics of computer vision, etc). In the end that makes my development time more expensive and useful with every project. But maybe I should think in products too.
But portions can be open source, as long as you keep what makes you as a business closed initially, you can retain control over your bloodline, while either open sourcing chunks or utilizing other open source projects.
When you make the decision to go open source obviously it's not from the product it self you are making money directly, only when sell licenses with support probably, but I am not excited with that model due to the fact that is not really clear how you can succeed reaching businesses to pay.

Thats my concern basically, while also the probabilities are mostly against you, and probably the product will disappear.

Of course, you seize to be considered a startup anymore, because a startup is about rapid growth.

So probably thats why te best way to go is to have a free version of the product and more advanced features for those who pay, and a seperate license to have access to the source code, like Symbian does?
I worked at RIM this past Fall. One day someone sent around this link: http://www.engadget.com/2007/10/03/is-this-the-blackberry-9x...

I looked at the prototype Blackberry Bold I had on my desk and laughed. I'm sure people at Apple are doing the same thing right now.
What this really says to me is that Google has devolved quite far, from the days when they were happy to slap on any google-doodle on the front page. They are now happy to waste (I can only call it that) hundreds or maybe thousands of hours creating an icon.
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"The iPhone is currently the dominant player in wireless devices."

http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/smartphone...

"May 30, 2008 07:57 PM

Research in Motion sold the most smartphones in the United States for the first quarter of 2008, more than doubling the nearest competitor's market share, an IDC report found."
"Talk is cheap. Show me the code."
Sensitivity Training question
Recently, at work, we got in another new person from England. There are a lot of people fleeing England, although it's one of the most liberal places on earth. Like most English men, he drinks a lot, drives drunk, masturbates to extreme pornography, and sleeps with moronic sluts who give him infections. He is very liberal and I'm sure what I said was totally insensitive.

Apparently, after a few beers, I referred to the United Kingdom (in which England is a state, like Vermont) as "Brokeback Island," at which point he punched me, but it felt more like getting hit in the face with an effete wet dishrag.

Someone immediately called me racist against the English, which I've never felt was true (some of my best friends were English) but then our black friend Tsewethawa said it might be homophobic instead. I think he took pity on me.

My question is:

* Is calling the UK "Brokeback Island" racist? If so, I need to go to Sensitivity Training SD-3082, "Learning to Recognize and Eliminate Racial Bias."

* Is calling the UK "Brokeback Island" homophobic? If so, I need to go to Sensitivity Training HD-6139, "Discovering and Preventing Sexual and Gender Bias."

If my words were determined to be racist, homophobic AND sexist, then I have to go through the whole diversity training seminar, which will take two weeks and be taught in Nigeria, and that's really going to wreck my vacation schedule.

Can someone help? If there's an informed opinion that says the comment was EITHER racist or homophobic, then I'm OK, but if it's both, I may well be screwed.

http://www.corrupt.org/transcendence/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1212857645
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A favicon is a pretty important part of an online company's brand/identity. I'm not surprised they thought carefully before deciding on what to change it to. Plus Google have a surplus of very intelligent people; it's not like they couldn't afford the time.

What surprises me is that I really dislike the new favicon, personally.
Agreed. You should have a very proven path to generate revenue, outside of licensing, if you go the open source route. Companies who try to go it "halfway" by releasing a core product as OSS and then try to introduce closed-source addons have a tough time getting by on services while they try to prove that the addon is worth the extra cost: ArsDigita had to try this route in order to grow the business, and they burned through $20M before getting sold for pennies on the dollar to Red Hat.

In short, fantastic tools with which to build a business, but as a selling point of a product...once you take the genie out of the bottle, you often find yourself wishing you could put it back in later.
The research tracked data from two million or sites and suggests that the iPhone is now the most popular mobile browser in the US, representing .23 percent of all browser traffic. That number is up from .14 percent in December, an increase of almost 65 percent.

- according to StatCounter, March 2008
Instead of "routines" why not just say "functions" - which then opens another can of worms because functions were studied long before they were ever used in programming.
> The frequent cry of "but we'll make money selling support" ignores a critical fact: There aren't enough hours in the day to get rich by selling support contracts.

Speaking of ignoring critical facts:

1) You can hire more people to do support, which increases the total available amount of hours in the day.

2) Most support contracts are barely used and bought purely for comfort, so you can oversubscribe your support team to increase profit margins.

3) Every year software companies make billions on support contracts. MySQL made many millions on support.
Regardless of which statistic is a better indicator I think Apple is the "trend-setter" right now, which is what the article seems to be concerned about...
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I have a co-founder, but I'm much more active, so it's more like 80/20. Most of the time I feel 'solo'. As I'm reaching my limit for workload, I'm trying to push more work to part-time contractors including: legal, accounting, and sys-admin type stuff.

Its a huge challenge to cleanly define areas to hand off, and to trust others with them. But I'm convinced its the key to growth.
This just goes to show how lost Google is regarding design.

They had no idea what kind of favicon to create, so they created 300 different ones (some of them absolutely hideous) and chose an ugly lowercase G that doesn't match Google's brand at all.

And blue? With a gradient? Why?
This isn't something Google should care about. If anything, it's an indication that web browsers should finally let users set their own bookmark/site icons (relying on sites only for initial/default icons).

How many people would care if Google changed a 16x16 pixel icon, if they could tell their browser to use something else?
Usually the success stories are products built on top of, or around, open source software. Suites that include support, integration services, and add-ons. Often these companies contribute back to the open source projects, while also keeping some of their own work proprietary. Then charge on a subscription model.
Regarding 1) - yes... that's true, but it's a very linear model, which means it's of less interest to people like VC's. 2) is true, but lots of people realize that they don't need the support. The better you can bundle it, like Redhat does, the better off you are, because it means sticking more people with fees for something they don't need.

It's not an easy road.
i think uppercase is too "strong" for the sort of relaxed company Google is seen as, and uppercase letters in general are rigid/disjointed -> ugly. also, the uppercase G in their font isn't as recognizable/signaturable as the lowercase (in general, i think uppercase letters have less tractable variation than lowercase)

though i think that particular lowercase g may be too complex (too curvy)
I don't agree at all. If favicon is important part of an online company's identity there must be something seriously wrong. However bad or good the company does in the future won’t be based on the look on the favicon… so in my opinion it does not matter at all.
I personally don't like purple for the color or the lower case..g - I think another color selection could have represented better things... is it just me?
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Yeah, so did I. So did I.

But unlike many others, I recognized that he's using poor style as a substitute for meaningful content. That's my point, which I apparently did not make sufficiently clear for native speakers like yourself.
Poor graphic design is part of Google's charm.
Who cares, really? This isn't news "hackers" care about!
Fascinating. I can't wait to hear the inside scoop on how they code their img tags.
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I agree with your points.

I think what is wrong with it is that it is too twisty and curvy for something that is to be so small. A favicon should be bold, simple, clear. Like the Y on this site.
I currently solve the problem with fast-user switching, but it's annoying (sometimes it's slow, it logs out iChat, and stops iTunes playback). I'd prefer user-switching to be a browser feature and I patiently await the day.