skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you are dealing with the burrito vendor outside your office and keep it straight business ("super burrito, with steak"), perhaps because it has been a long day and you are tired as hell, there is no retribution. The quality of your burrito service is not compromised just because you failed to be his 5 minute friend that day. Why? Maybe the burrito vendor understands customer service, maybe because the burrito vendor understands that you are peers in an economic transaction, or maybe because the burrito vendor just doesn't have an ego problem. Who knows, who cares.

Fail to pretend to be a friend to that cop, DMV worker, or private security guard at the front desk of your buddies apartment? Good luck not getting hassle or at least artificially degraded service.

EMT or firefighter? Taxi driver? Doctors and nurses? Train ticket puncher? Just like the burrito vendor, no pressure to be their "friend".

Some jobs either attract people with a sense of entitlement, or cultivate a sense of entitlement in otherwise decent people. The root cause of this? Who the hell knows, but everyone who perceives it is not imagining things. If you haven't noticed it, then perhaps you need to tune in.
Why wouldn't that future come? Considering Phase I of the GSM specifications was only published in 1990 we've gone pretty far.

This is an aspirational device. They should give a few away in Kansas city. Im sure it would be beautiful with Google fiber.
This article uses the wrong framework to think about successful open source projects. It's not like the mobile app store ecosystem.

Successful projects, in terms of numbers of users and contributors, seem to happen in places where many people need something complex and pool their resources to all share in a better solution than any individual one could have been.

Putting the whole thing under economic norms, and encouraging communities to think in those terms is probably extraordinarily counter productive. There isn't enough money available to pay open source developers what they are worth in dollars. If open source operated under economic norms it wouldn't work, since it operates under social norms it does [1]. There is a reason that everyone here doesn't get paid to work on whatever cool fun they feel like working on.

A "type 0" project is a hobby project and your github account isn't there to get you paid. Open sourcing it is socially acceptable public charitable giving crossed with academic publishing.

The next step isn't consulting monetization models or aquisition/IPO. The next step is more contributors so that a team of motivated people can solve a complex problem, for everyone, once and for all (that's the ideal version anyway, about as likely as an IPO or aquisition). That might bring some money, maybe for some core peole but more important is that now everyone else, and especially those that contributed and have expertise, can go on and build/do that thing that this complex problem was stopping them from doing.

Looking at this as an progression from github project to aquisition and defining the stage of a project by revenue misses nearly every lesson learned from watching this strange new market succeed so spectacularly entirely because it is based on different norms and therefore attacks different problems.

[1] http://youtu.be/OdjlOgGVRVA
Paul Graham and David Hornik on Bloomberg West [video]
Do you smoke test?
Exactly, and let's not forget OpenShift and Google App Engine :)
A counterpoint. Search for Stephen Conn's comment. http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2012/03/eight-years-today.h...

"We are surrounded by an ideology of exceptionalism that
teaches us that we will find fulfillment through great personal
achievement. But this is a terrible way to build identity. Not because
it is crassly inhumane--though it is--but because it is false."
Whats laotata.com
HN had a link in laotata.com but i coulnt understand what that suite is jus about
I might have talked out of my ass? Wouldn't be the first time, and I apologize if I did.
Why Microsoft backs Oracle suit
While reading this article of how Ubuntu's new features mirror window's 8,
http://microsoft-news.com/ubuntu-tablet-os-directly-rips-off-most-of-the-windows-8-platform-features/

You'd get an idea what Microsoft might want to do after Google looses.

Two companies might get sued. (Especially Canonical)

1. Blackberry
2. Canonical (Ubuntu)
Great timing: http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/20/boatbound-aibnb-for-boats/
My company failed (unexpectedly) in 2008.

I had signed piercing agreements on a large contract, and on some financing before the failure, so I ended up on the hook for a little over $500,000. The risk/reward payoff looked much better the odds were in favor of reward.

Here's my progress to date: http://i.imgur.com/IGQ3rz6.png

It's an anchor. It's killing my dreams. I worry that the stress will literally kill me.
Wow..lot of links..Thanks...
There was a Grand Designs episode (2003, Series 3, Ep 2 - "The Water-Works") where a couple took on an old facility that was in very poor condition but had some potential if you had imagination:

"The 1930s derelict water works Chris Jones and Leanne Smith fell in love with was huge and its design had clearly been inspired by Gilbert Scott's Bankside power station, now better known as the Tate Modern. But nothing would deter the couple. 'We looked at it,' said Chris, 'and saw our home.'"

Took insane amounts of work from the two of them, but they really made something of it. The interior looked fantastic by the end of the process. Their work desk was made out of a Mini, I think it was?

Worth watching if you can track it down and have an interest in that sort of thing.
I think the biggest barrier to ordinary users using a static site generator lies right here:

>Installation
>Install pyinotify. bash pip install pyinotify

I mean, considering the ordinary user we're talking about doesn't code and on top of that, probably runs Windows, well...
There are HTML templates in the `press` directory; you could easily add Disqus comments to post.html.
This plus moxie's comment (currently top) really sum it up nicely. Unless I get on the order of $500 or more for it a month, I won't stop seeing something as a side project or hobby. I certainly don't want the support responsibilities that come along with paid products.

Knowing that you've solved an unsolved problem in some niche, putting it out there, and seeing others voluntarily use it is far more gratifying than whatever small sum of income such a scheme might net you. This applies even more when those others start helping contributing back.
So use the Blockchain.info browser extension, instead.
Google undercut Apple. Google couldn't let Apple take all of mobile because that's where computing is going. No one was even close to where Apple was then and its taken android years to catch up. Thats the first reason.

Second, Google is a team player. The web is more profitable for everyone when things are open and free. Everyone is better off with a smaller slice of a bigger pie. Android has made a lot of people a lot of money.
Implementing an ORM with Coffeescript (Part 1)
Google releases Chrome 25
Why so overzealous? Would you be shocked if I said that I always sign stuff without even reading it?
> The thing that makes bitcoin different than other online payment systems or virtual currencies is that it's distributed. That property, however, is also what makes it difficult to use.

This to me highlights just about everything there is to know about Bitcoin. People are too easily turned off by the amount of effort it takes to properly command a Bitcoin wallet. At least with the traditional banking system, a big bank is there to lend you a hand should you need anything or should something go wrong with one of your transactions.

But there's a big tradeoff: when you utilize the traditional banking system, you must entrust at least some of your wealth to an entity you have absolutely zero control over.

Right now that's fine, but personally I like the idea of keeping external dependencies to a minimum, especially when it comes to money.

The price of Bitcoin remains affordable for now, and will continue to do so as long as people don't have a compelling reason to get off their behinds. For some perspective, the Bitcoin market cap is $332M. At a $1000M ($1B) market cap and ~12.8M BTC in circulation, the price per Bitcoin would be roughly $78. At a $10B market cap it would be $780. The market cap of Facebook is $68.7B. When you compare a global financial system with censorship resistant properties (Bitcoin), and give it a valuation six times less than a global social network (Facebook), 1 BTC is still worth $780. If Bitcoin is 60X less valuable to the world than Facebook, it's $78/coin. 120X less valuable and it's $39/coin. Meaning if Bitcoin truly provides the world less than 1% of the value of Facebook then it's still undervalued at $30.

IMO the world is practically crying out for an alternative financial system free from high risk banking, but I digress. Average people will not actively seek any competing financial system Bitcoin included until they have a compelling motivation eating away at them 24/7. There are scenarios which could create those circumstances, but they're long shots that hinge upon various social, economic and political factors at some vague point in the distant future. I can at least see Bitcoin having a $1B market cap for now, but for BTC to really come into its own, average people will need to get off their behinds. In other words, don't count on it.

Still the market cap of Apple is $450+ billion, and I'd like to think a global Internet currency/financial system is worth at least 10% of that to our society.
Ask HN: Good resources/Best practices about refactoring
Hi guys, i need to refactoring a 4 yo CMS (PHP Language) composed by a "monolithic" spaghetti code (5% oop & 95% functional/spaghetti).

Is there any good book about refactoring? Tips?

I know it's a hard task but i need to do it because, otherwise, it will be an suicidal CMS.

Thx!
Hiring a lawyer will get your boat back. It will not fix the problem.

The problem is too much government.

Perhaps you should consider this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism

We don't need to eliminate government, of course. Someone still has to throw parties for foreign dignitaries and say stupid shit on TV. We do need to trim it down to the bone and get it out of our daily lives. You just had a run-in with the "Gestapo" society we are building-up to. Thugs with badges and guns. Great stuff. That's exactly what I want the future to be in for my kids. Right.

I mean, think about it for a moment. You are buying a boat from Canada. Why should government be involved in any way whatsoever? Are you really free? You can't even go fishing to feed your family without asking for permission from the government in the form of a fishing license. Think about THAT for a moment. Our ancestors were able to fish and hunt to feed themselves, their families and communities as needed. Today, if you are caught fishing without a license ANYWHERE, you can be arrested and fined. I've seen guys with guns board group fishing boats here in California to check for fishing licenses. Imagine that image in my kid's mind: Fishing with Dad and guys with uniforms and guns interrupt the experience to ask for papers. Pretty cool setup we have, ey?

Reminds me of a story from when I was a child. We were traveling in Argentina. My Dad got pulled over by a cop at this checkpoint between Ezeiza (International Airport) and Buenos Aires. The cop asked for papers and took his time checking them out. Another cop came out of the booth. He, menacingly, looked inside the car were my Mom, Sister and I were. The first cop asked my Dad to get out of the car. They walked around the car looking for problems. The car was perfect. Then he said something like "We need to go in the office for you to pay your fine". I'm sure my Dad though "WTF, over?". He, politely, asked: "What's the problem officer". Without blinking the copy replied: "You were driving with one hand".

They went inside and my Dad, effectively, had to bribe them. It was a first class shake-down.

Here's what's funny: This was a Fiat 128 with a manual transmission. And, it would be my guess that the vast majority of cars in Argentina at the time had manual transmissions. There was no law about having to have both hands on the wheel at the same time, but, even if that law existed, you'd have to violate it for a fraction of a second every time you shift the transmission.

Next time you vote, think about who you are voting for and what they really stand for. Think beyond you and do the generations to come a favor by reducing government to the most essential functions we need and nothing more.
A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client.
It appears that agent solicited, and advised, you (the story's author) to falsify information. I don't know what weight that would carry with respect to this form, but were you to have initiated such falsification, I imagine it might or would have been construed to be some level of criminal activity.

So... did this agent solicit, advise you to commit a crime? If so, will this agent face repercussions for her actions?

Perhaps it's "not serious". Except that you sought to correct the information, to make the situation fully compliant, and she appears to have used her position to punish you for this.

I would also question why she was so eager. Are their incentives for agents, and perhaps financial incentives for the agency(s) involved, to pursue such seizures?

I guess, were I in your shoes, I'd be hesitant to further buck the might and potential maliciousness of the U.S. government. However, from my perspective, I would very much like a public airing and answers to these questions.
i can do next friday! or coffee/working sessions with people at a cafe sometime.

(saw your other thread on building friendships in SF--cool that you are actively kindling and organizing this!)
Captures the entire problem with the news industry right now: "Why is this closure happening, then? It's a business thing, and like most business things it's not easy to explain or understand unless you spend all day crunching numbers and paying bills. Which I don't."
For most type 0 pieces of OSS, there are no forums to refer people to.
So, the error wasn't amended and the form wasn't signed. Now you have to put up with the law. If the agent said they didn't care about the error, surely the correct course of action would be to correct it and sign it.

Am I missing something?
In Detroit we call it ruin porn and unfortunately it forms outsiders image of the entire city which is tragically wrong. You can spend entire weeks on the web exploring, there's even Europeans who have visited and created sites with thousands of images.

Here's a few:

http://detroiturbex.com/content/index.html

http://www.forgottendetroit.com/

If anyone is interested the DetroitTurbex group runs tours.
I would be more sympathetic if I hadn't had several magazines gutted in exactly this same way by Ziff Davis. Buy the competition, kill it off, more for your 'main' brand. I still miss Modern Electronics and Radio Electronics.

Same story to "Sure its making a profit, it just isn't profitable enough." Sigh.
Thank you, this confirms what I suspected. Google makes the laptop stream music and play full screen video for some amount of time, whereas Apple makes it only browse wirelessly ("up to X hours wireless web").
Bitcoin is distributed, and some people choosing to yield their micromanaged control to enjoy the dividends of convenience does not make the system any less distributed.

With Bitcoin you CAN run your own node, you CAN mine your own blocks, you CAN verify the integrity of every transaction that every person has ever made in the blockchain, but that does not mean that you HAVE to do these things. Because this is an open-source currency, WHEN you choose to yield to a third party, you get to choose one based on their merits because the barrier to entry to become a service provider is so low, thus competition is fierce. Compare with the banking oligopoly.

This is on par with Linux. You CAN build every binary on your machine from source, but you do not HAVE to and most people choose to yield their compiling duties to distributions and just install pre-cooked binaries. The benefits of open source continue to shine upon these people, because they get to choose their distribution, and they benefit from the fruits of the bazaar development model even when they are not actively engaging in it.
> I can't wait until all the current methods of creating web apps are obsolete.

Please, don't hold your breath.
I'm curious why you picked tax filings as an example of information that would be catastrophic to leak.

Here in Finland tax information is public and it doesn't seem to be that bad. As you guess, yellow papers embarrasingly make yearly rankings of rich people and they lose some anonymity. But anybody that was in any way interested in their life likely knew that they were rich.

I don't say that this Finnish practice of having public tax information is a good one, but it just shows that it's not the end of world.

Leaked Tumblr support information that allows associating Tumblr blogs to email addresses can cause a similar level of agony that leaked tax information.
"A man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client" - 19th century proverb.
They took it by force. If I took your car by force, what would you call it?
open source yeah.. but the real reason open source works out is because of the free licenses. Free as in beer and freedom.

If its not free, not everyone will use, test, expand it.

That shouldn't stop anybody from donating of course. But donating is not a _required_ payment. I personally donate to projects I like from time to time, expecting it covers the infrastructure costs, but never expecting it pays somebody to code for it.

I think the author simply wants to express his frustration, because some projects he likes died, or because he expected to get money/investors in his open source projects.

Guess what. All the big open source projects which started the movement were given away with NO expectation. THAT is what made open source successful. The free sharing of knowledge.
This reminds me a lot of scriptogr.am

Both use dropbox, markdown. The difference is that scriptogram doesn't run from your localhost and its not a static site. Still, there are a lot of similarities
Gistflow
I much rather get one or two corporations sponsoring my project than have each of my users pay $5, for the various reasons outlined in sibling threads. Or better yet, I wish there were government-level grants for this kind of work.

I've been thinking of seeking out sponsors for urllib3 (Python http library, core of Python Requests which recently broke 2 million downloads). After maintaining and enhancing the library since 2009 (with on/off contributors of varying quality), keeping the code quality high while not using the library myself[0] has been hard. Motivation to work on it has been hard to come by, but at the same time it's not as easy to give away to another maintainer as some of my other projects (workerpool and s3funnel have had very smooth transitions).

Getting some hours per month paid by a sponsor would definitely make some of these weekends easier to swallow, but I'm not sure which pricing model is best to pitch. Maybe offer to charge something like 1/2 of my normal hourly rate and let them dictate some feature/bug prioritization? Or maybe a tiered Kickstarter-like approach would be better?

Does anyone have experience with this?

--

[0] I love the library myself, but I haven't had any excuses to do http-related stuff lately.
Warning: tcmalloc does not release memory back to the OS, ever:

"TCMalloc currently does not return any memory to the system."[1]

That means if you have many long-running processes, then each of them will consume the maximum amount of memory that it ever has. Not good for a multi-tenant setup.

If it's a dedicated server running one multi-threaded application, maybe that's OK, although I'd be a little bit wary anyway.

I should note that, even if the application doesn't let the memory go, the OS could page out the inactive regions. Not really something that I would like to rely on, though. There are some other caveats also, like it would make memory accounting a little trickier ("Wow, that process is huge! Oh, never mind, it's mostly paged out.").

For what it's worth, I just spent considerable effort to get rid of tcmalloc due (in part) to problems like this. [2]

[1] http://goog-perftools.sourceforge.net/doc/tcmalloc.html

[2] You wouldn't think it would be a lot of effort, but we were using dynamic libraries that were linking against tcmalloc, which is outright dangerous if the main executable isn't linked against tcmalloc (you don't want to replace the allocator in a running executable). And some of those libraries were actually using the tcmalloc-specific features/symbols, so I had to get away from that first.
projects that became successful had zero financial backing more often that not. They get financial backing AFTER they're successful as a side effect (because the corporations use them).

You know. Linux. GCC. emacs. gdb. you name it. In fact, some of those still don't have financial backing. Heck Linux certainly wasn't started with Linus thinking he'd gain anything _financial_ with it.
People with money waste it on boats. People without it vote for the Gestapo society. Let's hope the former wake up first.
I learned LaTeX the summer after my undergrad, and rely on it now. Nevertheless, I'm not surprised that few others in my department, outside of my group, use it. When work needs to be shared or collaborated on, the simplest, lowest common denominator (Word or LO) wins out.
There's actually a couple of books coming for Play v2.

Play for Java : http://www.manning.com/leroux/
Play for Scala: http://www.manning.com/hilton/
<--- Drone Target Range
This is one hell of an idea. Is there really nothing out there like this?
You make a pretty good point here. Breaking up the big banks would be super easy, just like ending slavery, you just set the slaves free, not that difficult.

>> Big private corporations are as bad as big public corporations.

I think you miss the bigger picture the article paints, which is that the big banks actually function as part of the government in many ways. One aspect of this is described by the article, the big banks can't exist without massive financial support from the tax payers in the form of low interest rates and implied bailouts.

I also think you don't understand that only the power of the federal government can break up the banks. Show me one example in of all history where a big bank was broken up by a small decentralized governement? go ahead, ill wait...
"by paying some small amounts as a required step, not voluntarily."

Open source but not free.

I agree that developers need to taken care and that not enough people chip in voluntarily but Open Source is associated with free. If I pay $5 and then give the 'open source code' to John and Jane, who will go after me?
Whether your neighbor's tax information is also public might make a difference in how harmful it is for your tax information to be public.
Being nice to a beaurocrat is stupid. Appear to be nice or even charming is one thing but always be willing to throw them under the bus once you are done with them.

And never make excuses for them online in a hackers forum.
IIRC, Arrington is an ardent follower of Libertarianism
Why don't you write the dead-simple static generator. Then we can observe that it is only 2% different from the others and throw it on the pile :)