skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article is bullshit.

Not a single actor with Danny Devito's height and hairline earns half as much as Brad Pitt. Nor are there any Olympic medalist swimmers with small hands and feet. I can't think of any Fortune 500 members with Down Syndrome, either.
> * where are your examples of companies taking that code and "closing it up", making significant money off of that work, and without giving anything back?*

My understanding is that proprietary operating systems such as MS Windows use the BSD tcp/ip stack. Is this not true?
I typed-up a long comment, but just decided to submit it instead to YC as a blog post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=490145
Thirty-seven Reasons I Love Ruby
My experience with the OS/GUI built on top of the Squeak VM has been very positive.
> But GPL itself should not be considered open-source

The term "open source" has a clear, accepted, and well-understood definition -- http://opensource.org/docs/osd -- and the GPL clearly meets this definition. If you don't like the GPL, fine. But don't say that it isn't open source, because that's just not true.

If you choose to give your own private meanings to words, you risk being misunderstood. You also risk being seen as dishonest.
We use munin, monit and god for our monitoring. All great pieces of open source.
That expression is my joke based on the content and context of that essay.

He's suggesting that his friend may not be a hacker simply because it depends on "how much he likes to hack". My issue with that is two-fold: 1) it introduces the idea that being a hacker requires some form of external judgement and 2) it contracts his initial point that playing is hacking.

That said, it's possible his friend specifically did not enjoy eating with two sets of chopsticks in one hand.
I really like the Hackintosh movement.

Who ever would have guessed that installing OS X would be harder than installing Linux, and would have less hardware support? It almost makes me want to giggle.

(Oh, I love how you have to boot into the CLI. If this were Linux, everyone would be up in arms about how unintuitive it is. But if you're hacking OS X, ITS SO SUPER COOL. I am amused.)
One interesting answer was to "Let's say the 2 co-founders (1 engineer 1 business-type) have just gotten $100k angel and are hiring an engineer. What sort of equity range for that engineer would you expect."

The answer was "1-2%". It's unclear if that's 1-2% at exit, after the first VC round, after the angel round, before the angel round, or what.

Even if it's 1-2% at exit ....
The whole suite of Vista fonts is actually very, very good.

Which surprises me pretty much daily.
one more time for luck :)
Not quite. VC is equity funding, so they get a portion of the upside, whereas debt just gets the capital back plus interest. This means the VCs' interests are much more closely aligned with the founders'. They both get rich in the same way: from shares in the company becoming more valuable.

The empirical evidence suggests it's a net win for founders. How many tech companies IPO without taking VC? Zero, as far as I can tell.
This topic shouldn't be taken seriously, so I'm hesitant to post; however, there's a precedent in opposition to your first point that external judgement is not required. From the New Hacker's Dictionary entry for hacker:

"It is better to be described as a hacker by others than to describe oneself that way. Hackers consider themselves something of an elite (a meritocracy based on ability), though one to which new members are gladly welcome. There is thus a certain ego satisfaction to be had in identifying yourself as a hacker (but if you claim to be one and are not, you'll quickly be labeled bogus). See also wannabee."
That's not quite a fair comparison. Apple isn't presenting OS X as something that's meant to be easy to install on different computers. So of course anything you have to hack to install is going to be tricky.
Haha... imagine how creepy/awkward it would be.

Still, I'll go halves with you if you're interested. Otherwise a ride in Danny's Lamborghini also sounds good.
I thought NiNs drummer was a keyboard.
My last 3 laptops were all Thinkpads. I switched to MBP because I couldn't stand the LCD panels they started to use: dark, dim and low contrast TN-film without 24-bit color support. [I owned their FlexView at some point, I was crushed when I got T61]

Even resolution is wrong: 15" panel shouldn't be higher than 1440x900: many web sites aren't readable at resolutions higher than that, yet Lenovo offers only 1280 and 1650 horizontal pixels (too few and too many).
I Love Pair-Programming
Anything mac fans say about this might be true, but irrelevant. OS X is better on macs than on pc's, macs are better computers, they feel better, they look better, this IS illegal, etc. But the problem is with choice. Choice is good. And some of us LIKE Dells, imagine that.
Project Euler and Calc Mode
Hmm, last time I watched it, they had ads.

I do agree that it's excellent that they don't take episodes down. If the episode isn't available online, I'm not going to go watch it on TV. Hulu could learn a lesson.
Interesting analysis. Have any of you pair programmed? Did you find it as useful as the author of this article did?
Let's be honest, he's not Trent Reznor. How many people have even heard this guy's name before? "Hey man, come check out my band, we got the drummer from NiN playing with us" isn't going to get you very far.
Yes, but do remember most of these houses were bought during a bubble period. I doubt many houses will ever reach the value that they were bought at.

Especially if you've read "how the crash will reshape America" recently posted on HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=485036), you'll realize that many places where economic growth was fueled solely by home value will never fully recover (Arizona, Las Vegas, etc).
Hah, what the? Does Alexis work for Quicken?

I think that's a fairly standard definition of a user. Every company out there is looking for ways to maximise their numbers. I think if someone has signed up, then they're a user. If they create an account, they still have the potential to use the site at a later date, or they're exploring. How does that make them less of a user?

If you started culling multiple accounts and inactive users you'd start seeing some very different numbers from every major website. Particularly multiple accounts...
Many operating systems have networking API that is similar to BSD one, but that does not necessary imply that TCP/IP stack is same (and in case of Windows it is certainly not, as the BSD-like API is to some extent emulated in userspace).

On the other hand, some userspace parts of Windows are certainly traceable to BSD origins (i.e. some command line networking utilities and large part of POSIX subsystem userspace).
I don't think IPO is the required hurdle to take before declaring a huge success and while there are some companies that have made it that far on their own it certainly isn't the norm.

One likely reason is that the IPO process itself costs a very large amount of money and is usually underwritten in part by large institutions.

Didn't cisco make it all the way to IPO without any outside investments ?

Edit: cisco took 2.5 M in capital from sequoia
Look, I wasn't going to list out every popular open source project that doesn't use the GPL and I never claimed that there aren't useful projects that do use the GPL. I simply wanted to counter the mistaken notion that software without a GPL license sits in some small niche and all such projects have small inferior communities.

That being said, Freshmeat is a horrible way to support whatever point you were trying to make.
That works for a Word document, but what if you were editing a PHP file? You neither want your changes to be immediately applied while they aren't finished, nor can the PHP interpreter handle a special format with embedded undo.

Or, lets suppose you just log the undo in a hidden file alongside the original. Imagine you've edited a lot of files. All that eternal undo would pile up, and you'd end up with gigabytes wasted on useless undo logs. Plus plenty of stranded logs from moved files.

No, the ability to save, to not save yet, and to abandon the undo - those are useful features.
A (better?) variation of the Win 7 taskbar and OS X dock.
If an app is not running, show its icon in the dock.

If it is running with one window, show the window live in the dock with the app icon small at its corner and the document title below it.

If it is running with more than one window, do the same thing but
cycle between the open windows, display each window for a few
seconds.

===
UPDATE: Another variation:

How about showing a full size icon with the live previews immediately to its right and without the cycling?

Example: [firefox icon] [firefox win1] [firefox win2] [eclipse icon] [itunes] [itunes win] etc.

Clicking on an app icon always opens a new window.

Applications with open windows could be shown first. If there isn't enough horizontal space for all the icons and previews, the user could use the mouse to scroll the dock horizontally and/or some icons/previews could be reduced in size.
Well, it's not saying it's literally a mortgage-- more that it's yet another area that is often associated with people spending beyond their means.

Ideally, I think founders should skip the VC if they can grow/sustain things themselves or at least think hard about taking the loss of equity. Not every business model can make that work, though.

And, of course, not all companies want to go IPO, though I can understand that desire for a lot of people.
You're making an arbitrary distinction there since the networks own Hulu. They're just doing some good cop bad cop PR, and you're falling for it.
Cisco was funded by Sequoia.
The main issue with that solution: Each application no longer looks the same. In OS X, Mail would look a lot like iTunes, Word, TextMate -- because they're all predominantly white-background with black text. The taskbar/dock would soon look like a bunch of windows, but you'd expend more energy to determine which one was which.
Ok, how about including the full size icon among the cycling of open windows?
I am not an expert on this. However, it's probably worth mentioning here what I've understood from economists: the banks are not nearly as broke as they say they are -- the ones that are still in business, anyway. If they were really that broke, they wouldn't have taken the TARP money to buy out competitors and give upper management the fat bonuses. The banks that are going out of business ... well, they aren't, really. They're being bought out (e.g. WaMu) and the assets are now held by the parent bank. In that light, I think the original commenter's point stands; the houses aren't worthless.
Then you'd see something different every time you looked over to find your application. Consistency seems like something worth keeping.

A large app icon with a tiny preview might work, but that's obviously not much better/different than the standard OS X dock.
yep, I just found out about that... I recalled the story that they had a great problem finding funding, but it turned out that eventually sequoia came across.

Funny, I think a lot of VCs must have had a 'what if' moment there.

The joke in the industry is that it's the deals that you did that you'll regret and the deals that you didn't that you'll regret even more.
PasteBin Ubiquity command
I am not sure how people are adopting ubiquity but it looks quite handy to me. I have written a command to perform PasteBin functionality i.e. replace the selected code snippet by a url. Please comment.
Seems like most people are using laptops as their primary systems these days. Is the ideal setup for most designers/developers now a laptop with external monitor/keyboard/mouse?
> where are your examples of companies taking that code and "closing it up", making significant money off of that work, and without giving anything back?

Sun Microsystems and BSD? They have given stuff back, but basically, they did take BSD proprietary in a way that it took years to 'recover' from, in terms of a purely open source system.

This debate doesn't have one 'winner'. I suspect if you wanted to do some sort of rigorous, formal, analysis, you would turn to game theory. Barring that, though, I think that there are situations where the GPL is best: everyone can contribute knowing that no one will "run away with the pot", by, say, hiring up the core developers and taking the system proprietary. In other cases, BSD is best - with lots of software that gets used as a library, if it's under the GPL, even if companies want to contribute and be good open source citizens, they really can't, and so you lose any possibility of getting good work from companies. Even the FSF realized this and created the LGPL. So, like many things, it can't be boiled down to a simplistic "this one is better" type answer. It really does depend on the situation.
How about showing a full size icon with the live previews immediately to its right and without the cycling?

Example: [firefox icon] [firefox win1] [firefox win2] [eclipse icon] [itunes] [itunes win] etc.

Clicking on an app icon always opens a new window.

Applications with open windows could be shown first. If there isn't enough horizontal space for all the icons and previews, the user could use the mouse to scroll the dock horizontally and/or some icons/previews could be reduced in size.
I read your post, and a similarity struck me between your situation and the one I was in with a competitor funded to the tune of 30M US by two very large companies. We were approached with the intent to acquire, but the management team there was - to put it mildly - a little strange, so we declined. After 3 years they had burned through the whole wad and the plug was pulled.

It was the weirdest experience, to out-compete a company that has such enormous backing with a team of very few but very dedicated people in two small offices (one in Toronto, another near Amsterdam).
Is the parent post supposed to be self-referential?
I love the Usability Post setup. Having a vertically oriented monitor like that allows for a wonderful amount of context when coding.

http://cdn.cloudfiles.mosso.com/c25361/usabilitypost.jpg
I've done it, with two others on my team of six. The three of us thought it was good for quality and a preferable alternative to code review. I think each of us was a little shy at first, but once that faded we didn't feel held back by the pairing.

We used it mostly for collaborative design. It was helpful for bringing a new team member up to speed on our code base. We also used it as an interview technique, and that seemed very successful although that one hiring decision is weak evidence.
That's a good argument for science, but a putative engineering discipline must be something that actual, real humans can perform, or we are forced to admit that the standards should be raised and too many people are currently trying to do the engineering.

That's why I point out that it applies to all design philosophies I encounter. I hate to be elitist as a general principle, but I regretfully must come to the conclusion there's a lot of programmers programming who really shouldn't be, based on the evidence.
I hear you, and you're absolutely right, we will provide an easy way to opt-out for those who want to. It's on its way.
I pair programmed with a friend all the way through my graphics class. It worked out really well because my linear algebra was really strong and his C powers were unstoppable. We easily finished in half the time of other groups. I'll provide more detail when I'm not on my ipod.
NIN in the studio is basically just Trent Reznor. Live it is a full band.
I have a 1650x1050 15" panel on this laptop, and web browsing is fine, with the latest browsers and their "zoom" support. Theoretically, you should be able to have a 200DPI display and have everything work.

(I'd swear there's a huge bug in the Firefox image scaling algorithm, but since it's persisted this long it must just be me.... resized images are a bit ugly, but as we move into a world of resolution independence, a period of "ugly" is inevitable, unfortunately.)
It very much depends on the competitors out there. VC capital can work like an arms race, if your competitor takes an infusion of capital and you do not then two things can happen:

- they manage to buy themselves the top spot leaving you in the dust

- they lose focus and think that because of the capital infusion that they sky is the limit and start doing stupid stuff.

In the second case you clearly are the winner, otherwise you have a real problem.
Thanks, that's good feedback. We are actually working right now to provide another option - initially we wanted to sell a "single test" but we realised people are likely to want to fiddle around with their configuration a bit, maybe start a couple of small tests to verify that the config is working. To make things simple we thought a 1-hour subscription would be good, but it might turn into a "day pass" instead. We'll see, we haven't decided yet. Anyway it will be an account you buy for a very limited period (without a running subscription), it will let you run larger tests than the BASIC subscription allows, and it will be a lot cheaper than the PRO or ADVANCED subscriptions. Basically, it will be intended for one-off tests.
I've done it at my current gig for about 5 months now. I'm not sure I'd work anywhere where I didn't pair, from now on. Infact, I've started pairing with my friends via iChat screen sharing when I'm working on side projects away from work.
Google Ordered by Court to Remove Certain Web Pages From Search Results
I would be surprised if they don't sell. Some Disney fan will get the 10k package for dinner at Club 33. This package is cheaper than a membership there.

And the 20k and 75k packages come with members of Tool. Josh Freese may be very talented and almost-famous, but the members of Tool and very talented with some incredibly obsessive (and surely some rich) fans.
Road to Clojure Survey
I've learned programming this way with a good friend, even 28 years later we're still in touch.

It's one of those things where you can see how much it matters that you can rely on each other to catch stuff before it becomes a dead end, when you're programming on your own it's very easy to waste some time every now and then, and to have to backtrack later.

If you can't actually program pair wise I'd certainly recommend that you go over your design with somebody competent before you commit to code, you'll be surprised how much time that will save in the long run.
Microsoft hired Lucas de Groot to make the C fonts. de Groot's fonts are some of my favorite fonts (Thesis and C fonts are both stunning families)
The Future Of FriendFeed - Does It Have One?
As Facebook continues to add more and more functionality that mimics what FriendFeed does, is it becoming superfluous?
What's normal value?
Where are the Apple fanboys whining about the ruining of the Apple "experience"?
I never really pair programmed but I'm going to give a try :P
cf. how the words "queer" and "gay" are being reclaimed by the LGBTQ community.
Also calling Josh Freese just "NIN's drummer" is not very accurate. Freese did play with them on occasion, including the recent amazing Lights in the Sky tour, he is still one of the most accomplished studio drummers in the business. The man is a drumming machine and is extremely famous in his own right. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Freese)
I'd argue most musicians, especially drummers, have definitely heard of him. He's a very famous drummer.
Stuff alternating on my display when I'm focused on something else is very irritating.

I think a user interface / window manager should be as quiet as it could possibly be so you don't get distracted.
> Who ever would have guessed that installing OS X would be harder than installing Linux, and would have less hardware support? It almost makes me want to giggle.

Hardware support is easy if you completely control what hardware you run on.
I think '8' should be amended with Nikolai Tesla.
Does R have a Java binding?
Network discovery and monitoring tools:

http://www.zentu.net/oss/?q=forum/584
The 1997 prices: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Case-shiller-index-values....
The only problem I have with southparkstudios.com is that it's not 'available' in my country (Australia)! Back to allsp.deltavid.com for me I guess.
I did pair programming on some occassions and it is certainly useful. Also in my experience pair programming is good way to fix things that are so horribly broken so nobody wants to touch them with ten foot pole or quickly finish other tasks that are somehow obscure or boring.
293 days ago: "Ask YC: What tools do you use for notifications of server/site uptime?"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=180951

Lots of good suggestions there.
Oops: Microsoft Asks Some Laid Off Workers To Send Back Part Of Their Severance
LOL--they ALL look "minimalistic" compared to the mess I have...!
Sure, I know. You still have to muck around with the command-line, and you don't get full hardware support. People seem perfectly happy to make these compromises to install OS X, but they will whine and whine if it's Linux. What's the difference?

Anyway, all I said was that I find this amusing.
All of these workstations look the same, and my workstaton is no different.

Macbook + 30" inch monitor.

Enough said.
The vi analogy was really stupid. If you know Vim(not Vi) well enough, you probably won't need an IDE to be effective(unless you are using an IDE dependant language, which is bad). And yes, your IDE is bloated.
The extra pair of chopstics are communal, for picking up pieces of food and moving them to own your bowl/plate.

The PRC (no idea about the DPRK) was campaigning for the use of these pretty heavily around that time period as they're more sanitary and a lot of Chinese meals are taken "family style".

At least try to comprehend the problem before coming up with a hackish solution.
YES!!! Finally an explanation from a non-economist that doesn't descend into progressive-populist-bankers-are-evil propaganda.

And yes, a second video showing the actions of the government would be nice.
Does it make you more productive or do you just find it more fun?

I suspect companies that institute pair programming because employees are less likely to goof off when they have another set of eyes on them. I have a hard time believing that it actually makes motivated people more productive.
updated with sample output pic
>People seem perfectly happy to make these compromises to install OS X, but they will whine and whine if it's Linux. What's the difference?

Lets see some evidence for this. There are many more Linux users than Hackintosh users, so (using a similarly flawed naive analysis to your own) it seems that Linux users are more willing to put up with compromises.
I also love pair programming.

It usually begins with about 5 minutes of joking around and wasting time, but it takes only a minute or two to achieve flow. Individual programming can take 30 minutes or more to achieve flow. Once in flow, it is much harder to come out of it because you aren't tempted to browse to Hacker News. Also, no one will stick their head in your office and bother you because it looks like you are in a meeting.

Partners are incredibly helpful spotting errors and act as an extra cache for all the little details you need to keep track of. Usually the person not typing has a lot more capacity for those details because they don't need to spend the energy operating their editor and manipulating code (no matter how good you get at it, it still requires some brain power: a limited resource).

Also, when all is said and done, you now have TWO experts on a topic. Redundancy is a good thing.
This list made an appearance on This American Life.

http://thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1090 (Act 3)
So we need a high pass filter for languages?