skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, once you've grown to pretty much the size you'll be, and have captured a good amount of your sectors market, for many social based webapps releasing the source code may be a win. Reddit didn't suddenly drop in usage when they did.
Yeah, and Chrome is ... well, it's a reasonable 80% solution for an alpha product from what people keep saying, but I still can't actually try the damn thing on my usual machine.

Because, once again, a bunch of software developers have forgotten to obey the %*&(ing theme. Chrome's URL bar successfully takes my foreground colours and completely ignores the background colour setting - so I get a white hostname and a light green path on a white background.

And Firefox 3's awesomebar and the way it handles self-signed SSL certs both make me incredibly happy - maybe chrome does these just as well, as I say I can't tell yet (FVO "can't" meaning "choose not to fill the prerequisites in order to be able to", of course :).

But it strikes me that there are probably a lot of issues like the one I'm complaining about that don't matter to most people but are a showstopper for -somebody- - and firefox has probably nailed almost all of those by now, either in core or in an addon.

Seems to me that the key point of chrome is to provide a decent amount of testing for the tech that's going to go into site-specific browsers for various google applications - really, truly going head to head with firefox doesn't really seem to me to achieve anything for google when -somebody- crushing IE is likely more important to them than specifically them doing it and firefox already has a head start.
Ah, the open source advocate! The type who doesn't really care about freedom, who only cares about what is pragmatic in the short-term.

RMS isn't being extremist in this case at all. Your only two options are to fully enable or disable JavaScript. That's not much of a choice because if you enable JavaScript you let in some company's proprietary code to be run on your machine. Imagine you're coding a Free Software Javascript library and the proprietary competitor's product is run on your machine. They can prove that you've run their code, and maybe you looked at it and now you're setup for copyright infringement.

If you fully disable Javascript with NoScript, then you won't be able to run "safe" Javascript.

Two choices that are both extreme. The real extremism is in the web browser that doesn't allow you to create a blacklist/whitelist or to use replacement JavaScript.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_code

2. I'd assume as lines are normally counted. The number of line-feeds and/or carriage returns in a file. I don't see what the big deal is anyway; if you are at all concerned, just include the license text. Is doing so that big a deal?
I think it's great. There are many fonts and colors and variation, but the design still has clear sections (short product descriptions, detailed about company blurb, client videos, buzz etc.), and more important, there are points in the design that grab your attention and suck you in; these are the big icons at the top with large speech bubbles and the "A Better Way To Work" heading. This means as you glance over the page your eyes will find a place to land, and I think the copy itself is very well done -- short and to the point -- which means I'm likely to actually read it.

One thing that always bothered me is the navigation 37signals tend to use. It's stuck at the very top of the page and is set in a very small font size. Current locations are also not highlighted on some pages. Perhaps they don't rely on it at all and instead focus on getting people to click on calls to action inside the content.
The monitor checks HN once per minute and records a 0 for up or a 1 for down in the database.

RRDTool then averages these values out nicely so that, for example, when the graph is at weekday-resolution and you see a 50% filled bar spanning one day, then HN was down half of that day.
I don't know about GMail, but the Google Docs code (http://docs.google.com/doclist/client/js/1263044158-doclist_... for the current version) looks a lot like the GWT-generated code I've seen (http://gwt.google.com/samples/Showcase/com.google.gwt.sample... for instance). It might not be using the GWT toolkit, but it's probably output by the same compiler.
There sure are a lot of Free Software extremists then! Even if you're in the open source camp, you're still part of the Free Software camp to some extent. It seems like a lot of people actually like fighting this fight?
If you can arbitrarily modify the server side of any instance of the application then you can also just pay using someone elses credit card details.

Although I think what Stallman would probably prefer is the source to the site / web application being available so that people can run their own instances.

HN and reddit have their source available. I don't see anyone using the reddit code in a way that's any threat to reddit, mainly since the size of the community is an asset that's hard to compete with.

Potentially off-topic, since I'm not familiar with the prevalent licensing, but the various django applications look pretty nice for this kind of thing.
Thank you everyone for your criticisms. Yes, we are all business types, but we've thought of this idea and as business people want to take whatever actions necessary to get this thing up and running smoothly. It's essentially a new idea that really hasn't been touched upon. Yes, maybe we're going about it wrong and don't have the best design, but we're trying and we want somebody that can help us do that. Why we don't release what we are, is because people have told us, this is uber-simple to do for web-devs and so putting out that information, someone could easily snatch it up and put us out.
You get the code without charge, but you don't get it with (legal, licensed) freedom to tinker with it, which is RMS's ongoing concern.
No. Whose object code? Is it talking about my object code or the library's?

Ten lines per function, per header, per library, per program?

Edit: I think you didn't understand LGPL yourself either. I think in the quoted lines, "object code" refers to your code, and accompanying them with a copy of GPL refers to having to release your code under GPL. Or do you think you only have to say you release it under GPL and not actually release it?
Porsche did join in the SUV craze (and satisfied the "trunk room" and "more leg room" requests) by introducing the Cayenne. And I seem to remember something about a four-door coming out (or might be mixing it up with Lamborghini). Part of it is figuring out how to retain the base and still expand into a new area. Neat trick.
In the States, PBS does not run commercials. Yet the scarcity of people who watch public broadcast may be evidence against that claim. (Maybe average people prefer commercials?)
Yes but easier to control access. You don't usually want to give out your email address as a form of general ID, and there are all kinds of clever email-hiding methods used to keep from being crawled by spammers (i.e., foo at bar dot com or foo at google's email service). And @handle just seems more manageable (and more global) than foo@bar.com
Another note: All three of us are really busy, we all have families, go to school full time, and have other jobs. We're motivated to keep on keeping on, but we've got other things on the agenda with little time to put on Ampley. Yes, that's probably not a very good excuse, but at least I'm not lying here. We understand there are multitudes of things we could do better, but with limited time, it's hard.
And of course, it originated in Firefox. I also think Opera can do this as well, although I suppose that's not a libre browser.
>> "Imagine you're coding a Free Software Javascript library and the proprietary competitor's product is run on your machine. They can prove that you've run their code, and maybe you looked at it and now you're setup for copyright infringement."

Sure, most people using GMail or Google docs are programming open source javascript libraries on the side..... Very common I'm sure :/

If you're programming an open source js library and you're worried about a webapp suing you, don't use it?
If you just make up numbers you can justify just about anything.

Let us add in some more external costs to these imaginary numbers. What does it cost to get the petroleum used to manufacture the pesticides, chemical fertilizer, etc. used in conventional farming (cough cough war in Iraq)? How much does it cost to transport food around the world instead of growing it locally? What are the costs to public health from superbugs bred in feedlots full of sick, bloated cows inundated with antibiotics?

I will now make up imaginary numbers for these costs large enough to trump your imaginary numbers.

P.S. If you want some real numbers and facts, you should check out Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma", especially the citations in the back of the book. It's also a damn good read.
Well, they made a website with ruby on rails and without venture capital. Totally awesome!
Oops, that was me. I was using Trevor's computer when I typed that.
I feel like this post is just an OSX fan ranting about how he likes his hot keys in this spot instead of that spot.
Exactly, I am sure a large number of the YC guys use free software on their servers and workstations, yet how many have given monetary support to the FSF in the form of donations or anything ? I won't be surprised to know the answer will be too few.

Anyway, just give the man some respect, he is somewhat an extremist, but if it weren't for this guy you wouldn't be starting all these startups on shoestring budgets and I know that everyone in their heart of hearts knows that the world is a better place because of RMS.
It's incoherent rambling. Extremism.
You do know who RMS is, yes?

His overriding concern as an ongoing basis is that people should have the freedom to tinker with software - to be able to read, improve, share the programs we are running.

He's not arguing that you're falling into a personal, small scale 'trap' like you will get your finger stuck or something, but that whole groups of people who care may not have noticed this set of events sneaking past them.

Or that this is yet another area where we should care, but don't, and that should change so that if you do care, you can do something about it.

No end users care.

That maybe true, but it shouldn't be true.

I think the majority just care if something solves their problem, rather than if its open source or not.

Exactly the problem - this week I saw an end user called us up asking us to help get some information out of a program they run. Luckily, it runs on a popular database backend. Unluckily, it's proprietary closed source software and there is no documentation of what the database tables and fields mean or how they are used.

They bought it because it "solved their problem". Now that lead to other problems. Problems which are both completely predictable (information stuck in artificially limited proprietary system) and avoidable (use artificial-limitation-free documented open system).

And on a more general level, promote the use of such across the entire computing industry so such programs become available.
He must have confused Keynote with Keynote. http://www.keynote.com/
interesting point, and something most people probably don't think about
It would be really cool if shell lines included some sort of hyper-linking to man pages based on the grammar of each shell command and its arguments. Have one line that is the hyperlinked command, and another than has the command in a textfield. So rather than just a site of semi-magical incantations, it can be a catalyst for exploratory learning.

It is a little-pie-in-the-sky, I admit. The top command when I visited was `sudo`. What argument `sudo` takes depends upon the shell the user is using to execute `sudo`. Perhaps this could be a preference set somewhere, along with the OS being used. And maybe have a sister site where people contribute shell command grammars in some standardized syntax. I wonder how many people would be willing to provide those, though. Hmm.

This wasn't mentioned in the prior submission of this site, and it didn't occur to me until seeing it again. Just thinking out loud.
I'd go further and say that having nothing to lose is one of the biggest advantages for a start-up.

I remembering hearing a founder of an IPO biotech company say how he only started his company because he could not find a job. There was no other option. Doing something of his own was his last ditch effort to make a living.
Freedom. Freedom.

Not cost-nothing, but without-legal-or-other-arbitrarily-imposed-limitation-on-use.
>The fact that removing unnecessary white space is a commonly-used practice in speeding-up page loading is not mentioned, even in passing.

You can still provide a link to the full, unobfuscated source code. That isn't difficult to do. Just put the link in an HTML comment where the source is loaded, or at the top of the source file.

You're another one of those so-called pragmatists who only thinks about the short-term, ja?

Just think, 20+ years ago there wasn't very much free software (nor very much open source software). Now look how much there is! It is now expected that developers release the source code of their projects. True that they are mostly side-projects but there are many serious businesses that are built using Free Software.

>It's time for revolution's founders to retire gracefully, and for a more realistic (though still ethical) guard to take its place.

That was tried a number of years ago with the Open Source movement. Their philosophy is to never really talk about freedom, just talk about the benefits, mainly economic. Has it succeeded? Yes, but only as a marketing slogan, with companies co-opting it and the consumer never really knowing exactly what it means for software to be free.

>We've got to move away from this notion that software should be free (gratis).

You're allowed to charge money for any Free Software. The only catch is that you can't keep the source code closed or forbid the user from re-distributing it. Which basically means that when you charge money for Free Software, you're a redistribution fee, not a license-to-use fee.
Yeah, and I'm not sure I follow this (the Obfuscript bit). You _do_ have the source code, albeit a bit difficult to read. I'm guessing there are plenty of GPL'ed programs out there with horrible style and horrible documentation.
I'm not saying what the real numbers are because I don't know. My point is that the goal should be feeding everyone at minimal cost (environmental, political, and otherwise). The arbitrary numbers I made up were solely to illustrate that such analysis might lead to counterintuitive results that are nevertheless right. Or it might not; it depends on the numbers.
Today, more than ever, we live in a world of economic reality

Politician speak alert!

If there existed a fair and balanced way of rewarding open source developer

Buy their software. And with it, get the source code and the freedom to do whatever you like with it.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
I think the main black box draws the eye a little too effectively. I have trouble focusing on other parts of the page.
Why would Facebook users leave? They’d have to have a reason.
I disagree. There is a fundamental difference. In OS X, keys tend to do the same things everywhere because there is this carefully drawn distinction between Cmd and Control. Other OS's have context sensitive key bindings.

Of course this isn't universally true, but OS X does seem to do it better than the other two.
I haven't taken an IQ test, so I don't know exactly what that is like, but I've taken PSAT/ACT/GRE/GMAT tests, and it seems obvious to me that your performance on those tests is greatly influenced by how fast you can think.

If the IQ tests are anything like the other standardized tests, it is of absolutely no surprise to me that quick thinkers have higher IQs and I don't understand why it should come as a surprise to anyone else. Furthermore, assuming that IQ score depends on quick thinking, I'm not at all convinced that being smarter implies that you think faster.
If you have nothing to lose, that means you have "nothing". Having "nothing" probably doesn't give you enough resources to do anything at all, right? There are always opportunity costs anyway.

And... the article says paypal lost ~170 millions while "willing to invest millions of dollars to acquire new customers"

I wouldn't call it "nothing" ;)
Most OS's give you the ability to remap keys as you see fit. in addition, most modern Linux distros allow you to hook up an Apple keyboard. Combine the two and this entire post is unnecessary.

All of that being said, there's no difference between using the Apple key for commands vs. other key combos (ctrl-alt-shift, etc) it's simply user preference.

If you take this argument down to it's base level, it's a frustration at having to learn the UI of a new program, the equivalent of Vim vs Emacs. All of that is fine, but burying that sentiment in a general "only Mac software can do this" post which isn't the case.

All of this being said, it's looking more and more like Textmate development is dead, perhaps it's time to look at one of the alternatives?
The object code is the aggregate of your code and the library's header code.

If you have just your object code, you are not bound by the license of the library, then you don't need to include it.

If you have just the library header code, then you are not incorporating it into anything else, and have no obligations by the license.

If you have both the library header code incorporated into your object code , then you are bound by the license to provide attribution along with that incorporated object code.

As for you second question, I'd guess lines per file. But it is a bit ambiguous, as almost all legalese is. Again, you could just err toward caution, and include the license text regardless. Are you averse to this for some reason?

Oh, and as per the wiki link, object code is the compiled binary of your source code. At this point, whatever headers you included would already be integrated.
Difficult to read or not, there's not much point because you don't have the legal permission to change it, contribute to it, derive code from it, etc.

We have the right to improve GPL'd programs with horrible documentation.
Apple has done a good job of keeping software relatively uniform, instead of having random menus, keystrokes, UI's they've managed to keep the look and feel of most programs relatively similar.

But, key bindings are hardly OS dependent, rendering the general point of this post irrelevant. It would be really interesting to see this transformed into a rant against a lack of uniform standards for standard functions.
You make a good point. A slow thinker might be able to accomplish great things given enough time. Maybe we should consider such a person intelligent.

But even then I suspect that a quicker thinker with similar experience would be able to accomplish even greater things in that same period of time.
That's fine. I use flashblock and adblock to block annoying flashing animated noisy colourful page disrupting ads, to block ads and ad servers tracking me and giving them power and commercial gain with no gain to me, and to stop FireFox playing noise from background tabs I can't find quickly.

I don't do it to stop site owners 'making' money from me. If you can get non-annoying ads to me, and make money from me, that's brilliant. If that's all anyone did, I'd get rid of *block altogether.
We will be releasing Remindo Push, but since it requires us to setup an infrastructure to push notifications to apple, it will be a monthly service (using the subscription payment api's from apple).

Since 37signals graciously offers us free accounts that provide sms and email reminders, Remindo standard can be a pay once work forever kinda deal.
But your planting of a tree doesn't automatically prevent the farmer you bought the apple from from making any money.

If I have to release my code under GPL, I can't make money charging thousands for it (low volume type of app). If I can't make money from it, I won't spend years developing it. Not having the app would make it harder for some pharma scientist somewhere to cure cancer. Everyone loses. Communism doesn't work.
What Firefox should do
"label"
> And, there's a lecture on Google video (don't have the link) of a guy going on about how there are lots of expert systems out there run by companies that don't advertise themselves.

It it this, by any chance? http://is.gd/otrN

I haven't seen that one myself (watching it now), but I've seen others where Larry Smith talks about exactly what you mentioned. Unfortunately nobody thought to mic him and his style of moving around makes him hard to hear on a camcorder mic.
Redesign Revolt: What Should Facebook Do Next?
PBS does run commercials in the US. They're just in a different form.

However, it is true that PBS commercials are not synchronized with commercials on the "standard" channels.

The reason that PBS doesn't win is that many folks prefer commercials to PBS....
There may be a circular dependency here. AFAIK, to found the company you would already have to have a legitimate visa but to get a visa you would need to already be employed by the company.

IIRC Miguel de Icaza originally came into the US on a tourist visa and thus couldn't be an official founder of Helix Code/Ximian since he didn't have a work permit.
I live in Central Japan. (Originally from Chicago.)
He sees everything through his 'free software' glasses, the same way a dyed-in-the-wool communist sees everything through his Breznospecs.

Just as a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist sees everything through their Smith-o-specs.

We have always lived in a world of complete economic reality, by obvious tautology. It is that economic reality that gave rise to the GPL and the Free Software Movement. These were market instruments made to route around other market instruments perceived as damaging or inefficient. That there is so much under the GPL right now suggests that there was real market damage or inefficiency being routed around. Just because there isn't money involved in this doesn't mean there isn't a market involved. This market just happens to trade in something other than money; you seem to see something wrong with that.

I think I see why, as well. These people, who will work on software for free -- for hacker kudos -- are perceived as a threat to those who would work on that same software for money. They are not forced, they chose to, but it still means market forces threaten to drive the salary of a developer down. You think this will drive hackers into economic poverty. If anything, it has had the opposite effect. The software people release for free earns them a reputation that allows them to later release other software for a very handsome profit.

The open software movement cares more about its users than it does its developers.

The movement is very little apart from the developers, so this reduces down to the developers caring more about the users than they do about themselves. Are they being too altruistic? I don't know. If they are, they'll soon find themselves being less altruistic out of need. If not, I don't see why we need to cast aspersions their way. They choose to work this way.

As for threatening the livelihood of programming work-for-pay, it isn't. There are still problems out there that you would need to pay people to work on, partly because they haven't forgotten about their rent in all of this, and partly because there just isn't that intrinsic motivation for some of the software people need written.