skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To clarify my point, my problem is not with open source in general, it's with 'feature-by-feature clones of an innovative piece of software'.

The process of building, say, VisiCalc is a lot riskier and harder than turning Excel into Libre Office Calc. If Bricklin had known he was going to have to compete with free in a matter of a few months after release, he might have done something else entirely.

This may be hard to understand for people that haven't ever designed anything difficult, but frankly, it's _so_ much easier to clone something than build it the first time. Even just knowing that something is possible is a huge leg up.

If you think routinized F/OSS cloning of software is an actual service to innovation, you need your head examined. If nothing else, it makes going into a patent frenzy with every idea far more tempting.

It's hard for me to prove a counterfactual, of course, and show all the wonderful things that have been discouraged by the prospect of immediate shitty open source clones.
I fully accept that open source allows us to build innovative things on top of other software layers - it's not necessarily all bad. But it's not necessarily all good either.
This story has all the earmarks of an urban legend. Are there any other sources for this story?
I think the Samwers are the exception that proves the rule, since their ventures seem explicitly designed as clones. The strategy is the same, it's just been translated into German.
Trivial correction: It's neg-entropy, not entropy.

And interestingly, in current computers entropy is the valued commodity, while neg-entropy doesn't cost extra.
Business internet plans for personal use are way too expensive IMO. $100/month for 22Mbits? That's terrible.
Most people don't want to live in 3rd world countries.

Why do people expect programmers to be Jesus?

When doctors, plumbers, daycare workers, and bus drivers start targeting the 3rd world market I will too.

I'm getting really sick of all these bloggers telling other people to do something meaningful. Take your own advice before telling me to donate my life to charity.
I guess, despite its size, they consider proggit to be niche enough that most new users won't want to frontpage it.
Amazing how generational differences manifest themselves. I certainly wouldn't dream of using a scheduling feature of a router (routers have scheduling? didn't know that, thought routers routed traffic). My parents, now deceased, barely knew what computers were.
The Tragedy Of The Gas Tax
tl;dr: Whether the attackers are criminals, government agents, or bored kids is unknown, and even whether the attacks really originate in China is in question. No description of "The Chinese Way of Hacking" is given, other than speculation that one exists.
I really wished I'd moved into a place in Seattle which is serviced by condointernet. 100Megabits! No caps!

http://condointernet.net/
What if you agree with this article, you do feel constrained in an unhealthy way by your job in a large organization, but you don't feel that leaving for a small company or startup is an option (or at least not an option anytime soon)?

Well, here's a coping skill that can help you. Focus on doing your duty as well as you can, regardless of the context.

In other words, imagine your boss says that the web app must be written in C++ for political reasons, and you cannot convince him to switch to Ruby on Rails, and you just know that the project would die a slow painful death if written in C++. Well, supposing you are correct, you are in a crappy job: constrained to do the wrong thing and with a boss that cannot be convinced otherwise. And for whatever reason you've got to stick it out through this project.

Focus on being the best C++ web developer in the world. Do the absolute best job you can on the tasks that are assigned to you. Throw yourself into your work 110%. But to do this you have to shift your point of view. You cannot think about this as "wasted effort" since you know the project will ultimately fail. You must think about this as training. You are putting your mind through intense training, keeping your skills sharp, so that when the opportunity finally does come to leave your job (or perhaps a new boss comes along), your mind is in top form and ready to go. Sure, you've probably acquired some less than useful skills for web development (managing pointers) but you've probably acquired and maintained some very good transferrable skills.

Whatever you do, don't give up, because then your skills will atrophy.
Rates below market rates? I think most people would disagree. They aren't salaried but the equity often pays well.
Suppose I am a first mover, considering making the very first heart monitor, ever. Suppose that doing the research for this is going to cost me a huge pile of money. Suppose further that I know that all of the innovation in my product will be cloned by a competitor 6 months after I ship, who after I have established a design, market and framework for this wonderful innovation, will give away the product for free.

That's got to be good for society, right? I'm sure I'll just go do all that research anyway, because I'm a nice guy. And I certainly won't go off and patent the holy living shit out of each and every aspect of the monitor or anything nasty like that, because that would be bad, and we've already established that cloning products has to be an unalloyed benefit for innovation. Because it's, like, free or open or something.
What are you suggesting? Is there a competing product available to buy which is better? I don't know of one in most areas. IMO bandwidth is worth paying for.

You can say there "should" be better deals available. But it doesn't do any good. If you think it's so easy to provide better internet then start a company.
What you say doesn't in any way contradict the main point, except your unsubstantiated claim that it's automatically good for society.

Competing against a $0 product (which is essentially subsidized by corporate salaries) is likely to increase the barrier to entry. That will make bootstrapping harder, favoring existing enterprises. This is clearly not an unalloyed benefit to society.

The existence of a reasonable 'free' product may also deter the entrance of multiple competitors who would have advanced the state of the art. Clearly this is bad for society.

I'm not arguing that this always happens, or that free software is inherently bad. I'm arguing against the dogma that free software is always automatically good.

It's a choice with consequences and the dogma is an excuse not to think about them.
Burn Notice Season 5 Episode 4  
Burn Notice Season 5 Episode 4 against collectively, consumed collectively, proved helpful collectively as well as rested collectively They are children along with weapons, understanding direct the actual toughest type of policing there's.
So G+'s privacy controls actually work. This is going to hurt it (vs. FB) how?
I've seen you paste this a few times now and find myself disagreeing with parts of your framing.

First, I don't know any mathematician personally who makes such a clear linguistic distinction between 'exercise' and 'problem'. Once you get to university-level mathematics, many exercises are problems in your sense but they still tend to be called exercises or something similar. If you insist on this terminological divide, I doubt most people will understand you.

Secondly, there is the matter of an exercise's pedagogical purpose. Is it to sharpen general problem solving skills or to enlighten the student on a conceptual level? This goes beyond difficulty. It's a false dichotomy when stated so simply, but there is still something there. Many IMO-style problems are conceptually barren but still very tricky to solve. Conversely, some of my most enlightening learning experiences were solving guided sequences of exercises in a mathematical form of Socratic learning where none of the steps were individually too hard but still involving enough that they forced me to think and thus develop some insight on my own. (This approach can also fail. Silverman's otherwise excellent book Rational Points on Elliptic Curves has a guided proof of Bezout's theorem in the appendix that is just too atomized to engender much understanding.)
The weird thing is how selective HN is about duplicate articles. I've submitted things just to find out they were originally posted up to 3 years ago after it redirects me to the submission. A PG essay can be resubmitted, same URL and title, without issue at least several times (as the HN search link shows).

I'd love to know how HN goes about deciding which content is OK to resubmit over and over again.
Really I think her point is best summed up by "It’s never about the technology or impact it’s having, it’s about the game of entrepreneurship; getting users, funding and exiting as quickly as you can."

Her complaint seems to be that startups aren't trying to be successful businesses, they're trying to be successful startups, which aren't necessarily the same thing.
> This is why I pay $130 a month for Speakeasy broadband. They give me 6M and I can use 6M 24/7 with no complaint.

I like Speakeasy, too (I think they're now called Megapath, though). But around this part of Phoenix, the best they can do is 144 Kbps IDSL and it still costs $120/month. And just because a lot of people confuse Kb and KB, I should mention that, when you account for actual download speeds, you end up with ~15 KB/s, maybe 17-18 KB/s on a good day. And around here, the cable companies cap you at 20 GB/month, which is actually less than you can transfer even on a line this slow.

I don't think that $500/month internet is actually the alternative, though. I think the real alternative is to set things up so that there's real competition in the marketplace, rather than a bunch of regional monopolies and a few small competitive areas.

Otherwise, they'll spend all their time looking for ways to increase revenue by finding new things to charge us for. After all, the whole Net Neutrality thing started up because they were musing about ways to charge people for using services the ISPs don't actually provide, like Google.
I upvoted your comment because I think it's an important point, but I wanted to note something that I found bothersome: "people like you" is a rather broad brush to use when judging someone from a single comment. Perhaps less harsh would be "people who share this sentiment," as the original poster may be in every other way a decent person.
I don't think you're being too harsh. I agree that newT really doesn't seem like a templating engine - it seems more like a HTML generator. It's a pretty complex hammer to drive a carpet tack. Programmatically constructing DOM from that low of a level is still more trouble than it's worth.

For me, I stick to small chunks I can loop on my own if need be and use a simple tokenizer I wrote (see bpmv.toke() at https://github.com/BrynM/bpmv/blob/master/bpmv.js ). Far simpler and I can have anyone whip up HTML boilerplate to use.
The presentation of the video and slides is interesting. I especially liked having the real time table of contents.

Subject matter is interesting too, even if you're not a depressed indie game developer.
Are you saying "arbitrage" when you actually mean "incremental improvement"?
This author sounds to me like she wants Silicon Valley to entertain her.

She sees the valley not as a normal participant in the Western economy, but rather as some kind of vehicle for the creation of her utopia.

If you're going to condemn people for not sacrificing their lives for the Africans, why start with programmers?

When doctors, lawyers, plumbers, bus drivers, real estate agents, elementary school teachers, civil engineers, security guards, 7-11 owners, and bloggers stop trying to make money, I will too.
You can say there "should" be better deals available. But it doesn't do any good. If you think it's so easy to provide better internet then start a company.

Because sitting idly watching ISP's ratchet up costs and lower the quality of service sure is getting things done.
This is why security is such a wierd/nice/confusing/irratating line of work to be in. Newsflash SSL is not a one size fits all secure you against anything technology. I did not see the original article so I won't pretend that I knew the answer ahead of time. I just hope that I did not accept SSL as being a onesize fits all completely uniform technical conmponent.

There is a Dave Chapelle joke about cops sprinkling crack-cocaine over a crime scene in order to make the case quick and easy. Too many developers trest SSL like magic pixie dust for security.

Or as ptacek says "thanks in advance for putting my kids through college."
Making all the decisions yourself - swombat.com on startups
Installation Instructions Volkswagen LED Taillight
First: Open the trunk Second: Remove the negative cable from the battery using the 10mm wrench. To get at it you have to remove the panel on the drivers side that holds the first aid kit.
The one that I saw in the local Lego Store in Natick, Mass., was a midsized set (typically sell for $50-$80) that shows the finished set and a smiling, 40ish man with glasses looking at it at eye level. I don't remember what the set was (and it may no longer be produced, as the turnover seems to be very rapid), but Lego.com has more than 400 sets aimed at people over the age of 12 (the boxes aren't shown online). One of the latest things I've seen in the Lego Store are the stark architecture sets (http://architecture.lego.com/en-us/Products/Default.aspx), which seem more oriented toward adults than kids.

Some other resources to check out:

http://www.quora.com/LEGO/What-percentage-of-LEGO-fans-are-a...

http://gizmodo.com/5019797/everything-you-always-wanted-to-k...

"When we design sets, we take both children and adults into consideration. Children are our primary audience, especially as it relates to the core play theme sets; however, much of what appeals to children in today's Lego sets has strong appeal among adult fans as well. With Lego Star Wars, adults are equally considered. In designing any set, it's about the balance between the building experience and the play experience. We do also leverage our direct to consumer channels to provide ultimate collectors sets, special exclusives, sculptures and models that are designed with skilled builders and adult fans in mind. We sometimes even invite our adult fans to help us design new sets."
"The problem is that it’s all about the money; it creates emphasis on Y Combinator startups to quickly exit or IPO."

This sentence makes no logical sense, quick exits and IPO's are the antithesis of one another - there has to be an emphasis on one or the other, not both. It's based on a false premise anyway, the Start Fund has had no impact on how founders choose to run their companies. Since she's talking about investor incentives, I presume she thinks there's an emphasis on IPOs. If this were true, it'd directly contradict her argument, I struggle to think of any world changing companies that didn't IPO.

"organizations like Y Combinator attempt to marginalize, commoditize or manufacture a process that is inherently risky."

I'm not sure how we marginalize the process. Perhaps she should have asked some YC founders whether we've ever presented the startup process as anything other than the brutal, risky slog that it is.
Original paper:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/regina/my_papers/civ11.pdf

It is a neural network trained, in part, against the text in the game manual.

Of course, it's considerably more complex than that in the theory and implementation. :D
Amazon's position on state sales tax is unfair and unethical
Unless it states a duration, then they can just discontinue the contract at the next billing cycle. Is there any indication that they did otherwise?

They're not saying "You're over the limit; you're in breach of contract." They're saying "You don't make us enough money. You're no longer our customer."
Of course, none of this addresses the primary issues with ASP.NET MVC: it's much, much, slower to develop in than Rails or Django.

I'd say just the opposite. Things like deployment and things like gems are the big issues. Actually day to day dev work though, I think MVC is probably at least as productive as Rails or Django, if not moreso. But I think its personal taste more than anything else.

Code-generation has always been a major annoyance for real (ya, I said it) developers using MS tools. It'll be interesting to see if recipes are able to do what decades of similar promises from MS have failed to deliver.

I don't think Recipes are really meant to address codegen. It sounds like a simpler way to build Wizards, not much more than that. MS's solution to general codegen are things such as CCI (http://ccimetadata.codeplex.com/).
Does anyone think that a legislation preventing NPE's from suing for patent infringement would be practical? They'd still be able to hold them - just not sue.

It seems like something that large corporations as well as independents could get behind.
Good question. http://ycombinator.com/apply.html tells us that three founders (common situation) will get $20, 000, or roughly $6,667 per person. For three months. That's around $2200/month for skilled work, and it's not even a full-time job:

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

" Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. "

That sounds like 12-14hr/day, including weekends etc.

Now you can see how the rate drops a lot when you divide $2200 by, uhm, what, 70-80hrs a week? It's barely minimum wage.

Of course, you can say 'well, but they're giving you most of the stock if you succeed'. Yeah, but that also means you'll have to pay YC back in hundreds of thousands of dollars if you succeed. (Say YC is getting 5% of your $4 mln startup).

The equity is not guaranteed. YC does not guarantee you'll get huge. They'll just pat on your shoulder and give you some pocket cash in return for a part of your company.

Which is not bad.
Language design questions are also about how to not make languages complex and add too many features to them. I'd argue that creating or modifying a language should be a last resort.

After all, there's nothing to stop you from implementing this in Python right now with thread-local storage, and I'm sure you could achieve the same effect with other languages if you don't like the idea of the GIL or slow interpreted languages.
I'm working on a startup (http://infostri.pe) that is way out side of SV and we feel it. I have no idea what it's like to be there in person but I imagine it would be a lot easier to meet, know and get interest from people if we were. Getting noticed as a super small (but tenacious) outsider to SV is.. difficult. That I do know.
I was suggesting that individuals who choose an academic life over a more profit-seeking life are making a more altruistic decision. I agree with you that collections of academics (i.e. universities) often act in predatory ways - this is true of any sufficiently large group of people with a common interest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_psychology
I think the difference there is that books, computers, cars, and planes are tools that one can choose to work with, rather than a system that one has to work within. More briefly: you use tools, but hierarchical power structures use you.

And it's worth noting that Graham is working on creating alternatives (coughycombinatorcough), so your grumping seems a little out of place.
I think the average consumers access to information between now and then has massively changed. That isn't to say you can't have the same effect, just you need more talking heads to sell it. One person saying there is a shortage won't cause a swing. Several seemingly trustworthy sources may be enough though (imagine oprah or [insert news anchor here]).
Most proprietary software isn't any good, either. The difference is that bad proprietary software dies. Bad open source software "lives" on in graveyards like Sourceforge.
He worked at Yahoo! in 1998-1999.

He told some of his experiences in http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html .(The second part, after "Hackers", is the more relevant to this topic.)
Why was she at this bbq?
Emerging markets are all 3rd world? Brazil is an emerging economy, would you rate it as a 3rd world country?

Don't dilute the point with your logical fallacies.
There's a flaw in the argument that most people miss, namely that since it's so easy to create and distribute information everybody does it, making it so much harder to create a viral effect.

To extend your example: If just 1% of the population sent a Brad Templeton joke to everyone on the Internet you would receive 10 million emails with a funny joke. If you chuckled at 1% of them you'd send a penny to 100.000 people. Not a very likely scenario.

Since none of us receive 10 million joke emails this means that things aren't as simple as they appear. The fact is that since so much information is being created the bar for virality is extremely high, and it's rising proportionally to how easy it is to create information. The chances of your funny email reaching millions of users are as high as your chances of winning the lottery. The resemblance to slick entrepreneurs pitching their wares with the clasical "if only 1% of the market uses our product we'll make billions". That's just not how it works.

Note that I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your thesis that once a startup has reached virality it can be worth a substantial amount of money, I'm simply stating that reaching that point is as hard as ever.
There's almost no content here. The post consists of a personal anecdote that loosely segues into what sounds more like an urban legend than reality, not backed by a source; in other words, this really isn't newsworthy imo.
quanticle says it well, but I wanted to add that some things require a scale that's unavailable to "a small bunch of guys". Say, for example, you'd like to cure a disease. Can't be done on the small, as you need various flavors of lab people, slugs of lab hardware and then a number of suits required to get $COUNTRY approval.

You can do this, I guess, with outsourcing (assuming you can protect the IP), but then you need even more $$ to get people to do what you want - doubt they'll work for equity.

In short, there are good large companies and bad large companies (as I suspect they are good/bad small companies and startups). Hunter/gatherer people had no excess capacity, so you died if you couldn't keep up. It's a nicer society when there's sufficient scale to tolerate old, expert or otherwise non-critical path people.

This goes with life as well as work.
While I'm in favor of opening up journals and possibly putting out some nonprofit alternatives, and while I recognize that the peer review process is definitely not without its problems, be careful not to discount it completely. I cringe when I hear phrases like "value to a community" and "collective opinion" used to refer to scientific articles. The average reader is not qualified to judge the merits of an article, hence the peer review process. Some great examples: the age of the earth, evolution, global climate change; three areas where public opinion is divided but experts overwhelmingly agree. The value of science is based on its accuracy (which is best determined by experts) not its appeal to the masses.
Simple and clever. It feels like Chatroulette meets Twitter.

1. I found the user interface confusing, especially the older/newer controls and the rating timeline. You might consider a more immediate, in-your-face home page with a "Twitter Firehose"-like real-time list of video thumbnails (chronological and/or top scoring). The home page should tell me what the site is about; it should just show me. <:)

2. The home page is blank because it didn't load the "Welcome to 15Seconds!" window on Firefox 8 on Ubuntu. Firefox 8 on Windows XP worked correctly.
Comcast fired you as a customer. I can imagine scenarios where this would be a profitable business tactic for them.