skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'd actually like someone to name an open source software project that we all know and love that hasn't benefited from immense institutional support.

Honest question, what about Debian? I know they had a year of FSF sponsorship back in like '94 but they seem to be heavily volunteer based with even the Project Leader keeping a day-job to pay the bills. I know they take in donations but they're generally who I point to as an example of what a Free/Open Source Software project can be.

edit: '93-->'94
In an attempt to get free of the manipulation of the USD by the Fed, for example. (Whether that is wise is another debate)
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thanks ymmd
Sorry I was being a bit UK centric there John Lewis is a effectively a worker coop - even though they dont use the term and there are a few issues with how the internal democracy works.
Dylan and Ruby aren't that similar, except to the extent of their use of "end" as a delimiter (inherited from Algol through Pascal). In Dylan, methods do not belong to objects, and can dispatch on more than one of their parameters. Ruby, on the other hand, uses more traditional Smalltalk-style OOP.

Dylan isn't necessarily better designed than Ruby (though I think it is), but rather it's less eccentric than Ruby and more targeted at static compilation. It has type declarations the compiler can use to eliminate dynamic dispatch, it has proper lexical scoping allowing variables to be allocated to registers, etc.
That's a good thing. I am sick of lots of space and less content - I I go to websites to read things, not just look at them. A lot of minimalist websites are pretty in the abstract but unfriendly towards potential customers by withholding information or making users jump through hoops to get to it.
One of these points is way off the mark. I'll add my own two cents.

Language Barrier - The web and most of the programming languages which drive it were designed by English speakers or western corporations and hence the majority of documentation and educational resources are also in English. Although much gets translated this still causes a delay in new technologies and trends being adopted.

1. Many of the Japanese coders I've met have put in the effort to learn English. They might not be able to carry fluent geopolitical conversations, but they do tend to have enough chops to read API docs and skim code. Most of the Japanese professionals I've met, in any trade, are ultra professional, and will do whatever it takes to stay on top of their craft, including learning English if needed.

2. It's easy to forget that some of these programming languages, notably Ruby, are actually from Japan. As recently as a few years ago, some of my favorite resources for Ruby were in Japanese, out in front of English.

3. Go to a Japanese bookstore and check out the section for programmers. More recent web languages/tech, like node.js, are not well represented. But then look to the next shelf and you'll see something like Unity stacked to the ceiling. It could be that Japanese coders would rather work on different kinds of projects, spend their time learning new tech in those domains instead of the web, and only see the web as a means to an end. I wouldn't consider this a "language barrier", but rather a difference in priorities.
While I agree with the vast majority of your criticisms, I wouldn't be surprised if you're underestimating the language barrier issue.

>Is the claim that the Japanese are technologically behind the rest of the world? Why would web development/design be different than almost every other technical industry?

Many programming languages are based on English and the Latin script. Programming, and more specifically web programming, requires a level of fluency with English and its alphabet that I would expect significantly decreases the available talent pool in non-Anglo countries, especially countries with different writing systems[1].

No other technologies lean so heavily a specific language. Math and science are universal and independent of any language. Computer science is universal. Computer programming is not.

[1]Comparing a country like Vietnam (that uses a Latin script) to another equivalent Asian country might be interesting.
They're YC alum.
Bill Gates: Here's My Plan to Improve Our World
My hypothesis is that it's just very difficult to get a smart movie made without someone influential demanding that it be dumbed down.
Even if this is old, I don't understand why they don't push an open Browser VM spec. This would be much more open and fruitful.
Some in the historical and anthropological community are critical of Pinker's approach and statistics:

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1igscl/what_i...

http://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropology/comments/12gpj0/are_ste...

There are plenty more if you search in

reddit.com/r/askhistorians and reddit.com/r/Anthropology

So i'm not sure this debate is settled yet.
It isn't that "they want their money to go to the poor," per se. This program is not means-tested. And it isn't really that they're forcing each other into agreement. As I said earlier, the idea is for the giving to be coordinated in a specific way. Individual transfers of money are not a scaled-down version of a basic income. The scale is essential to the integrity of the program.

Many of these people may very well already give money to the poor. I don't see why you assume they don't. But the guarantee is the killer feature here, and you can't accomplish that by your lonesome, or even as a small group. A version of this that doesn't cover everyone is not the same thing at all.
Airbnb is a YC co.
Custom Timelines
I'm under the impression that once a game dev compiled for NaCl x86/x86_64 at all, it ran on all of the Chrome binaries on x86/x86_64, i.e. Mac, Windows, Linux, and Chromebook.

There are already a few games on NaCl, like Don't Starve[0] that work on x86/x86_64-based chromebooks. They just don't run on ARM-based chromebooks -- which is one of the incentives for PNaCl.

IIRC, NaCl could only run in Chrome Web Apps precisely because it was platform-dependent. It looks like PNaCl will also allow ActiveX/Flash-style embedding.

[0] http://www.dontstarvegame.com/
It's 1.0M sulfuric acid. Much less dangerous than the concentrated stuff.
Isn't this what "Do Not Disturb" does?
Reminds me of shadertoy (http://www.shadertoy.com/); although this should perform better.
Fair enough, I didn't say this, but my point was more to highlight that people who take in donations are on the right side of the argument, not the wrong side. There are good open source projects that don't take "institutional" support (though who know what work is being done on company time), but they take donations. Let us praise them for doing so.
What part isn't true?

I'll restate my narrative: Single instance, normalized, unpartitioned databases run into scaling problems the several-hundred million row range especially when under heavy concurrent load.

But once you start moving to multi-instance, partitioned databases, you start to lose the benefits of the relational model as most databases have to restrict how you accomplish things -- e.g. joins are severely restricted.
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I guess you're not familiar with the CRUD generation tools present in almost every PHP framework since 2008?
First, there is already unemployment, so there are already people not filling jobs.

If you believe the Keynesians or the Monetarists, it's because they refuse to work at a lower nominal wage than before. Unemployment/welfare/etc makes this an appealing prospect, and Basic Income only makes the problem worse.

* Also, your counter suggestion is based on the assumption that the government can redistribute jobs instead of tax money*

I didn't propose redistributing jobs. I suggest using people on the Basic Job for all low skill government labor, and creating additional (make-work if necessary) jobs if necessary. Make every park sparkling clean, no litter on any road ever, etc.

FDR got creative when he did this and we got a lot of great infrastructure out of it.
I get the feeling that many comments here, coming from developers who engage with FOSS consider the infusion of money to be a step in the right direction. Imagine like-minded people being able to contribute to a kickstarter targeting their itch, which some developer plans to scratch.

I think the picture the OP has is closer to the situation in scientific research, where you can replace kickstarter funding by grants from a funding agency. Many would claim that today's science research situation is broken, with scientists chasing grant money and low-hanging "high-impact" fruit, instead of taking risks working on the really challenging problems (large time-scales and investments) with uncertain results.

I think both perspectives have their place and it is important to have a balance between the two. In the case of research, one can argue that tenure is supposed offer security as opposed to an industry job, but it's also true that incentives are strongly tied to research productivity, and it's next to impossible to do research without research funding. If I understand the OP's perspective, he's okay with companies paying for developer time (kinda like tenure) as opposed to developers chasing grants. OP is drawing attention to the possible consequences of going overboard in this newfound enthusiasm/method for funding FOSS.
Can't hop on a train without money. Can't stay overnight at a nice hotel without money. Can't buy a plane ticket spontaneously without money. Can't pay for your girlfriend's ticket without money. Can't buy too much beer without money -- especially in expensive cities where young people like to aggregate.
I thought about it for a while, and this is the best I could come up with:

- All data is just a stream of "events" from different "sources" for any given "data type"

- Sources are things like my desktop, my laptop, my phone, my camera, etc

- Data Types are things like global position, cpu usage, webcam snapshots, webpage text, etc. Anything really.

- Events are just a timestamp + zero or more other "lightly typed" "fields".

- By "lightly typed" I mean the field is either: binary data, searchable text, a float, or an integer

- Fields give the actual data for the event. If there are no fields, it's a countable event (ex: imagine recording every heartbeat, all you need is a timestamp). For something like global position, you would have latitude and longitude fields. For another datatype called "semantic location" you have just a searchable text string with things like "car", "work", "home" or whatever other labels you have. Fields can also be binary data (like photos, videos, etc). I'll probably try to make lots of data types, each with very few fields, to make it easier to work with the data (ie, it's nice if there is only one numeric field in any given data type, then it's easy to graph over time)

I'm currently collecting all of the events via some scripts that are specific to each data type, and then emailing those events (serialized as json) to my own server, which just inserts the events into a sqlite database specific to that source/data type pair.

The nice thing about this approach is that anyone can easily send an email from any language, and if you don't want to use my backend, you can just send the events to your own email server and then do whatever you want with them once they're there.

Another benefit is that you and I don't have to agree about exactly what fields and data types there are. If you call your gps data "gps" and I call mine "global position", well, who cares? It's our own personal data. If this takes off, I'll make guidelines about what to call what information and how to format it for easier interoperability.
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Does this relate to Latent Semantic Indexing?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_indexing
I think this is the only way governments should "assist" their people. Further, I think portions of a minimum income should be the only way of creating currency. Currently, it is done through debt. Money should be made by the people, for the people.

Perhaps it can be done as follows:

1. Institute a negative income tax
2. Any citizens who get a refund based on the negative income tax are paid by money that is created

This way, when the economy slows down and people are making less money, more money is created which is what we do anyway.
While I agree with your general sentiment, there is also an observer bias inherent in your evidence that "open source is patently not better than closed source". There's a lot of closed source software that is crap, that, obviously, you won't see on github.
Something like 75% of Linux kernel developers are paid for their work. It seems to be working pretty well for them.
I reverted back to Firefox, but that was only because Google was gettting pretty creepy, and their stance on web-standards seems to have gone pretty downhill since they gained a majority market-share.

To me it just makes sense to support the guys who are working for the internet and world-wide web at large, as opposed to the advertising-company just trying to get more input-data into their big-data profile-crunchers.
Once an open source project has enough traction, there is generally little need for outside donations (as companies that use the product will hire people that focus on using and improving the product). The challenge is making that cross-over from hobbyist to professional project, and that is when money is helpful.

Debian had funding at the right time, crossed the rubicon and now has enough momentum to continue. Not all projects share the same luxury, and I view the funding as an attempt to make projects more professional
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I never liked that particular interpretation. It was too obvious and had been done better elsewhere.

I preferred an alternative explanation, where The One actually comes in two parts, a program in the matrix, and a human in the real world with a direct neuro link to that program. Neo's powers are expressed in the real world because he still has a direct link to the machines.

http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/movie/essays/understanding-th...

I liked the sequels a lot better once I read that. They're still not genius cinema, but they're better.
Because people have insurance that can be milked for that much?
Thank you. The context makes a lot of sense to me now.
Maybe I'm part of the problem, but I wouldn't let a kid to play with fully equipped chemistry set without supervision any more than I would let him/her play with loaded gun without supervision. Of course I also think that both activities are fine under supervision.

Anyways, I really really hope that anyone buying this for a kid is also prepared to spend time with the kid.
I think you're forgetting that Rails was created for free, in my spare time, while I was being paid $30/hour working for 37signals and other US clients on a variety of projects.

But that's even besides the point. Companies letting their employees use company time contributing to OSS has been great. As the first sentence of the article points to, I'm talking about projects raising money directly from the community.
It appears that I agree with you objection, but the heavy use of the word "you" in your question comes across hostile and personal. If you phrased your question in a more passive tone or otherwise referred to unnamed third parties, I'm sure this conversation would have much less of an edge.
Cool! I've been looking at it for some projects. Can you link or maybe just explain what you use it for/with?
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..and how do you think it got on all of those boxes? That's a chicken/egg argument.

Composer accomplishes the goals of being a "modern package manager that works on all platforms".
This might be useful for others who had no idea what cis meant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisgender
We're risking mass die-offs and mass migrations on that tech bet, hundreds of millions of people. Why not lessen the risk by focusing on a low-tech approach to reduce the population via birth control?
Some Costco stores have an on-site optometrist that will do a vision check for ~$50.

The last time I got my eyes checked, I went to a Lens Crafters type store that was having a special for an eye exam and 2 pairs of glasses for $99. Of course they tried to upsell me on the lenses and frames, which got expensive quickly, but I declined and just got the bare minimum. Then I bought a pair of glasses with a nicer lens material online at Zenni. So now I have a few pairs of backup glasses, which is very nice.
Yes! I wish I made that more clear on our website. Would that be obvious if we just put a picture of sunglasses? Also, would you want Rx lenes and Rx sun or just regular sun lenses?
Would you rather be an alpha developer or an enterprise developer?
If these tax-less spend-less austerity morons were right about their ideology, you'd think it might have worked once in a while. But it never has, nor will it ever. Instead they've taken to punishing the nations that prove them wrong. Same thing is going on now in Australia.
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The policy of a guaranteed job achieves the same goals, without the incentives for idleness.

Society also benefits, since it gains some productive labor from the workers. Rather than paying $7/hour of Basic Income and getting $0 in value in return, society might pay $7/hour of Basic Job and get $4 of litter removed from parks in return.
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> How does PNaCl differ beyond intermediate representation from asm.js?

Both are basically intended as a target for LLVM-compiled code, so lots of similarities, but the main difference is that asm.js is a subset of JS so it runs in any JS engine, while PNaCl is different. Aside from that, there are lots of technical differences, but it's hard to say which actually matter in the long run. To quickly summarize, right now asm.js tends to run a little more slowly than PNaCl but start up a little more quickly. But engineers on PNaCL and on JS engines intend to shrink those differences over time, and there is no reason in principle why they won't succeed.

To judge for yourself, you can see some comparisons between PNaCl and asm.js in these two sites:

http://www.flohofwoe.net/demos.html

http://trypepperjs.appspot.com/

My impression is that the perf differences are not that noticeable already. For example, the bullet demo in the second one seems to run slightly faster in PNaCl than asm.js. However, profiling shows that 65% of time is spent in three.js rendering code, not in asm.js, so perhaps rendering differences account for most of the disparity, and it mostly isn't comparing asm.js to PNaCl.
Every relationship should have a data-driven retrospective
> If you believe the Keynesians or the Monetarists, it's because they refuse to work at a lower nominal wage than before. Unemployment/welfare/etc makes this an appealing prospect, and Basic Income only makes the problem worse.

How? One of the problems with qualification-based benefit programs is that they reduce the marginal benefit of work (both unemployment and welfare benefits go down with work, which reduces the marginal benefit of any given nominal wage level, which makes people more likely to seek to avoid work at any given nominal wage level -- which also makes the benefit programs more expensive to administer, since they then need mechanism to try to catch people avoiding work to maintain the benefits.)

If you have unconditional basic income, you assure that work always has a higher marginal benefit for the same nominal wage than it would have in a traditional system of means-tested benefits, which reduces the incidence of people rejecting work at any given nominal wage.
It's all true, but in practice, in the US, and I strongly suspect in Switzerland as well, there are all kinds of means-tested transfers, such as unemployment support, so the first equation is actually
U(job income) - X > U(unemployment support)
which (unlike the concavity issue) is a first-order effect, and keeps millions of people from working. I very much suspect that replacing that with basic income is going to bring more people into the workplace, not the other way around -- as long as the basic income is kept reasonably small.

Now, keeping it small is another matter.
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Train drivers being called engineers has nothing to do with this. It is simply a coincidence that they happen to have the same name. They are sometimes called "engineers" but what they do is never called "engineering". No one thinks that the two jobs are the same thing any more than they think that an academic doctor is the same thing as a medical doctor. With software engineers, that is not the case. There is a great deal of academic study in the field of "software engineering".

There are, in fact, many places where engineer is not a protected title and to claim otherwise is just wrong. Many large countries like the US, UK and France do not restrict the use of the title engineer. They only restrict something like "Professional Engineer" or "Chartered Engineer".
>Many of the Japanese coders I've met have put in the effort to learn English.

I put a longer response addressing this point in a different thread, but you're interacting with the cohort that has already chosen to be a computer programmer. It's a biased sample group. I would expect people with no interest in learning English would be disinclined to even enter programming.

(This is still tertiary to actual cultural preferences in web design, mind you.)
I did not realise this. That is awesome.
The vanilla version is already really good. Play it on easy first, pause often in battles to think, expect to die a lot, read some guides when you feel stuck. The changes listed here will add a lot to the game, but they mostly take the form of freshening things up with new strategic options and fixing some interface annoyances. I think the game will be a little harder to learn after this update.
http://qing.blog.sina.com.cn/tj/539f69f5330027uu.html
My point is that this is, in and of itself, fundraising.

Edit

Also, I don't want to minimize the effort it took for you to create Rails, build momentum behind it, and get other people excited about it. What if Kickstarter, et al is just a new medium to help empower other people to do what you did?
This is good to see. The whole premise of stack ranking is fundamentally flawed.

Clearly there is a curve that when applied to an entire population shows that there are under-performers. So far, so good, however, the problem is that stack ranking isn't applied to the entire population since it's impossible to normalize the performance of each individual. Instead, companies that stack rank do it on a team-by-team basis, which is a statistically inaccurate sample of the population where there can be a lot of skew.

Since it's up to the manager to rank their employees, this causes a lot of problems. This is particularly a problem if the manager sucks at hiring, or over hires for their team, and there is a lot of chaff. There is a massive incentive to do this, because the more employees a manager has, the more corresponding perceived worth in the organization they'll have. Plus, if it comes time to cull, it's really easy to shield the favourite employees, even if they have performed poorly, without disrupting the organization.

On the flip side, if you're really, really careful about who you bring on board, your team is in a weaker position because there is no one to terminate. This means you get rid of good performers based on bullshit metrics. I saw this happen at a largish virtualization company where one of the best employees on our team was let go because he had some minor HR-ish type issue. This caused a big percentage of the team to be demoralized and ultimately leave.
Austerity: when the state breaks your legs and gets really stingy with the crutches.