skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're ignoring the long tail of streaming. Streaming revenue will continue bubbling in, while sales are shortlived. In many cases streaming revenue will surpass sales within a year or two.
But then he couldn't talk about being a part of TechStars and using the phrase grinfucking.
I think the author didn't go to the same France I live in.
random idea: tell the testers that they are testing a competitors product, so they don't have the feeling that their criticism is insulting to you
Meanwhile, farming and food production is one of the least profitable industries to be in... Trust me, when the need comes, there will be a way.

Obviously, the situation is different in poor countries - but just take a look at all the expired food we dump from supermarkets, restaurants, offices and homes - it sure is more than enough to feed a lot of those who are starving... if only we had teleporters...
These solutions are also very expensive. Given the fact that the population growth is at its highest in less developed countries, I think it is a lot more realistic to assume that the population will be "controlled" by killing those least able to defend themselves.

The ethical problems are easily circumvented if you do it indirectly through distribution of resources.
Wonder if this netbook has open source hard disk firmware?
I replied to you on the blog but since you cross-posted:

@Katelyn, I think you misunderstand the purpose.

It’s not a paranoia thing to prevent companies recording information, instead it’s a preference for how I like to consume the web. The companies are free to record whatever they wish, they do so by my user of their service. But I’m free to choose how my client consumes their service.

I just prefer web sites that aren’t updating state based on me just reading things.

I like to see opposing sides of the argument, so don’t like the idea of being bubbled by my own preferences.

I feel a little freaked out when one cycling site I go on has adverts for the tyres I looked at 2 weeks ago on an entirely unconnected web site.

Personalisation can get it wrong. In the same way that Amazon recommendations become tainted every December when you do the Christmas shop.

And personalisation can be extremely upsetting, such as a family member who still receives new born baby information months after a miscarriage.

It just comes back to how I use the web.

I enjoy it more when it’s made up of many disconnected things giving a consistent experience to the user... me.
Nothing of the kind is considered by anyone.

Nobody considers johnsmith@odek.com a better applicant than johnsmith@lumberjackservices.com.

Even if the job is for a hacker and not a lumberjack.
Yes, and if my data disappeared tomorrow, I'd be pretty pissed off. But since Gmail has a sort of critical mass, it would be likely that other people would lose data too.

You're picturing some massive server failure, but not the more likely case of your Google account being disabled for any random reason, which has happened to more than a few people. As Gmail gains more users, you become that much less important to them.
Roid Bionic possesses a couple οf features thаt οthеr smart phones
Are there really no other fully free systems available on the market by now?
> At best, he's a cautionary tale demonstrating the state of the world if he had his way.

How do you know what the state of the world would have been if he had his way? All you know is his state in our current world, which is vastly different from a world with nothing but free software. You think hardware manufacturers wouldn't use free software if that was all that existed?

You have no idea what the world of technology would look like if we had nothing but free software. And neither do I, and neither does Richard Stallman. But we do suspect it would be better. At the very least, don't discount the possibility.
I read an interview with him many years ago in which he said he can't do much programming anymore due to painful arthritis.
of course, that's trained human behavior. the post was a reminder to constantly elicit direct feedback from the end user and constantly collect data.
Nowadays most web startups don't do just web clients, they tend to create native clients for each platform. A web startup for sharing photos will fail on iOS if they provide only a web app. And even if you're creating just a web client, AGPL might still bite you.
Oh, I'm sorry. I thought I was on HN but it seems I wondered into Reddit or Slashdot. Let me amend my point of view: "I loooove Richard Stallman and I totally dig his choice of computing platform. I would never dare to say otherwise"
Funny. I just asked for alternatives to Gmail and other hosted software on the Richard Stallman post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3551345

Harald's suggestions boil down to

- share the administrative and financial effort with friends
- use hosting form NGOs or non-profits
- use small companies and ISPs

The first suggestions might work for me, but what does everyone else use? If you host your own what software?

Lastly, what do you think of a home appliance (basically a server the size of a router with a web interface) that people could install in their home to host some of their important data. Obviously it wouldn't be reliable enough for Email, but might be good enough for docs, password hosting, bookmarks, contact list, etc...
Socio-economic considerations aside, there's something subtly absurd about this situation— I think it's captured especially in the last line of the article:

Politicians in Sacramento, California’s state capital, are arguing over how to spend the tax windfall expected from Facebook’s IPO.

While conversely, NYT article noted that Warren Buffet paid under $7 million in taxes last year.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that taxing the flow of money doesn't make a lot of sense on the face of it. Taxing the static accumulation of money seems like it provides a more sensible set of incentives. Of course, I'm just a guy.
that might work. i'll try that.
1. Rich webmail is an absolute must for me. I use too many different computers from too many different places for anything else to be remotely practical at this point.

2. No open source webmail servers that I've seen come close to Gmail's functionality, and I don't have time to write one that is.

3. Even if there was/I did, I couldn't get the spam filtering to anything like Google's level even in theory since I don't have nearly as much data to work on.
Touchy.js - light-weight touch event library
You admit that there is a risk, but what can you gain from taking that risk? Because without gain, what incentive to you have to take the risk? Yes, I agree that the likely outcome isn't that bad if they break my trust but only tracking my search queries would be quite revealing and sensitive and would reveal stuff that I tell very few people. So, the thing that yahoo did (releasing all queries with an "anonymous" user ID) could have had huge implications for me personally.

In terms of friendship etc. the gains are huge, but what about google?

Relevant ads? I have never, ever, in my life clicked on a google ad on purpose (probably a few by mistake (thus I immediately left the page)). And that despite that they are "relevant", so... What can I gain from letting google collect all that information about me?

And honestly I believe you get much better ads by targeting a site rather than a person. The best ads and the only ads I've ever positively responded to are those from a local tech site (the same ads but on a food site would probably not interest me as much).
Landlines definitely use proprietary software for switching. It really isn't just wires connected together.
> you just replaced one roadblock with another. One is technical and the other is financial (buying a Mac)

I think you hit on an important point. Most people seem to be approaching this from an adult / professional perspective. I'm thinking of the bright 14-year-old kid who wants to learn about computers. He (or his parents) may not be able to afford a $2000 Macbook, but he could build his own box relatively cheaply and put a free operating system on it. Linux is democratizing that way. And he can download the source code to virtually everything running on that box. That has undoubtedly inspired a few programmers.
Until recently the GMail web interface was simply unmatched. When GMail first shipped, their conversation view was so far ahead of what anyone was doing on the web or in a fat client. I don't try out as many email platforms as I used to, but from what I have seen, it's still the best implementation of conversation view available.

Additionally, you hinted at the other main reason I use GMail in your first bullet point: "Control over your own data means you own it, you have it on your hard disk, it is not on somebody else's storage medium."

Sure, this means Google has access. But it also means I don't have to find a way to make that data accessible to me everywhere I want it to be. I don't have to pay for the storage. It's a solved problem... and available at a great price point ($FREE).

I trust google slightly further than I can throw them, so for now this is an okay deal.
I personally learned some of this in my UX course, but nothing substitutes for experience. As is, the article is seems to be extolling the virtues of keeping good feedback practices in mind (as well as highlighting a rather amusing term, "grinfucked").

It's good though that you can leave negative feedback on a rather open article. Keep up the Ivory Tower routine.
Scientists Chart High-Precision Map of Milky Way's Magnetic Fields
Something like that happened to me - my account (everything, not only Gmail) was suddenly inaccessible. However, a quick email to support and within 12 hours they sent me a link where I entered three emails I wrote to recently... that's it, password reset, account reactivated... I think they're getting better at handling these situations.
Yeah, but

a) you already saw the movie -- what's to say you aren't a cheapskate, BSting them to avoid paying?

b) you already occupied a space on the cinema that somebody else could have used

c) they already paid for the reel to the movie distributor
Nice. I don't get the function of 'preview'. Maybe there should just be an option to play the song without the video? Also, repeat would be cool.
Grinfucked is an unnecessary and combative neologism. Users are not trying to deceive anyone except to avoid looking stupid when navigating the latest UI tricks that often only make sense to tech insiders. Also, this has been happening for decades.
He has to compromise at some point. He can refuse to stick non-free software on his computer, but he can't refuse to benefit from the use of non-free software in the computers of the cars and planes that he uses for travel, and he can't refuse the non-free software that was used in the manufacture of many of the products he uses every day.
> There really isn't another solution out there right now

What about Git submodules? They do fundamentally the same thing as Repo, but it's a built-in Git feature and not a bunch of scripts.

Repo can make your life very hard and you have to be a black belt Git ninja to understand what's going on when things don't go as you intended. Git submodules don't depend on having arbitrary GUID strings in your commit messages either (like Repo's Change-Id).

GitHub's reviews can handle Git submodules (but it's not free or open source). If someone knows any open source code review tools that can handle, please tell us.

Sorry for beating a dead horse, but I really want to save someone from fucking up (or at least re-centralizing) their workflow with repo scripts, when native git is better.
A nice thing about John Conway's construction of the Surreal numbers is that integers are really a subset of the rationals, which are really a subset of the reals, which are really a subset of the surreals. I find this much more elegant than having "merely" finding an embedding of the smaller structure inside the larger one.
How does that not count as a decision?
Back up your email! Just because your data is in the cloud doesn't mean you shouldn't make a backup.

I just run getmail which retrieves mail via Gmail's IMAP interface every now and then. If Gmail went away tomorrow, I wouldn't be _that_ sad.
Because we care about efficiency, not least with regards to our time, and running one's own mail server is not an efficient use of such a scarce resource.
I wouldn't even call it lazy, I call it efficient. Google makes email management easy so I can focus on something more interesting and hopefully more beneficial to my peers.
I could do 99% of my job effectively on a ~200MHz Pentium with maybe 64MB of RAM. About the only thing that would really bite me is the occasional need to help the client team, which often means booting Windows in a VM and replicating their comparatively bloated development environment.
If you were to offer an self-hosted version that I could install in my own datacenter, that'd be of serious interest to me (my company). Allowing anyone else to hosting the sort of documents that end up in latex (very sensitive research papers) is simply not an option, but collaboration among researchers would be very convenient on a platform like this if we could control it. Sure, lots of latex is university or public research that ends up getting published anyway, so security is not a concern. A lot of it, however, is industrial research labs where information security is of paramount importance. This seems to be an overlooked market among many people who just want to make web programs. I urge you to consider the possibility that you have many potential customers who are not interested in letting you host their data.

Very cool site, though. Google docs for latex is a very useful offering. Thanks!
Facebook is the new AOL (2006)
It's easy, safe, secure and fast - but I also have an Yahoo Mail account as backup.

And you can't beat the price, unless everybody decides to go French and fine Google for providing a great service for free when there are other companies that do it for a fee :-)...
Indeed, it may soon be impossible to make money selling buggy whips, and we should not ignore that.
Easy slideshows with XML
NH Krystal Laguna Villas & Resort Hotel
Libre Graphics Meeting - May 2-5 in Vienna
" he's a cautionary tale demonstrating the state of the world if he had his way."

Almost all of the things you consider modern in the computer world are built on top of his creations. OS X, google, facebook, HN, etc ... all built on the foundation RMS laid. Without his creations we would be closer to your idea of a "pre-1995 digital stasis"
> 2. No open source webmail servers that I've seen come close to Gmail's functionality, and I don't have time to write one that is.

Obligatory comment pointing out an opportunity for disruption, etc., why aren't we all millionaires., etc. etc.
> To me, it demonstrates a far less altruistic motivations.

He does not have a problem with cell phones. He has a problem with the fact that if you use the same cell phone repeatably, you give up a large portion of your privacy though all the meta-information that can be collected.

To make a simple analogy: RMS's cell phones complaints are the same as his compaints about the CharlieCard system that lets you pay for rides in the MA public transit system.

If someone gets your card, they can find when and where you entered/exited trains. So RMS uses a card swap system where a pool of people exchange cards. This muddies the waters enough to make tracking your movements much harder.
How do their achievements stack up against RMS?
Jetbrains WebStorm or Visual Studio with Resharper. And of course Firebug and the tools in Safari/Chrome.
who are you, where are you from?
I did. Seriously.
CityGrid Local, Mobile, Social Stack: Geoloqi
Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, I'll add repeat functionality soon.

Intended use case for "preview": you get a burn link from someone, you don't know any of the songs, and you want to sample many in a short time. It's not selected by default because I imagine it's not what most people want. Maybe it plays too prominent a role on the page.

I really wish I could play songs without the video, but other music sites have gotten in trouble trying.

How would people feel about "add album" and "add random related songs" buttons?
Cube World's Developer Blog
1. Because Google solved the spam problem better than anyone else has

2. Because maintaining your own email server (which many on HN are perfectly capable of) is a giant pain, especially when you have to deal with SpamAssassin, DKIM, and all of the other things that you need to do correctly to have your email work

3. Because I still have my data even if Google loses it — I have a backup from downloaded email through Sparrow as well as an entire backup directly from my Gmail through Backupify (https://www.backupify.com/)

4. Because I like to outsource the tools and services that I need to people that are experts at it. It's the same reason that I use Beanstalk for Subversion instead of hosting my own server, use FreshBooks for invoicing clients instead of doing it myself, and send transactional email through Postmark.

It's easier. Much easier. And they are all very good at what they do.

Bottom line: So that I don't have to worry about email. It just works, which allows me to do exactly the same thing.
Xcode vs. AppCode
For 9 out of 10 used cars, there’s a better deal to be found.
I completely agree with you on the merits of the program. Why don't more companies do it on the scale of GSOC? Organizing it must take multiple full-time people. It'd be great to see more programs where students get paid for their work but I want to point out that it's not the only way companies and students are both benefiting from collaboration.

I'm at Portland State and we've got a solid six-month capstone program in computer science where local companies, including several in open source, are working with student teams. I know electrical/computer has a similar program with a more hardware focus. It's not that GSOC is the only program where companies work with students, only the most visible.
Major unsolved problems in theoretical computer science
I have taken a look to your free and paid applications and they are promising. In fact, you seem to be doing quite a number of sales of your "Social Media Ticker" application. It seems that you are lacking behind in free applications. I can give you some free advice based on my own experience developing applications for the android market.

First, I see you have published one free app a wednesday, and another a saturday. In my experience free applications launched friday night have better exposure than midweek. It can deepen on the application, but usually when I launch or update a friday night I get better results all the weekend than launching any other day. It might be the case that there are less applications in the new category to compete, my theory, most updates happen in working days.

Secondly, there is no way of knowing what the users want in advance. It seems they are not interested in saving pictures to the SD card or settings a screenshot as a wallpaper. I believe your abstract photo painter is a fun application with bad marketing. You can benefit from a name with more grab. It could even be doing too much: too many effects, too powerful. You could potentially advertise just one effect like "warhol-ize your friends", but make it easy. Social might help you: share your patenting on Facebook. Tweet it. whatever… at least, change the icon. A smiling female showing your effect can be a good idea. Even the "mona lisa". But your current icon looks awful.

About Android market SEO. You have long descriptions describing what your application does, which is good. Try to check if there is keywords related to your product on mobile search. This could increase your installs. A good starting point is the adwords keyword tool. You can set the results to only mobile. And don't use generic words on the name of the application unless you are king of the hill. Users searching for wallpapers are not going to notice your "Wallpaper Share" among the ton of results.
> Not very practical for webdev

On the contrary! I spend most of my working day using vim in a terminal (with tmux) to do web development. It's just text generation, after all.

I'd go so far as to say that if you're doing test-driven web development, it should be possible to build a system entirely within a terminal, and that's what I aspire to. It's only the front-end styling (CSS etc.) that actually needs anything more than a terminal.

And yes, I find this efficient: far more efficient than hacking and pressing F5. I think there are other benefits to this way of working: it tends to make progressive enhancement and accessibility the path of least resistance.
None of his alternatives — team up with family and friends to maintain a mail server, join a nonprofit to use their email (WTF?), use email from a small ISP — seem remotely practical for most people, so no wonder they use Gmail. Even worse, aside from the first alternative, all of his objections seem to apply to the alternatives as well (only with the name of the new email host in place of "Google").
Wouldn't you rather be retired than working full time, regardless of the job?
I find the situation with Netflix very frustrating: I'm on 3 DVD + streaming plan since forever, have not a single movie pirated since then, yet studios are constantly coming up with new hoops for new releases availability (especially with TV series)... I also think I could be paying more, just please stop making my life harder for no good reason.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Maybe you're trying to say that, yes, there are a hell of a lot of serious roadblocks?
When a Tool Becomes a Weapon
One point about privacy: E-mail is unencrypted and is delivered over public networks.

Assume that any government, be it your own, US or other will read your email if they so please, and encrypt anything you don't want them to read.
I'm not sure that an open source webmail is an easy way to become a millionaire. =P
DVDs are the new MP3s
Part-Time Jobs that Offer Medical Health Benefits
Because not even "extremely security and privacy aware" hackers care enough to use it. That said, Zimbra is pretty bloody decent.
A device that sits in your home and hosts your docs, passwords, bookmarks, contact list, and so on? It sounds like you've reinvented the PC.
1) Black listing - if someone in your IP neighborhood sends spam you can be silently blacklisted by Comcast, AOL, some random crazy zealots running a blacklist that other random people choose to use… et.al. and people stop getting your mail. Good luck getting unlisted. Wasted hours. Sometimes it's futile.

2) Spam filtering - If you are the sort of hacker that publishes their email address in order to interact with the community, and you become popular with spammers, then it is difficult to beat Google's spam filtering on the hundreds of spam you will receive each day.

Until a few years ago I used to run my own servers and corporate servers. Nicely trained bogospam filters (this is work and involves the brain killing activity of reading borderline emails to categorize) got most of it with little risk of resource consumption failures. SpamAssassin got some of the remainder, albeit with some risk of exploding, but spam still got through.

Those same addresses now let about 4 spam per year through the Google filters. You can't beat them. Your sample size is too small.
Yes there will defiantly be an API coming soon, please contact me via the link at the bottom of the website if you would like to be updated when it's released ;)
> demonstrably untenable

Please, demonstrate away.
Great idea and I will look into it, not sure how 'easy' it will be though :)
750users in just over TWO days and approaching 200 posts with several times more comments!