skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
$100k of return on investment is more than most start-ups ever see.

If you raise $50m, you don't have $50m - you have negative $50m, because that's $50m of value that you're going to have to create before you've even just returned their base investment to your investors.
Followup:
I may be wrong but it seems that you're more concerned with the ideology of open source. Not that there's anything wrong with that...
Right on. But it's as close as anyone has come to "shipping the source code along with the CD". So even though Id did it after it generated a lot of revenue, they still did it, which is extremely rare.

Also, one reason that Id's most recent engine (Id Tech 5) is closed and licensed is because of its brand-new technology: MegaTexture. As of now, no other engine has implemented that feature (or the engine isn't production-ready like Id Tech 5 is). So yeah, if you invent paradigm-shifting new technology, then it is probably a bad idea to immediately open-source it. :)
Swell. I just got install media for 19 computers' worth. I'm not looking forward to helping people install these. :(
Identifying Entrepreneurs During Job Interviews
How to avoid hiring a "wantrepreneur" at your startup.
Adeo Ressi Explains His "VC is Broken" Slides
Sun Puts Tech Layoffs Over 20,000 So Far This Month
Nick Denton: Pay-for-page-views was too successful
Compete: Google Docs & Spreadsheets Keeps Growing, But User Engagment is Flat
http://www.isro.org/pslv-c11/photos/moon_images.htm

Something tells me we're not going to see images of the MIP and the moon at the same time since the impact would likely wipe out the camera.
Yeah, you're right. I'm a big believer in "pay it forward" style gestures of goodwill. If you contribute to others, you are generally rewarded for it in the long run (sometimes in unexpected ways). That's happened to me enough times for me to believe that there is real value to be had in helping people.

But enough generalities. Here are a couple reasons in favor of open-sourcing your project:

- Free bug fixes. If a bug is affecting a number of users, then some users will at least feel like they can do something about it. That is a very tangible benefit because there's no faster way to lose a customer than if they discover they can't use your product for some mostly-trivial reason after they dropped $50. But for desktop apps, it's more likely that a user will just tweak the product slightly to suit them. They might even have fun with it.

- Free marketing. Even though the tech crowd is not nearly as massive as the consumer audience, techies are probably the most valuable type of customer. They will help build a community around your product by answering other users' questions, for example. And what better way to attract people like us than by offering us more control?

That said, the primary reason is to help people. When I was first getting started with programming, it would have helped me tremendously to see how an "industry-strength" game engine worked, for example. I personally like the idea that a novice might cut his time spent on learning down by half or more. All they need are real examples to tweak and to build upon. So if there aren't any reasons to keep source code secret, then I'm going to share it in the hope that it will inspire someone, somewhere. How cool would it be to have access to all of Facebook's source code? And Facebook wouldn't be endangered by that at all, because its value is in its content, not its source code.
I'm personally troubled about the right attitude towards competitors... I but I think it's:

Don't worry about competitors. Worry about making something people want.

Constantly improving your product, for what your users want, automatically protects you against competition. I also find that worrying about competitors (instead of customers) can lead to a self-defensive mindset.

If [users] take you up, no competitor can keep you down. http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html
Anything you ever type or say on the web, will come to bite you in the ass eventually.
What HTML 5 is and What it is Not
"It is also easier to get investment for an idea that is in a “hot” market such as e-commerce during the dot-com boom and social networks more recently. VCs also expect their companies to expand rapidly. This makes a VC-funded company burn cash by rapidly growing in a crowded and noisy field with expensive and scarce engineers."[1]

[1] http://codesynthesis.com/~boris/blog/2008/11/10/develop-new-...
Great article, I refer to it often, especially points 6, 7 and 8.

However, I find the example of Steve Ballmer... uninspiring. It seems more like the luck of knowing Bill Gates, and he gets to oversea Microsoft's demise.
Another good "talent vs effort" article: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-sm...
I did not read DHH's post and think he was suggesting Mongrel was leaking. I see that DHH screwed up and said Mongrel (which they were using in production, just not on Basecamp) when he should have said FCGI. But Zed has taken an entire DHH post, zoomed in on one irrelevant error, and attempted to twist the entire discussion around it.

Let's settle it now:

* Mongrel wasn't leaking.

* DHH clearly appears to have misspoken.

* But DHH also clearly said the leaks were in his application code.

The rest of this post is just more-of-the-same drama from Zed.

This time, instead of bizarro rants about Ruby security, or the play-by-play of the crank calls he gets, we get to hear about how Mongrel destroyed his career and how Rails will destroy the Passenger team. I can't see how this stuff has any relevance to me, as a professional developer, at all. If you can't make time to contribute to open source projects without screwing up your career, don't do it.
Yeah. The guy usually comes off as an angry lunatic but his posts are still informative. DHH, on the other hand, seems to gloss over details and his posts tend to read more like marketing materials than anything else.

Although this little feud is getting old, I'm also looking forward to DHH's response. It will be interesting to see if his comment about Mongrel was simply an oversight or a cheap shot lie. I think it shows a total lack of class on the part of DHH to publicly speculate on a blog about Zed's mental well-being so I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it was the latter.
25 billion / 100,000$ = ~250,000+ jobs for one year and they spend that income which creates more jobs etc...

I think we could help the economy just as much building roads or solar power plants with that money. The real question is what's the best use of 25 billion, and I don't think the subsidizing the US auto industry counts.
"Mom, DHH called me a stupid-head!"

"Did not!"

"Did so!"

...

Etc., etc.

Honestly, neither of these guys need us feeding their egos. They've contributed some decent infrastructure for web hacking, but if they want to have a he-said/she-said argument, that's their business. I personally don't want to waste any more time on their little ego-fest.

Let's turn this into a thread about Passenger, instead, since both of them seem to be blessing it as the next great thing for Rails deployment. Personally, I've been nervous about using it in production, mainly because I don't yet trust that it isn't going to interact poorly with my rewrite rules and authN/Z setup. Apache configurations can feel a bit like voodoo even when modules aren't stomping all over each other, and the interaction of Passenger with mod_rewrite, in particular, seems like it could cause breakage.

That being said, once you get the thing packaged and installed (which wasn't as easy under Debian as I'd like), it does save a lot of resources compared to a Mongrel-based deployment. I've seen a drastic reduction in RAM usage, as well as a major decrease in the number of idle database connections lying around in inactive Mongrel backends.
Why China's Stimulus Plan Will Change the World
This isn't a bad strategy to try, for morale, confidence and people wanting to help you: http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html
Thanks. I appreciate it. Excellent points!
Obama to Address the Nation Each Week on YouTube
Nope hadn't heard of it. Thanks!
that chick has an annoying voice, makes you cringe when she talks
Well, I'm a male parent in a stable, conventionally-married Catholic two-parent family. Do my kids get value from being raised by Erin? Yes. For one thing, they eat yogurt; for another thing, they can dress themselves. Do they get value from me? Yes. For instance, I am good at making pancakes.

Is there some huge man-woman socio-cultural hoo-hah I'm missing about what our relationship imparts on our children that would be dramatically different if I was replaced with an equally loving woman? Perhaps the pancakes would become crepes (though I'm good at that too). The whole of western civilization shudders.

There might be a real argument you have to make, axod, but you have to actually make it. Innuendo doesn't cut it.
Well when you summarize my argument that way, it doesn't sound nearly as incisive as it did to me originally.
Internet idiots
Be more specific about why Zed's post is "damning".
Myspace Supporting OpenSocial 0.8 (beta)
Is anyone here building Myspace apps?
True, it could have been an honest mistake. However, like I said in my comment above DHH starts off the post wondering aloud about Zed's state of mind and whether he needs help. Even if the Mongrel thing was a legitimate error the opening paragraph is an obvious cheap shot. Regardless of whether or not Zed just has an axe to grind here that kind of nonsense makes DHH look like a tool and a half if you ask me.
He accuses DHH of lying, and refers to an earlier (AFAIK uncontested) recording of the conversation to demonstrate his point.

Edit: I agree 100% with jm4's elaboration down below.
It seems like there are only two kinds of economists, "stopped clocks" and "wind socks".

The stopped clocks are ecstatic that their doomful (or glorious) predictions are finally right -- never mind the fact that they've been wrong nine years out of ten.

The wind socks just take whatever's happening now, good or bad, and say it'll keep on happening forever.

No wonder they call economics "the dismal science".
A giant ad hominem blog post is not worthy of Winer nor this forum.

(And I actually somewhat agree with him)
We look at good feedback as free consulting. Keep it coming :).
What I delightful thread. I am indirectly part of the creation of this inflammatory headline. It comes from the Panel discussion we are holding next Monday evening at SC08 in Austin. The panel's title is "There Is No More Sequential Programming! Why Are We Still Teaching It?"

It is a complex issue. I taught myself to program at 16 to play blackjack. 41 years later, I am still creating and playing games (not video games). For over thirty years I worked for supercomputer companies. Along the way, I went to grad school and formalized my education.

I believe my experience is not atypical. My students who succeed as CS are ones who at some point have a passion to solve a problem and are intent on gaining the skills to do it. Some start from flow charts and pseudo code; some start by debugging an empty file.

What does this mean for this discussion? I don't care whether we view sequential as a special case of parallel; or parallel as a special case of sequential. Ideally, I'm going to help my students have the thinking skills and the experience to solve interesting problems by cutting code with threads, with MPI calls, via Cuda, or just with other code. But there is no question that many of the rarified programming skills of my supercomputer days are fast becoming everyday programming skills.
I do hope that the videos themselves are accompanied by a copyleft or otherwise liberal license.
Zed may very well be paranoid, hyper-aggressive and caustic. However, you can be paranoid and on to something. The subtle forms of aggression that Zed accuses the Rails core of perpetuating are difficult to provide concrete examples for, and it seems as though he has done just in this case.. we will see how it plays out. It impacts me as a developer because this potentially diminishes DHH's credibility in my eyes, and as the Rails BDFL, this has the potential to impact how I approach the platform I use to make a living.
Actually, the only reason I ever go to a bar is to get drunk. Perfect record!
I've noticed a pattern emerging in the Ruby community. Everyone thinks everyone else "needs help". Zed "needs help". Zed's friend "might need help".

The reason I think this is interesting, though, is because this behavior apparently rubs off on Rails users. I know someone who switched from Perl to Ruby (on Rails) a while back. He came back to the Perl community by writing his own super-great web framework. When anyone gives it any technical criticism, he immediately replies with something like "I had a friend like you. I hope you get help and get better." blood pressure rising

In conclusion, everyone that uses Rails is mentally ill :)
Did you read both Zed's and DHH's posts? Perhaps "damning" is too strong a word in this situation, but at the very least DHH is clearly mistaken. At worst, he is a liar.

Memory leaks in Mongrel that were fixed in 2006 are the at the center of DHH's argument that RoR crashes are ancient history. Yet Zed shows that the application DHH is referring to that previously needed to be restarted 400 times a day wasn't even running on Mongrel.
We used Passanger at a place I used to work. We had some quirky mod_rewrite rules, but had no bizarre side-effects.
I agree. Let's go back to the original definition of marriage.

How much for your daughter?
It would have been helpful if the author had talked about how to find a buyer -- is there a Mac-oriented site with classifieds, or is it best to try one's luck with Craigslist?
Personally, I've been nervous about using it in production, mainly because I don't yet trust that it isn't going to interact poorly with my rewrite rules and authN/Z setup. Apache configurations can feel a bit like voodoo even when modules aren't stomping all over each other, and the interaction of Passenger with mod_rewrite, in particular, seems like it could cause breakage.

I hear it's possible to install it on a spare box and see if it works with your rewrite rules or not. Let's call it "testing".
Fascinating! Thanks for making the connection.
I'm currently using Coherence (https://coherence.beebits.net/) as a media source for my Xbox 360. It works quite well as a home media solution.
Parody time.
It impacts me as a developer because this potentially diminishes DHH's credibility in my eyes, and as the Rails BDFL, this has the potential to impact how I approach the platform I use to make a living.

Well, all the code is available, right? You should base your decisions on the design and implementation of Rails, not on one of the author's blog. This is a really scary pattern emerging that I've noticed. It seems like people want to base their infrastructure decisions on things that don't matter. "Well, I would use $foo, but the website doesn't look very nice." "$foo seems nice, but the main author can be mean." If this is how you make IT decisions, I pity you.

(A while back, someone posted to my blog a comment that read, "Because you were so mean on CPAN Ratings, I've suggested to my clients that they use PHP instead of Catalyst." That doesn't seem like a very sound way of evaluating infrastructure decisions, especially since I am not the author of Catalyst. If they want to make more work for themselves because they don't like me, all I can do is point and laugh. Clearly I'm mentally ill, though.)
I do play computer games, but I really wont care about the Source. How many of your users are actually going to see it? Look at Apple, they have proved that they can be propriety, yet successful.
Five whys: The startup immune system, Part 1
You're missing his point. That has nothing to do with polygamy and everything to do with being a wacko religious sect.
The video responses should be great.
I don't think the parent poster really believes that this should be defined in binary absolutes.

I agree with the generality, but the more important question is, how do we turn "Types 2s" into "Type 1s"?

They're just misguided, not evil.
I wouldn't go that far. That may be the party line of the day but in my mind, it's clear that a child benefits best from having 1 female parent and 1 male parent, who are committed to raising that child within a stable family environment.

Yes this means I consider same sex families and single parent families "sub optimal". No, I would not suggest for a second that having a child requires "optimal" conditions.

I grew up in basically a single parent family. There are a lot of things I know I would have been able to benefit from (that I've learned and am learning along the way) had this not been the case.

We need to stop pretending that every different way of raising a child somehow produces the same results. At the same time we need to realize nobody is able to provide the optimal conditions all of the time.
i disagree. there will always be advertising on any consumable medium, internet or otherwise.

unless he's saying viewer eyeballs are worth ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, there will always be people willing to pay for that exposure.

it's never going away, no matter how much people dislike it. unless legislation is passed AGAINST it... think that will happen?
The ability of China to spend its way to at least 6% growth (ask Dr. Doom) or maybe even 8% annual GDP, is amazing.

The war chest of (US $) savings they have is monumental.

However, don't expect miracles from China. Damn near every boom they've had has ended with a bust.

First TVs, then washing machines, then cars, all boom then bust, and then boom again.

That's why China keeps growing.
But it's growth is bumpy and that's why China is not a place where you "park your money".

All that centralized spending is not the most economical either. Sure infrastructure is almost always needed, but almost isn't the same as always.
Yes, I have those same concerns and feelings. The fact that he calls you an idiot is why I don't figure it should be on this site.
Agile Marketing (very short speech from Business of Software conference)
Flag, off-topic.
The title makes it sound so easy. I hope people don't forget that this stuff takes a tremendous amount of dedication.
This is great advice and can be used everywhere.

Beware that if you work for BigCorp this will make you unpopular.
How long does Google baby the iPhone?
I thought we all agreed on no political/economic garbage here?
Don't want to sound like a broken record, but Youtube + Obama + ReadWriteWeb = Hacker News?
If it is going to be produced by the US government wouldn't it belong to the state, therefore to US citizens?
Spinless leader. He should have fired half of the middle-managers right away, and some dead woods in his exec team, and reward well who is left.
Making money from open source is not an easy proposition. There are some ways to do it here and there, but it requires some very creative thinking, great skills at managing the open source community, and on top of that, good technology.
As the creator of a reasonably complex open-sourced research simulation code, I can point out a drawback with open-sourcing: The more successful you are, the more emails you will get with questions etc and responding to them can easily take quite a lot of time away from your real work. Of course, in that this is an increased incentive to document your code extensively, it might be a good thing, too... ;-)
The Dark Art of Cyberwar
Feedback on Startup: Videoly - simple video email site
This issue is at the heart of the petition against enacting Prop8 that was brought before the California Supreme Court.

The California Constitution distinguishes between "amendments" and "revisions" to the Constitution. Amendments can be used to clarify the Constitution and require a 50%+1 vote. Revisions are necessary for far-reaching changes to the Constitution and need a 2/3 vote in the state Legislature followed by a 50%+1 referendum vote.

The argument is that if mere amendments can be used by the majority to deny civil rights to a minority group, it would render the Equal Protection clause ineffective (a far-reaching change), which would require it to go through a "revision" process and not just an "amendment" process.
Where is marriage in the Constitution at all? My point stands.
All* works of the US government are under public domain anyways:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_of_the_United_States_Gover...

*almost, with a few exceptions
Clearly it's not the monoculture that people are opposed to. And if you think it's bad now, wait for the clouds to really kick in.
Following your logic... should any citizen be given access to the plans of american nukes? "it was produced by the US government, it belongs to the state and therefore to US citizens".
Pentagon Clears Flying-Car Project for Takeoff
The way Obama is using the web could be a powerful trend.

Does anyone else smell an opportunity for start-ups?
This is just sad. Go back to reddit, please.

Just because interracial couples can't produce pure-bred babies in the same way as same-race couples, and just as same-sex, infertile, and "mature" (beyond the healthy child bearing years) couples cannot conceive children together in the same way as some people... doesn't mean a tyranny of the majority should have the ability to take away their civil rights.
How do avatars have sex?
definitely source specific. innovative algorithms stay private for good reasons
Not logic, just law: in general, government publications aren't covered by copyright. For more details, you could JFGI, or have a look at the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_of_the_United_States_Gover... .

To the best of my knowledge, US nuke plans aren't generally published. Obama's speeches on Youtube certainly are.

Edit: just noticed that this link is also below. Oh well, it's a somewhat different posting than the one below.
"..all the code is available, right? You should base your decisions on the design and implementation of Rails, not on one of the author's blog."

I can stare at the code all I want and still be no closer to knowing how rails performs under load, or how much memory it leaks. That isn't just about the code, it's about behavioral interactions with the OS, level of traffic, other layers in the stack. To address those issues I could run a million performance evaluation experiments, or I could try to gauge how the community is doing, who's using it that is kinda in the same situation as me, and what issue's they're dealing with. And I refuse to believe you don't do the same.

He's not talking about what words DHH uses in a blog. He's talking about DHH's credibility in saying rails was production-ready. That is relevant to platform choices.
Probabalistic Learning of Programs
Make sure to flag it.
>Conservatives do not shy away from the reality...

Um, Jesus walking on water? Talking snakes? Worshiping a book that condones slavery? Believing that there is a "God" that just popped into being out of nowhere existing beyond time, and that this idea is more likely than the universe just always existing beyond time?

The Branch Davidians called. They want their delusion back.

BTW your comments about liberals don't apply to all of us. I'd be very happy to offend you, and I'm sure it wouldn't be hard, since you seem to be a conservative.
Why Google or Yahoo should buy Twitter.