skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would actually say it's not that hard to compete with free software. Here are a few reasons:

- Open source is free (as in beer). This means that there's no support, no training and noone to blame if things go wrong. As anyone who has worked at a semi-large business will attest that is bad from a corporate buying perspective.

- The UI design of open-source software is often terrible. Open-source values code, not pretty design. I've never heard of an open-source solution that has gone through formal usability tests. Often customers don't care about pretty code, they care about a pretty UI.

- There's noone to turn to with feature requests, etc. And no, for most companies submitting a request to sourceforge or just coding it up yourself is not an option.

- There's no marketing for open-source software. Marketing sells producs, otherwise companies wouldn't spend trillions a year on it.

- You have no guarantee that your open-source software will be updated in the future. It might just be abandoned. And again, for most companies just doing it yourself is not an option.

In summary, using open-source software requires you to know what you are doing, being able to overcome installing and maintenance hurdles without support and living with the knowledge that the software might not be updated. And you'll have to actively go out looking for it, because noone will try to sell it to you.

Most business-types, who are the ones with money to spend, don't even know that there is such a thing as open-source software, and if they did many of them wouldn't use it for the reasons stated above.
But for any software used by a business it seems pretty simple. You simply need to match the free software in features (or get pretty close) and compete on support.

The key question is "What if something goes wrong?"

Because a business owner can’t really use open source stuff unless they (a) know enough to edit the source competently or (b) can afford to hire someone who does. Assuming there’s a large market of founders who can’t edit source code themselves and don’t want to pay $100+ an hour to have someone else do it you end up with a pretty wide open market.

Corporate America will always be risk adverse which means the deck will always be stacked against free stuff. The trick to competing is just stoking the fires of that fear and then making your software look like the remedy to all of them.
Try to read the community book (http://book.git-scm.com/) the wow is too big to explain in a simple comment, but basically git (or any DVCS) makes your life a lot easier
1990 BBC Documentary On Hypermedia Starring Doug Adams And Ted Nelson
I think VCs in general will be backing less companies in the next year or two. Part of this may be that limited partners who have pledged a certain amount of investment capital will be trying to delay VC funding rounds until the economy stabilizes. Other has to do with the fact that there was a drastic reduction in IPO and M&A activity in 2008. In 2007, there were 86 venture-backed IPOs. In 2008, there were only 6, and 5 of those were in Q1 2008. On the M&A side, there were 360 venture-backed M&As in 2007. In 2008, there were 260. So in other words, VCs aren't getting their money back.

Out of the less number of companies being backed, I guess by this article's argument, these "exponential growth" companies are more likely to be funded. But isn't that obvious? If you were going to invest your money, would you invest in a company that "grows slowly" or a company that "grows really fast"? I guess it's safe to say: don't try to start a venture-backed service company...
They probably arent getting paid- there is just nothing too interesting going on in the startup world right now that they have to make trivial things into incredible stories.
I've actually considered this as a startup idea, except they would be actual news articles about local events or occurrences. Instead of interviewing witnesses to a local house fire or bank holdup the witnesses would just log on and add their witness accounts to articles, and people could attach pictures and videos as well (hey, everyone has a camera phone these days). Of course everything (articles, witness accounts, pictures and videos, etc) would all be user moderated and up or down modded, so if someone posts an account that seems less then verifiable then it could get downmodded. The user base would also act as editor, so people can suggest spelling/grammatical changes and other users can up or down mod specific changes.
It would require an enormously involved user base but imagine getting news reports directly from the people seeing it happen.

Later
Mark
As the Google crawler is a just a basic HTML parser, it makes sense that certain errors could cause major problems for a site — messed up nesting, missing quotes, etc. Google likely has fairly sophisticated error recovery in place, but I'm sure it doesn't cover everything. As such, it's always to one's advantage to validate their site in order to minimize friction.
Developing Mental Models of Entrepreneurship
That explains the use of compression. That doesn't explain clipping. Compression does not imply clipping.

Nothing explains clipping, really. It's just wrong.
Thanks so much for posting this.
This is what I come here for.
Maybe this makes sense for sites running entirely on renewable power or something, but I'm not sure I see the point of a TLD for a few single-issue "awareness" sites. We already have .org for non-profits.
This is a great idea. To start the ball rolling, send me $100 and I'll send you a download link, to validate your business model.
He should have put some content up on the domain before putting the advertisements up. If you have this sort of traffic, why not monetize it properly in a way that doesn't violate the terms of service?

Expecting Google to be as responsive as his own business simply because he is the boss is unrealistic. Nice to see Google giving some young legal interns experience this way. They probably save considerably over having more experienced counsel handle it.
Ah. Fair enough :)
Back in the day, I submitted this paper to the American Journal of Physics. It was rejected, not because it was incorrect, but because it didn't say anything new. If you like I can post the review.
Want something to worry about? Just look up
Meet Vivek Kundra, the nation's first CIO
You can also use Gmail labels exactly like tags, if that's what you want. ;-)
This is really just a long way of saying that services companies get lower multiples (1.5x-2x) than product companies.
Voyager Golden Record - Greetings from Distant Earth
At risk of having my karma blown to smithereens, was I the only one who clicked this expecting to find a page of insults?
Microsoft dropped support for IE5.0 and IE5.5 on their websites. I think that's a sufficient argument right there. :) Haven't had anyone argue with that so far...
Question: Does a blog sub-domain help the Pagerank and popularity of your main website?
I have my main application site https://drchrono.com, and I have a blog sub-domain under http://blog.drchrono.com. I was told by some bloggers that the blog sub-domain of your site helps the pagerank of your main site. Does traffic to your blog sub-domain help the Google Pagerank of your site and count as traffic to your main site?
Overall, regardless of guilt or no guilt, the fault of Google is lack of notice or ability to contact them for any kind of explanation or resolution. I'm glad this guy sued and won.

This is not the first instance I've heard of this inability to resolve issues being a problem with Google, and obviously it is a chink in their armor. Now if someone wants to go after Google, customer service is definitely a weakness to highlight.
-This means that there's no support,
Buy support! C/C++/SQL/Java are free with no support, but you don't choose to only program in JCL4800 because Burroughs sold it.

- The UI design of open-source software is often terrible.
Ever seen in house or enterprise software

- There's noone to turn to with feature requests
Yes because I have Bill's cell phone # for new windows features I want

- There's no marketing for open-source software.
Depends whether you look for software on the web or in the WSJ

- You have no guarantee that your open-source software will be updated in the future
Whereas you have a guarantee that MSFT will stop selling XP

- Most business-types, don't even know that there is such a thing as open-source software
That's why they have staff. They don't know how an IP datagram gets to their web server but they still have a web site. Or possibly they don't - they will be running DecNet or SNA because you can't trust this free TCP stuff.
This is such baloney I don't know what to say.

Let me just say this: the neuron is a black box. So confidant I am of this, I would be happy to volunteer for the experiment where each neuron in my brain was one by one replaced with an artificial replica.

I am serious. Call MIT, get Marvin Minsky on board, and I'm game. We can do it in Austin where I live, in Palo Alto, or at MIT. I don't care. It would just be nice to shut these anti-AI nutcases up once and for all. :-)
We just wanted a simple meaningless name less than 15 characters that was impossible to mistype. We will be playing up the brands of the games moving forward. Most people just refer to the site as "Blockles" or "Balloono". The key will be to continuing to provide really great match-based games.
If there is a lot of good free software to compete with you, it might be that you're trying to sell what is considered commodity. Usually the mature open source software projects are usually infrastructure ones. Unless you've come up with something to reinvent that product, it might be more prudent to build on top of open source software, and use it to your advantage instead.
One place where it's very easy to compete OSS is in the enterprise. For an enterprise, the license cost of software is only part of the total cost, which includes:

* Piloting, operationalizing, and deploying the code.

* Staffing maintenance and support.

* Training.

* Tracking and deploying new revisions of the code.

In fact, I think a lot of people have had the same experience I have, which is that it can be easier to sell software to an enterprise than to give it away.

The flip side of this is that for business/enterprise software, there is very little risk in just making your code open source and then selling a commercial version. Prospects will download and play with your code. They'll pre-qualify themselves, calling you only when they're receptive to the software's value prop. The people who will operationalize the free version probably weren't good prospects to begin with.
13 Ways to Make Google AdWords work for your Business
A bad economy is good for the bees
And risk a lawsuit for libel?
A bit offtopic, I know.

I am a European 18-49 male with good income. Why is so difficult to find European sponsors to allow profitable in Europe (Or Canada, or rest of the world)?

I would like to use Hulu. Or use Amazon on demand. But I cannot pay for contents even if I would be glad to.

Until this companies open their content. I would need to get my Lost episodes with Bittorrent.
The problem with the argument is that "getting around an obstacle" isn't an essential part of "culture".
I think that might depend on the value proposition of your product.

For the kinds of products that need the whole dance of vendor selection, budgeting, pilots, and rollouts, then yes: feature parity, or even a small feature deficit, is easy to overcome with a strong support pitch. That's because the sales process for these products gives you the opportunity to lay out a business case.

But a lot of software doesn't get deployed that way. They may have a more casual value proposition, they may be more "niche-y" (and thus less visible to the pointy hairs), or they may be early adopter products.

In this second category, I think it's harder to make a "support" pitch. If your prospect isn't 100% sold on the value of the product (and companies buy "phase 1" deployments of products to test the water all the time), they're a lot more likely to optimize for cost.

I think it's worth being cognizant of which category you fall in to. I think if you're in the second category, the right play might be to open source yourself. Again, just because you open up your code, doesn't mean enterprises will be significantly more resistant to pay for it.
Solango and Tomcat 6 on Ubuntu Intrepid
On the contrary, it would have been amazing if Google had sent a highly trained lawyer to deal with this. The amount in question, about $760, is probably less than a day's wages+benefits for a Google lawyer.

If you want to optimize for justice, there are plenty of failures in Google and Google's ad programs. They seem to be pretty clear about their intention of optimizing for profit, though.
The funny part about this is that the comments on the BoS board singled out developer tools as a place where it's impossible to compete with open source; in reality, developer tools are one of the places where commercial open source has been most successful. Just dual GPL/commercial license, like Sleepycat did, and charge the people who ship your code a tax to keep their code closed.
I am not saying Google its a bad company, but certainly its not the white knight everybody believes.
> Following this literally is a recipe for getting stuck in a local optimum.

Nope. It merely means that you don't leave a local optimum until you have something better.

In other words, there's no continuity requirement.
Hasn't it been located on jqueryui.com for quite a while?

And does anyone know if they have fixed the tab-plugin so it doesn't break back/forward in the browsers?
Agile Development for Business Survival
Are Ex-Microsofties Driving the Seattle Innovation Scene? Four Examples
I think the lowest reviews are usually the most helpful. It's good to be able to tell if the people who didn't like something didn't like it because they got a dud or they were mistaken about what the product would do, or if the product itself is fundamentally flawed in some way.
The reality is:

* The UI for most software is often terrible. There are dynamics that can even push OSS towards better UI's than commercial; for instance, OSS code often uses more modern UI toolkits, and commercial code often gets away shipping on stuff that looks like Foxpro.

* You're no more likely to get your feature wishlist with commercial software than with OSS. Commercial vendors pay product managers to pick the features that will expand their market and close deals with their top N customers; if you don't fit the bill, or (worse) if they farm the product for revenue, you're S.O.L.

* The cost of marketing software has changed drastically; nobody buys their software from the WSJ anymore. Read Eric Sink on advertising, and go back to the BoS board and read other people's stories on advertising. A well-trafficked blog can generate more leads than a $20k/mo marketing budget.

* The constant cycle of pointless updates is an irritant, not a win. Look at graphic design, where professionals often stick with archaic versions of Adobe tools and bitch about CS2/CS3/CS4/CSx.
Right on! The question of the brain is a matter of resolution. It's precisely because we don't have enough volunteers like you that we don't understand the brain better.

The computer /is/ like the brain because the brain /is/ a computer. It's a complicated computer that has evolved over millions of years, yes, but it's also a computer. It has inputs and outputs. It regulates itself. It keeps itself alive.

Plenty of AI robots are able to do portions of these things. They can be kept alive with solar. They behave oddly, unexpectedly like humans.

AI is real and it is here already. Computers are answering questions we have been asking for a long time.

It won't be long until computers are asking /us/ questions and that's the true test of intelligence. Anyone can answer questions. Only a few can ask them.
Twitto: A web framework in a tweet
It's hard to imagine that anything MSFT does with patents is going to damage its reputation any more than the '90s already have. Unisys was hurt because before the GIF debacle, nobody knew who they were, and after it they were a comic book supervillain. Fairly or not, Microsoft is already the Lex Luthor of software.
I know it varies by state, but where I live (MA) the small claims limit is $2000. When you take into consideration the amount of time you're sinking into the case, and the risk that you might not win, there is only a small range of damages that are likely worth pursuing in small claims court. If you're in a line of work where you routinely sign contracts, you probably have clearer-cut cases than the average landlord-tenant situation. I think most people hardly understand most contracts they sign, and doubt they understand the range of options offered by the legal system.

So two things would help: raising the small-claims limit (I think $8k or so would make sense) and educating people about the option. Follow-up question: do shows like People's Court serve or hinder the mission of educating people about small claims court?
If there are links from your blog to your main website, then yes. Otherwise no. Pagerank is on a page-by-page basis, not on a site basis.
Javascript Framework for 2D Game Development - GameJS
An insightful talk by Dan Gilbert on this http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_...
From the linked blog post:

If you’re reading this, you probably know it already. We finally made the switch to our very own blog at http://blog.jqueryui.com/, where we’ll regularly blog about development, theming, and more during each release.
Validation probably doesn't matter to your users anymore. (If
everyone wrote valid markup back in the day, browsers would be faster,
more secure, and more stable. But that ship is sailed, so you're
stuck with broken browsers for backwards compatibility reasons.)

With that in mind, though, it's easy to write valid markup. All the
rest of the code in your app has to validate, why negelct the HTML?
Making sure that your markup is valid will save you time when you have
to debug a weird rendering issue (or JavaScript's view of the DOM).

Finally, if you even have the opportunity to pass invalid markup from
your app to the browser, you are probably doing something wrong. In
my apps, I load the web designer's templates (which may be invalid
HTML) with libxml2 (it has an HTML loader), process them
programatically, and then serialize the DOM for the browser. This
way, the browser always gets something valid -- my program's type
system enforces this.

Valid HTML means you have one less thing to worry about.
The Boy Mechanic - 1913 (#171 Building and Flying a Hang Glider) (.pdf)
Apparently because he failed to keep his 'residency papers' in order. Although European citizens generally have the right to live in other countries it was common up until fairly recently to have to register in the country you had decided to settle in.
Study peace in…Spain
I've never understood all the AG hate on this site. I can see how you could pity the guy, or dismiss him out of hand, but a lot of people on this site seem to hold genuine malice towards him. It's bizzare.
3dCAD (in JS): (beginnings of) functions
Jay Leno Hosts NextEngine's 3D Scanner in his Garage
This talk by Linus Torvalds was what got me excited about Git: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
A surprisingly interesting site: http://www.jaylenosgarage.com/garage/index.shtml
They still have those annoying ads that make sound on mouseover. They should apply this click policy on these as well. Most annoying banners ever!
Fair point, this won't kill MSFT.

But it could kill MSFT's attempt to enter this market slice.
Everyone will run from MSFT like vampires from sunlight, and MSFT will never be a significant player in the GPS market.
Perhaps the whole device market!

If a free alternative that won't get you sued is available, would you touch MSFT?
Topify Lets You Manage Your Twitter Followers Via Email (200 Invites)
I used to rip my music losslessly, and then process tracks using an unholy mixture of iTunes, AppleScript (shudder), perl (semi-shudder), and ecasound (command line sound processing) to add audio-domain compression for use in the car. It made a difference, but not enough to bother fixing my script when a new version of iTunes broke things.

A 'Loud' button would have been much easier.
This is a philosophical question in the ballpark of "what is good?" So I'll turn it around and ask "what do you mean by good programmer?" Someone who meets deadlines? Someone who gets the job done? Someone who doesn't upset the boss?

I think the following video will explain why there can never be a single answer to your question:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spagh...
> I see nowhere in the story he admits to the judge that he violated to ToS.

It was the difference between their right to terminate for no reason and any reason.
I keep meaning to set my local network up for IPv6 and then asking my ISP if they can hook me up with an IPv6 range. And if not, keep pushing. I think that will have to be the way forward. Application support is actually pretty decent at this stage, it's infrastructure that's the main problem. Oh, and I'll probably have to upgrade my DSL modem...
Using the GIMP example...if you put together a manual for Photoshop users on how to use GIMP, you could probably charge $100 for the manual and the software and see some sales. Photoshop is costly, but if your staff is used to Photoshop, the leap to GIMP can be difficult and filled with searches for information.

A concrete example: a friend is a project manager at a local design shop. He is a designer by trade, so he knows his way around the Adobe suite. But, his employer doesn't have the budget for another Photoshop license, but I'm guessing they would shell out $100 for GIMP and a "GIMP for Photoshop Dummies" book.
This is not the reason I am talking about!
I mean: I see no "technical" reason!

Is it possible to change: max_length=30 to any other int? like 50 or 90?
It's not good to have a system that lacks even the most simple things!
Shiny Blog » 20+1 Shiny, Colorful iPhone Wallpapers from Flickr Artists
It's obvious that you, and most people on this site, are hackers. We are, however, a minority.

My post was primarily aimed at explaining the difference in mentality between hackers and business people. Maybe I failed to convey that properly.

Business people have another mentality, different core values, and different goals and reasons for doing things than hackers. If you can grok this mentality you will find that you can outperform free. Both as in beer and as in freedom.

I once worked with a business guy that had a yearly budget of around $200 million, and his stance was that if someone wanted him to use something they had better sell it really well or he wouldn't use it. The whole process of selling, procurement, contracts, delivery, etc. was important to him. Both because this is what he valued (just like people here would have a hard time buying something they knew was coded in a flaky way) and because it gave him plausible deniability and removed responsibility in the sphere of corporate games. If he had used open-source software there would be noone to point the finger at if it didn't work - it sould be his responsibility.

And buying decisions are usually placed with business poeple , not hackers.

If you want to sell software to companies you need to understand these processes.
Ask HN: Hosted Subversion?
Can anyone recommend a company that offers Hosted Subversion and ticket tracking?
I wrote this a while back, but just some things that I found surprising about git as I was learning it.

http://webjazz.blogspot.com/2009/01/git-allows-my-workflow-t...