skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Being an articulate advocate for an extreme position is an accomplishment all by itself. It opens people's minds. It makes people smarter.

I think RMS's positions are extreme. I don't share most of his views, including his latest concern about javascript. But I admire the man for knowing his own mind and speaking for his beliefs directly and honestly. You don't get mealy-mouthed bullshit from RMS. No evasions, no fog-of-words, no equivocations. I love him for that.

Also, he is more right than I once thought. When I first read "Right To Read" I thought it was ridiculous, extremist, absurd. Well, after seeing what "they" have tried to do with DRM, I was wrong. I think we are still a long way from that dystopia, and the momentum (right now at least) is in the right direction. But he saw something I didn't, and I try not to forget it when reading other things of his I don't agree with.
I'm going to be harsh here, just to translate how what you're saying reads to everyone else:

"We're three guys that don't actually have any time for the project, can't help with the development of the product, are pretty clearly startup first-timers since we don't know how to do this sort of thing, we won't tell you what we're doing or what we've done, and none of the three of us noticed a basic mistake on our homepage. But we'd like you to join! (Presumably unpaid.)"

Would you jump at that offer? Do you expect anyone you'd want to call your CTO would?

You need to say what you're doing. If it's as simple and important as you think it is, then it'll be copied as soon as you launch anyway. You need to say who you are and what you've done. If you're business guys, have you founded companies before? Have you written a business plan? Are you connected to angel investors? (With four mouths to feed from day one that's going to hurt.) Have you already done market research? Do you have special access to distribution channels?

You can't recruit a good CTO by saying, "We're three guys with a domain and an idea."
San Francisco now but originally from Philadelphia.

I bet the SF Bay Area probably has the highest concentration of HN readers than any other specific part of the US.
I have my fonts sized larger than default and forced to Verdana so they stick out of some of the boxes.
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
In Toronto right now though.
You are not forced to release your code under the GPL. You can spend years developing it and release it however you want.

However if you choose to release under the GPL you will be standing on the shoulders of giants. You will have whole new avenues of development opportunity opened up to you as a result.

"Communism" does work in the sense of the Linux ecosystem that you see around you every day. Not only that, but companies like Microsoft are forced to innovate because open source eventually catched up to them. Without free software all software would be tied up in a morass of patents and licensing fees. Progress would have ground to a halt, and we would wait with baited breath to pay $500 for the latest version of Windows crafted upon their latest business model to coerce upgrades from all their regular customers.

If you are adding 1000 man hours on top of 50,000 man hours of development that you are getting for free, is it moral for you to give nothing back? The GPL is simply a way for the contributors of the 50,000 hours to say that you can use their code if you share in return. It's not clear at all why you think you should be entitled to that code.
Portugal (Europe)
Pittsburgh.

(Pittsburgh meetup next Saturday night, the 28th, at 9PM at Church Brew Works in Lawrenceville. Email me for details and to be informed of future meetups)
Silverlight 3.0 Mix09 Demos Video
By AI, do you mean Asians and Indians?

In the Silicon Valley, yes.
Scotland, UK
Melbourne, Australia
Well, it could be treated similarly to version numbers in code. Once a given JS file is loaded, whatever __LICENSE__ evaluates to (e.g.), that's the program's stated license. If that global variable isn't set, then you know you can't assume anything about the code.
Unless the apple was grown from Monsanto seeds... http://www.mindfully.org/GE/2003/Monsanto-Reaps-Anger12may03...
the UX is broken
For philosophy, I don't think thinking speed is an important bottleneck.

For a startup rushing a product to market, then it's one of several bottlenecks to watch out for.
I think you may be able to hold the accomplishments/time ratio constant while varying the quickness of thought. However, the quickness of thought that I'm talking about may be different than what the article is addressing.

For example, in a math class it may take me a while to comprehend each step that the teacher is taking which makes me lag behind the rest of the class, but given enough time to fully understand everything, I can outperform the average without too much trouble. So it can be in the way that I attack problems. I slowly and methodically learn about all of its parts until I finally comprehend it all and then conquer it relatively quickly, whereas others may quickly learn about something but have to repeat the process a few more times to get it to sink in.

Maybe this kind of slowness has nothing to do with the speed at which nerve impulses travel, but it sure doesn't help with job interviews.
I hope that RMS or any other Free Software advocate hasn't ever come to your place & threatened you to develop/use free software. If you like the concept you got that way & if you don't... you are free to go your way... It's the freedom of choice.

And I too believe that RMS is very strict & straight on his view. But we shouldn't worry about that. Since he is the icon that represent Software Freedom, he being loosy will not do any good to the community.
Apple Wants To Make Jailbreaking Worthy Of Jail Time, $2500 Fine | Apple Iphone Fun Site
I think that's a great idea, though it's worth noting that the command line options to commands can be subtly different between Linux and BSD (and sometimes different Linux distros). It helps when people use the long options (--quiet rather than -q), when available; they're usually easier to translate.
Whenever I meet someone who says that s\he "hates advertising", I count the advertisements that they're wearing and carrying. It's always a non-zero number.

People do like advertising that provides value to them. They dislike/hate advertising that doesn't.
It'd be nice if it saved old to-dos so you can retrieve your history and remember what you've done.
Organic food has been demonstrated to be no better for you, no better for the environment (and likely worse) and it doesn't have the crop yields and costs to feed the world.

These days, especially in the US, the term organic doesn't really mean anything anyhow. It's all marketing used by large business to charge you more for essentially the same product while giving you a false sense of superiority over the unwashed masses.

Your health and environmental impact have nothing to do with whether the food is organic or not, rather it's whether you eat a burger or a salad.

For further discussion around organic food woo see the skeptics guide to the universe, they regularly debunk this stuff: http://www.theskepticsguide.org/ (great podcast btw)
41.285208,-81.098628
Email support AT pat.io -- this is in development and I'd be happy to let you test.
YouTube to Launch Its Mobile Client for S60 Phone
NYC anyone?
Really Simple History: Ajax history and bookmarking library
Who was the founder? Maybe I just don't understand the industry, but I always figured starting a biotech company was only really an option for the well-connected and well-funded. It seems really expensive.
There also seems to be some sort of underlying belief that software is a zero-sum game. That every piece of free software is taking money out of someone's pocket.

The problem with that belief is that every piece of free software makes it possible to build more valuable new things on top of it for cheaper. Software is additive in a way that no other prior asset has been.

As such, the value of free software is tremendous, almost incalculable. At every step somebody bemoans that the GPL is preventing them from grabbing free software and turning it into an incredibly profitable proprietary product. They quickly point to the lost potential revenue, and completely ignore the value that would be lost by the free software being supplanted by a proprietary product.

What if Red Hat had forked Linux to a proprietary model 10 years ago and done enough to become the standard. Do you think they could have delivered as much as the entire community has done since then?
Their design inspiration:
http://www.parrotsecrets.com/
By accompanying your object code with GPL/LGPL, you are promising your customers that your code is GPL/LGPL, i.e. you will be bound to open your code.

The fact that your understanding of the license is different shows just how sneaky and obfuscated LGPL is.
Cebu, Philippines
cool your at st andrews?

I'm currently in leuchars, in case you havent heard about it
there is a pretty active tech meetup in edinburgh

http://www.techmeetup.co.uk/
Hey!
Greetings from Montevideo, Uruguay!
Right here, too.

NYC seems to be an attractor to tech. Maybe it's Pecha Kucha. Or maybe a very well attended Ignite. Tech Meet-up anyone?

Or it could be Williamsburg... and the creatives it attracts.
Because OS X is the only OS that distinguishes between GUI editing and line editing.

Nope.

I could write a long point-by-point response to this post, but realized that I already did several months ago:

http://zentu.net/oss/?q=node/27

It's the concept of multiple desktops that Windows doesn't have and OSX doesn't get, either, that makes working on Linux systems so worth it. Productivity can be dependent upon how you organize and switch between these desktops.
I've recently switched to OSX from Ubuntu and I've found it equally frustrating in the other direction.

My biggest gripe is that the home and end keys don't work as I expect anymore. In Ubuntu (and windows afaik), the home and end keys work in pretty much every app (terminal, editor, browser and pretty much any text field) for moving to the start/end of the current line.

One of the other frustrations, which isn't entirely OSX's fault.. is that the shortcuts in my editor of choice (jEdit) sometimes use command and sometimes use ctrl.

I'm not trying to criticize any OS in particular.. but I've personally found it incredibly frustrating. I admit it's probably just because of keyboard shortcuts I've used for years are etched into my muscle memory.

I can definitely appreciate that switching in the other direction is equally as frustrating.
Close to NYC: Long Island.
I would argue advertising is doing just fine, perhaps better than ever. I see sites like Engadget, Techcrunch and The Boy Genius as really just advertising. I'd argue I have RSS feeds that are effectively entirely advertisements for products and services: web services news, hardware news, software news, design (eco), tshirts, design (3d and architecture), and local performance events. Frankly, a large portion of the RSS feeds that are web content filters turn out to be products/services too.

That is just in RSS land. In Twitter/im land, I have things that are effectively advertising too.
Heh. That is true, a lot going on lately around integrations and sxsw. You got me here.

We did used to have many more "this is what we learned about server caches" type posts when we were starting out.
funky alignment in the "also from..." section. ah, that's better:
http://i43.tinypic.com/mwqoeg.png
An option perhaps, but "just install git" seems even easier.
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Just because they recorded a loss of $170 million doesn't mean they consumed that much cash. Every account that they credited $5 to they had to record as a "loss." But how many people cashed out that money? Not many I bet, I bought something on Ebay with mine. Paypal essentially created a new currency that they pegged to the dollar. It didn't cost them any cash to "print" new money in people's accounts
Knowledge, in Real Time
> It's not clear at all why you think you should be entitled to that code

I never said I was. In the GNU utopia, Linux killed MS and all libraries are GPL.

My options are:

1. Spend years writing apps that help cure cancer, GPL them and starve. (not exactly hypothetical)

2. Develop some Web apps that are not bound by GPL. Make money.

What do you think I will choose in your GNU communist utopia?
Hey, me too!
Somebody, please save RMS, write an Emacs mode that inserts spaces into JavaScript and converts single char names into made up longer ones! For extra bonus, insert comments that talk about how if you are not using GNU, you are a slave! A slave, I tell ya!
I think this is one of the cases where the guys are so into technology/design, they're constantly changing it because they have nothing better to do.
Facebook is just trying to prevent itself from becoming irrelevant. It realizes that the service it offers it not unique in any significant way and it can get left by the way side when the next big thing comes along.

It's still a young company and without an established business model we can't really hold them to too much. You won't expect an application in beta to be a beacon of stability and usability. This is the stage facebook is in and it should be allowed to evolve until they find a sustainable business model.
Section is not just a “semantic div”
Massachusetts, USA....
Anyone from New england?
Darien, Il a suburb of chicago.
> but if it weren't for this guy you

We'd be using OS X and FreeBSD instead of Linux. Who's laughing now?
Reminds me of the OODA loop (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_Loop).

If this is true, then it seems plausible to optimize for response cycle speed and iteration to evaluate solutions to problems, regardless of one's raw intelligence (whatever that means).

This measure does, however, tend to lean towards problem-solving speed as the primary indicator of intelligence and that's probably not the most accurate way of measuring it.
Do you think it would be better to add an entirely separate category for San Francisco and area? I suspect that while they're not as overrepresented as some may think, there may be a sizable number that could be broken from the US.
crystal lake, il here
Wow are you ever right.

I just came back to HN to post a similar remark -- it's damn near impossible to read anything outside that box.

Or perhaps we're both deficient in some unique way that makes us susceptible to black (or near black) boxes.
It's quite simple to rebind home/end to work like you expect in all Cocoa text controls (i.e., almost anywhere you edit text -- Firefox is the one frustrating exception I'm aware of). If you haven't taken a look at the Cocoa keybinding system, I suggest you do so. It's really quite flexible.

http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/Cocoa%20Text%20System....
Santiago, Chile
Looks interesting. There is still a lot of space in this field for some people to disrupt the market.

Do you know if they fixed the noticeable flickering that makes the LED Christmas lights I have unusable? If they did I think I am on board.
Exposé is very cool, but why can't I also search for a window using keywords?
You could for example search by keywords in the titles of windows.
Vancouver, BC (previously lived in Czech Republic and Russia)
Howdy neighbour.

I'm in nearby Guelph, Ontario.
Montreal (francophone) here
denpasar, Indonesia, hey dude :)
I recommend why's guide to every non-techie I know who wants to jump into programming.

I had an HR friend of mine trying to make sense out of some data, and wanted to contract me to write a really simple script to make some sense out of his flat file data.

I didn't have time, and since he wasn't an idiot, I figured he could take it on himself, and gave him a link to the poignant guide, which he claims worked like a charm.

Now he's making me justify my salary to him.

For people who already know programming concepts, and just need to know syntax and what's different about Ruby from what they already know, I think the poignant guide is the long way there.

For this crowd, I understand the bitter reception.
What I mean is, with everyone who is alive today, the resources of the larger economies providing large military funding backing a program that's both important to national defence and the safety of highly dangerous weapons, with lots of smart people working on it, ways of doing things are still lost.

It's a near certainty that the current ways of manufacturing steel are not what the ancients used, and even if you studied the best available guide to the ways the ancients used there would be implied and secret knowledge you wouldn't have, terms and names you wouldn't understand (or worse, seemed OK but were actually wrong). So much of what we "know" simply isn't there.

Medicine? What do I know of medicine outside drug brand names? I "know" activated charcoal can help people who have ingested poisonous substances. But I don't have any understanding of how activated charcoal differs from any other kind, what it looks like, how to make it, how to administer it, or how to make or find normal charcoal or how to store it or if there are alternative poisonous kinds.

Iron? Know what Iron Ore looks like or where it's likely to be found or how to refine it without using things you can buy at a shop? Not me.

But there's a deeper problem than that lurking. Ok, we carved stone, put likely iron ore into our clay furnace, pumped by sewn leather bellows and got a rod of metal. Still, we have shelter, and we don't need girders, I-beams, railways, canons, ironclad ships... what are we going to do with iron exactly, anyway? What did people use iron for?

Not only am I lacking knowledge of how to make things and what they were used for, but we're lacking an entire civilization within which to make use of things.

When the OP asks what it would take to recreate where we are now, what does that mean? Fabric dye wouldn't be high on my list of things to work on, nor would post-it-note glue or felt, leatherette sofas or shampoo which smells of flowers and has sea cucumber in it, asbestos, pewter, even cardboard is only useful because people post things to me in it - I don't do anything with it. With no postal system and not many things, what would we want with cardboard?

In fact, the core of what I probably want to recreate is some way for other people to do things I don't want to do, in exchange for me doing things I do want to do that other people will pay me for. And by the time I've tought myself to become a blacksmith or soap maker or wheelright or glassblower or died trying, then recreating where we are now no longer matters quite so much.
Australia, anyone?
Anyone from Ohio?
Bangalore and Boston :)
In OS X, keys tend to do the same things everywhere because there is this carefully drawn distinction between Cmd and Control.

It's my 2nd year on the Mac and I continue to struggle with hotkeys: they are a mess.

On top of my head: how come Ctrl+left won't bring me to the end of the line in Terminal but does in every other editable window? And why Shift+Command+arrows switch tabs in Terminal but not in Safari? OSX doesn't even have a universal "close this goddamn window" hot key, which drives me crazy - some windows go away with Esc while others need Command+W, plus you get a super weird 3rd variety which can't be closed from the keyboard at all!

OSX is by far the least typist friendly GUI in my humble opinion. On the other hand Linux, especially Gnome, absolutely rocks with their handling of hot keys: there are many more of them (I can move/resize windows on a keyboard) and the bindings are very consistent. Whereas OSX is simply not usable without a mouse: even top-level menu items don't have hot keys, like Alt+E for "Edit" or Alt+F for "File".
Can Opera Ever Become Popular?
Warning: This site may be addictive for some of you.
DC native
Keeping the midwest startup scene alive in Quad Cities, Iowa.
Middle England.
It would be fun to know how "fast" my brain is. I'd pay multiple dollars to find out.
I had never read this article before, and I was happy to read it today.

What he said about Django applies today - all of it. He really did a good job of summing up the powerful point of Django - the grace of Python, generic views, the admin back-end, inherited templates, etc, etc.

Spot on today, just as yesterday.
I have to admit this is our first iPhone app and we knew nothing on this. Here’s how Team iBokan got started (http://ibokan.com/2009/iphone-bokan/)

However, we’ve learned our lessons and done much better with “Cute Math”（http://ibokan.com/2009/about-cute-math/) and “Eye Test“ (http://ibokan.com/2009/testing-your-eyesight-handily/)

The graphics are created from our own tools that will be open to public in April. I hope you’ll check it out later.

Thanks a lot for your comments, which is really what I wanted for this post.

–Bo Wang
http://www.iBokan.com
I don't see this having a chance success. Paying for applications for which you have to hack your phone? I'm not going to pay $30 for an application which lets me tether my phone, a feature that I'll get for free in the next iPhone OS. And with the real store at least I'm sure I can use my applications after I update the firmware.

The strength of the App Store is in the numbers. Users expect limited support and no future updates unless explicitly told. This will never get nearly the amount of users the App Store has. This means that the apps in the Cydia store must cost more than in the App Store for a developer to 'even out'.

How frustrating the Apple process may be, I just don't see this as being a better alternative
right here too.
I took a degree in AI, and now I'm firmly convinced that AI == search. If you make something searchable in a simple, new way, that's AI. If it's grandiose but doesn't work, that's not useful.
College Prestige "Lies"
What do you guys think?
for the osx crowd, try:

man -t UNIX_COMMAND | open -f -a preview
I don't think it's a "loss". Every new account is an asset for them, and they paid 5 dollars to "buy" accounts without actually giving cash to account owners (as you mentioned). However, unless they have assets to cover this "deferred liability", that would be a fraud. And they had access to money to cover it. So it's not a case of desperate startup with no resources, I am afraid :)
In case anyone here isn't already on it, there is a mailing list for HN readers in the NYC area:

http://groups.google.com/group/nyyc

Traffic is basically non-existent, but it's useful to be subscribed because we use it to organize meetups every few months.
I work in AI as well after completing a phd in computational intelligence (a relatively recent flavor of AI). from my limited exposure, working in AI involves consulting/software engineering with different tools, in my case intelligent agents.
And if the key bindings in OS X's System Preferences isn't something you want to use, Command+Left Arrow and Command+Right Arrow move the cursor to the front and end of the line respectively.
Elhmhurst, Queens
And Thompson notes that our brains, unlike our bodies, peak relatively late in life.

"The wires between the brain cells, the connections, are the things that you can modify throughout life," he says. "They change and they improve through your 40s and 50s and 60s."

I wonder how this squares with the following --> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516949

Do we peak at 27 or 60?
I just got a mac last week. I am a brand new mac user and don't see where the author is going with his rant. Why should Ubuntu change the default settings just to please him?

My last computer was loaded with Ubuntu. There are so many annoying differences between the two operating systems. I grumble, but I don't write a caustic article about them because I expect these difference to occur. These OSes have completely separate histories and were built by completely different people. There is no universally perfect computer interface.

I think this article is akin to complaining about the differences in the shifting pattern on Honda and BMW cars.

EDIT: spelling and grammar
I still believe that business will kill hacker culture.