skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> [citation needed] :)

What I mean is that a product manufacturer sells something to me and that's it. I should have complete control over it. Just like a fruit vendor can't decide on how I should eat it similarly a product manufacturer can't decide on how I want to consume a product. I am just customizing a product for me and not competing with the product manufacturer. So, I do not see anything wrong in it.

> Also, I don't see an obvious way to allow users to change your code without allowing competitors to steal your work, whether directly or indirectly.

That's a fair point but let me assert here that the onus is on the product manufacturers to do this without violating basic principles of purchasing goods. Any good once purchased is in the hands of the purchaser and he/she may choose to customize to good as per his/her needs. Of course, the purchaser should not be allowed to compete by putting up a layer on the existing platform which should be illegal or unethical. However, if he is not doing so no entity should allow to control how he wants to use it.

> If a user voluntarily chooses to buy a closed product, what's the harm? Freedom includes the right to make self-detrimental decisions.

:-) This is not an appropriate assertion. We are discussing whether a closed product should be allowed in the first place. I do not think we have come up to a conclusion as yet.
Freelance marketing is a much different beast than freelance programmers. That's because, unlike programmers, most people think they can do marketing, without any experience or training. The same cannot be said for programming.

Those that are wise enough to acknowledge that they're not an expert marketer tend to bring the job in-house. Marketing is much more hands on with the business end and I believe people feel more comfortable having someone there day in and day out.

With that said, there are places like elance, RFPDB, and Craigslist where marketers can find work. However I've found that personal recommendations are the best way to go (I know this is obvious).

My experience has proven that these sites are extremely ineffective. People ask for the world at very low pay. Like the many different programming languages, there are many different disciplines of marketing. I'm not sure if programmers are expected to know every language, but many people looking for freelance marketing help expect someone to have expertise in all forms of marketing (i.e. SEO, Social, PPC, Media, Content, Email, etc). Not impossible, but not common.

I'm sure paragraph 3 was all you were looking for, but I thought I'd add in some color to the answer :) Hope this helps.
When you say 'work' is this freelancing work, or work as an employee at a company? If its freelancing work, how do you find enough to keep you busy during the 1st year?
I voted in that. I know I didn’t like Stack Overflow because it is a negative thing, and I thought it’d be better to choose a name with a positive association; but obviously it’s not been a problem.

I don’t remember what I did vote for. I don’t love any of those candidates.
West Virginia paid $22K each for Internet routers
"around a dozen that I would consider acceptable"

How much did the 'acceptable' designers get compensated?

That's the problem with the 99designs. There isn't a scale of compensation for quality. Either the designer wins or fails with the rest of the junk.
I don't understand this sort of complaint. Are the participating designers being deceived? Are they being forced to participate? Are they being subjected to conditions that are hazardous to their health? If not, what is wrong with participating in this sort of thing?

I am a happy 99designs customer, and I sleep well at night.
Are you kidding? You use stack overflow to receive free programming support.

Can you explain what the difference is between 99designs crowdsourcing design work and SO crowdsourcing development troubleshooting?
Man was drinking milk long before there was a western civilization.
99 designs is a disgusting waste of resources and talent. If you're a designer like me, you'll get much more value investing your time in building long lasting relationships.

If you're looking for a design, please put in the effort and get to know a designer. Most are incredibly hard working and won't be happy until your happy.
Yes, but, when starvation looms, it seems you're better off having the milk directly (if you can).
We created our distractions, and we will surely limit them if doing so becomes worthwhile.

If a company that banned non-enterprise smartphones during work hours was more profitable than one that did not, if the difference was great enough, the banners would quickly overtake everyone else.

This is where culture comes from.
I agree. It's by choice that people participate in this type of website, with the knowledge that they may not be paid. No one is forcing designers to partake.
dereferenced.com would have been pretty good too.
The main problem of this paper seems to be 'publication bias.' I mean by this, given a number n of statisticians who look at a certain fair election. Each using n novel method. Then we expect ß n papers from it, given that ß is the chance of falsely rejecting the election as fair. Since each statistician uses a number of tests, which may or may not correlate with each other, it is very much impossible to determine sufficient level of certainty, without committing first to the statistical tests used.
I got one last week, after having waited a year.
For starters, 99designs is spec-work, and stack overflow isn't. Nobody is making any money from Stack Overflow by contributing.
Wow, really? Do you have a source for this?

Anecdotally, this seems untrue. I was back in China for 2 months earlier this year and milk (fresh, no less, with expiration days of literally 3 days or less) are sold everywhere. Clearly there is a high demand for milk in mainland China (so much so that there are even brands of imported milk from Germany). This was in the capital of Beijing.
Why does it have to be either/or? I use both Google Drive and Dropbox; the two products have different strengths and weakness, and so I see them as complementary.
this wasn't supposed to dissuade people from applying! just sharing some wisdom.
Nike Dunks On Sale - Dunkslife.com
You're making the same argument that a well-rounded executive would make, as I said in my post. It's what the free market bears. You certainly have the right to use 99designs, and I'm happy you're satisfied using it.
You call it a "race to the bottom." I call it a functioning market. Lowering prices for a product isn't a bad thing. It's effectively what we're all in the business of doing.
Sent (and that was my last of the 2 I was given).
This is a great example of what you can do with chrome packaged apps. Many of the APIs associated with packaged apps are not supported in the current official release of chrome, unfortunately.
yes, i'm using Chrome on Win7.
Not at all. This is dev workstation stuff. I want Flash, mp3s and Java as well!

I think the problem with LTS is mis-stated - Long Term Support is just a lie.
So all the amazing contributions the StackOverflow team and users have contributed to the engineering world are now less-useful because you found out they got their logo from a crowd-sourced platform?

Are you kidding me? If you don't like spec-work crowd-sourced sites, then don't participate, but to try and suggest they are less of a company for using one is over-dramatic bullshit.
Or maybe like Vim in tmux?
It's weird how almond, soy or coconut liquids can legally be called "milk" none of those sources have nipples. Coffee is liquid from fermented beans similar to soy it's no more milk than soy is.

I know here in Canada for decades margarine had to be smuggled into the country, when it was legal it couldn't be yellow like butter (but even butter has artificial yellow colour added), it certainly couldn't be called butter.
> The success of the lactose tolerance mutation may be partly due to sexual selection...The ability to drink milk as an adult is a neotenous trait, and it may have been "accidentally" selected for when other beautiful features were sexually selected.

Accidentally? Try getting laid when your GI tract is in rebellion. An accident my ass! (Or some ancestor's lactose-intolerant exploding one.)
This is sort of like saying Hollywood spec script writing is unethical, when there's a lot of history in such an endeavour, and a well known understanding of the risks associated.

Also, the whole concept of working for a startup is, in a sense, doing work for nothing, hoping that it will pay in the future. Admittedly, equity is a more likely avenue to get paid when you do hit success than pure reputation from spec work, but on the flip side, such successes are much more of a team effort than that of an individual. Having been a leader at more than one failed startup, I don't ever recall anyone in the market having "empathy" for us as we ran out of cash and were laying people off.

I guess I'm saying that arguing this is somehow unethical seems absurdly entitled, whether for designers or developers.

edit: grammar
How are you so sure? It seems like the red queen effect to me. We do it because become the norm, not because we actually get anything from it. Actually it seems to be related more to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus
You must have a lot better teeth than I do... I eat Grape Nuts about four times a week and can't imagine eating even a bite without milk on them to make them a bit softer.
A modern keyboard re-imagining should ditch the caps lock entirely. When's the last time you found it useful?
> Heart disease, diabetes, alcoholism, celiac disease, and perhaps even acne are direct results of the switch to agriculture.

Really? A plant-based whole foods diet is probably the best cure out there for heart disease and type 2 diabetes. (google Dean Ornish, Neil Barnard, John McDougall)

The author tells a good story but his bashing of agriculture is unsupported.
I think that the author will get all the funds regardless of reaching the goal. It is the first time I see indiegogo and it would be quite different from kickstarter, but that's what their page seems to indicate:

>Flexible Funding campaign
>This campaign will receive all of the funds contributed by Wed Oct 31 at 11:59PM PT.
I see from this comment and others on the page that you're very angry about 99designs, and people who use it. I can see why - it commoditizes your profession.

But can you see it from the other side? There are clearly designers (starting out, living in low cost economies, etc) who are happy enough to use it, and it's not always possible to pay a designer until we're both happy.
> Are you kidding me? If you don't like no-spec crowd-sourced sites, then don't participate, but to try and suggest they are less of a company for using one is utter fucking bullshit.

Please be civil. I am not saying that they are less valuable. I am saying I appreciate them less.
How, specifically, can sexual selection operate in this case? It would seem necessary that the lactase-production gene, which the article mentions, must have some external effect that's peculiarly attractive. But I don't think it's possible to tell apart lactose-tolerant people by their appearance.
You've described one side of the debate, yes. The technical side has no less merit; don't dismiss it offhandedly. Hence why I find the essay on bits having color so useful: it frames the debate nicely without actually taking a side.

The arguments you referenced would indeed make for relatively unsophisticated legal arguments, but they don't claim to be legal arguments; they're statements about technology and about how geeks want technology to work. They carry no less weight than statements about how lawyers want technology to work.

Or, to put it more snarkily: your claim that bits have some unrepresentable property of "color" sounds like non-geek misunderstanding to me. There is no legal problem here -- only a problem of non-geeks applying legalistic results where they shouldn't. :)

Let's not rehash the arguments that the essay already eloquently expresses; neither of us will get anywhere that way.
But that's still only one person modifying the code and the other watching. There couldn't be two cursors/editing points at the same time.
There is a trick to it, you have to kind of grind them with themselves. Grapenuts is actually the only cereal that I can stand with milk as well, but I prefer them usually without.
Funny, my initial assumption before reading the article was that it was going to be something nano-scale.

Also, the article is focussing solely on the "this stuff dissolves in water and is bio-compatible" part of the equation, pretty much ignoring the "fight infection" part.

So I'm guessing that this is just a proof-of-concept of the "electronics that dissolve in the human body without killing you" part of a complete solution (which is very cool, don't get me wrong...). If so, is the fighting infection part a solved or trivial problem? I'm trying to figure out how a chip inserted into a single point in a body fights infection.
There's a huge difference. 99 Designs works on the premise that only the best should/will survive, a brutal winner takes all system. None of the participants in 99 designs are contributing their efforts as charity... they hope to get paid. While SO is the exact opposite. Contributions made as pure charity with no money changing hands.

Not sure how you could miss the distinction.

Just to clarify - I'm not passing judgement on 99D one way or the other. The people that participate there are free to do so if they think it is the best use of their time.
My usual setup is a monthly stipend from a somewhat early stage startup, or one that I'm cofounding and then I do freelance/other stuff on the side. At the moment I'm doing full time work for a startup out of Harvard, freelancing with a dev on an iPad app, and doing some work for a YC startup.
Since you've created this developer vs. executive dichotomy, I should point out that I am most certainly a developer, and only an executive in the sense that anyone can print out business cards. I do not care about maintaining high wages for designers, just like they don't care about maintaining high developer wages. Everyone wants to pay less for goods and services, and demonizing people for that when none of the moral lines I mentioned have been crossed doesn't make sense to me.
Taboo doesn't mean bad. I have had several great experiences with 99designs, but I don't bring it up in casual conversations with designers I know, much like people that have had good experiences with prostitutes don't mention it on dates. I do think 99designs has become more taboo over time. That being said, stackoverflow is a community site, so a community designed logo fits the business.
I used to be able to say this, then I went on soy for about a year. Didn't have any liquid milk. Now if I have more than a cup I get sick.
The title is somewhat inaccurate/misleading. The conclusion the blog comes to is that there are far better chocolates available for far less and that Noka are intensionally obtuse and misleading about how their chocolate is made and where it comes from.

Their site and other marketing material gave the impression that they oversaw the entire chocolate making process from "bean to bar", while in actuality they bought blocks for chocolate from what Dallas Food found to be Valrhona. This buying of chocolate and "rebranding" it is commonplace and accepted. What is not accepted or acceptable is concealing the source of the chocolate and misleading potential buyers.

The real issue (I wouldn't call it a scam) is that Noka doesn't seem to add any value while marking up the chocolate massively. And while being evasive about the chocolate's provenance. Once again, reselling and "rebranding" chocolate is no different from the OEM-Brand Company relationship and is not an issue.
Obviously, I'm not a legal expert - talk to a lawyer.

However, I believe they do. As you said, you were "injecting stuff," which is malicious activity.They don't know that you didn't have a malicious intent, and unfortunately you have now way of proving that. In general, you should get "approval" for penetration testing from the website's owner.

For example, I'm close friends with the Systems Administrator at my school, so whenever I feel that there's a vulnerability in the network, I just tell him and he either allows me to show him, he tells me that I'm wrong and explains the precautions they take against that attack, or he tells me that it would work, but not to do it.
I'm a bit paranoid with sensitive data, so wuala.com has been great in my case. You just get a client to access the data and when you upload files they all get encrypted before going up there.
Have you seen this TED Talk (It's worth a watch): http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_lessons_from_a...

He puts an interesting spin on the fact that in a world of declining physical resources - increasing the intangible value of products is very valuable.
Why does modernize mean not supporting a terminal interface?
Have you tried evil[1]? I've heard good things about it (even from Vim people), so maybe it's a good compromise between Emacs and Vim.

[1]: http://emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil
Dont know about large file size, but the problem with google drive is it is the most memory eating application. It require around 150 MB RAM when not synching. As compared to dropbox require only 40. Even if it has more space for free users i will not use it. Dropbox primary and SkyDrive a secondary are my choices.
BeeLiked Social Media Marketing launches in Chrome Store
Having attempted to make cheese, I can report that it's almost certainly not compatible with hunter-gatherer (ie nomadic) cultures, so the logic seems to support the idea that agriculture came first, then milking, then cheese, and that therefore the change was already happening. That is, whatever caused lactose tolerance to be such a huge evolutionary advantage didn't require cheese to be a large part of the equation.
Apparently what I was describing here has already been put into practice in the shape of Monolith [1]

In the case I describe, as in the case of 'munging' using Monolith, neither B nor C bears any resemblance to A except when the two are combined.

In my view, at least, you cannot say either is a derivative of A. To do so would bind you to declare everything a derivative of A, because any B when combined with an appropriate C can form A.

If I take your post here as B, you will likely deny it is a derivative of any copyrighted work, but if I make the text of the post the encryption key to another file (C) which, when decrypted, becomes copyrighted work A, is your post itself derivative of a copyrighted work?

What makes your post non-derivative and the encrypted file I create derivative? They are both nothing in themselves, and yet a copyrighted work when combined with the other.

[1] http://monolith.sourceforge.net/

Edit: Reading through the article on the color of bits it seems this exact argument prompted the article in the first place. I guess I should finish reading this!
This is the best thing that has been said this entire thread.

I was born in Beijing, moved here when I was 2, grew up with white friends, dated white girls, a lot of what you cannot do is all in your head. Have confidence with who you are, and what you can offer to a relationship.
That's for sure. By the time you have something halfway edible as cheese, a whole village could have died of starvation. Horrible finicky stuff to make, even with modern refrigeration.
Lewis Black said it (ranted it?) better: "There's no such thing as soy milk, okay? And I know that because there's no soy tit, now is there? I don't know a lot, but I know you need a breast for milk."—Rules of Enragement, "Ireland and Health", 7:04-7:11.
Some great thoughts, like this one:

"Revenue is just like funding but it costs you less to get it, and building products isn't a total waste of time even if they don't succeed at massive growth."
The distinction here is that few of us will think you're a jerk for taking that approach. It's a completely valid one, in my opinion. I think it rarely leads to success, but if it works for you, go nuts.
Is FastPay A Real Alternative To VC Funding? Two Digital Media Startups Say Yes
Nice analysis.

I had a similar problem, less hairy, involving a bad bit in a disk drive's cache RAM. Took a day or so to figure out a solid repro.

Stuff like this does happen. Handling bit errors in consumer electronics storage systems is an interesting problem, and one that I'd love to see more attention paid to.
Amazon gets feisty updates homepage to talk smack on the ipad mini
How about the many stack overflow users who contribute questions and answers on a regular basis? Are they being ripped off by Jeff and Joel, too? NO. Because Stack Overflow provides us with a very valuable platform. By posting our questions and answers, we accrue valuable reputation on the internet. This is proven and true, and the reason careers 2.0 is working out great.

Now, if you take a look at the link to the original 99 designs contest, you'll see that the artist who won the contest is now known as "Please_Remove" -- gee, I wonder why? Perhaps because he was able to use 99designs as a conduit for his graphic design career and is now taking on much bigger and better projects? I'm sure after designing such an iconic logo like that, you'll become famous.

So, you see. We participate in these crowdsourced sites because there's something in it for all of us. I post on SO, for me. I understand others benefit from my posts, but I'm there for two reasons: demonstrate my knowledge, and sponge up everyone else's knowledge.

People working on 99designs might not even be designers yet. But they're getting valuable experience in what clients want, every time they attempt a design, whether they win it or not.

The people on 99designs are not people who have their full schedule booked up with work. And ergo, they have taken a radical and brave step to change that. By subjecting their work to the scrutiny of market forces, they will see if they truly have what it takes to swim.

You can argue no-spec all you want but the two facts remain that make 99designs 100% legit:

* Everyone working there is doing so voluntarily
* Everyone shopping there is doing so voluntarily

No one is forcing you to do anything, and the people working on 99 designs are clearly benefiting from it if they are worth half their salt as designers.
It's unethical to expect monetary compensation for work?