skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Either of my children is more likely to behave well when the other is behaving badly. It looks like we humans don't grow up. In the case of children though, it's probably motivated by competition for parental attention. I'm not sure what the motivation might be for Carnegie-Mellon students.
While i find some truth in your post , about Microsoft, it would be good to put things in perspective, and imagine for a second what the GNU/Linux landscape would be without miguel's contribution.

The guy has been proven to behave like an asshole, but i find it good to judge people on what they do. The contribution of miguel , in usefulness for a regular Linux user experience today ,is certainly comparable to RMS's.

And while i, like many others ,am very suspicious about the mono story, i would really like like to see this project succeed, if only because there is IMHO a desperate need for a decent multi-language VM on linux (other than java, wich is pretty unusable for desktop applications on linux).

Also, the patents infrigement threat has been hanging on diverse parts of GNU/linux for a very long time, and i've yet to be convinced of the solidity of the case microsoft could have against mono, since after everything i've read i couldn't reach a clear conclusion.

So yeah, RMS is true to himself. But i don't find that admirable at all. There is no balance in what he says, ever, and i don't view that as genius ...

I don't want to live in his free software world, because he looks like a totalitarian. Even if his views and his works are to be valuated, i respectfully disagree with him on almost anything ideological. And i don't like people insulting others in public, for any reasons ..

Like if i was watching a movie, i have real huge problems picturing miguel in the position of the ugly traitor, sorry ...
Which is a bad law, that doesn't make sense and was created to cleanup the governments interference in train system.

It's like saying someone who broke laws during the civil rights era, to integrate their establishments etc... being convicted of a bad law is meaningless.
My condolences for your loss. It must be hard.

My partner and I recently thought about this scenario for us and decided that one way to ensure business continuity is to have a key man insurance for each other. We took out the policies a little while ago on top of other insurances.
> I don't trust him because he's written anti-climate change before

So, you are saying you will only trust him if his views match yours?
Article is members only.
The talk dates from 2000, if that helps...
This was published more than nine years ago.
This talk dates from 2000. Any particular reason it's relevant now?
Uh, multiple page article, with no indication of how many pages to go? Flagged.
Work + Life = Balance
This is a talk is from August 2000, when Miguel de Icaza had recently participated in the founding of Helix Code (later Ximian) which sponsored a lot of the early development of GNOME.
Rackspace using Drupal
Great to see well-established organizations, like Rackspace, use Drupal for micro sites or add-on sites. It is a great way to dabble your feet in Drupal and get a sample of its power.
He's ranting about it without having read it, so I doubt that's going to change his mind any.
Isn't this really old? Gnome doesn't still use bonobo does it?
He criticised Unix and the wrote how he and the GNOME team planned to fix the problems he delineated.

If you agree with his analysis, that makes him a huge boon to the Unix community, not a traitor. Even if you disagree with his analysis, that doesn't make him a traitor--it makes him a Unix developer who has ideas you do not agree with.

You'd have to prove his purposely trying to destroy the Unix community to call him a traitor.
In the 3-Year Average graph, South Dakota is below $0.00, is that possible?
Steve Mcintyre is an interesting guy. His hobby is to check the data, statistics, and models published in climate science articles. As far as I know his work is quality, at least several of his corrections have found their way into mainstream climate records. The fact that he has been involved in so many tooth-and-nail fights to obtain the data he seeks, often being flatly denied, ought to concern anyone who cares about the veracity of the claims of climate scientists and activists, as well as anyone with a vested interest in a political system that looks poised to spend trillions of dollars on climate policy over the next decade.

You can check out his blog here: http://www.climateaudit.org/. But be warned, it's not political at all. If you don't have a head for data series and regression models, you'll be put to sleep.

The amount of bad scientific practices and obfuscation that this one man has uncovered is staggering (scientists cherry-picking data for a paper and then refusing to provide the whole data set seems a common complaint). However, as good citizens we must believe that the thousands of papers he has not gotten around to checking are perfectly valid. To do otherwise is to be painted with the label of "heretic".

In the end, it is the poor treatment of the scientific process by scientists and activists, as well as the religion-like enforcement of agreement, that causes me to hold onto my green skepticism. I'm not sure that climate change won't Kill Us All, but I am not convinced by those that do think so.

edit: One final cause of my green skepticism is the fact that so many highly-publicized predictions made by environmentalists in the past, many of whom held PHDs, have been wrong. But more importantly, they have always been wrong in one direction, the direction of overstating the environmental damage done by human activity. The environmentalists of the 1960s foresaw a world that would undergo multiple environmental holocausts by the 1980s, which of course never came to pass.

While the quality of past predictions has no direct bearing on the quality of current predictions, indeed one might even assume that modern predictions are of higher quality given more advanced methods and greater funding, it does make me skeptical of any would-be green Nostradamus, at least until one establishes a good track record of predicting the future.
The thing is: he's not saying "this particular piece of research seems questionable" - he's saying "because this particular piece of research seems questionable, measures based on it and lots of other, better sources should be reconsidered".

It is in fact quite similar in style to holocaust deniers (you brought that up, not I): look through the other side's data carefully, find the weakest parts and make a big show of proving those false and conclude that therefore it must all be lies. (And yes, the holocaust deniers often go one step further and just make stuff up)

In real science, you try to disprove the other side's strongest arguments, not their weakest ones.
"Seems to me he's just searching for arguments to discard the scientific consensus and not trying to further the debate at all."

A frightening, ignorant statement. If this subject wasn't so political then "searching for arguments to discard the scientific debate" would be considered exciting, interesting and daring, not "shut the fuck up, we figured it out already".

Hasn't science been wrong about everything at one time or another? for luminiferous aether, for eugenics, against evolution, against continental plate drift, etc
No, you're reading it the way that piece of FUD is intended to be read.

There's lots of other evidence that the author carefully avoids mentioning. If you're in Europe, go see some glaciers in the Alps while you still can - they won't exist for much longer.
Don't those word at cross purposes? Perhaps with great skill a VC could manage to do both well, but this must be very easy to get wrong, especially because both personalities and technologies are involved, making it hard to just follow some formula.
Cato is a (classic) liberal or libertarian think tank, not a conservative think tank.

Furthermore, arguments against global warming are normally 1) there is a warming trend, but we cannot assert it is anthropomorphic, 2) there is evidence of a warming trend, but due to poorly chosen temperature locations (e.g. cities), it may be overstated, or 3) there is no evidence of CO2 related global warming.

Saying glaciers are receding does not refute any of these hypotheses. I agree with randallsquared: people who do not buy global warming hook-line-and-sinker are likened to holocaust deniers.

Bias notice: I fall into an odd category on the debate. I don't know whether global warming is anthropomorphic, and I don't really care. I believe there are benefits to "clean"(er) energy sources that will lead them to dominate, regardless of environmental views or policy.
There is a need for this kind of brand management service. Remember that youTube video by two Domino's employees? However, the model to deliver this service needs to be thought through further.
Well if you have consensus then there is nothing to debate (and hence nothing to further) unless you have an argument against the consensus.
yeah that's a very good point, if he continues and succeeds, he'll end up being in court all the time fighting claims that the site would have been a huge failure without the other code.

hell you'll most likely be blamed for the death during the trial. ex: you tinkered with the car in order to kill him, to get him out of the company
the age of the founders seem real important in this article. how come ?
Most companies are about making money and most jobs offer very little ownership. They're hiring you to get something done on THEIR project. When we get emotionally invested, I think it is typical to want to see things done our way. If it's some early stage startup where you get to help set the direction, this is different but rare. This doesn't mean you should be apathetic, of course you should care about your work. However, I think everyone should have their own goals and most jobs should just be a means to an end.
I believe the actual problem with LED's is the fact that lowering voltage output to an LED doesn't make the light dim.

I remember reading an article about this somewhere, it was a little over my head but a pretty interesting read if someone has the link available.
$2 billion is chump change as an industry goes. This is about equivalent to what you'd get if there were a "Rap Music Industry". A "Microsoft Industry" would be about six and a half times larger in terms of earnings.

Roofing tile was something I hadn't considered, though. That could be huge.
This post is good on security and bad on OS design. The last 10 years of OS design has in large part been about finding small facets of the kernel that can be exported to userland via apertures and very-low-level programming interfaces.

The answer "no you can't have these privileged instructions" is incomplete; it's missing "but here's the API that safely wraps them."

Problems like this are part of what makes OS security so interesting. Good security isn't about saying, "no, moron, if I give you that capability you'll be able to own up the kernel." In fact, security is almost never about saying "no". When you tell someone "the only way to build this feature is by writing a driver", you're asking them to write kernel code instead of userland code, which makes security worse.
No, it's not a crime, and Microsoft was not convicted. US v. Microsoft was a civil suit.

Please use the correct terms to describe things.
If there is honestly nothing that does what you need, fine.

I'm just saying the NIH-syndrome is a big problem for the FOSS community, and leads to the fracturing of attention. Far too many talk a big talk about how collaboration is the key to FOSS ('a million eyeballs', etc), but then turn around and start their own project in solitude. Sure you can learn massive amounts -- but how much of that time is spent making the same mistakes someone else already made?

I'm comfortable with telling a programmer "NO! Don't write your own," because I know if s/he really wants to, nothing I say will change that. The value of getting them to stop for a minute to think if it's necessary is worth it.

Any competent programmer can write their own X. But it takes a master to help someone else's X succeed.
That's a meaningless question because it ignores important factors that often swamp the generic data.

For example, the product and market matters. If you're starting a fossil-fuels related company, you're probably better off in Wyoming than on Sand Hill Road.
The programmer productivity front
You may be reading what is written correctly.

But what is written is very, very false.
37Signals Valuation Tops $100 Billion After "Bold" VC Investment
I think the problem is that others are telling him that doubting the scientific consensus is how science, academia, and the world should be. Quite contrary, science has improved and expanded beyond what it was 100 years ago simply because everyone doubts and challenges the norm.

Now, I've never seen scientific data to prove that climate change is real (besides it being hotter in Florida in my opinion). I'm not a scientist and I don't actively search for such data.
Because Unix still sucks, and de Icaza is being called a heretic for pointing out the bloody obvious: Microsoft does some things better, and are worthy of emulation.
Was this article written recently? There are hints throughout that it might be a few years old.

Having said that, I think he generally makes good points.

One thing, though: I don't think his examples of bloated applications are indicative of a Unix problem. He tries to claim that these apps aren't reusing much code. But as far as I can tell, every application he lists is also ported to/from non-POSIX OSes (Netscape, Acrobat, Mathematica, Purify, FrameMaker, etc.). Reusing Unix parts wouldn't help them when they have to port to Windows, so yes, they probably do have all their own stuff.
> You'd have to dig a well to get a high enough level of arsenic to poison yourself.

Not so fast. Acute poisoning from above-ground sources may be unlikely, but chronic isn't unknown.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs210/en/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic_contamination_of_ground...
> RMS basically invented Open Source

You didn't just say that!!

What really invented "Open Source" was the arrival of the Internet. There have always been people wanting to share their work freely, the Internet making that possible and cheap. Heck, researches on ARPANET collaborated openly to build the Internet. And the first open-source Unix kernel to run on top of x86 wasn't Gnu or Linux, it was 386BSD.

RMS didn't invent the people's desire to share. People have been doing that long before RMS was born ;)
"Low carbon footprint of production"? For a brick made from by-products of BURNING COAL? Surely you jest.
40-60% of Yahoo's users have an empty cache experience
I saw "lots of evidence" in lots of places, then I saw "there is some evidence" in some places, but I don't recall it going further than that.
This is sad, because it makes the whole subject a matter of belief. Even worse, anyone having a bit dissident opinion is likely to be treated as nay-sayer, heretic and the enemy of the Earth. I don't see that as scientific way to tackle the problem.
The Cato Institute is not participating in the worthy, rigorous, hard-nosed scrutiny that underpins any real science. They are a PR firm disguised as a think tank. They exist to serve the interests of the energy industry.

They are called deniers, and derided alongside Holocaust deniers, because their actions are base and foul. They, and others like them, will cause millions of deaths from environmental upheaval in the 21st Century. Millions of deaths that could have been avoided had we worked together and put aside our political differences.

Climate skeptics are the ones to laud for their bravery in the face of scientific consensus. They are the ones that evaluate every result, every harebrained theory, every scientific paper on climate change, and shoot it down in flames if it doesn't add up right. They are invaluable.

However, unlike the deniers, they accept results that go against what they previously believed. They are quite willing to change their minds if they see good evidence to do so, like any intelligent human adult.

Deniers, though, have no reasons beyond self-interest or madness. They simply deny everything, based on lies, speculation, half-truths, false appeals to common sense, and any more underhanded methods. They don't care, or they delude themselves that they don't care (which is worse) about the fact that if we don't fix the world in time, millions of people (at least) will die early.

The holocaust deniers merely insult the memory of the victims of the worst crimes in modern history.

Climate change deniers will cause millions of early deaths. They are WORSE.
I've also seen too many blog posts trumpeting the amazing ability to do something-or-other in three lines of Ruby -- one or two of which are loading some library that does all the work. Not impressed. It's nice that you can get something done with minimal work, but the emphasis should be on ease of use, not on number of lines.
I would like to outline the basic "traitor" scenario, tell me if i got things right :

1. Miguel de Icaza, after a secret deal with microsoft and novell, starts an OSS implementation of the dot net platform. It has been his goal from the beginning. In fact he always wanted to work at Microsoft, and he decided to become their infiltrated spy, to stop the worst threat Microsoft has ever seen : Linux (ahem, sorry ,i mean GNU/Linux). Some say that's even why he started GNOME in the first place.

2. He gets a lot of contributors, but that's mainly because they're too dumb to see the secret plan he has from the beginning.

3. The mono platform enters a stage in wich it becomes usable, and applications begin to appear and after some time, begin to become integrated into common linux distributions. The fact that Novell is actually developping a major linux distro is a big factor in this.

4. Some very clever OSS users / programmers / developpers, led by their enlightened guru Richard Stallman, finally discover that this is a secret plan to make the whole GNU/Linux stumble. They decide to put aside the quarell about the Linux name, because duty is calling them. They consequently put tremendous effort into alerting people about the menace

5. The evil duo (Microsoft / Novell) and Miguel the menial, are in a very bad position. They never expected anybody to actually SEE through their evil plan. Microsoft then decides to publish a 'promise' not to sue anybody about an implementation of the CLR. The plan is very clever, because mono implements not only the CLR, but other parts of the Microsoft stack. When things will be calmer again, then will be the moment to sue !

... are you guys serious ?

Now i know there are some real risks, some real stakes, maybe even some part of that is true. But common, when i read some contributions, i just wonder how much hollywood movies has affected our brains.
today's Unix sucks less than the Unix of late 2000.

for instance, millions of consumers carry a Unix around in their pocket. if that isn't successful I don't know what is.
Ranking and mapping scientific journals
so you're defending microsoft's actions, then?

were you in the software business circa 1992? quite a few companies who thought they were creating good businesses for themselves were in fact doing market research for microsoft, to mangle something pg said in one of his essays. microsoft's antics managed to retard software innovation for a good long while. i, for one, am glad they are no longer the unstoppable juggernaut they once were.
The "Rap Music Industry" has millions of customers, numerous magazines, radio stations and a TV channel dedicated solely to it. That makes it very large in my book.
As someone recently getting into using Perl, the Guidelines and Tools Slide (#36) was amazingly useful. Its got a whole list of things I've wanted, but didn't think to go out and look for yet. (Primarily tools/books on writing good perl or testing it).
It's hard to be the first to say "I will go on" because there will be someone who will say "how could you?"

When everyone comes together in a wake and pledges to go on AND to help each other, then moving forward is a powerful, bonding, and relationship building exercise that your lost friend would be proud of.

My condolences as well, you are a gifted blogger and I do hope you are able to continue.
Presumably, Godin and his colleagues did their research into similar businesses -- namely, Get Satisfaction -- before starting Brands in Public. And if so, they would have known that some companies were not happy with Get Satisfaction's page design and copy, claiming that it hijacked their brands and confused customers.
Congressional Data is Defective By Design
If you make brick cheap enough the market volume will grow. Currently aluminum siding is used, primarily for cost reasons.
I'm so glad someone made a product like ServerDensity. I hope this means I don't have to ever configure Nagios or Munin or Monit again.
Actually, from what I remember, holocaust deniers tend to make up stuff out of whole cloth, both for their arguments and against (for easier demolishing, see). Maybe they look at actual evidence now, but I haven't paid attention in years.

In any case, I really have no idea whether the data in question was critical to the argument that climate is warming faster than it was earlier (since pretty much everyone accepts that significant global warming has been going on since at least the 1700s; the arguments are in the causes and details), but I just object to the hammering of the "deny", "denial", "denier" refrain.
Some modules still use it but it is mostly marked as deprecated and will be removed in Gnome 3.0.
Ben Franklin on making decisions
Receding glaciers refute the hypothesis that "there is no global warming" - which is what this article is intended to make people believe (successfully so, look at ars' comment). It states no hypothesis of its own, questions the veracity of one set of data, asserts that this data is the only basis for global warming and concludes that all policy concerning global warming is therefore flawed.

All in all, a very nice piece of classic FUD.