skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's bad for the business of programming because now customers expect to be able to find a free solution to every problem.

Isn't this suggesting border-line price fixing?
It's a lot less work, with fewer ongoing demands on your time, to write a mildly popular open-source library and then get a job at Google than it is to support a micro-ISV.
try http://ckan.net for the data, http://ckan.org is for the software behind it :)
Lesson learned: never modify literals, quote lists only for constant data
So true. I have this print framed above my desk at work:

http://joeyroth.com/charlatan-martyr-hustler/
Not really. While companies do stick to the rules when it comes to copying source code or using open source libraries, when it comes to ideas and discoveries once the cat's out of the bag, it's out for good.

It doesn't even need to be done intentionally or maliciously. All it takes is one blog post detailing how something works (as discovered by reading through my code), then another person summarizes that discovery, and the next thing you know, it's all over the web and anyone can & will use it.
IE/XP browser support is what held me back when I was looking at SNI. SNI would have definitely made a migration to Amazon AWS more compelling. Without SNI, every unique SSL certificate = unique external ip = unique EC2 instance.
A far lower risk of the death of your child if you choose vaccination.
I have no idea if that is where the makers of Andromeda got the name. Sometimes there are bizarre coincidences in life. But thank you for sharing.
Multithreading Magic - Why Everything You Thought You Knew about Concurrency...
Try a smarter way to stay on top of Twitter
I was going to say it slightly differently, but this is pretty much exactly what I was going to suggest.

One of the main reasons is that it's a quickly moving target. Any technology you learn today has to be questioned in a year. It may still be around, but it'll probably be used at least a slightly differently.

So to learn web development, you need to learn to be flexible from the start.
Because it's fun. I love writing software. I've been programming for nigh-on 20 years, but it's only been in the last 3 or so of those that selling software has even remotely interested me.

I could go on and on about what I've gotten out of doing open source stuff – it's made me a much better programmer, it's opened up doors to jobs that I'd not have had by other means, but really, at the end of the day, I've written a bunch of this stuff because I liked doing it. Also, for those who are working a day-job in addition to the stuff they're doing on the side, there's something freeing about being able to write OSS stuff outside of business constraints, what your boss told you to do, what the market thinks it wants ... you get to simply write software the way you think it should be written.
Here's my take from having gone through a similar problem, it may or may not be relevant to you.

A few years ago I had a great idea for a product and would pitch it to whoever would listen. I had the domain, had a plan, just had to execute. I'd barely gotten started when I ran into a wall, instead of working I would just stare blankly at my computer. I had zero motivation to do any actual work.

And yet, I was still passionate and believed in the idea, which led me to a similar place as you where I'm wondering "what gives?"

This situation showed me that I had an internal problem, that while I could function in environments with external motivational factors, if I removed them, I had nothing. Something inside was holding me back.

It was only through a combination of months of therapy and soul searching that I was able to find the source of my motivational short-circuit, I had given up on the first thing I ever truly wanted without even trying to achieve it. After that epiphany, motivation has been the least of my concerns. Heck, I'm working on my plans for world domination at this very moment.

So here's my advice, take the time to debug your brain, it won't be easy, but it beats having that error message pop up for the rest of your life.
Maybe it's the time of day?
how much are you paying him? i'd assume self-starter contractors command a higher rate?
People who think like you understand without explanation. People who can't think like you won't understand no matter how much explaining you do. Like you said, they are so sure they are right. That kind of 'certainty' doesn't allow for others to be correct, also.
Links to essays in Joel Spolsky's Best Software Writing I
Oddly, there is nothing in Belgian media about this.

EDIT: correction!
http://standaard.be/artikel/detail.aspx?artikelid=DMF2011020...
If you like that, you should look into old-school color cycling/palette shifting techniques used in the 8-bit era.

Someone did it with HTML5 too:

http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_S...

Demo:

http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/?sound=0
How Deaf People Think
>I usually multiple bytes * 10 to account for overhead

I don't disagree with your point, but this bit is faulty. If you want to account for some overhead you should multiply by a number lower than 8, not higher.
Given your personal take on everything relating to your talk, I decided to do this from a throw-away, just to simplify matters on my end and avoid complications on m-o.

Your talk was not bad; it did, as claimed from the get-go, cover a fair bit of ground at a moderate level in very little time. You pointed out the relevant documents to dig deeper, and several people I talked to found you struck the perfect balance there.

Now, I disagree with them there: I was after a more technical talk - a token implementation of semantic hashing and discussion of issues run into while making/scaling it would have made this talk amazing for me. But that's a personal preference thing, I was aware of the techniques mentioned before entering so I was not really your target audience.

Beyond that, everyone I talked to was unimpressed by your begging for coverage as per the "tweet this" slides and matching vocal appeals for such. This isn't a blog article where you make the appeal clear and loud to get more followers; this was a presentation at an industry conference, and that behavior was particularly out of place and ill-received.

In addition, you are the only conference speaker I saw appealing to attendees to rate their talk (at least twice on the #strataconf tag) so i would take the ratings with a grain of salt.

I know the above seems very negative, so I should repeat: it was a fairly good talk, and would have been great (even though less technical than I was hoping from the 'practitioner' track) except for the primadonna attitude surrounding it. I have enjoyed many of your postings on HN, I've found substantial value in metaoptimize/qa, and I really wanted to love your talk - so perhaps i'm being unduly harsh. I sincerely hope you will tone down the self-promoting aspect of your talks in future; if you do I will be happy to catch your talk at Strata 2012.
I really like your point here, all the disucussion about open source license always makes me wonder how applicable that is in the real world. What it comes down to is that a lone software developer doesn't generally have the resources available to enforce his license, making it rather pointless.
It seems obvious that the person asking this question is a troll.
You are, of course, fully entitled to decide whether you open-source your code or not.

That being said, as an open-source developer (SumatraPDF reader) I have perfectly rational reasons to open-source my code.

Open-source app is a better marketing tool for my professional skills than just a free app. When I apply for a job, a potential employer can not only look at the final product but also at the quality of my code and that counts.

I also write free and open-source for the karma, I just get more of it than you because I provide more value to the world. People can not only use the final product of my work but I can also help them write their own products. I'm not sure if you thought about it, but your position on "doing it for the good of humanity" is inconsistent. You want brownie points but chose an arbitrary cut off point.

Other people can help me. I started as a solo developer on SumatraPDF and I've gotten significant contributions from others. The software is much better for it and has features that I know I wouldn't implement.

As to the downside you mentioned.

For me, the ability of other people to use my code in their own work is a feature, not a bug, so that boils to the difference of opinion.

I haven't noticed the effect of "diminishing attribution". If anything, the attribution I get increases. First, pretty much every open-source license requires attribution. Second, my software has been improved by other people but since I'm the original developer and host the website for it, I benefit from that (not because I try to hide the fact (quite the contrary) but because most people won't look at svn checkins to see who did what work and will naturally associate most of the credit with the guy who's the face of the project).
Joyent responds to Yahoo's issues with V8 being used under Node.js
I'm at a point where I'm actually afraid to use any infrastructure that's not open source, and I think many developers/hackers feel the same.

If I were to write a library/tool that lies more on the "infrastructure" side than the "product" side, I would open source it because I would be scared to depend on infrastructure that's not open source. Also, because I will get much better value out of it if people more talented than me took part in its development.

If node.js wasn't open source, I wouldn't even bother looking at it. If I looked at it, I wouldn't use it, just because it's not open source. I wouldn't trust one company to do it right. But I trust the hacker community to make it rock.
Answering a question and editing are different things. Suggesting edits means changing someone else's question or answer.

If you did suggest an edit, it didn't actually take effect immediately. It just looked like it did. You see your own edit as if it occurred, but nobody else does until the edit is approved by others.
hmm, is the app you are planning something that will solve some of your own problems? Or is it something that your boss's client would appreciate.
I am guessing that it might be the latter in your case and that's why you have trouble motivating yourself, because your boss isn't there. If you would find something that solves one of your own problems and made your own life a lot easier, then finding the motivation to do it is far easier!
Of course, "costly but worthless" is just another way of saying "art".
There has been some very nice discussion on deafness here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2111278 I picked up helpful tips from there.

I have limited hearing on one side and lost it fairly late (in my teens). So I do think in a verbal language, however I also picture/visualize things and not always speak to myself in words. This has a weird consequence that, if I am unexpectedly asked to explain the thought process sometime, I have to struggle for words. One perennial but minor difficulty is telling time, as sense of time is mostly visual to me, I do not tell myself the time. But I do not know if this idiosyncrasy is deafness related or not.
Original article from Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz (Yahoo): http://www.olympum.com/future/nodejs-to-v8-or-not-to-v8/

Response to OP from Bruno: http://www.olympum.com/future/answering-jason-on-v8-governan...
Unit tests. I also read code recreationally.
You don't have to be deaf to think in pictures. My oldest son thinks in pictures. He also has no sense of time and some other issues. I don't recall if these two things are specifically related. Temple Grandin thinks in pictures and wrote a book with basically that title ("Thinking in Pictures"). My son has to translate spoken words he hears into pictures to understand them and then translate pictures in his head into spoken words. This need for translation means he sometimes has the kinds of misunderstandings with people that you typically see from someone who speaks English as a second language. (And, in fact, he was a late talker -- and was basically pushed into it by mom enrolling him in preschool.)

These days, there is a fair amount of literature on things like lack of time sense and thinking in pictures. Here is what my son once said about living with no sense of time:

http://www.kidslikemine.com/b8timeblind.shtml
This seems like a poorly-expressed question. The premise is that one set or another of tools are used only for OOP.

UML is a modeling language for talking about abstract constructs. That means it's as good for working with FP as OOP. What you model in UML and how much you do and how you do it? That's an entirely different thing.

You have to have data. In FP, more than anywhere else, data is king. So I use UML to initially model data structures, just like I would no matter what paradigm I was working with. Let Codd be your copilot.

It's never right. There are those who model code ad infinitum and try to code the world completely top-down. This never works. There are those who don't model anything and try to code completely bottom-up. This works, but can become unmaintainable if not implemented correctly. The trick is to do a little top-down, a little bottom-up, a little top-down, etc. Usually within a couple cycles of this your basic program/data structure is nailed and you can move to being bottom-up and refactoring. I've probably described it more complicated than it actually is. But it works the same in OOP as FP (although I've noticed a quicker tendency to move towards bottom-up in FP and a tendency to stay top-down in OOP)

If the questioner is talking about software development methodologies, like Agile or RUP or CMM or waterfall, then it's also the same. After years of beating ourselves up in various ways, we've pretty much all agreed that short timeboxes, with concrete deliverables, public demonstrations, and constant adaptation to changing conditions beats everything else. However else you want to do it is up to you, but it should conform to those basics. FP or OOP really has nothing to do with it.

I think maybe the questioner is making the assumption that all this _stuff_, UML sequence diagrams and use cases and tiered architectures and whatnot -- that it's really how you program in OOP. But it's not. It never was. All that crap is just various tools that are useful in various situations to communicate about complex problems. They're not actually how you _do_ anything.
No, he's right here--just looking at it from a different perspective. He's saying "it takes roughly 3.5Gbit/s of bandwidth to support 350MB/s of real data transfer."
I don't see why you think that a 3rd option is not possible: someone who understands someone's opinion and accepts as a valid choice but has a different opinion.

The issue boils down to opinion and personal preference. As such, it's not a matter of who's "correct".

Clearly there are people in both camps (although I would say that "open source" camp is much bigger than "no-cost but not open source" camp).

There are valid reasons for both options and I don't see why you assume than someone in "open source" camp is utterly incapable of accepting that being in "no-cost but no open source" camp is also a valid choice.

I for one see no point in not releasing the source code if the app is free but if you want to keep your code secret, all the power to you.
It's strange to find a blog of an iOS developer, complaining, which you can't actually read on an iPad. I can't scroll the page at all.
"as soon as your radar is tuned,"
That's the hard part.
I think what your doing will probably be saving people money. As you have pointed out there wil be people taking your source, renaming it and putting it up for sale. I think this type of software there would be a lot of people that would find the alternative first and pay for it.

It's weird I guess that charging for the software would get people off your back but giving it away for free draws this extra criticism rather than thanks.
I feel bad saying this, but I'd also want some kind of guarantee or something that the service wouldn't shut down in a few years, since you mention that you did this before and shut it down.
Eddy Merckx (bicyclist) used to have a resting heart rate of 26...
A list of startups from both incubators. Seedcamp doesn't seem to have a single exit - is that correct?

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF90b1l...
He has. There are projects like http://www.gpl-violations.org/ and people like Harald Welte (and many more) who do have the resources and who will help you (for free).
Cut the sales pitch. Your reaction is emblematic of what I'm talking about.

>What's missing?

Substance.
I have small computers with VIA processors that have the padlock hardware witch provide an incredible boost to most common cryptographic operations. I'm serioulsy considering sticking with these computers, at least as front end to ssl.
"... So guys "play it cool" as a way of signaling that their true social value is well above the woman's, and they don't need to play her with gifts for them to be worth paying attention to It's a way of saying "I'm so cool that I don't need to buy you drinks to make you pay attention to me."

Spot on observation. Obligatory reference to Feynman, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" cf "You Just Ask Them?".
Sorry Joshua!

Next time you are in Philadelphia or NYC I'll buy you a drink. Come to think of it, you are one of a few intellectuals I haven't had the pleasure of bs'ing with anyway. Cheers.
Definitely for infrastructure, but usually if a project is valuable to many businesses/ individuals there will be many contributors so the burden falls less on a few people to dedicate their lives to something everyone else is drawing benefit.

The dynamics are quiet different I think for small single person OSS.
I've seen that before, but I'm still amazed at how beautiful it is. I can't fathom how simple palette cycling can produce these effects, even when I'm looking at the palette.
Is the lizzard brain that is fighting back, is trying to protect you from failure
see this http://vimeo.com/5895898
What helps me with this approach is to pick a small module, and then start writing a README for it as if the module already existed.

By pretending that the module is already done you get to use it before it exists (which is a lot of fun :). In the README, write your instructions in such a way that they are testable (python doctests make this easy, I assume you can do something similar with ruby).

When you're done, it is much easier to start on the actual module itself because you've already figured out how that module interacts with the rest of the system, and you have a set of tests to verify it.
"... became a millionaire by 24 at which point I bought a large modern house in Bel Air; got ranked among the top 10 Commercial Real Estate agents in California and the top 20 Commercial Real Estate agents in the World at Remax Commercial for 2005 and 2006; ..."

Is selling in the real-estate boom cycle a good indication of how to make money?
Thanks. We're all here for the better of ourselves and others (at least that's how I feel). BTW, I'm going to try one of those crazy jellies from the site you are working on.
Localmind, get to know what is happening at a place in real-time
It's kind of off-topic, but I found this statement from Jason weird:

"functioning as a real contributor when there’s an issue (e.g. don’t report a bug unless you have a patch)"

Doubly so as later in the same post he's asking Bruno if the failures he's talking about are real or hypothetical. In other words demonstrating that bug reports are valuable even without patches (though of course their value can vary wildly).
The F5 blog is a FUD machine. I feel dumber every time after glancing over one of their articles.

But perhaps you need that kind of marketing when you're selling overpriced appliances.
The "Hello World" curve.
I can almost guarantee you it is. The Wikipedia page is not as fleshed as it's supposed to be, but I was raised on the fear of Yagog & Magog and we're told the only thing stopping them from coming out and massacring us all, is the great wall of China (well, not exactly, the myth was developed under a flat-world, so they're "at the edge" of Earth. Nowadays the apologists just say it's the GWoC to keep intellectual consistency, but we all know it's not. By their description, they sound like "unlearned savages" outside the Caliphate, Siberia, South East Asia, and Scandinavia; since the rest of the old world was by then very well explored.)
Out of love and benevolence.
I often find the hardest part is actually starting whatever it is you're putting off. After that, it's a lot easier to keep going (provided you don't get distracted by interruptions).

My solution is to turn off all my IM clients, load up a different browser without all the tabs I normally open, mute everything except the radio, and force myself to start it. After that, I can usually work through and get it finished.
Your right that no one probably would, but I could see a group of companies/ single people that have a vested interest having a specialised accounting package contribute to an open source accounting software project.
Beyond just learning theory (although this is crucial), make sure to get your hands dirty implementing something, talking to knowledgeable people (professors, researchers in industry, classmates with common interests), and finding out what actually gets used in practice and why. Sometimes they don't tell you these things in classes.

When you are somewhat comfortable with some basic concepts, it might be interesting to form a reading group with some like-minded classmates and scrutinize some papers, from classics, to the more recent research.
I think all entrepreneurs and engineers go through this kind of phase at some point in their life.

The best solution I've found is get yourself a partner, someone that can keep you accountable and motivated.

Remember not to take your code too personally, most of it will inevitably need to be rewritten again anyways - it does not have to be perfect in the beginning.

If there are certain aspects of the project that are frightening to you and stopping you from starting (UI, DB design etc), then bite the bullet and outsource those parts... makes things much easier.

If you have the funds available, consider outsourcing the entire project - this will leave you with time to get the business end sorted.

Best of luck!

Sean
There are a few interesting discussion points being thrown back and forth between the Yahoo developer Bruno and Joyent founder Jason.

The most interesting question raised in my opinion is Bruno essentially saying that thread-per-request blocking I/O server design is safer than event based server design. If one thread dies it's less likely to propagate problems that will kill the server. Due to this added complication he thinks that node.js should focus more on reliability and believes that V8, with roots in browser side and not server side JS, is ill-equipped.

Jason wants to focus on two things. First, he keeps asking for specific examples of where problems have arisen (as otherwise it appears to be a theoretical fear) and second he wants to push node.js towards 1.0 and stabilize the API and feature set.

It seems Jason thinks Bruno is looking too far into the future. It's essentially the architectural equivalent of premature optimization - until the API and feature set stabilizes there's not going to be any great call for perfectly reliable production servers.

Even then Jason is confident Joyent can deliver on the latter considering how many active V8 devs they have working for them.

Both guys seem to really love server side JS and want to push for it, they just have different ideas about which direction to head.