skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you sure you represent the typical developer? Knowing this stuff in the detail you just provided would seem to put you near one end of the spectrum. I would suspect that most people simply don't think about it.

I think of places I've worked in the past and the people who worked there. Would your typical VB developer in a typical corporation know about this stuff? If he did a google search for a code snippet to perform a task, and ended up on SourceForge, would he read the license or would he simply drop the code into his project and get on with his day?

I think hanging out on sites like HackerNews, filled with some of the smartest programmers around, clouds our perception of the "typical programmer". I've worked at a lot of shops over the years, and I can count on one hand the number of devs who I might ever expect to find here.
How about adding ethernet and wireless latencies?
I think the author is confused with three different concepts: fault tolerant system, idea generation and agile development.

A system being fault tolerant, like googke, just means that it can rollforward/rollback when an error occurs. It is nothing more than a technical concept.

People in design industry often use brainstorming to generate and screen ideas. IDEO is just one of them. Brainstorming is not an explaination of either how they succeed or why they succeed.

And the framework Ruby on Rails characterizing convention over configuration and don't repeat yourself even has nothing to do with "failure-tolerance", thought it emphasizes fast iteration in development.

The over generalization in the article make its conclusion very unconvincing.
From Richard Gabriel & Ron goldman "Innovation happens elsewhere". Gabriel's prose is almost always very pleasant to read:

http://www.dreamsongs.com/IHE/IHE-42.html#pgfId-956546
http://www.dreamsongs.com/IHE/IHE-47.html#pgfId-956575
Hiring programmers (2005)
This article is filled with some ... interesting statements:

Lucovsky has been an integral part of Google’s APIs, including the all-important Search APIs.

Would anyone characterize them as all-important? Also, this:

Lucovsky was also the architect of Microsoft’s Hailstorm project to port older Microsoft products into .NET. It’s a project that’s be named as a precursor to the current open web movement.
> ultimately criminal

In other words, the answer to my question about which of the demarkation points provides security is "none of the above".

Contract and criminal law apply to the cloud as well. As with every other kind of hosting, you must decide whether the contracts offered by a specific service suit your purposes.
How right you are. I'm rarely ever "comfortable" in standard work clothes, but when I get home and throw on jeans and a t-shirt, the creative juices flow and I feel charged and ready to get stuff done, likewise when I open my blinds, I know it's time to clean the house.
Don't think it's referrer based - copying and pasting the URL into a completely seperate browser instance still results in 403s for me.
You might also like this entry (ignore the slightly misleading link-bait title, the principal on focus is a good one) http://thinksimplenow.com/productivity/the-4-hour-workday/

And also, http://zenhabits.com, this is a great resource of inspiration for me.
“I wrote most of the kernel executive, kernel32, and the Windows API,..."

A quote like this gives hope to all of us.

No matter how complex or massive the software, it's surprising to find out it was written by one or two people.

I see this all the time. I once implemented an ERP package in a $100 million company. I called customer support and got one of the 2 guys who wrote the package! I couldn't believe it.

Believing that one or two people can code something large and awesome is often the first step to doing it yourself.
Dan Ariely comes to a similar conclusion in "Predictably Irrational":

"“FREE!” has a striking effect on people, causing them to make irrational decisions."

> This is why charging money for your software -- even a dollar -- creates a magical change in your customer relations.

Sure, but that changes things in other ways too... we were talking about open source software and how to be a good citizen in that community.
The complexity is a feature.

Exactly. If you go down this road, you want big companies to be scared of potential liability. Then you offer to grant them a traditional software license for a traditional sum of money, just like they're used to, and everyone goes home happy.
"I mean, what prevents people from actually going forward and using Zed Shaw's GPL code in a startup?" Decency. It turns out that quite a lot of people have some of that.
Why don't you put a poll in here? You'll likely get more feedback.
What about using Firefox's bookmarks sinced by Weave? Its private, its safe, it supports tags, it is easy acces the bookmarks through the awesome bar, etc.
I don't think Jeff or Joel proclaim the SO to be a hardcore in depth learning session, I see it as primarily entertainment about technology and quite enjoy listening to it, much like a normal person watches a TV show.

And as for the example of unit testing, it is refreshing to see successful programmers question the gospel of the unit testing crowd...judging by the writings from that community, something like SO would be virtually impossible without serious unit tests or TDD, because as you know, projects are just absolute chaos without massive unit tests in place.
Actually, the more important factor here is memory consumption. When you do lots of string concatenations, you end up with tons of unused strings, eating up memory. Also that translates to CPU time the garbage collector has to spend.

Using StringBuffer, although it looks a bit crappy in the code (IMHO), actually does result in massive gains in terms of performance.
You can learn to manage multiple projects after you master managing them one at a time. This doesn't mean you should be working on multiple projects at the same time though, multi tasking seems to be pretty solidly proven as less effective than serious focus.
How to cache smarty templates
Visual Sitemapping tool for web developers
Actually I had not, I will look into it though.
Microsoft will let its business customers run Office Web off their own servers
It's reasonably hard to detect if just the least significant bit is random, but if you do the last three significant bits you don't even need an algorithm--you can see the jagged, broken histogram.
Why iPhone apps are so cheap.
I want my cyborg life
I think the classpath problem is the number 1 reason Java failed on the desktop. Sun would've been much better off freezing the core language at Java 2 and solving the classpath problem than wasting all that time since then cluttering up the core with unnecessary features.
In this post, whenever I use GPL I am using it to refer to the class of licenses (AGPL, LGPL, and GPL proper), not the specific license.

Remember that Colin is FreeBSD's security officer, so it's probably pretty obvious which camp of open source thinking he falls into. :-) I'll do my best to present the other way of thinking within the open source community. I recognize the FreeBSD school of thought and don't have a problem with it, I just think there is a better way.

Let's use Colin's example and say you find and fix a bug in an open source library you are using. It is at that point I believe you have an ethical responsibility to contribute back. You found a bug and you should share the fix with everyone. Hell, the library probably wouldn't even be in a usable state if people didn't contribute patches. Patching back is what keeps the open source ecosystem flowing, and if you can encourage it though a license it's probably a good idea

Now, people of the FreeBSD camp believe that people will usually contribute patches on their own accord. This might be true for open source hackers, but I can tell you that it is not true at large companies (not sure about the startup scene). The GPL camp believes it is better to have stronger language to encourage people to contribute back.

Even with the GPL, if you are modifiying code for your own use, you can do whatever you want. It is only when you use GPLed code to run a service or to provide a product that you have to make your patches availible under the GPL. It's simple really. If you attempt to profit or use the code in any way other than for personal reasons, the GPL kicks in.

Let's examin a running theory in the OpenBSD community. Theo thinks that the GPL is a poor choice because companies are scared of it. They are afraid to get involved with the GPL because it is a viral license, and thus will not contribute code back. He contends that to achieve their main goal of security, they need a more permissive license so companies will patch back. Theo may be right, but it is my personal belief that in practice this theory does not hold. I contend that any company with a useful patch will want to hold on to it, no matter what. Useful patches for OpenSSH represent a competitive advantage that other companies do not have. If I ran a company purely for profit, I would keep all my patches under wraps, regardless of license. It is for that reason that I believe the GPL style licenses are a better choice.
Six pages? Really?

Okay, I didn't read it, but I'm wondering if they mention the obvious: That lots of people in NYC are migrants who arrived in their 20s or later, which increases the longevity for simple mathematical reasons.
India built a vast distributed system of small reservoirs - also known as village ponds or temple ponds. The fact that the rural system of governance was dismantled (and they realized the problem, and tried to reassemble it in a pale imitation) led to the neglect of these ponds, among other issues.
Absolutely.

I needed a wrapper for the Native WLAN API in Windows XP/Vista, and hey, there's an open source (LGPL) library available. I ran the license by our lawyer (we actually produce packaged software), and while the LGPL would have allowed us to use the library in closed source software, he thought the inclusion of the LGPL license regarding a library could have potentially scared our users (who need to maintain the integrity--and secrecy) of the data our software is used to collect.

This wasn't ideal from my perspective, because now I had to write the wrapper knowing that the code existed and I could just sit there and copy it. But I didn't. And I probably know more about the Native WLAN API because of it.
Whirled Peace
I'm assuming those are SBCL numbers, given who's posting them :-). So, it seems to me that these figures confirm that CASE gets expensive for large numbers of cases whereas SWITCH doesn't. (You're missing the NCASE-1000 entry. If it's also quite small then you're also confirming that NCASE doesn't get expensive for large numbers of cases.) Which I thought was the most interesting finding here. You've also confirmed that SWITCH is a bit more expensive than CASE and NCASE except when the former blows up.

However. Geoff Wozniak's results seem to show (1) CASE-100 being more expensive than CASE-10, where you find it costing the same; and (2) CASE-1000 being more expensive than CASE-10 by a much larger factor than you've found. The curious thing here is that a constant extra bogus overhead from an expensive SYMBOL-FUNCTION implementation ought (I'd have thought) to bias his results in the opposite direction to that. Are you and he using different versions of SBCL, or something?
You sum up two points of view:

* Make them share stuff (GPL)

* Be permissive, and aim for a bigger community - companies can participate and still use the stuff for proprietary code of their own. (BSD/Apache).

> it is my personal belief that in practice this theory does not hold.

Do you have any evidence either way? Both are valid points and have been show to 'work' in some way. Apache has lots of companies that participate, which is a counterpoint to your theory. On the other hand, maybe individuals are less likely to participate in efforts seen to benefit Big Companies?

I suspect there are no certain answers.
They may not have turf was between parties (since one political party controls the entire government), but don't they have turf wars among factions within the party?

(I am not anything close to an expert on Chinese politics but this seems to be a feature of just about any large organization, no?)
Microsoft’s Azure Gets A Business Model And An Official Release Date
This is the best essay on parenting that I have ever read. Thank you. You have articulated so many things about honesty that I have been trying to practice with my own child, but could not always explain clearly why.

It's a cliche to say it, but I can't stop myself: This should be required reading for all parents.
you and every other bandwagon futurist. no new thinking there, unless you're claiming original thought dating back, in some form or another, decades.
red hat contributes to kernel development ;)
"We've tried scraping ourselves in the past (yes, it's perfectly legal),"

Is scraping indeed "perfectly legal"?
PSA: Pinboard's account activation emails are flagged as spam by Gmail.
Ask HN: Twitter and Spam
Hi guys,

I finally succumbed to the crowd and joined Twitter this past weekend. (Yay! danielbmarkham)

I still don't understand it, but I figure I need to play around with it some to at least give it a shot.

And almost immediately I'm starting to get followers. Double yay!

But as it turns out, these are like 'fake' followers. They're auto-generated machinations that seem to exist to get me to visit their page so they can sell me stuff.

I feel like that little kid Ralphie in A Christmas Story. The one who saves up coupons and sends off for the special decoding ring only to find out the secret messages from Little Orphan Annie are actually Ovaltine commercials.

Is this Twitter's version of junk mail? If so, what do you twitter people (twits? tweeters?) do about it? Is there some kind of anti-spam strategies you can use? Because if I've only been online a few days and already have 4 B/S followers, this is a mess that is only going to get worse.
In 1985 I shoved quarters into a Gallaga machine, one after the other, without a second thought. Now, even though apps offer unlimited play, like the author, I'm hesitant to pay $1.99 for one.
Typography on the Web is basic and dull. Typekit will fix it
"only now"?

http://web.archive.org/web/20080102040259/http://www.zedshaw...
That is big. It could kill Google's prospects of getting Docs taken seriously by larger corporations.

Data ownership was always going to be a big sticking point for the cloud. In the end corps would probably have moved there simply by default (might have taken a while though).

But M$ will sell tons of this if they get the licensing right. For a corp it's like all the benefit of the cloud with none of the data ownership gotcha's. Superb maneouver.

Google's move.
'Lipstick on a pig' -- tracking the life and death of news
I don't think people hate the GPL per se.
It's more about the way GPL is promoted ... in the name of freedom and all that shit, when in reality GPL is more likely to be used in instances where the company wants to sell commercial licenses.

What I don't like about the GPL is that it limits the choice of license for derived works ... where "derived" has a very broad meaning (if your software uses a GPL component, and that GPL component has no replacement, no matter how trivial it would be to implement one, than it's a derived work).

This is in contrast to .NET for example, which is proprietary and doesn't permit changes to the code base and it's not developed in the open ... but it doesn't restrict your choice of license.

Another bad example ... Qt's licensing may have been good for Trolltech, but because of that Gnome / GTK+ happened. As a result there are more third party applications (both proprietary and open-source) written on top of GTK+ / Gnome, although it is an inferior technological choice. Qt got LGPL'ed (finally) but I think it's too little, too late (regarding the Linux desktop).

The GPL (not talking about LGPL) is a good license if used for the right purpose. But it is promoted as being the backbone of software freedom, and looking unbiased at its current usage, that's just not true.
You're right, there are no certain answers. In fact, sometimes it seems that community and company participation is kind of arbitrary. It is because of that uncertainty that I believe in the GPL. The GPL licsenses provide legal incentive and wont stop any altruistic individuals from contributing as well. As for companies, you'll see from my example below that license may not actually matter at all.

If you look at some of the more prominant examples, getting companies to contribute actually doesn't have anything to do with the license, and everything to do with popularity. nVidia provides both 32 bit and 64 bit blobs for Linux, but only a 32 bit blob for FreeBSD. This is only because Linux is widespread, and the blobs are neither GPLed or under a BSD license.
"...things like wallets are going to disappear."

Along with radios, televisions, CDs, trains, faxes, mail, and everything else that's been "replaced".
That would lower the mortality rate, not increase longevity. Longevity is age at death.

I think the simplest explanation works well. NYC has become richer over the past 10-20 years, and rich people live longer.
Even worse are the ones that seem legit for a long time (like a month or more - I suspect regenerating other ppl's tweets, but I've never tested that) and then start to "spam" subtely. Bloody clever and I've clicked links w/o even slightly imagining they were spam.

Im guessing it is down to Twitter being fairly quick to kill spammy spammers.

At the end of the day now my steam moves so fast (with just a few hundred follows) that it's tough to keep up anyway :)
The licenses are actually not that long. Just read them. You'll be able to make a pretty good guess as to what they are meant for and how they will work in practice.

If you want airtight legal advice, only a lawyer can get you that.
Zed should make his own BSD-style license that says you can use his software freely, as long as you send him a notarized letter stating you're using it, along with a note on your website.

I can't tell if I'm joking or not.

(To be clear, I think Zed is awesome, and he has the right to use whatever license he wants. Oh, and we use Mongrel).
This will probably spur Google to release a Google Docs Appliance. Similar to how you can buy a Google search appliance.
Well - I love mongrel, and I love Zed too.

One thing he can hang is hat on is that by giving away mongrel for free he really helped legitimize RoR by providing a stable platform, which helped the spread of RoR, which itself spawned many more applications, coded more quickly, and for less money, that themselves went out into the wild and helped to organize people's lives, or save them time, or money, and so contributed to the well being of humanity itself and perhaps brought us one step closer to the Singularity. So he's got that going for him, which is pretty good.
Customers would get more of the benefits of cloud computing if they didn't have to set up their own servers though. It'd be cool if a customer could, say, host the app within the customer's own AWS account.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Bill_Gate...
how dows it compare to feedmyinbox.com? Did you try both? Which one would you choose?
Well those followers don't generate any traffic, their sole act of spamming is just following you. I'd just ignore it. And I think you just got +1 actual follower.
Yeah, but it's well established that big companies will pay ten, a hundred, a thousand times more if it means they have 100% control over the software and data. There are hundreds of thousands of programmers who wouldn't have jobs if not for that fact.
the trouble is in large (very large) companies anything not directly inside the control of the company inspires cold sweat and shakes from management types :)
They are only keeping a small amount of information (name, type of store, location ect) which links back to the original site I'd imagine?
In that sense it is legal.
Maybe the answer is just to follow people you know?

But that kind of defeats the point of Twitter, right?

And if you've got so many people in your feed you can't track them anyway, what's the point again?

I'm still missing something here.
For them to show up on your feed, you'd have to follow them. Them following you only does two things, as far as I understand: Add them to the list of those following you and bumps up your followers count.
well I dont use it so hardcore as some do. If your a regular user with lots of follows then one of the desktop clients (I use Thwirl when I feel like it) turns it into something of a public IM application (which is pretty cool).

Personally i just check in a couple of times a day and usually find something interesting. And I post my blog posts and anything I might find interesting on there in case other people are noticing :)
I block them, which I believe helps identify them as spammers faster.

At the same time, deadbeat followers don't really cost YOU anything. Follow and follow-back people that seem interesting or valuable to you.
Linux is not an Operating System
Here is the exact opposite of what you asked for:

http://www.ifosslr.org/ifosslr (via boing boing)
The posted link has a trailing ")" that needs to be removed.
It is a very smart move. But the cloud is really about getting your data away from your own networks, into better redundancy, downtime minimized and not having to pay for the upkeep.

It is a smart move since they are in the corporate space but companies that choose it maybe not so smart. Sounds like another way to bolt on Sharepoint which does alot of what office on the web does already (editing, revisions etc) and Sharepoint is extremely painful and unusable. Plus let's not forget Microsoft launched Live Meeting with some office tools to no fanfare at all.

It just makes me laugh a bit that some people think that keeping documents on their server is more "safe" when they are much easier to break into than Google and with most times very poor remote data backup procedures and tests.

I'll just make a prediction now that this Microsoft locally hosted office web will not gain much traction except in the Sharepoint world.
The public trusts scientists—but not their conclusions
Recently the spam followers have been increasing at a faster pace. I would say of the last 15 followers that added me at least 10 were spam. I'm also stating to notice more spam when doing a search for a trending topic. Hopefully twitter can get this under control. I'm not sure why they dont have a "spam" or "flag" button on @replies, messages and on the follow pages.
More on Lou Montulli from Wikipedia:

He was also responsible for several browser innovations, such as HTTP cookies, the blink tag, server push and client pull, HTTP proxying, and encouraging the implementation of animated GIFs into the browser.
Mag.ma: TV Guide For The Internet (useful tools review)
The Wikipedia entries for various licenses are pretty concise and straight shooting, I find. I had the same problem as you until I read them.
Steve Mann - Wearable computers pioneer
I'm using Weave (just for bookmarks), and couldn't be happier. On any given day I might use a Windows PC at work, my Macbook Pro at work or at home, my wife's Windows laptop at home, or my main desktop at home which dual boots Vista and Leopard. Weave just works, and I have all my bookmarks synced on all of these computers.
So long as it is presented to your web browser, you can also read it with a spider (wget, etc). However, your question suggests that what you do with the data might fall under some sort of copyright if you are going to republish it. I have a book "Spidering Hacks" that discusses this, but I am unable to locate my copy.

One additional point that the book makes is that one should keep in mind is your robot showing up in the logs of places you search. You don't want to overload sites, or get on the wrong section of the site admin's radar.