skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"In that case, how has the GPL and Linux's "business friendly" license made a difference?"

There are probably more company-sponsored developers contributing to Linux than there are FreeBSD developers. There is a rich ecosystem with companies making money out of support assurance. In the case of FreeBSD, the obvious case is like Juniper: embed and close up. They give back whatever they think is not important because they don't want to spend money maintaining.

"The GPL. The usual "if you don't distribute it, you don't have to GPL it" argument is disingenuous given that all but a few real-world use cases require distribution."

If I contribute something to a GPL project, the copyright is still mine. Nobody but me - and that is the difference that made MySQL possoble - can distribute it in violation of the GPL. Also, the rationale that IBM donates resources to Linux in order to create an advantage to their service organization simply doesn't make sense. All of Linux is open. There are no secret advantages there. The only not patently impossible scenario here is IBM somewhat steering the development of Linux in ways that favour them in the future. But this is a very long shot.

GPL incentives sharing. BSD doesn't. It's not anti-business, but anti-effort-duplication.

And, BTW, I wouldn't be surprised if the Nvidia's binary driver were more related to the bad things that could happen to Windows support for Nvidia GPUs in the future.
Nicholas Wade flails at the philosophy of science
Of course it's ok. It's a free market. There are at least half a dozen different companies I know of producing e-book readers. What would preclude Apple from competing? They don't have a monopoly on publishing or any other conflict of interest. They are quite well known for producing good consumer electronics devices so it does seem like a natural market for them to enter. Amazon isn't exactly a saint either -- the Kindle is a DRM-ed closed platform just like Apple's product would likely be.

As far as Amazon's success goes I'd say they're in good shape to compete with Apple toe-to-toe in digital publishing / e-book readers. Their only limitation may be the inability to offer a richer platform. The Kindle is pretty limited to just an e-book reader with tie-ins to the Amazon store. Apple would likely offer a device with a color screen, full audio/video playback, almost certainly a third party App Store. That might be more appealing to a mainstream audience that wouldn't spend $250 for a device that is exclusively an e-book reader. Amazon could easily adopt Android and beef up the Kindle into more of a general purpose platform. Competition is good.
I think we already discussed that some time ago. Anyways, the biggest reason why you should not pay angels to let you pitch is that you want them to be thinking that if they do not make an investment, they are wasting their time.

You can never force an angel to like you, but if you have an angel that does not get any money from your pitch, it means that the only way he/she will make anything is if he/she invests. So they will be itching to invest with someone. Again, this will not make them invest unless they like you, but at least you know they are looking to give their money to someone.

If you start paying to pitch you may easily get into a situation where the "angels" are not really looking to invest at all.
I've been in Australia and New Zealand for the last 4 weeks or so, and so far the internet experience hasn't been that good compared to the states. Perhaps it's just the hotels, but everywhere we've been so far has been very, very stingy with connect time and bandwidth compared to the U.S.

For instance, I'm paying $35NZ today. According to the TOS, that is for 24 hours of internet usage that might include up to 100MB, if they determine I'm acting "fairly" with my connection.

It's freaking highway robbery is what it is.

Here's hoping you guys get that fiber.

(sorry, just had to get that rant out on the net somewhere!)
Complementos recomendados: Complementos para o Firefox
Actually I'm going to have to agree with Johnny here. Not only is the US government designed to be ineffective by giving more factions power, it certainly has manifested it's intentions in reality. Despite democrats controlling congress and the presidency, has Obama been able to pass his progressive healthcare reforms? Anything much? No, and this shows that the US is the one more capable of incremental reform, if anyhing because opposing factions have equal power to counter each other. China, on the other hand is one party, one entity. They want something done, nobody will stop them. The can suggest seedig rain and the next thing you know the skies are clear. Most likely none of the over 1 billion people are consulted. No opposition, no resistance. Things get done faster, but here's more risk since there's less diversity of opinion.

I think you are disregarding johnny's points and assuming he's a brick wall. Take a minute and make sure that you are not doing to Johnny what you think he is doing to you.
Public Table of Seed Funding Incubators
I have created a Google Docs Spreadsheet with all incubators/accelerators and their characteristics I have found.

Feel free to correct or extend the data!

The table includes Y Combinator, Seedcamp, Springboard, Start@Spark, DreamIt Ventures, TechStars, Summer@Highland, LaunchBox, iVentures10, NextStart, Capital Factory, Shotput Ventures, NYC Seed, Bootup Labs, You be the VC and Obsidian Launch.
Nice stuff. As mentioned at the bottom it is based off a production version by Biergert & Funk (http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/20/biergert-and-funk-qlocktw...) But it is worth noting that an instructable on how to make a lower cost version can also be found here :http://www.instructables.com/id/A-Word-Clock/
What happens when the novelty wears off?
It is a pain to use and understand, even for a techie like me.

When it works, it's magic. And often I don't mind--especially since facebook's implementation of it.

When it doesn't work, I've no freakin idea what is going on. And it really makes me miss the plain ol login/pass.
Ask HN: Who's Hiring... Students? (Again)
Hey, I recently saw the old "Who's Hiring... Students" thread from about two months back, and realized that it's exactly what I would love to know right now. I'm guessing that info from two months ago is slightly outdated by now, so...

Is anyone out there still hiring students? (For part time positions or internships?)

Also, maybe we could have some sort of permanent page for this type of thing? That'd be great, I think.
Tune the keys to different scales on different days. Have it play certain themes on important days and holidays when you step through it in sequence.

Personally I'd like to hear some video game-style level up music whenever I climb to the top.
I don't get it. Isn't the whole point of online shopping to just click and be done with it? This just prolongs the process.
You read me correctly, I don't see why load balancing should be taking place down at the app server level.

Aren't you going to have multiple machines each with their own blessing of unicorns? You're still going to have to use some kind of load balancer in front of independent sockets.
That "legal distinction" says stealing music is punishable by millions in fines, so...please start making sense some time soon. The very legal system you want to overthrow you're now saying justifies claiming one isn't theft.
My opinion of Calacanis is very mixed, but on this I'm 100% with him. I really hope he does follow through. This has the potential to help far more startups than TC50 ever could.
European Shale Natural Gas Extraction is Biggest Energy Innovation of the Decade
Nice. I just dismissed the tuning aspect completely.
Profitable in this context being defined as what?
Not to be snarky but-

you have obviously never used stackoverflow, nor have read any article covering stackoverflow internals.
"Foxes seem well-designed to catch rabbits. Rabbits seem well-designed to evade foxes. Was the Creator having trouble making up Its mind?"

I suppose the author thinks God must be either pro-rabbit or pro-fox? That seems odd to me. Calvin and Hobbes argue a lot--just think of how self-defeating that is. How short-sighted of Bill Watterson to have overlooked that he could have assigned them milder temperments. Why all the villians and heroes in novels? Why all the weapons and defenses in the video games? Why all the contrasting elements in the painting?

The engineer sees nonsense in creating one thing to foil another, but it is no mystery to the artist. Sometimes the conflict is what makes each part what it is, what makes it great. The desired rabbit-fox population equilibrium could be achieved with lower effort, but that presumes the wrong goal. The artist creates for the joy of the thing itself. One can delight in the rabbit because he is fast, and the fox because he is cunning.

It is not the cruelty and conflict of nature that are alien to Christianity; famine and war and lion and sword and boil and rot and death are never far from the heart of that story. What Christianity would find so alien is the idea that life is about personally surviving and avoiding pain and embracing pleasure. That God is some sort of fool or underachiever for creating a jungle instead of a zoo.
I suggested software update because "Apple Software Update" (the Windows program) is required to be installed on Windows Boot Camp partitions, while iTunes is not. Apple likes all-encompassing, "we'll take care of everything" experiences; they wouldn't just go through all the trouble of making it work on the Mac side and then leave off Windows support (thus making the Apple Software Store the first thing you'd install on any Windows computer, in order to pull down all your favorite applications—convenient for them, isn't it?) It would be much harder to convince people to install iTunes in order to install, say, Photoshop, than it would be to convince them to install a single-purpose general-software utility.
But if it is wrong they it would also be a good example, no?
i can relate to that - with logging with openid here in HN. I had to post an "ask hn" to catch attention of pg - who resolved it. I couldn't make head or tail of what was happening and strongly assumed that clickpass was at fault. Then pg said he had to fix some code.
StackOverflow does just use openid. It just happens that yahoo, google, facebook, etc are all openid providers. But SO only accepts openid as a login method. (Hence SE is the same currently, but that will change.)
A number like 500 req/s is irrelevant without an understanding of what the site has to do. For a simple site that does simple database lookups, I'd expect more than that. For a site like GitHub that has to do database lookups and pull large amounts of data from Git repositories, it's an entirely different story. Without knowing the split between cache hits and misses, the number is even more irrelevant. You're arguing in abstracts, whereas I am constrained to actually working with real life. I'd love to see some examples of the type of sites you're running and the solutions you employ wherein 500 req/s of dynamic requests on an 8 core machine are considered "frighteningly bad scaling."
I made a similar rant: http://creativedeletion.com/2008/11/05/wifi-in-sydney-availa...

I was in Sydney but went to the Philippines earlier than planned because I couldn't get internet access in Sydney without paying crazy amounts of money for internet by the hour (or 15 minutes etc.)! And as a "westerner" being in the aussie/kiwi timezones, sometimes you might want to be online when the cafés that have internet are closed. NZ was similar.

In Australia they had a TV commercial advertising how much 2GB traffic a month was. Surreal. Traffic seemed in very short supply. I've been used to unlimited traffic (only limited by speed) via DSL for maybe a decade.

In my experience in Asia, South America and Scandinavia internet via wifi is available many places in hotels and/or cafés, bars etc. without having to pay extra. In Tokyo you want to use ethernet because wifi would limit the bandwidth :-)
apparently one of the angel forums is suing him for this...
http://twitter.com/Jason/status/4745489235
Most reverse proxies do the easy stuff, but all the hard stuff is still on the client side javascript/flash code. It'll probably take you a few hours to hack up one of the existing proxies out there and get "almost" what plurchase has, but you'll soon see that menus won't render in amazon and links just won't work because the link menu system is completely dynamically constructed so most proxies won't take you this far. We have an html rewriter written in javascript on the client side to solve some of those issues. We also have a javascript rewriter written in javascript to proxify the javascript code. If you right-click view-source on one of the proxified frames, you'll see that we go to great lengths to make things work under the cover.

Also, you might notice that you can't ignore all images & static assets, some of the image requests actually modify cookie information so you may need some different level of proxying there -- same goes for css/javascript assets. You'd be surprised what websites do under the cover. Even with all of our technology, there are still some sites that don't function properly and may require some tweaking on our proxy engine. I tested kayak.com yesterday on our proxy and it almost works but there are still some weird issues going on that I'll have to debug further. I mentioned most of these details in a blog post -- had this been the web 1.0 days, proxying might actually be easy, but we wouldn't have the speed of modern javascript interpreters.

I agree with you on some of the ToS stuff that we'd have to potentially work with merchants on. And since we're white-labeling based on domains, we can remove them if they don't want us there, but proxying shopping sites is unlike other sites -- they want customers to buy stuff. Anything that causes a customer to convert better is in their best interest. Large merchants were actually interested in this, but they didn't want partnerships until they saw traction.
Maybe that means it makes more money than it costs.

You know . . . "profitable".
Oh. I, too, had an issue logging in with OpenID here. I finally gave in and reset my password so I could log in with that.
List of Essential Wordpress Plugins For your wordpress blog.
Hacker's Guide to Printing Money in the Stock Market
Adapt or get fed to the lions
(I'm 1/3 of 280 North, btw)

In Cappuccino each "view" object (CPView, CPButton, etc) has a DIV element as it's base, and other elements contained in that (usually just IMG, canvas/VML, or subviews' DIVs). We don't output HTML at all, but rather manipulate the DOM elements at runtime.

This sort of approach definitely makes sense for the kind of highly interactive applications Cappuccino is designed for, but maybe not for more "pagey" websites where you want search engines to be able to index it, etc.
urk - this story keeps coming back to HN.

Ruby isn't the issue here - most of the hardware spend (tiny as it is) went toward master and slave databases. Our database isn't huge, but it isn't small either. The working set doesn't fit in 32 GB of memory - lots of memory and fast disks are critical (even with caching and all that) and that takes 2 non-cheap servers.

As far as the platform goes - list of technologies aside, I wouldn't agree that it is complex. I also wouldn't trade some of these pieces (Sphinx and HAProxy, in particular) for anything.

I worked on Java web apps for 8 years before starting Ravelry and I definitely don't regret choosing Ruby for this project :) Did I have to buy 1 more server than I would have had to with Java? Yeah, I think so. ...but the trade-off was definitely worth it.
He could easily concentrate on Mahalo and and not reach back and motivate the people working on startups.

Or maybe he thinks Mahalo is not what it's cracked up to be and he is grooming himself to become an industry guru/consultant/visionary?
Does anyone know what license is used for the stackoverflow code and where/if it's currently available? From reading the article is sounds like Jeff and company are making the software available to the public in some form. I'd really like to learn more about this.
I love this: "Evolution has no foresight, it is simply the frozen history of which organisms did in fact reproduce."
Getting Hume Wrong
Trust your team, not the crowds, when it comes to risk
Esr wants to build a new Forge
Having attended a 2004 lecture in which Jack Horner told us that dinosaurs were probably all covered in feathers I find that all and any new dinosaur discoveries must be taken with a grain of salt. Though scientists have been studying dinosaurs for 100 years or so, it seems increasingly likely they've barely scratched the surface of really knowing what that era was like.
http://stackexchange.com/
This link is locking up Safari before it even loads. Can't even get the menu bar to activate. Works fine in Firefox. Anyone else experiencing this?
i often wish i could stream books. if the kindle allowed me to check out from a digital library and return books, even with a very low monthly fee or very low price per book, that would be sweeeeeet.
Obama got the prize for the simple fact that he is not bush. His doctrine is one of engagement and diplomacy. The people in Oslo clearly stated that they meant for the prize to make his doctrine permeate the status quo. I agree that it's a bit too early for him to get it but the prize was clearly political.
Following the author's own advice I have made a Mac OS X dashboard widget version and made it freely available:

http://experimentgarden.blogspot.com/2009/10/dashboard-text-...
Anyone has numbers on how much bandwidth (a range..) it takes to stream a movie in close-to-DVD quality?

I don't have personal experience with streaming from Netflix (I'm in Canada), so I'm not sure how they do it. But back of the envelope, I would assume that with a modern codec (f.ex. h.264) you could compress the average 2-hour movie to about 1.5 gig without losing too much quality. That's about 750 megs/hour, or about 210k/s. Certainly doable.

But if you want HD that's another story...
Works fine in Safari 4.0.3 on OSX 10.6.1.
Did you stop reading after a couple of paragraphs? The author is an atheist, and uses the supernatural as metaphor to introduce his subject. He states quite clearly that he believes that evolution by natural selection is quite sufficient (even necessary) to explain what we can observe and that no god or gods are necessary.
5mbps, encoded at 720p, with a decent h264 decoder will far exceed DVD quality with audio and video. Apple TV is a good example of this.

10mbps will approach blu-ray.
This break the economic model for books. It works with libraries because of limited quantity.

This could work if we had a fixed number of digital library books per a zip code.
CSS history hack used to ban torrent users
When you're talking about business, sometimes it's appropriate to talk in business-speak.

It is true, though - with innovation outpacing business much of the time, there is truth to that. The landscapes of tech shift daily, and I don't see many VCs with their fingers on the pulse of those shifts. Some, but not many.
It's really impressed on me the degree that the U.S. is interconnected. For instance, when ordering a pizza, I went online looking for shops. Wrong answer. Shops were found in the yellow pages. Only in Sydney did I see online ordering available, and it was from an American Company (Pizza Hut) In New Zealand in some places if you want internet you pay for it in 15-minute/5MB increments! Holy restricted-internet, Batman.

Because of that, the things we take for granted back in the states are a major pain here. For instance, we're using FlipCams on our vacation, creating movies to upload. But forget about uploading movies over 100MB unless you want to pay lots of money. We have Carbonite to backup our hard drives while we do other things -- but that can be heavily bandwidth intensive as well. On Saturday nights I like to use video chatrooms, but forget about that too. Without knowing it, we're easily consuming hundreds of MB (and perhaps more) back in the states.

I have satellite at home and regularly complain about the restrictions on it. It just goes to show that until everybody gets fiber to the NIC, we're still going to be sucking wind as far as the possibilities for applications go.

Disclaimer: I only have a very limited experience, so I might be way off-base in my analysis.
U.S. to Look Into At&T Complaint Against Google
CGIProxy has full javascript support.

It also handles cookies and can dynamically determine whether or not it should proxify images and CSS assets.

CGIProxy also handles flash.

In fact, CGIProxy can fully proxify an SSL-encrypted GMail session out-of-the-box.

CGIProxy is _very_ mature technology. Take a look at the source code -- it handles 100's of special-cases.

Some of the special-cases that CGIProxy handles are truly bizarre. Reading through the CGIProxy source code is actually pretty fascinating.

This brings up an interesting point. If you're interviewing a software engineering candidate, ask them what their favorite language is. Next, ask them to write a simple HTTP server in that language. Finally, ask them to write a reverse HTTP proxy that works with the server they just wrote. This is a surprisingly effective way of separating the wheat from the chaff. Most people with CS degrees are completely incapable of doing this.
I've never seen a social lizard, and they've had 65 million years longer to evolve than dinosaurs.
Sharing queues wins. It's as simple as that.

It's a general result in queue theory that you want one global queue as early as possible in the system. This is because requests don't take exactly the average service time to clear backends: it's a distribution. The more workers that can pull from a queue, the less the worst case service times affect the average service time.

One queue per worker with no global queue is the worst configuration and should be avoided if at all possible. Anyone who's run large reverse proxy installs knows this pain well.

The ideal system would be for the balancer machine(s) to hold the requests, and for backends to pull them in a sort of ping/pong fashion. I gather fuzed runs in a pattern like this, though I've not used it.

Telcom folks have analyzed this stuff in detail for the better part of a century. There's a lot of theory out there and it's surprisingly practical and applicable to real world web applications.
Obama, Peace Prizes, and Reciprocity
Cool !! Not bad !
Have you tried contacting the Passenger developers about this? I won't be surprised if they come out with a fix for this.