skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If it's a debate about legal issues, it's crucial to not be ambiguous about definitions. We've seen what damage and abuses can occur when people get sloppy with legal terminology - the redefinition of "enemy combatants" in 2008, for example. "Theft" is a criminal offense. Copyright infringement isn't necessarily (though there are conditions that make it so in the US).

Some things warrant rehashing and reaffirming. Note that a new, but substantially similar, discussion about female engineers or gender discrimination pops up here every week or two. That discussion plays out the same way every time not because it adds anything new but because it's important (to someone, clearly).
Point is, I don't feel like I'm in the top 1%.

Well, to be fair, you're stretching the logic being applied a bit. There is a big difference between saying "The top 1% of developers don't have resumes" and "Anyone who doesn't have a current resume is one of the top 1% of developers."
The pain of contentEditable is quite nicely removed by using http://aloha-editor.org/
I've tried really hard and failed to find even a remote correlation between hacking and/or news.
Funny thing how this obviously flawed analysis has popped up at the same time as the Trumpet Winsock piracy story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875.

Small developers can get badly hurt by piracy.
For a few reasons, probably.

1. It's directly related to the startup world. Startups hire people, and this is advice for that.
2. Not everyone would have read it. Things come up. Being 5-years-old in this context isn't bad.
3. It's far better than some of the other articles here dealing with body image and piracy
The blind man who taught himself to see
But there is an ever-growing amount of good writing online, much of which suffers from its proximity to these low-rent neighbors.

I'm not entirely sure why good writing 'suffers more' from proximity to a direct-marketing campaign - acai berries, belly fat, whatever - than it would from, say, an ad for a Ford Focus or The King's Speech. Both offer an equivalent amount of visual distraction.

The author here doesn't understand that online advertising is fairly efficient - the 'get four auto insurance quotes' advertisements show up because more-familiar brand advertisements simply don't work well in those spots. People reading good writing online aren't particularly valuable to advertisers, so they get to see no-risk-to-the-advertiser cost-per-acquisition advertisements. Got to try and monetize somehow.

I suspect there's a certain bit of class snobbery here - the reader is engaged in something literary, so how dare he be subjected to an ad so déclassé, it belongs on a gossip site? Obviously he, a refined soul, deserves more tasteful commercial distractions!

There are two solutions here. The reader could be extensively and thoroughly tracked, so we know enough about him to show him an ad for that off-Broadway adaption of Silas Marner he's been jonesing for. But that approach is currently under attack from all parties - and besides, when people are tracked, the ads best suited for them are often less sophisticated than they'd anticipate.

I prefer the more direct solution: if you don't like the ads, pay for the content through some other means, and eliminate the need for advertising altogether.
Unless someone creates an independent installer / upgrader package that will grab updates from unofficial sites, I.e. torrents. In which case the pirated versions are again almost the same as the registered versions. Then the only difference is the lag between the official and pirated versions, which is generally very low for popular products.

Convenience is the differentiator (itunes v.s. thepiratebay) and many consumers are willing to pay a premium for it.

Regardless, if you just accept that a good portion of your market won't pay for your product and work around it you can still have a very successful business. Then focusing on techniques like convenience, reward systems, free t-shirts? etc. can increase your paying customers. Maybe suing them can too, but it's definitely not the only way.
We're trying to implement this "decoupled content management" idea to other systems as well via http://wiki.iks-project.eu/index.php/VIE

There is already a WordPress plugin in works... https://github.com/Jotschi/Aloha-Editor-Wordpress-Plugin
Someone who's never coded is a waste of your time. With the extremely low barrier to entry for learning through all the free and cheap resources available, and open source projects to work on, the question is simply: why haven't you coded?

Make them write a simple project and come back in 2 weeks and present it to you. That will tell you everything you need to know.
Holy crap. This. Looks. Stunning.

We need to talk.
We do something similar for http://www.webpop.com (video of it here: http://www.webpop.com/blog/videos/on-site-editing-the-easies...), but with the difference that we always do open up a form.

In our first prototypes we were experimenting with inline editing, but we actually decided against it.

The really good thing with allowing editing right on the site is that it matches non-technical end-users conceptual model of a website far, far better than some abstract admin backend for their content.

This is a big deal, since for many users even something as seemingly simple as Wordpress can be really hard to explain. They just don't intuitively understand that there's a database somewhere with content that are then sucked into their website and displayed. And when they want to edit something on their site, they don't want to go somewhere else to look for it.

The bad thing, in my opinion, with actually doing inline editing, is that the end users conceptual model is actually wrong. There really is a difference between content and design. The same content can often be displayed in many different places and used in different ways.

Sometimes you have an article with a long text and big photo, but choose to only show the first paragraph of the text as an excerpt on the front page together with a thumbnail version of the photo. Or you truncate the title to a short version to show a teaser for the article in a small box in the sidebar, etc, etc.

If the user clicks on the excerpt of his long text to edit it, inline editing starts getting problematic. Do you allow him to edit only the first paragraph inline, leaving the user unaware that he might make the next paragraph in the article sound really weird if he change it? Or do you expand it to the full text with the risk that the design will get completely mangled?

Some of these problems are solvable if you limit how the designer can use the content and what HTML/CSS he can write (CSS can really mess with inline editing as well - just think about overflow: hidden or white-space:nowrap).

That's why we went for a small miniform triggered by clicking directly on the content you want to edit, but with a link to the full form for that content. We want to gently guide the user towards the right mental model of how their website works, without forcing them to go search for the right content in a backend interface whenever they want to edit something.
Have any celebs tried to get themselves into a 'send me a free copy of your product, and I will tweet about it' gig? Seems like a golden opportunity to get tons of stuff (and good advertising for the companies obviously. Except not technically advertising )
I'm fine with this - this is within Oracle's rights. It goes against what we've come to expect with regards to Linux and GPL projects in general - but it's perfectly valid.

Oracle is under no obligation to provide source patches back to anyone, with any additional meta-info. They are only required to provide unobfuscated source for the binaries they distribute - which they are doing.
Think of it as a big kernel fork that runs it's project a different way.
The community is free to analyze and take back what they want - that's all the GPL is about.
If they had actually obfuscated the CODE to make it unreadable, that would be another matter possibly - but while not providing patches and possibly stripping comments, etc, is a form of obfuscation to the outside community, it's not code obfuscation.
It's too bad they did this.. it's probably some paranoid manager at Oracle thinking this will make a big difference... but there's nothing wrong with it.

you are free to take the current kernel, hack away on it all you want and just provide new copies whenever you release, without talking to, explaining, or helping anyone with anything, as long as you stick to the GPL.
I agree, for the most part.

However, I want to note that by following an effective trend, the "two-sentence landing pages with an obvious call to action" in this case, isn't there a chance that one might be missing an even more effective/efficient way of doing things? Sure it works, but does it work the best?

>I guess the inverse of the advice is "Don't refuse to do something
>just because it's trendy -- base your choice on whether or not it
>makes sense."

Also couldn't agree more, I think there is a really fine line between innovating because you think you can do better and innovating because you want to avoid the trend.

*Edit for formatting, I am new here.
> now figure out which patch each of those differences belongs to

Why would I have to do that?

And don't forget we not only have the current tarball, but we can analyze every release for differences, capturing some history with it.

Reconstructing each original patch may not be possible (it's an interesting problem), but reconstructing a set of distinct patches is. Humans would then be better at assigning meaning to them, even if it means calling Red Hat's support line and paying for the answer.
Someone hiring you and not paying you is a breach of contract but that's not the same as piracy. If I download the latest Hollywood blockbuster for free, I've not breached a contract because I didn't enter into one (though I may have breached a contract with my ISP). The offense committed is copyright infringement and in many jurisdictions this is a civil offense rather than a criminal one (or, as in the US, there are conditions to turn it into a criminal one that very few downloaders would satisfy).
> If an iPhone is a better smartphone because it encourages more browsing [1] why go through the trouble of writing your own OS AND writing your own OS in a way that your competitors could backstab you?

What a loaded question. First, Google pays Apple something like a few hundred million dollars per year to be the default search engine. With Android, that's money saved. A lot of money saved. Second, I've got no idea what you're talking about with the backstabbing. Hhuh? Are you somehow insinuating that open source software invites backstabbing?

Edit: For the Apple part, it's also security. What if MS or Yahoo ponies up a billion dollars per year? Then what? Since mobile is growing so rapidly, Google can't afford to be so easily shut out.
Who Contributes the Most to LibreOffice?
It shouldn't be in the php binary. Even with ruby you have to have another program,
I would guess it is in part because a lot of them carry around far too much baggage that adding this in afterwards is too much work.

I am having a shot at it with django. Rather early yet, but doing something like this is the goal. It only really exists on svn right now http://codefisher.org/svn/djangopress/
Littlecosm FAQ

http://yongfook.com/littlecosm-faq
Great PPT with tips for Frontend Web Performance
Good insight and examples into how to speed up web performance. Was presented at #SLLive2011
When we say 'better' what do we mean by that?

No reason to get caught up in semantics--parent clearly means Android is better relative to browsing on a Nokia or old Blackberry.

Everything else you write here doesn't follow parent at all.
"In many cases, there is a lot of dynamic behavior when an app server starts up, but later on, the system settles down, there's no fluidity in type information, and the system might as well be statically typed."

I am quietly (and very slowly, its very much a side project) working on an experimental language, which, while statically typed (using type inference), allows for many dynamic operations as you would expect from a dynamic language. What I am trying to do is detect as much as possible during compilation and storing the rest as metadata. The metadata also contains a lot of other information, such as register usage. Then the runtime is a hybrid between AOT and JIT compilation, where most of the program is native AOT compiled, but that the runtime can choose to recompile segments of code using the JIT, eg, to optimize the common path once it has been detected (inlining, avoiding branch misprediction, optimizing for cache usage and avoiding register spilling etc), or to resolve dynamic types that could not be determined at compile time.

Every now and again, discussions of AOT vs JIT arise and people on both sides have good arguments as to why their compilation strategy of choice can generate the most efficient code. I want to explore mixing both strategies in a single language/runtime in an attempt to get the best of both worlds. I have searched online, but have not yet found anything similar (but if someone knows of a language or VM which mixes native ahead of time compilation with JIT compilation in the same executable, please let me know!)

So far, I have most of the type inference engine and abstract syntax tree done and some prototype code in assembly and C which will eventually become the code generator, runtime library and JIT. I am also still working out semantics and syntax of the language itself (which I need to finish before writing a parser, finishing the AST and writing the code generator and JIT..) A lot still needs to be done and I'm not finding as much time for it as I'd like (too many other projects :P), but I'll get there eventually. I'll probably blog about it when its closer to working.

"back-port static type annotations to the source code"

I love this idea. Profile-guided type resolution or something like that.
It's way beyond that. Kim Kardashian reportedly gets $10k for a sponsored tweet. As they say, nice work if you can get it.
that really is excellent feedback - thank you very much :)

pacing is super important and you're right, I need to make sure I reward those first few steps quite quickly.
Ten Steps to Screen Your Fit for Entrepreneurship
While I don't disagree with his point, instapaper isn't a great example of this, as it started off free. It had a quite sizable following of devoted users before money changing hands ever came in to the picture. Had he charged money from day 1, the dynamics would have been different. Not saying it wouldn't have made money or been successful, but I don't think it would have been the exact same outcome.
That's a strange version of "required". Basically the elements are not required in a document until parse time at which point they are inserted following an extremely arduously defined algorithm.

It seems bizarre to me that you wouldn't simply define the location of meta elements strictly as being in the head but instead define that should the parser find them they should be wrapped in to a head element.

On a brief view it looks like one can just drop a meta tag, say, in anywhere in the document and the parser has to move this to the head element?

I didn't realise that they were encouraging tag soup; this isn't part of the spec I've seen before. This sort of complex parsing algo wasn't in XHTML1.X or HTML4.X was it?
Wasn't ATH0+++ used to cause modem users to hangup via IRC CTCP requests? Good days.
Part of the reason they don't join forces more often is that the IP lawyers often are kept busy by looking at other large company portfolios. Their business is both offensive and defensive.
Cheap flights, hotels, car rental and holiday packages, visit 7Startravel
willing to learn, willing to listen

The latter is quite valuable, and less common than many think. (To listen really well, you need to be constantly seeking what you don't even know that you don't know.)

also not afraid to ask questions and challenge things

In a constructive way, if possible.
Doesn't Google charge OEMs for Android certification and for the Google core apps (Gmail, Maps, Android Marketplace)? That's what I thought they were making money from.

Edit: Ah, yes, the Android documentation says that they're licensed separately:

"Android Market is only licensed to handset manufacturers shipping devices."

"The Google apps for Android, such as YouTube, Google Maps and Navigation, Gmail, and so on are Google properties that are not part of Android, and are licensed separately. Contact android-partnerships@google.com for inquiries related to those apps."

- via http://source.android.com/faqs.html

That still doesn't necessarily mean that they're charging for them, but I strongly suspect they are based on that wording. Does anyone know for sure?
If you are in London then you are competing for talent with the financial services industry which will pay senior devs 100k and up.
Explain how any right is a natural right. This is a spectrum, some rights require more effort to protect than others. Private property rights require a great deal of effort to protect, as do intellectual property rights.
It's not just that some people include A into lost sales though, although that is the major problem. Some people are strongly against group A because they feel that they should not get whatever they pirated for free. You'll see this a lot in conjunction with the word "entitled". I can understand their point, too.

Personally, I think the world is a better and richer place for more shared culture (see also group C, who likely exists largely because of A), and if that means people who weren't going to pay anyway freeload through piracy, so be it. If the would not convert to a sale, then they should essentially be ignored. The piracy that should be focused on is B, because that's the only one that actually has a real monetary effect.
First class support for GMail etc. above other providers wins conversions to GMail, then users use GMail on the desktop and are logged into Google whenever they are surfing the web.
They typically blur out logos on these shows, don't they?
My argument doesn't hinge on the negation of natural rights theory. It's based on a simple observation of the way large-scale societies have always worked in practice: they have never treated protection of private property even in its purest forms as an absolute.

My point is not that the question at stake is straightforward, but that once we stop clinging to flawed analogies, the matter reveals itself as a policy issue like any other, an issue that is complex but ultimately resolvable by the usual means of analysis.

All the rest is rhetoric.
The point is that they don't need to be networkers, because they will be networkees. i.e. other people will notice how good they are, and actively try to get them into appropriate jobs.

I think this is largely true, though it takes a while for reputation to spread. There are some brilliant young developers who haven't yet been noticed by anybody in a position to hire them -- but they won't stay in that situation more than a couple of years.

The exception is somebody who is excellent, but stuck inside one company and not producing any publicly-available code. If she isn't actively promoting herself, it's possible nobody will ever notice her talent.
Why one Computer Graphics academic left the field [2006]
I guess that was sort of my point. I just failed to realize it so sucinctly. =)
Give some very precise specifications and leave other instructions incomplete and let them know explicitly that they have the authority to make decisions on your behalf. See to what degree they make excuses, vs. get useful work done.
You couldn't be more correct especially regarding so called 'health' magazines. I cancelled Men's Health because it turned into a Maxim.
The correlation, however tenuous, that I arrived at is the abiding interest in the hacker community to find a fitness regimen that interferes the least with the 16-hour workday.
I think you do have a resume and it's a rather extensive one. Your comments here and back on JoelOnSoftware forums are extensive and you keep a very active presence visible with your blog.

Better yet, you document work/business and results extensively and then submit to the interwebs for consumption by the masses.

You have a resume to the nth degree - your portfolio of work and thoughts are huge compared to the average sw engineer.
No-one is saying that you're not right, we're just saying that this has been said so many times that it doesn't need saying again.

Anyone who insists that copyright infringement and theft are the same thing isn't someone who has anything useful to add in this debate. Given that why not focus the debate on useful, genuinely contentious areas and solutions, not rehashing an argument that has been had and won over and over again?

(And yes, I know there are people who don't buy into this but by and large they're not reading Hacker News so you're doing nothing to progress the argument on that front repeating it here).
The Runner's World cover is always a pretty girl, but I don't think that's the case of the content, e.g. Craig Pickering (100m sprinter) looks like a perfectly normal person but he's in there almost every month. Jessica Ennis and Kate Dennison have normal healthy body shapes.
New Delhi, India. Remote a possibility.
while i applaud your charity efforts, i want to let all those non-designers understand how design contest driven sites like 99designs hurt the design industry as a whole.

to put it in perspective for programmers, it's like submitting a completed project (or at least a functional beta) with no guarantee of payment. it's up to the client to pick the best "code" and all the others lose their time/money.

for more info on how this is hurting designers: http://www.no-spec.com/
It is advertising, and as such you're required to disclose any products you blog about that you received for free.

There are many celebs who do this, though most are just randomly sent free stuff rather than asking for it. The exception might be actresses who need an Oscars dress or something, but usually boxes of stuff just show up every day and mostly get thrown out.
I'm not entirely sure why good writing 'suffers more' from proximity to a direct-marketing campaign - acai berries, belly fat, whatever - than it would from, say, an ad for a Ford Focus or The King's Speech. Both offer an equivalent amount of visual distraction.

It's not about visual distraction, it's about reputation and the reputation-by-assocation of the publication on who's website the ads appear. I trust car manufacturers and movie studios a lot more than the people behind those acai berry and belly fat ads, which to me, are as bad as spam about Viagra and Cialis.
Ignoring the Zed Shaw tone, he makes an excellent point. Part of why I work on Faux is that jQuery isn't a framework. It's a library. I try to explain to people that Faux is to Backbone as Rails is to ActionController/ActionView and Active, and now that I think of it, Faux is to jQuery as Rails is to ActiveRecord.

Well maybe not exactly those comparisons, and it isn't nearly as good as Rails 3.x, but certainly that's the right scaling, and it would be a tremendous mistake to start a rich SPI application and think that jQuery is a framework, just as it would be a mistake to start a web application and think that ActiveRecord is a framework.
Given that $53m had been invested, this doesn't seem like that big a pay day.
Dojo sucks at marketing whereas jQuery kicks total ass

Evidently.