skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Open Source, the future or not?
For a long time I’ve been asking myself this question. More and more startups are promoting themselves with Open Source and free to use services. Lets take an example, a new service called www.supportduck.com. This is a startup that are promoting themself with Open Source approach where you can download the code for free on Github, or you can use their web service for free. The startup above are moving into a market with a lot of great businesses already, well known businesses such as www.olark.com, www.zopim.com etc.

So that is why I'm asking, do you guys on HN think there is a future for businesses with an Open Source strategy where it is free for everyone.

I think that in the next couple of years, we will see a lot of startups with an Open Source strategy, but if they will keep running without any income I'm not sure.

Kind regards
Kenneth
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/social-media/7965381/Y...
Haha "hormonal predisposition". Suave.. Heh
Yes and no. What puzzles me is that people seem to have to work more and more to make ends meet. Our parents could finance a home and family with one earner, now both parents have to work. Social welfare is always under attack (speaking of Germany), which doesn't seem to make sense - why could we afford these things a couple of decades ago, when today the industry should be much more efficient? We should have an easier time than our parents, but do we?

I feel that some force is trying to extract as much work from "us" as possible, sometimes even selling it to us as a liberation. I am not even sure if it is a conspiracy or just human nature or what not. However I found it interesting that apparently 40h work weeks were established because industrialists noticed they yielded optimal output. That is already that principle: squeeze as much work from workers as possible, so in their spare time they have no energy left to produce, only to consume.
But here's the thing: CSS is a stone soup of non-local, action-at-distance effects -- it's "goto" programming. HTML lacks decent layout primitives (border layout, grid layout) because it's a document-oriented abstraction. It's just really obnoxious to get a single screen application look working correctly on all browsers.

So, I'd welcome a reimplementation of, say, WPF on canvas. Something that works without Microsoft's, Google's, and Mozilla's explicit blessing really is needed.
I don't think this is a result of "pestering" FB, you can dump your entire profile any time you want. As far as being concerned about what they're keeping, there's an easy solution ... don't upload the things you don't want the world to know about.

I don't think a FB account is a right, and I find it hard to sympathize with those that don't protect their own privacy (perhaps with the exception of kids who haven't gained that skill yet).
Cue: Everything is amazing and nobody is happy.
http://vimeo.com/14975413 (starts at 1:54, although the whole thing is vaguely related)
It's not so much that they need to be created in one piece [1] as that they need to be annealed after taking shape.
I believe theres a big future for open source companies if they do it right !
I agree with the gist or your post, but as others have pointed out, GWT is essentially depricated and really not the right direction to go.

I think the angle that TypeScript is taking may prove to be more fruitful.
"We're living the dream..."
The question is, who is the dreamer?
Red pill or blue pill?
Hmmmm
1% of your market cap to take your fastest growing competitor (in the photo sharing space) completely out of the game and gain significant footing on your other biggest competitor (in the social networking space).. sign me up.
BB10 to appear on 01/30/2013
Irrelevant. If if a renewable source is 10x less efficient than non-renewable sources, the key here is NON-RENEWABLE. We've got to take the pressure off of petroleum based fuels until such time as we come up with some alternative system - hydrogen, high-capacity battery storage, etc.

PS. Adding Nobel Prize to someone's argument doesn't have the gravitas as perhaps it once had. I think Linus Pauling and vitamin C diminished that.
My dad hadn't signed his credit card, so she handed it back to him, told him to signed it, took it back -- and _compared_ the two signatures.

The only reason this kind of behaviour makes any kind of sense is if she (and the clerk in your example) were just going through the motions and didn't actually care about the security.
Oooh. That would be a good test. Similar to the above comment, our guy has a number of toys and can distinguish by name. Totally going to the pet store this weekend to see if we can try that out.
She gave me the name of the collections' agency and her own first name.
I read people saying "duh, this is obvious". Of course it is, and everybody knows it, but it is still important when political personalities start to say it publicly.
Um, no. That was never really a complaint of our parents to my generation. Note, I wasn't talking about a recognition of struggle. I never said we had to struggle and, IMO, we didn't really.

What I meant was things like your statement "awful race relations". In the USA at least, race relations are HUGELY better today than when I was a kid. The improvement is astounding really given that most people from back then are still alive today. Also, LGBT rights are stronger and better recognized today than in the past.

Finally, I'm not pissed about anything related to what I wrote. More simply mystified.
Apple is not censoring anything, they are only regulating what can be sold in their store. They do not have a monopoly/single-handed-control on eBook distribution, let alone publishing in general. Your local Barnes & Noble probably does not carry hardcore porn, but it would be crazy to call B&N's policy being some form of malicious censorship.
Launching Recon.io (my side project) out of beta
> Suppose you could build the product for $50M with a 50% chance of significant delays or failure. Then the upper bound of what you’d rationally pay to acquire would be $100M.

Am I the only one who thinks cdixon is slightly off here (except Chris with his reference to sophistication)? But what is the right way to calculate?

To simplify ignore the risk of delay for now (so 50% is risk of failure). Also assume the risk of acquisition is 0%. Then you have three outcomes: 1) acquisition, 2) internal success and 3) internal failure. In economic terms 1 means you gain $500M - X where X is the acquisition cost, 2 means that you gain $450M and 3 means that you lose $50M.

In this oversimplification I would say that the expected outcome of internal development is a gain of $200M (50/50 chance of $450M win or $50M loss). It would be rational to pay X < $300M since that would give you a certain gain of more than $200M.

Right? This is of course also lacking in sophistication but I have a feeling it touches on the angst that drives acquisition valuations up... :)
I'm sure you mean this in the vein of "Apple is controlling the App Store so they're evil" but in reality you should be thinking "Apple is controlling the App Store because if they didn't they would be sued over and over again by posting adult-themed apps because the US is a) puritan and b) lawsuit crazy".
It's not only non-techsavy customers that are to blame.

There actually seems to be a trend amongst some corporations (for example ISPs/telcos) of a certain size to hide their phone number as well as possible. They'd rather route requests through an online ticketing system that is often of questionable value to the person requiring support. Usually you can find it somewhere in their impressum, but when you click on anything called "contact" or "support" you end up in a maze.

A Google search usually does it, but the phone number really should be easily available from the website.
you da man.

edit: Looks like ~$750k. Significantly less than I thought.
Younger generations didn't grow up through "real" crises. Their frame of reference is different, and through that lens, mountains are made out of molehills.
Is there a remedial school for headline writers? Naturally it missed the Earth or we wouldn't be here. Perhaps the headline writer meant - "Billion-Ton commet MISSED Earth by perhaps a few hundred kilometers in 1883".

To quote George Carlin - "It's not a near miss. A collision is a near miss. It's a near HIT!"
Yeah. These practices are plain stupid and I do the same. YOU tell me who you are and I'll call you. Don't even give me your number because it could still be a trap. For example, if it's a credit card company, if I can't call back at the number on the back of the card to know what's this about, they're doing something wrong.
Funny how proportions are lost. They're assuming the billion views yet they're still 200 million views away. There was a time not so long ago, when Avril Lavigne and the Evolution of Dance battled themselves out fiercely to reach 200 million views. Clickbots, fanclubs and all.
We have always had a solution to this problem: patents on math are not allowed. Now we just need the patent office to stop giving credence to the "well it's not a patent on math because it also says 'on a computer!'" lie, and this problem will go away once and for all.
+1 I am in my early 60s. I think that the world was a much more dangerous place during the 'cold war' but few people seem to realize that. Part of this is marketing by special interests ("Orange terror alert today!") motivated by profit.
We (in the US) have a political system where the other side isn't just portrayed as being wrong.. but being immoral monsters looking to destroy: people, businesses, society, women, families, gays, religion, etc, etc.

When everyone claims those are the stakes, everything looks like it's life or death.. and every little loss is monumental.
...because as we all know, an RFID badge is so terribly difficult to clone.
$1 CPM is what pretty much everyone can get, $3CPM and beyond are possible but generally reserved for people that are members of well managed Youtube networks. Gangnam style is probably a unique case in that it's a single video that advertisers will want to associate with, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's making $5 CPM ($5k/1m views) -- $5CPM average, probably peaking at 10 - 15.
I wonder how much testing they did before releasing this. As developers we often have a blindness to the way users see things compared to how we see them, especially if we're in love with our ideas.
They were on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, weren't they?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yatta_(song)
What the other person said, how can you be so sure it is bad w/o even having seen it in the first place? :-P

FWIW, it is an excellent satire on pop-culture in general, hip-hop videos, OTT dance moves in most music videos, etc. And the tune itself is quite catchy and has excellent recall value even without following the language...

In short, I cannot emphasise enough on how wonderfully it works as a satire to all things that you might consider "crapola" (this view is based on how quickly you dismissed the video as crapola in the first place), so I suggest you fire up the video and only then dismiss it.

You're welcome to diss it though, just watch it first, make an informed opinion, and then you're welcome to diss it all you want ;-)
Stopped reading at the point he names anti depressants as a life improving discovery. Author obviously forgot this is supposed to be journalism not creative writing.
It seems though that the problem is that even if reliable companies discontinued this practice, people truly attempting to scam you could be mistaken for tactless companies.
Indeed. I'm at a loss trying to understand why he thought he was demonstrating anything interesting. There would be no harm, except that now and then you hear people claim that it has been proven, by studies, that the mouse is faster than the keyboard. I suppose they are quoting people who are paraphrasing people who have sort of heard of this trivial study.
>> There is no future in GWT.

I think there is. This doesn't look like the site of a failing project: https://developers.google.com/web-toolkit/

>> but it has extremely long compilation times, the development mode crawls

When you go to create the deployment package it's slow. When doing development, which is most of the time, it's fast to me. I can change things in the client or server code, save and see the results instantly.

>> it's inexcusable for a 2012-era framework to not have a quality form validation library available.

http://code.google.com/p/gwt-validation/

>> The other downside of GWT is that it's written in verbose Java

That is a huge, major win dude. Seriously. What else would we all program the web in? JavaScript? The language that has to be excused for all the weird things it does when you thought your code would do something different?

>> ...Java, with plenty of non-DRY stuff.

DRY is a principle, you can repeat yourself or not in any language you choose.

I'd quote more and respond to more but most of your arguments are clearly in favor of JavaScript programming, it makes no sense to compare a Java to JavaScript technology to a simple JavaScript library (jQuery) because with jQuery I still have to program in the weird unpredictable, odd behavioral world of JavaScript.
"I feel that some force is trying to extract as much work from "us" as possible, sometimes even selling it to us as a liberation."

In theory, work and leisure time both are goods that you can choose to consume with varying degrees of flexibility. In theory, they are both subject to the usual decrease in marginal utility as you have more of one or the other. In theory, on a marginal basis you will choose to do one or the other as it has more value to you, so if you face an hour in which you could work for $40 or experience leisure time you value at $45, you will not do the work.

I've larded that entire paragraph up with "in theory" because it is a massive oversimplification and we all know that. However, I think in the end the point it leads to is still significantly true, which is that as society has advanced, an hour of work produces more value to the user. Even if the gain is flat in purely monetary terms, in terms of subjectively-experienced wealth the value can still be rising, per all the advances mentioned in the article. (No amount of 1980-money will bring you Minecraft, etc.) Therefore, it is easy for leisure time to get crowded out through perfectly rational decisions by the worker.

Due to diminishing marginal advantage, it's not a linear process; one may work a 55-hour week instead of a 45-hour week, but this process is not capable of producing someone who works a 120-hour week who would have chosen a 30-hour week. The value of the next hour of work goes down too fast and the value of the leisure time goes up too quickly. But it is an effect that shows how an increase in productivity can actually be a cause of longer work hours, not a bizarre inexplicable side effect.
I use Office 365 (Exchange Online) and made the mistake of using my own email address as the primary Exchange Online address. I was unable to access my email for close to two weeks. Other than that they've been better that expected.

What I'm saying is that unless you do it yourself these things will happen. A service level agreement can only be viewed as "this is what we promise as our best endeavour", but when it goes south it goes south, and you're at the provider's mercy.

I made the mistake of regarding"the cloud" as this "machine" that's impervious to human error.
All those things have gotten better, but for a lot of people economic security has gotten worse, and economic security tends to override a lot of other views when it comes to perceptions. Median incomes are roughly flat, and security of those incomes is on a significant downward trend. My dad, for example, graduated with an engineering degree in the '60s, and landed basically a "good job for life": good income, defined-benefits pension, full health coverage, informal understanding that as long as you didn't do anything absurdly bad, the company would find a continued place for you. Also, workweeks were 40 hours, vacation 6 weeks/yr, and there was only quite rare overtime or weekend work. That kind of secure employment is much less common today.

As far as war goes, I'm personally not hugely disconcerted by terrorism, but a lot of people seem to be. Osama bin Laden is certainly less of an existential threat than nuclear war was, but people are in a way almost more on edge about it: the possibility that the whole U.S. might get vaporized is one of those things almost too apocalyptic to worry about on a daily basis, while people do worry (often irrationally) that their subway train might get bombed.
If I am not mistaken the 'M' in CPM stands for 1000 not 1m. the M is a roman numeral for 1000. That would also be more on par with what I am seeing other youtubers get (see AdamGibbins's link).
I suggest to watch the whole video, it's not very long, but funny!
"per capita GDP...the trend is positive"

The thing is, this article leaves a lot out. Per capita GDP has been rising. What has been happening to the inflation-adjusted hourly wage? It is below what it was in the early 1970s.

I look at the Forbes 400 and heirs like the Koch brothers, or the Waltons or the Mars family are doing well. Or entrepreneurs like Amway's Richard DeVos. Or upper middle class sons of lawyers and congressmen like Gates and Buffett, with rumored screwy mothers of the type that the sons don't kick back and relax once they hit $20 billion, they have to go on.

The majority of people are worse off. I don't primarily look at it as a "moral" thing, I see it as a broken system which will eventually collapse in some manner due to its internal contradictions - just as feudalism did, just as slavery in the US south and ancient Rome. This article is an example of this. Why not just tell the truth, that according to the government, the real hourly wage was better in the early 1970s, that things have gotten worse since then?

Stratification means the white, upper middle class, college educated Americans reading this have no idea what I mean. They are living in their own bubble of VC, congratulatory back-slapping etc. Born on third base and thinking they hit triples.

The point is, why are lying articles like this necessary? Why can't they just tell the truth? The fact that lying and propaganda, which the average wage worker believes no less than Russians believe Pravda, shows the weakness of the system. People don't buy these lies any how. They know. The majority of people - not the SF bay white upper middle class bubble of people.
I enjoyed that comment - thank you for posting it.

It reminds me of a post on Patrick's blog (patio11) -

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...

"All business decisions are ultimately made by one or a handful of multi-cellular organisms closely related to chimpanzees, not by rules or by algorithms..."
like you cant tell cocaine is bad unless you tried it, right ?
Behavioral scientists advised Obama campaign
GitHub Notifier extension
Are people still surprised by Google's lack of support?

I think one of the messages here is to take note of any support codes (account #'s or PINs in this case) and store them outside of the service that requires them.
"knowingly poisoning others"

Tobacco and alcohol dealers do the same, yet they are quite civil...
Video Cartoons it s a collection of best animated movies from YouTube
Well, I for one appreciate Schrems' efforts.

Facebook is in the business of advertising. They make money selling ads in Europe and whereas they may be above the average, they are not above the law. They should abide by European rules or take their business elsewhere.
Fortunately due to advances in mobile technology this could be a thing of the past in the near future, back before 3G there was a real need for low-bandwidth sites and hence mobile specific versions of the site.
Now we have devices with larger screens, faster processors (which often now include GPUs almost as standard) and proper browsers that support much of what their desktop equivalents do.
Give it a few years and hopefully more web developers will see the importance of flexible design for their webpages, that is if the App craze doesn't kill this off.
Apples and pears, I'm afraid.
>> GWT is essentially depricated and really not the right direction to go.

Where does it say that on the GWT site?

https://developers.google.com/web-toolkit/
You're correct, it stands for 'Cost per mille', and indicates the revenue received for a thousand views.
Most uses of RFID badges for access control have nothing to do with building control or server rooms (and why would you want something as poorly secured as RFID when a smartcard would be equally convenient and far more secure?). Most uses of RFID are based on the same reasoning that leads to the installation of keystroke logging software, MITM devices, etc. -- the idea that employees should be watched at all times, and that the more detail you have about your employees work habits, the better (and you should never have know how to judge the products of their work; after all, that is not the job of a top-level manager).
i dont think it is a satire of anything. it's just pre-pooped music like most of today's mainstream music.
Crashplan Online Backup Lost My Entire Backup Archive (2011)
The rich are much richer today then they used to be.
What puzzles me is that people seem to have to work more and more to make ends meet.

I don't know about Germany, but in the US we work less than before.

Hours worked per employee is down, while the employment to population ratio isn't up enough to compensate:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USAAHWEP

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/EMRATIO

Employment per capita was up a bit during the peak of the 90's bubble - by 2 hours/week over the 1970's.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fredgraph.png?g=d5P

Further, I think if you compared the same basket of goods, you'd discover that it's actually quite easy to make ends meet 1970's style. You'd live in a house that is tiny (by modern standards), drive one car/family, and give up all sorts of expensive medical treatments invented more recently than 1970 (MRI, chemotherapy, viagra, most prescription drugs). Not to mention all sorts of labor saving devices in the home (e.g., a dishwasher, washer/dryer or roomba).

The right question to ask: is all the stuff we've gained since 1970 worth an extra 1-2 hours/week of paid labor?

[edit: an earlier version of this post asserted working hours didn't rise at all. That was incorrect - I compared the endpoints. After the fact I spotted the fallacy, and put my third graph in the post.]
yet both are fruits.
>> What's the point of a high level powerful tool if you need to understand the underlying technologies and the transformations to it well in order to use it?

What on earth are you talking about?
We've created Discourse ( https://www.discoursehq.com ) to let big corpo have a direct link with their customers so they don't have to call them - instead they just send a message and nature of our channel is that customer can engage in a conversation, get more details etc. Would you, dear HNers, use it? We will launch first big brand customer in December.
This is exactly my feelings as well. I just compare my situation with my parents and see that they had it ridiculously easy compared to what my situation is like now, while the lifestyle is basically the same in every way.

It's like my parents asking me if I want to be just like them, only work a lot harder and get a lot less for it. Um, no thanks.