skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know that a lot of the famous idealist of the past have been laughed at for being diluted and not in touch with reality. RMS is not blind, he just sees what he wants to see. He knows the reality and knows that a lot of people laught at him for some reasons, but doesn't care. Look at him, he doesn't give up, he pushes harder and harder. I don't support his extremist ideas, im a more moderate free software fan, but his impact has been mainly positive. Did he cost any real harm to technology? Are his ideas killing jobs, destroying businesses? No, they are just supplying alternatives. We are now more ahead, if we didn't have free software. We may not be extreme as RMS, but we get pushed by a complete nutcase to do good. Im pretty sure RMS doesn't have any illusions and knows that he can never win completely, but he sees that he has positive effect and just goes on.

P.S. Gimp sucks, but Photoshop's prise tag sucks more.
I can't see in what way you can call "freedom" restricting individuals from enter mutually-beneficious contracts. Governments must intervene to prevent abusive clauses. There are some limitations that would be reasonable like making a deposit of the source code for cases of disappearing vendors, forcing software vendors to honor the buyers' right to their own data...

But the basic fact is that someone can create and sell licenses for a closed source program that would not be profitable unless it's made for many customers. Sometimes an open source program can be made for the same niche and offer similar quality. But not always.
Which language do you use for day-to-day stuff?
which language do you use for day-to-day stuff?
Coders expect to be paid for developing apps by the people/companies that want those apps. Coders who write code and then release it under an open source license are not expecting to be paid for it. Writers or photographers who produce and then post their stuff on-line, un-prompted, ARE creating it for free. If you want to get paid to write or take photographs, find someone who is willing it pay to have you write or pay to have you use a camera. This will require that someone actually want /your/ output.

Developers go to work and produce something for someone else, and in exchange get paid. Then they go home and work on their own stuff. Writers, too, can get a job where they write for someone who is willing to pay them, and then go home and write their own stuff. In most cases, the developers don't really like having to produce stuff for someone else, but that's how they pay the bills.

The developers seem to be more adept (in your analogy) at solving the problem: they find someone who wants to pay them BEFORE they produce the software (even shrinkwrap software or startups presumably have done some market research to find out if their output is attractive to potential buyers of said product). The writer or photographer who tries to find someone to buy their output AFTER it's already created is facing an uphill battle, mostly in marketing, trying to convince someone to buy their product rather than producing a product the market demands.

Developing software for someone else is like working in a portrait studio or photographing products for ads.
It's too bad that pie-in-the-sky solutions or the output of someone's final project in architecture class gets more mindshare and column inches than actual, workable, pragmatic solutions.

Pragmatic solutions are boring. They work.
It's ironic that the biggest obstacle to Stallman's idea of free software is his own stupid use of the word "free", so I feel I have to ask but do you mean free as in "without charge" or free as in "unencumbered"? Given that this is Hacker News, it's perhaps important to keep in mind that Stallman has nothing against commercial software. The whole "free" issue for him has to do with restrictions on the right of people to hack and redistribute their hacks.
Independence Day: HTML5 WebSocket Liberates Comet From Hacks
That's not the only reason. It is suggested that URLs be dated like that to ensure their uniqueness and to generate a URL that is more permanent.
What difference is noticeable? Speed? Code ugliness? Coding speed?
I admire your sense of duty, but want to play devil's advocate for a second.

Should a slave continue to be enslaved out of a sense of duty to their master? Should a kid brought up in a religious family choose to remain in that faith merely out of a sense of duty?

It's curious how patriotism seems to instill a sense of duty in rational minds where even religion can find it tough to stick.
Ask an expert of five deferments - Dick Cheney.
Last years that we had the mandated military service in my country, a lot of people were choosing "substituroy social service". I didn't because I didn't consider that I had any moral reason not to serve. Neither had most of people that were choosing it anyway, but that's another story.

In war time it would have been a very different matter. I won't pretend I have the faintest idea of what I'd had done if I'd been an american.
Why use it when you can use good, free, robust/reliable, open-source tools to do the same things?
So as long as you donate a percentage of your income to a good cause, it doesn't matter how you made that income? Like if you run a serial killer business or the Mafia, you are still good, as long as you donate to cancer research?

Not a judgement about Bill Gates Foundation vs Stallman, I don't know much about it, just questioning your logic.

My qualified opinion from reading lots of crime novels and watching mainstream Hollywood movies is that publicly donating to good causes is established standard practice for villains. (Again, not saying BG is a villain - being able to donate to good causes is one good motivation for trying to hit it big with a startup).
I'm crediting him for suggesting YAML. To be honest, I heard the name before but never thought it's so nice.
>I could hack this together in 15 minutes

>Total cost? $250.

Do you really charge 1000$ per hour? What do you do?
Why must proprietary be evil?

Personally I think it's a mistake to argue along the lines of good/evil.

The biggest problem with both proprietary and free software actually lies in the ignorance of the people who license and deploy either form without understanding the consequences, especially the technical and legal ability to access data and historic documents.
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Also you managed to insult Imams and Wal-Mart shoppers for no particular reason, even though as far as I know neither takes a position on open source versus closed source software.
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Find a much more detailed article here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_...
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Ask HN: does scarcity lead to better design?
Maybe it is a no-brainer, but I just thought about this while pondering the switch from Eclipse to Vim. On the one hand being used to an IDE, I am worried that I won't manage so well with complex tasks. On the other hand the problem might not be the development environment, but the programming language and framework (can't handle Java without IDE). So using a more restricted development environment (not saying Vim is, I don't know it yet), I would automatically aim for more simplicity and tractability in my code.

On a related note, if Oil had always been scarce, SUVs (epitome of ugliness, bad taste and atrocious design) might never have been created.

On the other hand, presumably one can't simply state "the more scarcity the better", there is some kind of sweet spot?
Given the above analysis, we now understand the bug well enough to try to write some code to detect it.

This is exactly as it should be: the burden should be on the browser developers to investigate bugs and write the tests they want web developers to use in their workarounds.
I really doubt Aitzaz Ahsan's contribution. I've been following that judiciary debacle in Pakistan and I don't think he's that vocal even in Lawyer's community, especially after that Long March decision that he took on his own at the eleventh hour.
Thanks for the answers folks. My roommate is talking about needing tens of thousands of dollars of servers for a company he's thinking about starting and and my immediate thought was "why?" I just got my first EC2 instance up and running from the terminal in OS X so I'm doing my little happy dance. Thanks for the help.
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Yes that is true and I know a lot of languages and while Python perhaps doesnt offer as deep possibilities within each paradigm it offers every paradigm.

As you said this makes it very good for writing programs and does so in a lot of different domains but perhaps when digging really deep into one area you can find something better suited.
honestly... ruby, awk, bash (in that order)
Hmm I always thought I speak and write english really well. I have also been told so by a number of americans but then it perhaps has been in comparisment perhaps with other europeans :)

I am swedish btw.
I wonder, does Google count links from bad sites as negative, or does it simply ignore them?

I am afraid it will be negative, but this opens the door for abuse by linking to the competition from unwanted pages? So to just ignore them would be more fair?
There is nothing wrong with ASP.NET. The guys at Microsoft who write the developer tools are second to none. The wide availability of excellent books and the choice of languages makes this option well worth considering. The .NET framework itself is great with all the functionality you might want.

The downside as I see it is what I call the "upgrade treadmill" imposed (I assume) by the MS Marketing types - you will be pushed ever onwards once you start down this road. My corporate customers seem happy with that and we have built some great interactive web sites that scale well but it is a factor that you might like to take into account.
How I built a web app in six days for only Rs. 350 ($8.75)
The problem is that reading UTF-8 from a web browser, then storing it in an 8-bit clean database (everything), and then displaying that binary data back to the web browser usually works OK.

That sounds like something you could fix relatively easily. In my experience this does happen, but it's not with UTF-8, it's with Windows-1252.
ASP.NET and the .NET Framework are free no less, and more reliable than Windows itself. And the Mono project (.NET stack for Unix) is open source.

While ASP.NET in its out-of-the-box form may be a bit daunting at times, since it follows nearly the same development model (viz event wireups, binded controls etc) as with developing software apps. But ASP.NET MVC is an upcoming alternate model that is quite flexible and more appealing for web development.

Having worked with MS tools for over a decade I can easily say that the .NET IDE's have only gotten better, more usable and powerful, whether its Visual Studio Express (free) or SharpDevelop (open source).
Unless you have a specific partnership or business model in mind that requires it, I'd say ASP.NET's advantages are not sufficient to offset the disadvantage of being coupled to Microsoft's decision process (both business and technical).
Umm, this is a simple answer - they had $51 billion in sales last year and is a publicly traded company.

They have to realistically do whatever is best to protect the interests of their shareholders and as long as their current business model works, I'm sure they're not really going to change it drastically.

Thats the sad reality of it all.
Why can't you quantify usability problems found? Isn't it just a matter of counting? More users yields diminishing returns in number of problems found, and with 15 users you basically find all problems that you will find using any larger number of users. That sounds sensible to me. What am I missing?
Idea for a startup:
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Whats the github for svn ?
what are the best web-based svn tracking/utils synonymous to github?

(btw does svnhub.com comes from the same stable of github.com ? all links there seem to point to youtube videos though)
That post is partially in response to TechCrunch featured 'How To Build A Web App in Four Days For $10,000 (Say Hello To Matt)' (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/03/how-to-build-a-web-app-...) and partially to document my process of building a web app.

Critical comments and candid feedback appreciated.
English? (depending on who you talk too, they might say barely)

I'm actually a big fan of Python lately
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"pay for what you get?" :-p
Actually that is very good progress for both the timeframe and cost.
I don't understand what your comment means. Elaborate?
"Free software still clearly lags behind proprietary in some cases, and always will."

For Stallman it is not a question of quality of software but of ethics. And he explains his views without resorting to religion or calling people idiots.
I'm sorry but I don't see any difference in learning *nix admin vs Windows admin. If anything I think it's the opposite: Windows admin is much, much easier to learn. Where MS excelled early on was in usability and less-training-required - that was kind of the whole point.
he he :)

it is some stuff with DNS. Facing a lot of trouble on that front. Any solution?
Reddit, YCombinator, Digg are all rife with anti-MS folks so, if you follow the idea that, "The world must be like what my experience is" and you only visit those sites (or similar ones), then you would absolutely get the impression that ASP.NET is a bad choice. There are as many if not more "hackers" using ASP.NET than all others except maybe php but those ASP.NET folks typically hang out elsewhere.
The author has changed the link. Here is the working one: http://camendesign.com/?200806291149
Not enough information. What language? Web app? I'm not coming back to this to comment but just FYI for the future: give us more info.
they have to realistically do whatever is best to protect the interests of their shareholders

I took the article as suggesting that NIH is not in the best interests of their shareholders, as things like MSTest simply frustrate their users.

The debate about whether NIH is good or bad for MSFT is interesting.
The #1 thing that I hate about C++ is all the fcking side effects that people can bury in their constructors and every where else under the fcking sun. I want to start swinging a baseball bat at all the fcking idiots that don't think in advance of using the latest fcking cool C++ whatsamcallit.

When you are maintaining a very very large project, the best thing about C is that when you read the code it is fairly obvious what is going on, and you don't have worry about some innocent looking code causing a bunch of other crap the be executed behind your back.

On the downside of C, name space collisions are a problem and the ability to hide data and functions.

I vote they should add C++ style classes to fix the name space problem, and private and public keywords to hide data and functions. I don't want all of the object-oriented B.S. like constructors and destructors that makes it difficult to read and debug other peoples code.

Don't get me wrong.....I think some features of C++ are very useful, especially operator overloading which has allow us to make it easier to code big programs that handle lots of longer intergers and weird integer sizes like 56 bits, or 112 bits, or 128 bits. Yeah, these days we have uint64_t in C99 compilers, but back in the mid-90's we had to write code in C++ just because it had operator overloaded classes, which we also had to write.

Even though I haven't stated earlier...I do real-time embedded software...so I'm not going to be writing an interrupt in Perl or Python anytime soon. C is not going away in the real-time / embedded software / driver world anytime soon. It is still very very common!
DHH?
Hilarious. "The Hack of The Faithful". Muslims vote up their co-believers for "Best Intellectual" on the Foreign Policy list, until the The Top 10 is made up solely by - Muslims. Hey, they do care, while others don't! Noam Chomsky makes "Best Non-Muslim" at rank 11 (for old time's sake, perhaps). Al Gore, representing Christianity, follows on 12. Bernard Lewis - a historian and Islam specialist - is at 13. Ayaan Hirsi Ali - an Islam critic - is at 15. Fareed Zakaria - a journalist and Islam commentator - is at 17. And Richard Dawkins comes in at 19. Who woulda thunk it?
Gates didn't steal his money - he made it a way that Richard Stallman happens to disapprove of... there's a big difference.

Gates took his capitalist profits and put them to good use treating malaria in 3rd world countries - doesn't smell like the mafia or organized crime to me; but what do I know.
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I agree that Stallman's stab at the gates foundation is cheap and uncalled for. However, if you're going to write an article accusing someone else of FUD you'd better make sure you're not guilty of it yourself.

>"Is Richard Stallman seriously suggesting that it’s right to illegally obtain copyrighted software?"

No he isn't. He's suggesting that Bill Gates should have allowed people to share his software.

>"It’s one thing to say that Gates should never have charged for his software and another to say that it’s OK to use it without paying."

Stallman is saying that the software should have been free as in speech, not free as in beer. Nowhere did he imply that it's OK to use the software without paying.
If you read what I wrote, I am not claiming that Bill Gates is running the mafia. I am merely making the strictly logical point that doing something good doesn't prove that your other actions are not bad.

I usually defend the business practices of Microsoft in discussions (for example http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=229715) - I am in general for capitalism (I say in general because people might have varying definitions of capitalism in mind). But if what Stallman says is true, that behind the scenes Microsoft is investing in damaging industries, I think it is fair to take that into account. Again, I have to stress I don't know the substance of Stallman's accusations - but something tells me you won't notice that I wrote that sentence anyway... In general, I like Bill Gates, I think he is a very capable guy.
This is something you have to figure out for yourself. As long as you are very aware of the things the IDE does for you, it does not necessarily end up in worse design. As for the opposite, using only a text-editor will not make your software better automatically. You have to find your own balance.
The #1 group that says C should be dieing off is f-ing book authors and sellers! Why? Because they can't write a bunch of new books on an older language. It is old...so we can't write book and make money on those older things. New stuff is cool...yeah new stuff is cool...buy our books...buy are books.
Very nice, but bare in mind they didn't really make it for $10,000, thats what the salaries for 9 people for 4 days of work would be. (and even then, they only had 3 real people doing the work on the site, the other 6 people were doing PR, which obviously worked!!)

I don't know where you live and how much a salary and living costs are, but I'm sure if you had to charge for this it would cost more than $8.75...in fact I would estimate it would be equivalent to $1000 doing it alone, maybe?
After dodging the draft in college for 4 years, I enlisted in 1972. Because back then a white boy with a college degree wasn't going to end up in a rifle company.
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It's interesting that people are comparing the draft to slavery. Aren't wars fought to avoid being enslaved to the enemy.

I think modern wars are less clear cut but certainly for WWII Brits signed up to avoid slavery under the hun.
>> C is a powerful tool, and every programmer should know it. But it's woefully underpowered as a fulltime software devlepment tool.

Only a inexperienced fool says such a thing! The bottom line is that it all depends on your what you are trying to do. For embedded / real-time / drivers / O/S, both C and C++ are perfect, but for middleware and scripting and many other high level things they aren't the best language.
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Ask HN: Recommend any books about Medicine?
I was never a great fan of Biology at school. I found it for most parts boring with terms that were very hard to remember.

But, I was always interested in how our body works and was wondering if there are any good books(s) that you found easy, interesting and informative to read about our body.

Thanks!
you're probably right about the future of search and people's words coming back to bite them.
Yes, aptly put. But I recently graduated from college and having holidays before I join a firm. So just did that for fun. Salary-wise, maybe I would put in additional Rs. 10,000 ($250) for six days. But that is still extremely bootstrappable.
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Most of the time the things that go wrong have little to do with individual languages. The issue with unicode is that you must be consistent across all layers of the application and there is no way to abstract it away in a general fashion.

For a Java based scheme implementation the primary issue may be the internal representation of scheme strings. java.lang.String is immutable whereas scheme strings are mutable. It's probably still the cleanest route to stay with some UTF-16 representation internally. Maybe StringBuilder would work but what do you do about regular expressions? I'm glad I don't have to solve that one.

You might also want to check out what the jruby guys say about this issue. I think I remember they made the switch from Java Strings to some other mutable representation, I believe UTF-8. They must be using some regex implementation that you might be able to reuse. Also look at SISC.

Another issue is the source code character escaping stuff. I don't know what the scheme standard says about this but in any event you have to think about it.

The last and easiest thing is to just make sure you always correctly translate back and forth when reading and writing files and network/database connections.
And just today, I had to fix a Firefox bug where the cursor in an editable document would be displayed in the wrong place. Note that this is purely visual -- it acted as if it were in a different place than it showed. Good luck detecting that. So yes... there we go again: /Gecko/.test(navigator.userAgent)
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