skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't believe Microsoft can act against its own interests by making a true commitment to open-source.

I don't think Microsoft is acting against its interests by committing to open-source. Quite the contrary.

If they open-sourced Silverlight, would they lose money from their authoring tools? What they would lose is some level of control, but they could win a big enough user-base to take on Flash, which is still king. Would I care if their authoring tools are proprietary and expensive? Not at all if they're getting the job done, as long as the platform is open.

You see, open source is really about economics, being many times a cheaper and more effective way of developing and distributing software. If you want to talk about rights with normal people, you'll have to explain those rights in terms of benefits.

Having the ability to share software with your friends is not a good incentive for many software developers. But having your piece of software maintained by others (when you don't want to die doing that) is an incentive.

And I don't think that the "giving back" attitude should be forced. It should come naturally from the inherent gains. We are so blinded by the individualism promoted by capitalism that we forget sharing and cooperation have real advantages. But being blinded by an ideology with opposites points of view is evenly shortsighted.

You see, while many people in Silicon Valley or in Cambridge are working happily in startups or on cool projects that will save the world someday, the rest of the world is kind of stuck in consultancy with flat hourly bills, working on boring and-not-quite-fulfilling projects that in many countries pays less than your average gas-station supervisor. And working on Free Software when your hourly rate is $10 an hour you can trust me it's not that great.

Another thing about open-source software is that there are clear disadvantages of the development model. You can see that in the unpolished GUIs of the open-source applications or in the lack of documentation (there are times when I thank God if I find a blog-post with an example for a library I'm trying to use). The notable exceptions are only those where the software itself is a complementary to something else that sells (like hardware, or ads) ... which is ironic since Microsoft was worshiped back in the day by many programmers for being a successfully pure software company (finally, our profession was going to have recognition).

So yeah, fighting a war against proprietary software is futile. Proprietary software will never be replaced by ideology. A better business model will (like <gasp> software as a service ... in which the software doesn't even run on your machine).
What about sending them fake bank account info after that point? You could probably get them to try 3 or 4 different accounts etc if you kept saying that there were typos, wrong bank, etc.
I do most of the sales for my company and use Highrise. The major thing I like about it is simplicity and having an email dropbox that I can BCC.
Absolutely. Sass is a CSS generator and while it might spark ideas for how a new in-browser stylesheet syntax would work, I don't think that it ever will be that syntax for one crucial reason: an in-browser syntax has full knowledge of the DOM to which it is being applied -- and that really changes how you think about things.
I'm just curious- Why would you want to specifically avoid the GPL?
Unauthentication
As a sometimes follower of GTD, I also find dumping my to do's from my mind onto paper is remarkably energizing/motivating.
Link to the full article bypassing blog spam.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-09/mu-rda092409....

The blog leaves out the bottom part where it mentions:

"Willpower is like a muscle: it needs to be challenged to build itself," she says.
Just to be clear, Huddle is based in the UK.
Toward the end of the article, Greg argues that big companies should use early stage acquisitions as outsourced R&D.

In other markets this has proven fruitful. Specifically, in the pharmaceutical industry, the major players such as Pfizer have increasingly turned to the acquisition of startups to fill their drug pipeline, rather than their own internal research groups. That eliminates much of the Phase 1 and 2 risk, but also allows the market to assemble the best innovators rather than attempting to internalize it.
Roy Baumeister has done a lot of the early work on ego depletion.
Wikipedia has a good background of reading material:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion
While Joel writes for "hits", I honestly think he also believes in the DTP. I mean, they write in a custom language which compiles to a lot of other languages.

For many shops, DTP is VERY important. For other shops, it's a very bad idea. For my company, DTP is good for some products, but not for others.

Like all tools, it's important to use it when it is the right tool for the job. Joel unfortunately did not specify when that is.
You might want to consider tmux (http://tmux.sourceforge.net/) as an alternative. Its cleaner (and, incidentally, BSD-licensed) codebase means that it's getting features that have been gathering dust on screen's to-do list for ages. Most notably, its dwm/XMonad-style layouts (http://tmux.sourceforge.net/tmux6.png) are really nice. AFAICT, screen doesn't even officially have vertically split windows yet, it's still an unofficial patch.

Either way, if you use Unix, learn to use screen or tmux. They're tremendouslyuseful. (Also: Noisy wireless connections are the new flaky dialup, when it comes to resuming shell sessions.)
Wow, I didn't realise they re-voiced them for the US market! Is this usual for British productions that make it over the pond?
"But those hairs can get stuck in a bent position."

In tinnitus, the hair cells beneath their stereocilia hair component die, and they don't readily regenerate, just like brain cells.

I am really skeptical of this treatment for noise induced permanent hearing loss.
Please don't use it for I18N.

It would surely produce some funny yet useless message and is vulnerable to poisoning.
This is why it's sometimes better to go free than charge a low price.

One arts group site in particular I transitioned to a CMS, redesigned, did training with several members, implemented dynamic galleries, ... that would have been way beyond their means to pay; instead they pay me for hosting (a pittance!) and I get to support an arts group that create some great inspirational work.

If I low ball it and charge them then the publicity is "this guy is really cheap" and there'd be no way to live on what I'd earn from that. As it is I get to charge a normal rate and the arts group get to tell everyone how generous I am!
The new economy
I'd like to see more libraries in more languages for .tel domains (reading and writing DNS records, i.e. NAPTR/TXT/LOC), and more mobile apps too. It's an open platform, see: http://dev.telnic.org/

I should also declare my interest:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/12/internet-mo...
I would love a javascript data viz lib built on top of processing.js, may be a large project, but you could probably get a thing displays one type of chart in a single hack sesh.
Isn't that the thing about insurance - by the time you need it it's too late!
Many thanks for posting this. This is exactly the kind of thing I come to HN to find. I use screen on occasion but never really had it in my mind that I should be using it as a productivity tool.

I have once again found minor enlightenment and am already more productive because of it. Its nice when procrastinating on HN turns into a net win!
No offense, but how does it's BSD-licensed codebase mean that it 'gets more features'?
For starters, it has built-in dwm/XMonad-style layouts, while screen has taken ages to even get vertically split windows.
Thanks, I will look at that, looks rad! I just thought the article covered some really key points about multiplexing terminals in general...
I'd suggest changing it to vim.

But no, seriously, screen is one of the more useful programs I've ever used. I have a screen session running on a server somewhere, and just log into it from whatever terminal I happen to be using at the time. It's pretty much the best.
I rephrased my comment - I think it's the cleaner codebase that makes the big difference. Its BSD license has some perks, though - for one thing, it's part of the OpenBSD base system now, which means security auditing and excellent maintainers. That will probably also lead to more features in the long run.

OpenBSD man page: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=tmux
More importantly, it is also a question of your toolset and the problem at hand.

If you're a Ruby programmer, and especially if you're a web developer using Ruby, TDD may well save you time, depending on your style: There is a lot of testing infrastructure, a culture, a bunch of blog posts, a language with flexible syntax, and -- in the case of Rails -- a framework designed with the intent of supporting testing.

Whereas I can't imagine that the average C programmer has an easy time adopting TDD. Surely you don't write unit tests in C? That sounds like hell. But if not you have to learn some other language, and write your tests, and integrate them with your build system. And no matter what you do, every build takes a certain minimum amount of compile time and link time... That might be pretty fast in these enlightened days of multicore processors, but let's just say that I'm not surprised that (e.g.) Jamie Zawinski didn't invent TDD for C in the early 1990s. He'd still be waiting for his test suite to run.

TDD is a necessarily new invention. Imagine trying to explain it to the punch-card coders of the 1960s, when computer time was a precious resource that you signed up for an hour at a time in advance, perhaps days in advance. Those folks sweated blood over every line of code, trying to find and fix the bugs before it ever ran. The idea of deliberately breaking your code and then fixing it, over and over, would have been crazy.
If you look at it through the eyes of the GNU people, you're making an active choice any time you use software. By using GNU software, you're supporting the FSF and the GNU project.

Some people would rather support the BSD license instead.

Other people just don't care at all.
The same way there are people that want their entire software usage to be GPL/MIT/BSD/etc, there are people that want everything to be non-GPL. Unless you are going to be hacking on GNU Screen and feel the need to do something that the GPL forbids, there's really no reason to stop yourself from using a software package just because it's GPL-licensed.
I'm not exactly the target audience of this, but I discovered this fact only having created a number. A little more description on the home page will definitely help.
I've been satisfied with just using multiple tabs in Terminal.app in OS X, but I'm curious if anyone has switched from that solution to screen and wouldn't go back? (for local use in particular)
Implement a web-based app which performs copy-move/clone-stamp detection in images. Similar to the experiment here:
http://coding-experiments.blogspot.com/2009/03/detecting-cop...

So, the web-based version (kept simple) would allow a visitor to:
1. upload an image (& enter their email)
2. process the image in the background (the detection algorithms that I've seen aren't fast)
3. email the visitor when the detection is complete, with a link to results.

This would be a valuable service to newspapers, magazines, and news websites–who must make sure that news/photojournalism images aren't tampered with in Photoshop.

If you could improve upon the algorithm linked above and open-source it along with the web app, I think it would be a great resource. Of course, you'd still have plenty of room to build a for-pay service at a higher level. I know larger news organizations that would pay to be able to run several images through such a service and save the results.

Feel free to get in touch if you'd like more details.
This is why it might be an idea to have unit tests AND QA. Be pragmatic with the unit tests and center them around core functionality and things that are hard to test (think very hard about race conditions for example). QA if they're any good should catch the boneheaded exceptions (such as a mis-behaving getter that calls itself).
Studies have shown that willpower is linked to blood glucose levels, i.e. that sugar is the fuel for willpower:

http://psr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/short/11/4/303

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/how-to-boost-your-w...
What jQuery Can Teach You About Good API Design
I haven't read the article yet, so I'll guess at it's contents then check it to see how well I did.

TRAGAC because they teach every kid the country chess in school - identify the gifted - send them to chess camp - identify the more gifted - send them to chess school - keep filtering - concentrate the best of the best into more and more intense training - Botvinnik ran a chess school at the very top that trained both Kasparov, Karpov and Krammnik.

Make sure the talented get their 10,000 hours in with no distractions, like having to have a job.

Easy, peasy.
I would join a meetup in Berlin as well, pubs are plenty around here ;-)
No, I am talking about anyone who puts a link in their tweets and it's someone I follow. Bonus points if the ones that are coming from multiple people bubble up to the top.

Depending on how many people you follow, there's a good bet you miss some links. You can swim through your feed, or, if you are like me, you want for a better solution. Maybe I code this up over the next handful of days.
I understand they were testing out of the box stuff, but I wish they had upped to a newer gcc in the FreeBSD install, and recompiled some of those programs. Id really like to get a feel for the actual differences between the OSes without extra variales like compiler and 3rd part libs getting in the way. Such a thing would really be kernel+libc comparisons then.
The end result is relatively similar. Erlang has an underlying representation that uses something akin to prefix notation, albeit more verbose and a lot uglier than what you'd get from lisp. Here's a blog post with an Erlang Abstract Syntax Tree described in it: http://seancribbs.com/tech/2009/06/20/building-a-parser-gene...

In essence, this can get close to lisp macros; with parse-transforms, some people have developed modules as objects, qlc (querying an mnesia database as a list comprehension), cancelling out single assignment, etc.

The ways to do this are rather obscure and not too documented. I think that it's a bit fortunate (arguably) because it makes it harder for people to build illegible macro systems.
I like ` (just backtick, no control), though that clashes with Lisp a bit. (I don't usually use Lisp inside tmux, though.)
You can also just hit "C-a a", which screen will interpret as "send C-a to the terminal".
The study escapes me at the moment (it might be from a Dan Gilbert TED talk), but people who've just spent time on a difficult puzzle/task are also shown to have less willpower. It's not so much that we have a finite amount of willpower that we have a finite amount of cognitive resources that we can devote to various tasks, willpower being one of them.
anyone care to share their screenrc? heres mine: http://github.com/bdotdub/dotfiles/blob/master/screenrc
Create a Hacker News clone for politics.
Playfulness is good for business
My remote `.bash_profile` ends

screen -d -R
logout

On the rare occasions that I don't want to run under screen, I run `ssh -t user@host bash`.
Sites using this vulnerable signing method must add a warning to their documentation.

Flickr authentication spec lists ludicorp.com authors,

http://www.flickr.com/services/api/auth.spec.html
I wasn't making a civility argument and I don't have the time in my life to fix every social problem I can identify.

Do you have a constructive point to make? You've taken everything I said completely out of context and made completely irrelevant responses. As it happens, the last sentence is the central point of my comment, and serves to motivate and justify the preceding two sentences. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear enough.

Maybe it would be useful to me to remember that a lot of people read English as if they were finite automata--once they read a given sentence they get their heads into a given state, even if the sentence immediately following it provides essential context to what I actually meant.
You're quite right with unit tests, I often wonder why people only seem to state their about regression. Two and a half years into my project I think our tests have only caught one or two relatively tame regressions. I mostly use them to test new components (that would be hellish to QA manually as the system is so big it takes a while to build->deploy->run), large refactoring of components and integration tests (like spamming our transaction service randomly and ensuring it always outputs valid files)
In general, one should probably know their way around GNU screen in addition to tmux just because you'll probably encounter it on more installations. Much in the same way that it's really to your benefit to know a bit about vi even if you are an Emacs user.
Dumping the Gameboy Color boot ROM (w/ commented disassembly)
I'd see if you could get them to provide you some free advertising in return for your goodwill. Good word-of-mouth advertising is worth it's weight in gold.
What about if you load your stream http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/BrandonWatson.r... into a program and use regex to fish out the links? Throw it in a for loop to search beyond the first page.
I think this is politics, not racism. Botvinnik was a stone communist and the party's fair haired boy. That's why the fix was in.

I actually met him in Toronto in 1977.
Y'know, I don't like IDEs or C++ much myself, but I have never, ever regretted the time I took to write tests. I'm not a devoted TDD advocate though; sometimes I'll think of tests to write first, sometimes I'll write some code first, but I sure like having those tests there pretty soon after I'm done touching the code for the first time.

I'm gonna keep plugging away at tests until they don't make sense to me any longer no matter who tells me they're not needed.
` cannot be used since in terminal C + ` or C + SPC or C + @ translates into same thing(only allowed characters are @ [ \ ] ^ and _ ). I personally prefer using \
This article can not be trusted. The version of FreeBSD they use in the test is in 'debug mode'. The speed of every critical system is impacted while debug symbols are enabled. The fact the author fails to mention this critical fact casts doubt over the veracity of the entire article.
Here's a good discussion on a related topic in the 9fans archive - http://www.mail-archive.com/9fans@9fans.net/msg10581.html
Ah yes...the technical aspect of the problem will be easy to solve but the social aspects will be nigh impossible.
Computational biology is still a very young field, and even a lot of biologists don't quite appreciate the computational aspects. However as Leroy Hood says, biology is fast becoming a digital science and our education around biology has to change.

Here's a paper around recent thinking, especially among the comp bio community, in this area

http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/20/14/2...
That's like Javascript vs. Java when they are not the same thing at all.
I posted my config sometime back.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=843630
Yea, but the word 'apple' is a dictionary word that means "fruit with red or yellow or green skin and sweet to tart crisp whitish flesh," but the lawsuit between Apple the computer company and Apple the record company has been pretty well publicized, not to mention lengthy and expensive. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v._Apple_Computer. I would consider changing the name, or keeping it and plan for a legal battle if this becomes any kind of success.

It is a nice service though, and awesomely simple.
An Atlas of The Universe
I hope you mean on the server. IIRC, some things like GNOME will source .profile or .bash_profile so that you can have globally customized $PATH,etc variables.
I would moderate it like pg does here. High-quality political articles only and moderators would remove inappropriate content. Partisanship may come into play, but only in the article rankings via votes.
I use screen constantly and would never go back. The detachability is incredibly useful. Say I had to go to a meeting - I shut my laptop and it goes to sleep. This would normally kill any SSH session (and thus leave vim swap files lying about in my case)... but with screen I can just pick up where I left off last time.

It's also great if you want to run something big - say a job that would take 5 hours. I'm free to do whatever I want without fear that killing my ssh session will also kill the job.
Oh, I'm using just ` , not C-`. It's like hitting ESC in vi. (I also noticed that space and shift-space are indistinguishable, which is a bit annoying because in Emacs I use S-spc for languages with lots_of_soft_spacing or-several-words-joined-with-dashes.)
Getting insurance can be a pain in the ass, and rates vary. I might argue for a middle ground: find out from your industry how likely it is you are to need insurance within 6 months, and get it ahead of time if you will.
I keep mine pretty simple too: http://github.com/DannoHung/my-config-files/blob/master/.scr...
> run something big - say a job that would take 5 hours

The monitor function can also notify you when there's activity or 30 sec. silence in a window, too. :)
O,k I read it. It DID have some mention of the state support system, but said it was for more ideological reasons.

Ayn Rand wrote an essay on WTRAGAC and she pointed out chess was a very CAPITALISTIC game. Why?

In chess, you own all your own pieces. Just about the only private property in the USSR. No Central Committee or Five Year Plan can tell you how to place your rook. At no time will your rook ever be nationalized by the state just when you need it the most.

Second, only you get to push your pieces. It is NOT collectivized.

Third, you are rewarded for being strong in a non socialist manner. You and the other guy start out with the same number of pieces, soon the stronger player has more. They don't NEED more, being stronger, but, as in life in the West, the rich get richer!

Rand argued that the TRAGAC because they used it to escape an unnatural Socialist system.
Might just be a matter of context and without the context we get the zealotry. Biggest mistake everyone makes when saying "XYZ is teh lames" or "teh wins" is not describing their context.

Our OS team works differently from our apps team for example, because if something in their stuff breaks it's a big deal, they also really worry about backwards compatability and whenever I touch their code I have to create an IPrinter34 to not break things for old clients (who still want their IPrinter12).

In our apps team though we keep things cleaner and kick out the IPrinter23 and keep things as IPrinter so people can read the code more clearly. Backwards compatability isn't so much an issue for us (apart from obviously considering updates) as we release 1 single unit that replaces all our files. If somebody has an old OS then its not supposed to work anyway so the app going titsup is the correct outcome.

Therefore I don't have an opinion on this subject either way, in some scenarios you do IPrinter34 and in others IPrinter.

When people talk with strong opinions on code they should probably start by announcing their own applications of it.