skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN, again: Do Companies Exploit Open Source And Programmers Are Plagiarists?
Someone had a good technical post on HN later this week which went into a flame war. Unfortunately some important issues were missed on the thread which might be interesting for hackers:

1. Do (VC backed) companies exploit open source?

"For a VC backed firm it is entirely about ever increasing revenues to give the illusion of growth so that shareholders will invest and drive the price of a stock as high as possible. It is not in their best interest to not do an IPO. They want money now, as much of it as possible, and they aren’t interested in good technology investments or people.

What they want is tons of free technology they can hide from investors. They want that technology all run by people who didn’t write any of the software so that these employees can’t claim ownership later.

This nearsighted management, combined with limited funding at the start, means that these companies exploit open source. They will use it, make their money, and then run off when they’re done. Which, actually, is totally alright, because that’s just how things are, and honestly if you’re a company looking to make money that way, then that’s what you should do."

2. Do programmers are plagiarists?

"Honestly, how many of you people who use open source tell your boss what you’re using? How many of you tell investors that your entire operation is based on something one guy wrote in a few months? How many of you out there go to management and say, “Hey, you know there’s this guy Zed who wrote the software I’m using, why don’t we hire him as a consultant?”"
They're dimmed because they have a tag that is in the user's list of "ignored tags" - not because of downvotes.
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Thanks. I expected something like that. Local people have a strong incentive to make sure a local pond works. The people who run a centralized government have an incentive -- mostly their own thirst for power over others -- to make sure they control it, and little incentive to make sure it works.
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"It’s a combination of the technology and business model that makes formerly complicated, expensive, inaccessible things affordable and accessible."

this reminds me of google. they are essentially providing what used to be complicated and expensive tools at a much lower cost.
Europe increasingly requires their ISPs to track "IP detail records" (IPDRs) summarizing network activities into/out-of/within their networks using products such as SenSage (http://www.sensage.com/solutions/cdr.php). A number of telcos/ISPs acknowledge using the product (see http://www.sensage.com/customers/index.php), and many more likely do.

No matter what you think of censorship, it will be interesting to see how law enforcement starts using gathered data to track down origins of attacks. Given a number of identified attacking zombie computers serviced by a several (regulation-complying) ISPs, network forensic detectives will increasingly manage to trace back activities through the event-funnel/layers to the computer of origin. You need not have recorded all intervening links for all zombies ... I'm sure heuristics will be developed to identify with high confidence the computer(s) of origin.

A natural rebuttal: "no set of DBs can possibly have stored so much data that they have the full network capture to trace back attacks." SenSage & competing products don't store the full network capture, but just enough info to figure out the temporal/topological aspects of an attack. That still requires many terabytes per telco for several years of data, but the products can crunch that data real fast.

Here comes the knock on the door ... you ready?
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I reckon a lot of Hadoop users would balk at calling it Enterprise Software, but sure ;).

I think the criteria for using Hadoop is nothing to do with how many machines you have, and everything to do with how big you expect your data to grow. There are a lot of startups these days dealing with massive amounts of data (or at least data which will scale), so I'd argue that it probably is hacker news.

Given recent improvements we're looking at implementing Gearman at Last.fm as well as Hadoop, for completely different tasks. As I said, apples and oranges.
That's true, but the chances of finding follow up funding are larger anyway if you already have a seed fund backing you.

The one things most VC's are scared of is being first (and the other thing is having missed an opportunity). It's a fine line between those two...
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Exception handling in 30 lines of Potion (a draft, using continuations).
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I doubt that the web based Microsoft office will be as good as Zoho's offerings which have been optimized for years.

I can even imagine another effect: More people finding out about office webware and then searching for other office suites than MS. Also bloggers pointing out MS office webware alternatives etc.
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Yeah, it did. Netscape 4 was a mess and Netscape 6 took too long.
Good point. Some of this probably already happens, it's just more informal...
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Nashville, healthcare.
Seattle, hipster music start-ups & social networks for cutters. :)
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Thank you all for your replies - I really apreciate this - what a great community this is!
I did my master's thesis on symbiosis between prototype OO and class-based OO models in an interpreter scenario. The objects would be exposed in both directions so that you could use objects from the host language (Smalltalk) in the hosted language (a toy language developed at the university), and the other way around.

Pretty interesting stuff.
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Of course companies exploit (as in make use of) open source software - it's free (as in beer and speech).

As a developer, using open source without proclaiming that to the rest of your company is hardly plagarism.

Unless a licence forces a company / developer to broadcast their usage then that won't happen in the majority of cases.
You're welcome :)

I hope this will make you sleep a bit better...
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I tend to agree with the exception of watching TV. Watching TV is even worse than wasting time on the Web. Here you are just a passive consumer while on the Web you at least take part in communication.
Obviously the Apple II is far superior to the TRS-80 family for any serious computing task. Ataris are good for gaming and the Commodore 64 has a disk-drive that's too slow for any practical use. As for the MSX machines, they have no soul.

I am sorry. Could not resist.

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We are selling them in Romania, no legal issues. Here even one can sell legally marijuana substitues called Spice.

I've tried the spice too but it is far from the illegal stuff: the taste is the same, you don't get high, and you'll get the usual hangover.

e-cigarette site: http://smuff.ro
spice site: http://espice.ro/
Well the C64 disk drive was good enough for gaming, I can tell you that for sure.
I've got a pair of Quested F11's (the sexy purple version) at home, and I think they sound really "good" :)

They're the best investment I've ever made, but I'm just a music-enthusiast. I was roughly aware of the issues you brought up, and it was a very good and thorough explanation.

I guess I just wanted to point out that there are even "normal people" out there who appreciate accuracy/quality in speakers.

It's important to know that anyone can benefit from using studio monitors for listening to music. They reproduce music in such a lovely way - accurate, detailed and pleasant. Listen to your favourite music, but in a new way. Discover things you didn't know were there.

Even - shall we say, despite the accuracy - there's plenty of bass to go around, and your studio monitors can put out insane levels of volume and still reproduce everything beautifully.
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Pet projects are the one refuge I have from "methodologies," my one little corner of the world where I don't have to proactively leverage my synergies and deliver turn-key, best-of-breed cross-platform whiteboard convergence and scalable, clicks-and-mortar enterprise-strength XML deliverables for B2B/B2C WSDL BPEL SOAP that get someone their five-9s ROI.

No methodologies.
This is obviously the future.
There are 1000's of people selling the electronic cigarette right now. This is one Chinese site of many. Currently, two large American distributors who were selling in bricks & mortar stores are in a legal battle with the FDA who started confiscating shipments around last April. They argue the FDA had no jurisdiction to do so. The judge's verdict is expected next week. Smaller home based operators are still managing to get the product into America though some have had random shipments taken.

I keep a slinkset updated with info: http://e-cignews.com
I really like this approach (similar to the zoho article) to helping underpriviledged groups in society. Instead of 'discrimination is bad, let's do affirmative action', this attitude is 'discrimination is bad, for those that practice it. these people are an untapped resource'. Seems much more organic and sustainable to me.
Back in the day I was running an ISP, and when we did a website redesign at some point we added reverse lookup of the users IP address followed by a quick little dictionary lookup to add a "Back to [users ISP]" link (we did not have much business/marketing sense) if it matched any of the major ISPs.

Two days later we got a frantic call from someone at another ISP to tell us that someone had hacked our server and added a link to them - he wanted to make sure we didn't think it was them that had done it.
A more relevant link was posted a few days ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=638479

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Well it's true that there is no cost at Google's side, but most importantly there is also no gain. Apple does have to pay for the servers, the bandwidth... But they also are making money out of it.

It may be true that the future is the browser, but I currently see no way for companies like Google and Apple to charge money for a web app.
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> Honestly, how many of you people who use open source tell your boss what you’re using?

I do! He loves it because it is free (with the caveat he adds "be careful").

We've offered money to OS maintainers of projects we've made use of in the past (either to consulty or, more usually, to develop some features for us) - mostly they refuse (usually politely).
Which email address on those sites is yours?
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It's not a bad idea, and certainly is the first alternative nicotine product that replicates a lot of the cognitive feedback and sensations that are so intricate to the positively reinforced behaviours of smokers. I've tried a few of these and have been reasonably satisfied with the experience, and during the time that I had them I pretty much was ready to never smoke a real cigarette again. It's not that the experience is comparable to real smoking, and if you expect that it is, you won't like the e-cigs; that's the wrong question to be asking. The real question is whether it's something you can make yourself switch to, not whether it's identical--it's not.

While the damn things worked, that is. The problem is that the cheap, Chinese-made technology breaks down after a few weeks, necessitating a complete replacement (and, of course, waiting for it). The vendors appear to know this: they are happy to send you a replacement unit free of charge and with no questions asked, but they won't answer any questions either. I told them I appreciated their generous warranty policy, but what I really wanted to know was, is there something I'm doing wrong with the thing that's causing the atomiser to overheat and/or stop working? To that, the response was amazingly silent. Apparently, that's just the level of product quality. I've had other problems as well -- e.g., after about a month, the batteries won't hold more than about 5 minutes of charge.

Let's just say the MTBF on these is very, very short.

If they'd actually get that part right, I could see this really taking off, Big Tobacco's efforts to kill it notwithstanding. I know Health New Zealand published a study a while back (you can find it as a footnote off the Wikipedia page about e-cigarettes) declaring that it is free of virtually all of the health hazards of real smoking, and appeared to endorse it publicly (NZ has a high per-capita smoking population).
Not to mention that it'll do wonders for keeping pages accessible where we'd otherwise risk people making them a mess of javascript...
Wouldn't this be better as a poll?
Are you aware that plagiarism is a crime? Hence, without being convicted nobody is a plagiarist.

It's like saying: are programmers burglars? Well, have they been convicted for burglary? No? Duh ...
Having been convicted for burglary and having committed burglary are two distinct things.

It is possible to be -wrongfully- convicted of burglary without ever having done a burglary, it is possible to be rightfully convicted when you've done it and you can 'get away with it' if you have done it but you have not been convicted.
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Companies will take an advantage wherever they can, using open source is no exception. I venture that almost none of the really large web properties that we have today would have gotten off the ground without open source.
Very misleading I think. The hackers were not anonymous because of Web's anonymity, but because they went through a chain of hacked computers. Hardly a method that is available to the average person.
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Looks very promising. Some unique features. Does anybody use them already?
It's an interesting question, and I'd love to see your dissertation after it's done. Thanks for being willing to post drafts, etc...

It seems that a lot of cities/regions want to start tech incubators as a means of boosting the local economy. A number of cities that I've lived in want to start a "Silicon Prarie" or a "Silcon Forest" or a "Silicon FooBarBaz" in their neck of the woods because successful tech businesses produce a lot of good jobs and tax revenues. So, the city starts an incubator, promote their new downtown as a tech hub, and hope for technology companies to spring up and boost the local economy.

I believe that one of the reasons that Y Combinator succeeded was because it wasn't about boosting tech companies in regions, it was about funding startups. PG and Co. set out to hack the economy by seed funding crap loads of startups. So, to that end, they started funding startups in the locations that were best suited to that: Boston and SV. They then went on to localize primarily in Silicon Valley because they thought it was the best move for their startups. ( and they were sick of being bi-coastal )

The difference in those two motivations, is I believe a watershed between the wins and the fails. YC has done what's best for their startups because that's their primary goal. The vibe I get is that a lot of other incubators try to do what's best for their region and are therefore conflicted.
I agree with this very much. Slashdot suffers greatly from this (or it thrives on it, depends on your point of view I guess).

Apple vs Microsoft, Republicans vs Democrats, GPL vs BSD license, RIAA vs the world etc the discussions are always the same and nobody learns a thing.

It's a mindset problem, a flamewar does not do anything to advance the topic it just causes everybody to dig in just a little deeper.
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TC "Working closely with Twitter"? Twitter and TechCrunch Joust
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are you people still on CRT's or something?
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is the entire guideline, too long for a title.
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The programmers working on the latest version of Excel are about as likely to choose the fonts as they are to design the advertising campaign for it.
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Sure, I have an agenda. What's the point of writing if not to change minds?

My emphasis was you should be conscious that everyone has an agenda, even those who claim to be 'standard' or 'objective,' particularly when it comes to the dismal science.

I told the commenter to read strong viewpoints and think for himself. Then I suggested my preferred quadrant of the noosphere as a place to start. Why? Because I consider it more generally insightful and intellectually honest than most of the drivel out there. But of course, your mileage may vary.

In retrospect, I should have just suggested PG's essay "How to Make Wealth" [1], as it contains the single most important insight commonly missed in economic discussions.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
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Just like they do every year...?

EDIT: Also, if you went to WWDC, you already get free access.
Interesting, and I agree that more and more YC clones are coming from outside the Valley. I guess the question is if the city/region has enough expertise to make a clone successful. Perhaps if focused on a more vertical field it has a better chance of success?
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Don't talk like a lawyer. That's exactly what these companies/businessmen do too. They just look at open source as a free way to make money, they don't see the community behind it. That's the way it is. We, who develop open source software in our free time, shouldn't think about this... we don't do it for money. If someone makes money using my free software, it's fine by me. My good conscience worth more than money.
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I've been hired twice because I wrote open source code.
I've seen the gym advice so many times already, but I just cannot motivate myself to do it. I understand that it's healthy, and I tried it for a couple of months, but I really thoroughly hate working out. It just doesn't seem to work for me. It doesn't give me "energy". It doesn't make me happier in any way. I perfectly believe that it's healthy and it's what I should do, but frankly after (or before) a day's work, plus the necessary housekeeping, I just can't be bothered to do anything that I don't like.
Personally I think you could do a lot worse than employing people with autism. Communications may be a little harder and you'll have a hard time dictating planning but it is going to be tough to find people more dedicated to whatever has their interest.

I think I have plenty of the 'autism' traits, I'm probably not the easiest person to get along with on a daily basis but once you get me motivated and going there is no stopping. (though it may take more than a little bit to get that to happen). If the job was interesting enough to me you could probably get me to work for you for free...

Companies usually prefer consistency rather than the all-or-nothing that comes with the territory of autism but from what I've seen around me to have a network of 'minders' around people with the above traits can produce spectacular results.
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Thanks for this. There's only one thing worse than people being religious about TDD, and that's people being religious about TDD being a religion.

Can't we just for once and for all realize that some techniques work well in some situations, and for some people, but that there is no golden bullet?
Not really. Reordering declarations, for instance, is a "safe" refactoring, though not when you're using reflection at some point.
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It still feels weird to me for a company to charge for instructional videos on their own platform. Google doesnt' do it with Android - there are heaps of tutorials on YouTube coverring different APIs. Microsoft doesn't do it for their tools either. Google want to sell Android apps, Microsoft wants to sell development tools, Apple want to sell iPhones. Why charge?
Most people and companies don't work so well without an oxygen supply... :-)
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I know this is off-topic, but your username is slightly misleading. :)
That's kind of sad. I'd pay $12+ or more depending on how useful it would be for a FF extension. Especially in case you'd get some support and regular upgrades.

12$ is not much for you but for the programmer it can make a stable income once the add on gets popular.