skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At the moment, no examples of start ups which started as closed source and went open, come to my mind.

However, there are a few open source startups out there which started open from the beginning, such as Drupal or WordPress. You could also have a look at NewsBlur which got some traction after Google shut down Reader.

Whether or not being successful depends on a few things:

First, will open sourcing really make the product better? From my experience people tend to overestimate the capabilities of the open source community. This community does not translate to "legion of free developers at your disposal" but require an proactive engagement and community management. Are you well prepared for that?

Second, the nature of the product and the audience: If you're selling server software, for example, such like RedHat, there will be those "private" and "small" users which take your product and use it on their own. But there are also corporate users who will buy SLAs and first and foremost want someone to blame for things that are not working. Second, there are products who benefit from centralization. NewsBlur for example may less valuable for individuals if it would not provide a "hosted service". The same goes for Facebook. Their asset is more the user base than the technology (even if that's, of course, also a huge stack).

Third, what is your "open source strategy". There are companies like Pentaho or Alfresco which offer an "open core" and sell additional features for that. I would consider that more as closed than as open source, in some way it is a bit like a "demo version".

I would love to hear what you've build so far, because open source in a commercial environment is a topic of interest for me.
(Full disclosure: I'm not part of our talent coordination / hiring efforts, everything is anecdotal here)

A predominant amount of the applicants we see (we, as in, the people who are told that there's a phone screen or interview to be done) are male. It feels, strictly from my limited experience, that a big chunk of the problem is finding qualified female applicants.

I'm not sure if it's a lack of female applicants period, or a lack of qualified ones. This also goes back to me asking for real-world experience, because I'm not even sure where to best focus my donations / efforts.
We put it back. The real problem here is that "neovim" doesn't show in the domain, which is part of the title row. "github.com" is far too generic to be meaningful. We may experiment with making the domain say, e.g., "github.com/neovim" for github.com and one or two other popular sites.
Please explain this reasoning? Do you have any direct evidence this would be the case, in a general sense and not just personally? Income taxes in the US were the highest they've ever been in the 50s, 60s, and 70s and those were some of the most productive decades in this country's history.
They were not that conventional. The first Lisp Machines were using micro-coded processors with special instruction sets tailored for compiled and interpreted Lisp.

* tagged architecture

* stack-oriented architecture with large stack buffers

* hardware assisted GC

* support for generic Lisp operators. For example a simple + operator.

* support for basic Lisp data structures like cons cells

The result is that Lisp programs compile to very compact machine code.
You know what's really funny? When someone gets on the Internet and makes a big claim without providing any source evidence. Maybe you're telling the truth, maybe you're simply offering an opinion. The rest of us have no idea. The country was in a deep recession so it is possible there were cuts.
There is an entire movement about open companies, among them

https://assembly.com/

https://gratipay.com/

https://www.balancedpayments.com/
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I find the premise depressing, and maintain that this doesn't happen in hard sciences and engineering except anecdotically, and also know of researchers in biomed who are irreproachable and would find the gross generalization taken as far as here simply untrue. It's not that the research activity is perfect, but serious debate needs to be more sophisticated than 'most restuls are false'.
Without any jail time, what's the disincentive? A smart scheme would have a bunch of funds paid out to numerous early, repeat investors, where each one is secretly the ponzi creator but is made to look like a normal investor. Meanwhile, the creator transparently takes a small fraction of the bitcoin as profit, knowing that it will be found and forfeit later. After the fines accumulate give up the transparent amount, declare bankruptcy, and enjoy the secret horde of hidden, untraceable bitcoin.
It seems like this article is about Uber, not the sharing economy as whole. We don't have enough data to say if a "sharing" economy is viable or ethical. Companies skirting around laws and exploiting their employees (or whatever they choose to call them) such as Uber don't reflect well on this, though.
Merkle tree
according to NOAA http://www.noaa.gov/ocean.html 71% of the earth is Ocean leaving only 29% land. So the goal is for 14.5% of the earth to be set aside for Wildlife? That is a terrible title for an article. 14.5% != 50%
There are a shitton of companies that are open source and don't succeed. Do what you're comfortable with. Are you more excited to nuture and manage a community rather than do marketing stuff?

Also, if you've stolen customers, and your marketing is non existent, then maybe you should just fix your marketing and not radically change your business model.
Giant Bug
> Already we've reached a tipping point with things like mobile computing and social media where there are no big breakthroughs waiting around the corner.

That's probably what thousands of people said about pots of water boiling over fires before the industrial revolution. How do you know what's around the corner?
Even if an asset price decreases on the long term, you could still make a hefty profit by buying and selling at exactly the right times.
> a world with just farms and cities and the animals that can survive within is not going to bode well for us or any other species

In what way?

The main threat is disease if we shift to being large aggregations of essentially the same animals. We've run in to this problem before, with bananas as a particular case. However, we already know the solution to that. The answer is that you preserve several cultivars of the species, and intermingle them. We already see this kind of behavior with pets, gardens, zoos, etc. I fail to see why you think we're likely to end up with anything but more of the same kinds of pruning-but-not-completely-destroying-families behavior.

I'm also failing to see why you think we need thousands of kinds of lizards that are all basically the same, rather than a few hundred, and why such a bottle neck is either unnatural (hint: we've hit smaller choke points before) or why it would be particularly dangerous.

Ed: A key word.
Reddit started out proprietary, and then became open source. Of course, their community is necessary for a site of that type to succeed.
>>get on something like Tinder and start getting pussy again just for your self esteem and self worth.

I appreciate you helping here but i would disagree with this statement. This could be a recipe for disaster and lot of mind fuck. Never ever base your self esteem and self worth on how much sex you are getting and from what type of women.
It's more than a coincidence. The company's original name, SEOMoz, was inspired by projects like DMOZ [1], an "open" web directory that started under the mozilla.org umbrella.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ
> Uber is just capitalism, in its most naked form.

Considering that the workers own the means of production, this is a curious thing to say.
>Open sourcing will make the product better, will make it well known and might even speed up our growth.

Open source by itself won't do any of those things.

The question is, what advantages would being open source give you over remaining closed source? Whether it is open or closed, you still have to do the promotion to make it well known. If you go open source, does that automatically mean you will open the development process as well, and if so, you'll have to consider the process by which you accept changes into your product, IE: will there be an open level and then a supported "commercial" one, for example? how will you build a team of community supporters?

Yes, there are obviously examples of open-source success in the world, but it isn't clear from your posting whether there is a strategic advantage or not.
Larry Ellison has not left the building. For Oracle's sake, maybe he should
SaaS is Sexy, and I Want a Piece
Virtual Reality: A Place for Us All
Building Quality into Your Projects
What I Learned Pitching to 13 Investors at the Same Time
I believe this team was interviewed on Debug.

http://www.imore.com/debug-44-brianna-wu-amanda-warner-and-r...
So You Want to Steal a Frigate?
>For what?

Money.

I think that you just described the tragedy of the commons.[1] Individuals acting in their own self-interest contrary to everyone's long-term best interests by depleting common resources.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
I'm not sure I follow. It sounds like you're suggesting that for any costly responsibility placed on employers, there will always be a laborer willing to work without it. Ok, sure. There are also surely families who would be willing to send their children to work in a mine. But that doesn't happen anymore.

What am I missing about your argument?
Leadership Lessons for Founders - Infographic
If you want to go the route of improving marketing, I'd suggest https://training.kalzumeus.com/ and associated links as a first cut.

That may not totally apply and you may be in a situation where you could easily justify hiring, depending on the income of the business, but it'll start you down what's probably a much better path than you're on now.

I know it's frustrating to ask how to do X and get told about how to do Y. However, I will say this: You describe some problems, then ask if open sourcing will work, and to be honest, I honestly have no idea why you think that problems connects with that solution. The average open source project crawls in a corner and dies. I think you'd be trading some admittedly long odds for some much longer ones.
#4 is a really great idea, and something I'll have to try and research. #1 - #3 are very good, too, but #4 hits a chord with me for some reason.
Yes, that should be pointed out. But I don't know if that situation is different enough to make those companies irrelevant.
Yep - and I agree that's a very different scenario. They didn't (necessarily) open-source the product because they thought that would be the game changer, they saw a market connected to the project and looked at how to fulfill that market's needs.
That's an insightful way of looking at it. Reagan was likely the crest of a wave rather than the start of a new one.
And Thiel makes it abundantly clear that competition is not the end goal as most markets are not static.

So essentially Thiel isn't advocating "pure" capitalism, because using any methodology as a catch-all is bad practice.
Let me replace the issue in its context. In the article it is written that the current extinction is the only one that is due to a singular species. I do believe this is pretty much wrong considering how likely it is that the biggest paleontological extinction event was due to an archaean genus (not a species, but pretty damn close).

If someone states that 2+2 = 5, should I shut up and not state that 2+2 = 4 in case some people give this fact some bad moral interpretation?
What kind of product is it? If this is a SaaS application, I would not recommend open sourcing it.

If you are shipping software that runs on client hardware (e.g. a database) it might make sense.
"In the case that we have two mirrored disks and accept the performance penalty of the controller reading both, the controller will be able to detect differences, but has no way to determine which copy is the correct copy."

If you 'seed' the checksum algorithm for a block with the block number being written, a subsequent read of a different block that produces the same data will have a checksum failure. That would make it possible to choose which block has the right data.

So, if you are willing to eat the performance, you can detect single misdirected writes.
Related (but primitive): https://github.com/mcrio/tiptip
Implementations will differ for "elastic" software defined load balancing so understand this is not a definitive statement applicable to all cloud service providers. In the case of AWS a default ELB set to serve one zone might have one IP. If it is configured to serve to 3 zones it may then have 3 IP addresses. These are minimums and they do change randomly so AWS warns you not o set A Records to IPs of those.

This is not hardware. This is software defined networking which you should apply one of the rules of good cloud design which is to expect failure - and this is a feature - IPs change. Deal with it. ;)

Further we have the TTL issue noted and an very interesting thing happens there. If you use a default of say 300 or more seconds for your FQDN in the DNS record which has even a CNAME to an ELB set of FQDNs (if multiple ELBs for example) then your going to have a condition at some times where that 300 seconds is still ticking down when the say 60 second TTL for the ELB's fqdn expires and or the ELB IP itself has changed. In that time span your resolved IP may be assigned to another ELB and traffic going to your platform hits some other platform. So perhaps at the first 1 second mark of your 300 second TTL start the AWS ELB TTL has expired and perhaps is assigned to nothing - your traffic gets failure to connect - then the IP is assigned to some other FQDN and your traffic hits some other ELB. (Your church patrons now get porn perhaps.) The flip side is true and interesting to watch in logs.

How to take advantage of this feature? Oh that is fun. Marketing? Route all such identifiable traffic to good bad or ugly ends?

This situation should be expected.
Thanks for the suggestion - I might give it a try and see how it fits.
Open sourcing doesn't necessarily mean the product will get better. There are often "fights" in the open source community, and you could spend a lot of time discussing what features to add or not add instead of implementing them. (This of course all depends upon the method in which you open source the project/product.)

If you like developing and dislike marketing, use some of that $50K and hire a marketer. You don't necessarily need lots of money to market, it just makes it easier. For example, you probably missed a good free marketing opportunity by not mentioning the name of your company or your site in this post. Try and find someone to help you become a bit more clever and tactical in your marketing efforts, and it will probably pay off much better than open sourcing. My $0.02...
Go Green by Going Digital and Build a Better Future for All
You judge a merger by how the combination will unlock new value. Just because the business models are similar doesn't necessarily mean it's a good acquisition. I don't see how BuzzFeed can benefit with Yahoo other than perhaps accessing its ad sales network?
Well they certainly can do that now, I just think that that's not what they were planning on doing originally and with all the other dev problems they ran into, they couldn't pivot fast enough to the new data source.

I think they're just facing a lot of growing pains in trying to become a Big Company in an industry (SEO) that is getting rocked year by year by Google. That's why they're trying to change to "inbound marketing" with a more balanced focused on social, seo, etc. I don't think they're necessarily wrong for doing that, I just don't think the market they're targeting is big enough personally.

The thing about the recent Google updates for Analytics and Penguin/Panda is that it knocked a ton of beginner or amateur SEOs out of the park. Basically the guys who dabbled in Grey Hat, thought Black Hat was cool but didn't know how to do it right, and fed on as much White Hat stuff as they could to "protect" themselves from the big G. When Google rocked all of their sites, most of them just gave up - I saw this directly in my subscriber numbers after a big penguin update - leaving the pure White Hat guys and the Black Hats.

The Black Hats don't give two shits about Moz and most openly deride them because they either build their own tools or plain just don't care. So that really just leaves the White Hats, which is a tough road to follow when you ultimately have no control over the algorithm.
How about Netscape? I think they've been reasonably successful with open source development and foundation governance.
I was intrigued by the fact that it's inspired by Self, Lisp and Forth. It seems like a weird mixture of languages all of which are generally considered well designed.
I'm glad I read this despite the link title, which is appropriately based on the article's sub-title (The title, "Choose Your Character", is even less descriptive). The article hits on some of the startup and indie gamedev work-life balance issues that affect everyone and some unique to women.
Great article; I've always been fascinated by Timbuktu and hope to visit it one day. Here's to hoping it regains its political, economic and social balance soon, so that more organized attention can be directed at staving off the encroaching desert.
Awesome stuff you guys are doing!

Aren't there legal restrictions on flying UAVs for commercial use right now?
I've thought about this on and off, and one day I arrived at this: The only technological progress that truly matters to me are medical ones.
If people could live and not get sick, and not die until they're 90, then I would be fine living with 1970's era tech, or whatever year's era tech. Then all we'd need would be to have less violent, more egalitarian societies, à la Scandinavia.
Flying cars, faster+cheaper computers, better internet be dammned. (or they could go on being improved, but I wouldn't care if not)

P.S. I never get the flying car thing, since we have helicopters.
It depends on what is being scanned. Say you have a perfectly formatted image, directly taken from a scanner, it's a pretty darn quick process.

But from my experience, what adds to the slowness is pre-processing the image to make it suitable for OCR, especially tesseract. I still haven't found the magic combination of filters because every image is different, especially if your source them from users camera phones.
I'm actually curious, why LCD displays? Was it thought to be incredibly difficult to achieve before?
Alibaba's IPO by the Numbers: Bigger Than Google, Facebook, and Twitter Combined
Well, good content is always important for a variety of reasons. Links are and will always be a major factor for why a site ranks. Technical SEO is what I recommend to most people...basically doing site audits to make sure you don't have any duplicate content, all your links work, proper content siloing, page speed is good, etc.

You can also use tools like SEMRush to still kind of find out where sites are ranking but obviously their data can only be so good as they're just crawling Google SERPs. But it's the best we've got now unfortunately.
I have been told that TI have given formal permission to redistribute their code, I will chase up the person who got hold of it to get it properly labelled.

The LMI stuff is more interesting to me as it is complete, I'm still a fair bit of work away from being able to build it though. I have spoken with RG about it but we didn't discuss the licence.
Poll: What type of phone do you use?
Just wondering what type of phone do HN users use?
Nokia Symbian
I do not agree with his opinions on the matter.

His great example of a monopoly is Google, however Google doesn't have the kind of monopoly that other companies have. It's easy for people to switch search engines and if Google lets people down, it leaves room for competition, therefore they have to continually innovate, otherwise a competitor can pop up that will do to them what they did to AltaVista or Yahoo. It's easy to switch emails, especially webmail, therefore they had to produce the best webmail experience on the market and had to keep adding value add-ons. It's easy to switch phones and it's easy for phone makers to pull the rug under Google's feet, therefore they had to produce a reasonable alternative to iOS to ensure their survival.

I don't really know what he refers to when he says "perfect competition", but I wouldn't describe air-lines as being in a perfect competitions. The planes I fly on are refurbished planes built 20 years ago, with no room for my feet, extremely shitty service, the airport experience is extremely shitty and to top it off the tickets are still way too expensive if you don't buy with months in advance. That's not competition, that's an oligopoly.

Google hasn't showed monopolistic behavior until they started to deeply integrate their products with each other, creating their lock-in effect. And I remember other companies that did so, most notably Microsoft and it wasn't good for anybody, not even Microsoft.
A library to overcomplicate love (have a look at issue#1)
That's at today's bitcoin prices, though. The scheme operated in 2011-2012, when bitcoin prices ranged between 30 cents and 30 dollars.
On Golf balls, pebbles, sand and beer
I don't think giving people useless jobs is superior to letting more efficient tech replace them. Instead of just wasting a potential efficiency gain, the government could use a part of the gains to either give the resources to workers directly or spend on training and education. Anyway, there are plently of useful things you could do with workers besides just wasting the efficiency gain.
Enterprise is changing and people are getting fired for buying IBM.

http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/outsourcing/3275270/astr...
As others stated, binary package management is state-of-the-art now, thanks to the `pkg` command (aka the pkgng system). In fact I can never remember all the sub commands for apt+dpkg but pkg is a dream by comparison. I particularly like `pkg audit` - https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/pkgng-intro.html#pkgng-...

Btw, I would completely disagree that the sysadmin side is or was behind Debian. FreeBSD is way easier to sysadmin than most Linux, even without pkg.
Here is the game in question: http://www.revolution60.com/

The feedback in the article was spot on. The characters look decidedly anorexic.
Letting people artificially keep jobs that could be automated cheaper and safer is not giving the people a job.

It is giving the people daycare. I do not relish the thought of a kindergarten society.

Note: I have nothing against spending on unemployed people (education etc) or welfare spending in other ways, I just don't like keep-busy kinds of activities.
I'm curious as to how they dealt with that price evaluation.. Is this the first Bitcoin related SEC case?
Fancy running into you here!
This is CloudFlare's entire core business model. CloudFlare is just a reverse proxy+cache. The original web server is still run by whatever company is using their services.

Fixed: "If they're using CloudFlare and they're a large [anything], we just need to find the location of the [origin webserver]."

This hasn't been a problem for any of their customers that do this so far (hint: all of them), adding a keyserver is no different.