skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you considered running your legacy Windows software in a VM? VirtualBox is free.
New Nikon D5000 Digital Camera
The Nikon D5000 is meant at people who are appearing to step up from a compact digital camera to a Digital SLR. The main characteristic contain 12 megapixels, a 2.7 inch LCD screen.
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The Amazing World of Version Numbers.
the analogy is not quite the same. Rsync are subtely different in that they are putting up a new dated sign each week and stop doing so if served a warrant.

(the point being they are not actively making a change [taking the sign down] to indicate a "visit". Could make a difference)
Does anybody actually read, let alone abide by these open source licenses? I can't imagine actually picking through one of them and making strategy decisions based on them. Has anybody ever actually been called on it? Are there really companies that have open-sourced their entire product just because they use some random little GPL library?

I tend to avoid using 3rd party code, as it invariably ends up being garbage, but I'm happy to use the odd open source software package to do my work. If any of those packages stuck some silly gotcha clause into their license agreement, I wouldn't know about it. And I certainly wouldn't spend my time worrying about it.
Saarland University has an amazing reputation for programming language research. I'd like to do my Ph.D. there in the next few years.

http://frweb.cs.uni-sb.de

And ETH in Zurich is the rough equivalent of MIT in the States:
http://www.ethz.ch/index_EN
Is it true that there is an increased marketing focus on 'sustainability' when the economy is down? I mean, I thought the same was true in the 70s, and it kinda faded as the economy picked up steam again. (I could be wrong about that. I wasn't born 'till '80.)

It sure seems like in the last few years since this downturn has started business have talked a lot more about sustainability, and fashions for the middle class have changed as well. SUVs, from the beginning, were symbols of wealth. Rising gas prices can explain why people stopped using them, but if anything, it seems like that would enhance their status as symbols of wealth, but that's not what happened. They suddenly became uncool.
Top people (+1) that have influenced me as a programmer
Financial Times tweets pink iPhone App: The future of business rags?
Well, it highly depends on what you want to study, computer science is pretty broad.

Probably the best way to figure this out is to pick your chosen subfield, then find out who is prominent in that field and then where they lecture.

For instance, Amsterdam has Tanenbaum, but if you're not into OS research then that is probably not going to help you. (I'm not even sure if he still lectures).
That's an excellent list! Anyone who doesn't recognise some of these names (I didn't) should google them immediately.
Worth of a Business Week(ly)? $1.00 U.S. to take it off McGraw-Hill's hands
Really interesting piece, good stuff. New York's funny for me, because I did all my working, living, and visiting of NYC only in the last five years. I'm old enough to remember hearing of New York as a dirty, dangerous place, but I never experienced any of that outside of movies like Coming to America. I talk with older relatives about spending time in Harlem, in Queens, in the Meatpacking District, and they're like, "New York?! Be careful!" And my reaction was, "...umm, it's one of the safest cities in America." People don't believe it.

IIRC, Freakonomics had a chapter talking about the reduced crime in New York. It's been a few years since I read it, but I think Friedman's conclusion was that the reduction in crime had less to do with the broken windows policy and more to do with the fact that NY tripled their uniformed officers in that timeframe. Uniformed officers walking around an area is one of the largest deterrents of crime anywhere. Some good stuff in that book, anyone who liked this piece would do well to check it out.

Steven Levitt's blog:

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/

Freakonomics, no affiliate link:

http://www.amazon.com/Freakonomics-Economist-Explores-Hidden...
The title is misleading; the source might be a UK based server but actually that would suggest to me it is entirely unlikely that the attackers originate from the UK

It's not hard to buy servers in the UK from abroad - and doing so is sensible (and these crackers seem sensible) because it is one extra layer of security :)
ON SOMAK HOLIDAYS
The top self-sufficient holiday company for travel to long-haul and exotic destinations around the world is Somak Holidays.
The article's not being told something about the real failure here, whatever that may be. India has monsoons, and anyplace with dependable monsoons and enough land to build reservoirs should never run out of water.

BTW, if you've never experienced a monsoon, I can't recommend it enough. Most westerners try to travel in the dry season. That's understandable, but they're missing out on one of the great wonders of the world. It's just unbelievable how much water the atmosphere can hold and how fast it can get rid of it.
Surely you're not suggesting that anybody besides you understands the differences between any of these 30 open source licenses. I've been writing software professionally for 15 years and I can quote you the initials of a few of them, but not even the names. I honestly don't have a clue as to the contents of those licenses, and I just plain don't care.

Sure I've contributed a fair pile of open source software. But it's just code that I've put out on the internet, with no silly license attached. It's entirely possible that some of the places I've stuck that code have presented me a list of checkboxes to randomly select a license, so one of them probably got checked. I can't quite understand why anybody takes this stuff seriously enough to spend even 5 minutes comparing licenses.
Memcache-stored Sessions: How it works (behind-scenes) with PHP
not sure why you would think that! objective-c uses a dispatch method for message-passing which is a little slower than direct function calls, but it rarely slows things down in practice. even if it does, there are ways around it: for speed-critical code you can circumvent message-passing and call functions directly.

cocoa code ends up being compiled, after all. that makes it lots faster than the latest scripting languages.
Start-up orders Fast Food; VC responds with $17M
7 hours ag it was $2.91, and about an hour ago it was $3.93? Not too bad. Would be cool if I could sell my username to someone when it's a hundred-odd bucks :D

Had a teensy bit o' cash to splurge, and signed up. Very clean look - Delicious-ish without the 'sociality'. Loved it so much I deleted my Delicious account (and now hoping Maciej doesn't pull a Zune Store!)

Also hoping last item in the roadmap's After That section comes kinda true, and Yahoo! is nice enough to refund at the same going rate (i.e. users * 0.001)

p.s: First time I've EVER paid for an online service, piddling amount though it may be..
sure, you care about it, but it's not what you do. Just like as a Unix SysAdmin, I care very deeply about power. Without good power, nothing I can do means jack. However, I know less about it than an electrician would, and (going back to Zed's comment) I wouldn't be able to name the people/companies who are famous for coming up with the high power switching technology required to keep my data center on-line.
p.p.s: Kidding about the roadmap last item thing - cash out by all means, but don't grow useless!
Please, avoid the ad hominem attacks. If you have something to say about the article, say it about the substance of the article, not the tone, or the character of the author. This is hacker news. http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

Zed makes some interesting points about the abuse of open source software in startups. If you read some of his other writings, and don't bite on the troll/flame bait, you can see that he's been pretty upset about the lack of contract work after releasing mongrel.

I think that's a fair topic for a good rant. I'd be interested to hear the perspective of other devs of the django/rails crowd weigh in on this topic. How does your contribution to open source contribute to your bottom line?
Inc. on How to Manage Volunteer Software Developers
Thought experiment: How many people never sign up at all because you ask for email and password twice each?

Did you track how many fewer signups you get now that you have that double email? Are you net positive on the total activated users per day, adjusted for growth?
I believe that most courses and most degrees with the Open University are excellent in scope and delivery. Neil Fraser has a different experience:

http://neil.fraser.name/news/2006/09/01/
An Unhackable Server is Still Vulnerable
Thanks for the list. And for people like me who don't know much about (some of) them, here is a primer:

Ian Lance Taylor - gcc maintainer, creator of GNU UUCP
Rob Savoye - primary developer of Gnash
Tom Lane - member of the core PostgreSQL development team, standardization of JPEG
Lou Montulli - co-authored Lynx, came up with HTTP Cookies and HTTP Proxying
Jacob Kaplan-Moss - Django maintainer
Raymond Hettinger - core developer for Python
Margo Seltzer - Berkley DB architect
D. Richard Hipp - architect and primary author of SQLite
Ben Tilly - developed a bunch of Perl modules

Edit: Added standardization of JPEG to Tom Lane's intro.
High-Availability Load Balancer With HAProxy/Heartbeat On Debian Lenny
Just a simple observation on an otherwise brilliant presentation. I had success modelling an organization chart in the past, just by simply adding a reportsTo field in the employee Database! It removed a lot of unnecessary tables in the database.
Ask HN RE:  Company's responsibilities to the open source community
Zed's rant prompted a strong response from the HN community, but I feel the discussion really got derailed onto Zed's personality instead of the larger issues that Zed brought up. I'd love to hear HN weigh in on those issues.

What are a startup's ethical responsibilities to the open source community if your startup is based on an open source stack? I'd imagine that there's hundred's if not thousands of startups in the world that are writing great software. I think Zed has a point: Why aren't they open sourcing more of it?

Zed's also written several posts about how startups that have used his software extensively haven't reciprocated in terms of offering contract work. Zed's persona aside, do other open source devs have this problem?

And another question I'd love to hear people weigh in on is this: When a startup exits, should they contribute financially to the open source devs that helped them build that startup?
"Good luck getting the Russian Business Network to abide by the GPL!"

Why would they need to violate it? They don't distribute any code except trojans and worms.
Ouch.

I admit there are limitations. I think dissertation wise it depends what tutor you get (I wont start my diss till next year but my tutor seems pretty clued in :)).
has Posterous done themes yet? Maps are cool and all, but you know.
OK, it obviously depends on which industry we actually speak of. The overall Web industry tends to do it wrong like in the example above. Creating two sites for the same content is fundamentally flawed.

From a SEO perspective we always try to avoid duplicate content issues and splitting up of your site authority. I'd recommend the current issue of the Search Marketing Standard Magazine (disclosure: I'm an affiliate of it) which features an interview with mobile SEO Cindy Krum. She explains the issue with separate sites/pages quite well.

On the other hand I have witnessed the negative impact of such subdomain based mobile SEO already years ago. It never quite worked with Google.
Commercial grade mobile applications with Python
The doorbell: Yak shaving at its best.
We have recieved panicked phone calls in the past along the lines of "our mission critical servers just got torn apart, help". After a rescue the next sentence out of the CEO's mouth is usually "can you make them unhackable? We'll pay".

The quest for an unhackable server is (obviously) a pipe dream. But people will still do it. Because companys will still pay for them to do so :)

And at the end of the day some good practices/apps/tools have come out of it.
Although the date is April 1st, I've been following Neil's blog ever since I saw the talk on MobWrite, and somehow I believe that this is the sort of thing that happens to him.
Excellent read Timothy, thank you. I have changed some of the code because of this article. I also checked the history of all uploads to see if any of the holes mentioned had been used, and apparently there was at least one instance of somebody trying the .js route but they got hung up on the fact that the file names are changed after every download.
"The results contradict assertions made by some in the US and South Korean governments that North Korea was behind the attack. Security analysts had been skeptical of the claims, which were reportedly made in off-the-record briefings and for which proof was never delivered."

Exactly. As I said before claiming NK did it is utter nonsense. They don't have the resources for it.
There is nothing that will teach you security as fast as having a number of tech savvy users on your machine with user rights.

Privilige elevation is so much harder to protect against than getting people on your box to begin with.
Two pointers:

1. Desperation helps. "Necessity is the mother of all invention." If you have to do something, you will. I was never able to launch products on time until I started taking preorders, promising a firm date, and guaranteeing we'd ship by that date. If I negotiate a project management contract, I like to negotiate for "guaranteed xyz milestones by zyx for abc pay" terms. Part of my pay attached to getting things done on time. I once put in 60 hours of work over 3 days to launch on time. (work 20 hours, sleep 4 hours, work 20, sleep 4, work 20, then sleep for like a whole day) (lots and lots and lots of caffeine, half delirious, but we launched on time) (also - not recommended).

2. Manipulate your environment. People tell me I have iron willpower a lot, and they admire that, etc, etc. Bullshit. I try to eat well, but if I have a bunch of chocolate and cookies and junk in my home, I eat it. So? I buy a bunch of clean, healthy, easy to eat food with low barriers. Want to jump on something tomorrow? Make a to-do list for the next day the night before, line up all the materials I need, and make a note, "Don't turn on computer until making these 3 unpleasant tedious phone calls." And so on.

Two very related, highly recommended posts:

http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/barriers-are-your-...

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2008/07/habit-change-is-lik...

Building your environment so success is easy and failure is hard helps a lot. It's hard to brute force willpower yourself against your environment. Changing your environment to suit your goals helps a lot.
Great question. Don't have much time for an answer, but I think a lot depends on how critical the software is to the company in question. Another user of Apache? Probably don't need to do much, just put a "thanks" link somewhere on your site. Took some BSD licensed code, closed it up, added something to it, and based your business on it? Morally, I think you owe something, even if you don't, legally.

What really bugs me as an open source guy is when people don't even attempt to participate in the community in even minimal ways. I can understand if you don't want to hang out answering questions on the mailing list, but if you find a bug and don't even bother to tell me so that I can fix it (for free, for #####'s sake!), that's just lame.

But that's a really quick treatment of a very interesting question - I look forward to seeing other responses.
I had a whole reply typed up, but I removed it.

I give up. You simply don't understand what I'm saying, and I can't keep trying.
As an exercise in masochism, I created my own threaded comment system for a social news site I built. This question took me a long time to figure out.

Eventually I found Jow Celko's Trees and Hierarchies in SQL for Smarties. http://www.amazon.com/dp/1558609202/

Highly recommended if you're modeling trees in your database.
The real answer is, if someone distributes a Python module in GPL (as opposed to LGPL or other more liberal license), they clearly are either A) stupid/ignorant of the issues surrounding open source licensing, or B) don't want anyone to use their code who isn't also going to go whole-hog down the GPL rabbit hole.

In real life, any useful plugin/loadable lib/module/etc that is intended to be used in a non-academic/research/bits-want-to-be-free-like-speech-and-beer environment is not going to be released exclusively under the GPL.
> When a startup exits, should they contribute financially to the open source devs that helped them build that startup?

I dont think there is an argument for Open Source licenses to include a caveat like that. But I do think it should be considered as "good form".

Perhaps not money - but as I commented on the Zed Shaw thread something saying "we used X, it's awesome check it out". Because the whole point is if it was useful to them it is useful to others!

I think more serious recognition is nice too (look at Google hiring Python's BDFL. Or Facebook open sourcing portions of it's "support structure" code base) but shouldnt be required.
Disagree. Bad product is for failure, good product is for success. The business model doesn't count as much as the product.

Consider yourself as a possible startup founder. Your first question is what to build, what the product will be? If you create something _unique_ you'll be the first on the market so you can start charging.
And if you'll continuously improve your product and service to prove you are the expert of the domain you'll probably stay on the top of the market. So you can keep charging.

Once these two criteria -- innovation & continuous improvement -- are not met you'll have to deal with business models and other speculations to sell yourself.

Freemium is more a marketing model than a business model. You are giving away for free the demo part of your product instead of spending on _classical_ advertising. If your marketing is successful you'll sell more products.

Those products who are not replaceable will not be free. You'll always pay for what you consider a necessity.

[Update]

As every business IT has it's own built around ecosystem: there are some successful products, the core of the business; there are newsmakers who do the promo, marketing etc. generating revenues by telling success stories; there are the followers who keep trying with similar but less competitive products generating more buzz than revenues. And there are endless discussions, rants by the watchers who are spending their time/money to express themselves and hear their own voices.
Walking built into everyday life is "revolutionary?" Seriously? I think just about any European city dweller can tell you that. This is not revolutionary, it's just commonsensical, self-evident fact everywhere else.

Life in the suburban/rural US (i.e. most of it by surface area) is a very non-classy way to die, at the mercies of some of the most perverse planning and design humanly imaginable. I deal with the implications of that in the sprawling, automobile-centric catastrofuck that is Atlanta every day -- and I have it "good," I live downtown!

Also, a very, very important insight:

"It’s also because New York is old and filled with attractive architecture and interesting street scenes—since, as it turns out, aesthetically pretty places lure people out of their homes and cars."

Bingo! Even though there exist places in the US where it is possible to walk, in principle, it is not a compelling aesthetic or interpersonal experience. Consequently, it is unmotivating and unfulfilling, so, unsurprisingly, people don't do it. Taking a walk in otherwise comparably "inconvenient" ways from a purely logistical perspective in many cities in the world is an interesting undertaking; people are interesting, nicely dressed, there is nice architecture to look at, engaging and attractive public spaces, etc. That has a lot to do with why people do it. Most of the US is a horrific existential blight in that respect, even many of the parts where sidewalks exist and the distances required are theoretically manageable.
That Newton's Laws are not "truth" is exactly my point. I kind of set you up for that one, sorry.

Programmers and technicians deal in booleans -- yes or no answers. I know a couple of times I've heard people around here get frustrated when we start talking about the meanings of words. They just want simple declarative statements: evolution is true, detractors are wrong. Global Warming is true, detractors are wrong. etc.

Analysts, or people who have to translate from human languages to programming on a regular basis, understand that truth is such a slippery concept as to be almost meaningless. I can have three people in a room and have them discuss what a program is going to do until everybody is happy, and then still there are misunderstandings. Language is just too slippery for universal truth operations.

Or put another way, save universal truth for the philosophers.
I think a lot of his points have merit.

Meebo is a multimillion dollar company (est $200m), built mainly off libpurple. I really don't understand how the libpurple developers can look at that situation and not feel hard done by. Tireless work reverse engineering protocols, which is then taken and silently used without real credit, to build multimillion dollar companies :/

I had a discussion about this with some hard core free software people, and they just said they thought libpurple would feel "proud". Well I'm sorry, but if someone was making millions from work I'd done, I wouldn't feed proud in the least. I'd feel like an idiot.

(I'm not saying meebo is bad to do this at all. I'm more saying that I don't get how anyone could be motivated to work on an open source project like libpurple without some protection in place).
Based on reputation, it's undoubtedly Cambridge and Imperial College London.
Well ServInt can up your plan in minutes, too. Free evaluation of the next-size VPS for two weeks. All it takes is one email.
Isn't Tom Lane the guy behind JPEG or is that another Tom Lane ?