skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
* Being the de-facto expert in your product

For some things this may work, but if someone's going to be investing 6-7 figure consulting contracts, and the code is open and free, they'll eventually replace you with someone else in-house.

* Training

Isn't a recurring or ongoing stream.

* Tech support

If you design your product/service well enough, people probably won't need much hand-holding. Or... someone else will take the code and make a better version that doesn't need the hand-holding, and win your potential customers away.

* Books

Again... not really recurring.

Yes, there's ways to make money, but none of these are terribly good business models. Books? Entire massive companies based around books are folding or shrinking. Suggesting that someone's business model be based on books is... weird.

And when the code is open, you'll face more potential competition than if the code was closed.

ACK - I missed your 'milk' phrase. 'Milking money' just doesn't scream 'solid business model' - it screams out "petty vendor who will nickel and dime me to death".
I recently interviewed with an SF consulting company (a sort of network/placement firm), which purports to offer only the most senior devs to the hottest companies. The process includes a timed puzzle-solving test.

Ironically, fresh CS grads are more likely to do better on such a test because senior devs have filled their minds with ways of solving real problems and building complex living systems that actual humans use. They know that the once or twice a year they need to solve such a problem, they will likely find it well-solved in a library or site like this one. If not, they know that the boss will not be holding a stop watch over them -- she measures productivity in person-months, not person-minutes.

Even more ironically, this particular test also rewards premature optimization by stress testing your solutions for micro-optimization.
According to Amazons top 20 best selling laptops, Chromebooks do quite well. A Chromebook is in the second position and Chromebooks take up 6 spots in this list.

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Laptop-Comput...
The landmine in labeling someone ‘black’
Or could close their "beta" you were depending on without notice, could lose your data, could leak it, could give unexplainable corrupt results and leave you looking like a fraud, etc.

There are a lot of opportunities to trade off short term ease for tail risk, and thats a bit hazardous. RMS would probably argue that while you should have the freedom to do such a thing, you really shouldn't both because of the harms to you not being justified if you don't overemphasize the near term, and also because of systemic effects like losing solidarity with other people who would prefer to make another decision().

[e.g. many people who choose to run their own small mail filters find them regularly invisibly black holded by major mail services due to overactive spamfiltering.]
FBI Warned Year Ago of Impending Malware Attacks But Didn’t Share Info with Sony
Wait... You are not running Elementary on production servers are you???
CS Internship Recruiting Guide
Stallman got $240k from MacArthur in 1990. Pretty sure he's burned through that by now. The Takeda award in 2001 was split three ways so his take was at most $300k.
I agree with everything you mentioned. I have tried to establish some testing procedures in the labs I have been in the past, where even backing up data was a myth, with zero success. With the requirement to compile code in four different OSs, testing and some automated procedure was the key, but not one person came on board.

Now moving to a diagnostic setting, and working by myself, testing and documentation have been the main goals to me. And now, every single piece of third-party software has to be exhaustively validated in every aspect before being put into production mode.

"I'd love to see science funding agencies spend a couple million to fund reasonably sized groups of 5-10 programmers/scientists to produce code over ~3 year funding cycles. Just to make sure that signals don't get crossed, these groups should be told not to spend a single minute of their time on publishing to journals. Dissemination is limited to short talks and training workshops. Continued funding would also focus more heavily on user surveys than third-party citations."

On the side of software/funding, your ideas are spot on. I think it is about time to have professional and steady funding to keep software working and available. I haven't published app notes or the like in the past, most of the software I worked on were never published, but I see important applications where the code is not open source, there's no testing and no updates for years. We need to move from the on-the-clock science to some model that would allow scientific software to be properly maintained.

Maybe if we treated scientific software like we treat "regular IT", might be the key.
At Facebook, Boss Is a Dirty Word
Former IT salesman: 'In part I blame the American mindset that took hold'
Hey guys, I wrote a guide to help freshmen and sophomores in CS to get an internship. I'd really love any feedback you guys have.
> I'm sorry you aren't imaginative enough...

No need to be condescending. I've actually been researching this a fair bit lately for a new project.

What I found was that even though people parrot the revenue models you list above, the reality is that it is far more risky to go open than to "control the supply".

The margins on services (consulting, training, support etc..) are much lower than selling the code.

Here is one example I came across showing how it's no slam-dunk:
http://www.locomotivecms.com/articles/we-tried-to-solve-the-...
I love a good plugin as much as the next guy but that is just unnecessary. All this "plugin" does is source an existing plugin that ships with vim and wraps around it. Might as well do that:

function nan {
nvim \
-c "source \$VIMRUNTIME/ftplugin/man.vim" \
-c "Man $*" \
-c "set number relativenumber readonly|only" \
}

My method even works with neovim! And you don't need to edit your .vimrc/.nvimrc nor does it force any settings on you.

I should put that on my CV.
Anybody can do what you are mentioning. Competition is fierce and training and tech support aren't scalable for a small shop.

You also forgot to mention the culture behind many Foss projects: profit is seen as evil and your project will get forked, the second you try to turn a profit.

Foss users expect free support, bug fixing, and software. Part of the entitled generation of internet users.

If you want to make a living, proprietary services all the way.
@kazuho any examples of setting up filters or handlers via config?
hey, it should play all formats supported by Clappr: http://clappr.io
Thailand’s Government Claims It Can Monitor the Country’s 30M Line Users
You joke, but a fellow PhD student on exchange from Pakistan mentioned that one successful professor in his university (having published ~ 400 papers on fluid mechanics) would refuse to take on married PhD students, because their wives would limit their working hours too much.
It looks very interesting.

I just want to mention "Fishertechnik" as another alternative to Lego. Not sure how common it is in the US, but it seems to be available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_10/191-8762533-9514...

As a kid I enjoyed it much more than Lego. It is more about gears and motors, and back then there were also specialized kits about electronics, pneumatics and robotics.
> No need to be condescending.

I disagree because this is HN
Red Hat, by the way, deliberately obscured their kernel code in order to stop Oracle from simply providing support for Red Hat code. Probably the correct business move, but also probably against the spirit of FOSS.

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Controversy-surrounds...
Roadster 3.0
I guess it's hard to change, even after it becomes clear the old way doesn't work.

http://qz.com/96206/google-admits-those-infamous-brainteaser...
The syntax is rather reminiscent of jQuery... and just like how that has created jQuery developers who know next to no JavaScript, I could envision many Cello developers who know almost no C which given the characteristics of the language would probably be an even bigger problem. It's good that they have a disclaimer saying that this isn't for those who don't already know C.

I think it's more like a framework than a library, based solely on the principle that it basically encourages a completely different syntax and code style that someone else would have to learn in addition to C in order to work with code written using it.
It is quite fascinating that the localized Excel function names do not have some kind of internal reference/ID so a spreadsheet's language could simply be set by the user.
I agree and don't agree. This is what I think too if you look at libs like Cello, this is almost an attempt to write a new language on top of C, in some way. It is an interesting experiment, but it can only end writing a compiler IMHO, turning what is sugar here into a real grammar emitting efficient code and so forth.

But, C can be improved a lot without violating its nature with better libs. Libc is very unreasonable on what it offers. It should have data structures, dynamic strings, a few buffers that are easy to consume both sides, and so forth. This is what people keep reimplementing again and again and again.
At a minimum you should know what you're getting into.

Imagine that that server is controlled by your worst enemy.

Still okay with using it? If so thats good evidence that you can just go ahead. If not, ... well, it gets harder because how do you know your worst enemy doesn't or won't gain control of it? (What? your worst enemy is the neighbour's chihuahua and Amazon doesn't hire dogs?)

WRT the costs there, I'm not sure that really follows. At least on the high end EC2 is phenomenally expensive if your load is predictable, it's interesting when you can't predict it. The large high cpu instances basically pay for the hardware in a couple months worth of use. Small instances are low performing to the point that a $35 quad core arm or $50 atom device is competitive. Surely there are cases where EC2 is cheaper, but "not computing at all" sounds like an exaggeration.
Should churches (or temples, mosques, synagogues, etc.) remain tax-exempt?
Two companies that take from the community to save money and then don't give back anything even remotely related to their business model.
I've long suspected that A/B products "confidence" stats are intentionally bad. I see far too many egregious declarations of "wins" in VWO. Even if they temper it by saying "you should wait a full seven days", I still think they do a large disservice by not forcing larger sample sizes before steering you in any direction. Those tools make it very easy to run tests and assuming any of their users are sophisticated enough to make their own statistical conclusions is such an obvious mistake that they have to be aware of it.

The conversion optimization consulting companies I've seen aren't much better. They have no problem reporting "increased" revenue and rates well before there is enough data to support that. I'm calling these types of tests A/B Dog and Pony shows. It's easy to report these gains up, get some short-term love from your boss or client, and hope the chickens never come home to roost or things are forgotten before they do.

There was a blog post on Unbounce last week talking about a "successful" A/B test where the combined conversions of A and B over the testing period was 12. This is the kind of information a company specializing in split testing landing pages is providing. The article was since taken down, but it's pretty clear that a large subset of conversion rate folks and the products used for conversion rate optimizations have little interest in dealing with legitimate results.

Spend some time reading A/B testing article on Inbound.org or GrowthHackers. I'll call them mostly a 50/50 mix of articles saying why your A/B testing results suck and don't stick and articles bragging about A/B testing results that aren't statistically valid.
Tizen TV no substitute for Samsung's long-awaited answer to Android
I don't agree with many of Stallman's positions and I think that people should be free to create and profit from proprietary software if they want, but let's try to be rigorous.

I don't think Stallman has tenure (or any position) at MIT. Wikipedia says simply: "In February 1984, Stallman quit his job at MIT to work full-time on the GNU project, which he had announced in September 1983."

The Takeda foundation award was about $250K:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2001-12/msg00002....

The MacArthur fellowship was awarded in 1990, about 6 years after Stallman decided to work full time as a free software activist. I don't think it's fair to claim that he would behave any differently without these awards.
How can you access Python and Perl libraries?

However you feel about the JVM, it has led to adoption of Clojure, meaning if you're in a big city you have a chance of finding a job doing it. Not many jobs exist where you can use Scheme as your primary language.

But the main reason I wouldn't go back to Scheme is that it doesn't have a rich array of immutable data structures built in. Too quickly the implementations I've seen capitulate to mutation, which makes code harder to reason about, harder to parallelise, and just less fun to write IMO.

I'm looking forward to Emacs implementing Guile, as Elisp is yucky. But realistically that's not going to happen very soon.
The word "improper" seems to be pushed by the intelligence agencies here. The CIA said the same about its spying and hacking of the Intelligence Committee's computers:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/07/31/cia_spying...

It's to "control the message" so people don't start calling it "illegal" in their headlines. They find it better to send the press release themselves to the media, with the words they choose, even if they have to admit to at least some of the wrongdoing.
> they'll eventually replace you with someone else in-house

Yeah, that's why you don't put all your eggs in the same basket :)

> ACK - I missed your 'milk' phrase. 'Milking money' just doesn't scream 'solid business model' - it screams out "petty vendor who will nickel and dime me to death".

I view business as inherently evil and selfish. I am choosing to engage in business because I don't care about being good.
Meet 'Vound' – one of our latest featured apps
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Using Python as a scientist
Why Oakland's a Tech Start-up Game Changer
I think the correct quote is "If a Hungarian passes through a revolving door right after you he will come out before you". Many fellow Hungarians keep bringing this up because they think that it's a positive thing expressing how clever Hungarians are while in reality this is not exactly intended to flatter anyone. :)
> Anybody can do what you are mentioning.

Yes, that's the point of free software. Everyone can.

> Competition is fierce and training and tech support aren't scalable for a small shop.

I think you're underestimating the degree to which most of the world outside of IT (and including much of the world inside IT) is too lazy to figure it out and would rather pay money for a black box that solves their problems.

> Foss users expect free support, bug fixing, and software. Part of the entitled generation of internet users.

Not all of us do. And if your audience is companies, not users, the goals align differently.
Sort of unrelated: reading Wikipedias mobile pages on a "standard" (15" in my case) screen is actually rather nice. Very clean look.
"Should mention that a battery pack upgrade is not coming soon for the Model S, but it obviously will happen long-term."

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/548269323681529856
I also had these when I was a kid (and Legos, K'Nex, Erector sets, model car kits, etc).

These didn't have as much of an impact on me as some of the other toys. There isn't really as much flexibility as there is with sets like Legos or K'Nex.
> […] will calculate the 1 000 001st and 1 000 002nd numbers in 4 seconds. Classic version would take much more time, as the program has to operate with multi-thousand-digit numbers.

I'm not sure what classical algorithm of computing Fibonacci numbers OP is mentioning, but using Mathematica on my machine takes about 4 ms to compute the 1,000,001st Fibonacci number exactly…

Maybe by classical he means naive, in that case: doesn't it ever get tired to pick as an example an algorithm that will be optimized away by any half-decent compiler?
Should euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide be legal?
>The same argument would imply that you shouldn't do computing on VPSes or similar services that other people own.

I don't think he saying that exactly. I think is more of a consider who has the control of the data .

For example. I worked for a company that monitored power use circuit but circuit. The data was uploaded to our servers and processed by our software. All very convenient. You could download some of the raw data, but generally small chunks. (minute by minute, day by day). You stopped paying and you lost functionality.

This is a similar problem with user generated fitness data. Some "Services" don't make it easy to take your data with you.

VPSs you generally have more control, and can just dump your data and move to another provider.
I had Legos, K'nex, Meccano, a lot of Legos, Capsellas, lose PVC pipes I screwed around with in the bath, some roller coaster ball thing I forgot the name of, two spaceship things featured in Lego mag, and probably another modular toy system I forgot about.

Capsela was really cool, but I mostly remember that the tolerances or the connectors were loose enough that some didn't connect properly, and some other just stuck together forever.

And now I program.

Correlation not causation, but...
"The original Roadster had a drag coefficient (Cd) of 0.36. Using modern computational methods we expect to make a 15% improvement, dropping the total Cd down to 0.31 with a retrofit aero kit."

I wonder how's this going to affect the generated downforce (=> and, as a consequence, the aerodynamic grip). Cd for a F1 car is around 1.
Google Warns Developers Not to Put User Testimonials in App Descriptions
That's only one part of the problem. Bad data leads to bad science just as frequently if not more frequently, a limited understanding of the effects of sample sizes on output quality for statistical procedures is another, as well as what the software is actually doing internally.

My main exposure to this has been by observing a biologist draw absolutely unsupportable conclusions from a bunch of very low quality data using some software as if it was a magic incantation. Not that that bothered supervisors or anybody else, as long as the funding kept coming everybody was absolutely happy.

The software wasn't all that bad, even though the user interface was crappy. The whole pipeline did not stand up to scrutiny, and of course my sample rate of this sort of thing is too low to draw conclusions from but I really hope that was an example of how it is normally not done.

Personally I think that if you aren't using software to do something faster that you could do yourself manually then you probably shouldn't be using that software.
So, segregation is the answer?
> While open source is great, its a terrible business model.

I think this is a necessary trade-off. Great business models often lead to monopoly and stagnation.
> The same argument would imply that you shouldn't do computing on VPSes or similar services that other people own.

By my reading of the argument, they might not have a problem with VPS. First, the software on a VPS can be completely free (Linux). Second, it's not computing you would do on your own (short of buying a fiber connection and racked servers), and this is their argument for why a search engine might not be SaaSS.

As an aside, with a project such a YaCy, I think their final point that P2P software can replace SaaS (such as search engines) is coming to fruition.

> The same argument would imply that you shouldn't use the email or shell account from your university

Again, I don't think they're arguing this. They'd certainly want you to use a free client, but the email protocol can't really support running servers on a user's machine if it's ever going to be turned off.

Personally, I think the solution for SaaSS operators is to license their code as free software, preferably Affero GPL so that others can't make it non-free. This still introduces privacy concerns but remedies all the lock-in issues and gives users the option of running that software themselves.

To your point on self-hosting being insecure, I think it's still more secure than putting 100% faith in a 3rd party, and one that's a single point of failure (or surveillance). In the end it's not much different of a problem than updating your personal OS.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7829100
I love the part where he says that "Cloud computing" = "Be a sucker". LOL
From the most recent report (https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/IOB/FY2013_2Q_IOB_Rep...)

>NSA/CSS is developing a tool to automate submission of mission compliance incident reports across the NSA/CSS enterprise. The [REDACTED] will become the Agency's central tool for reporting potential mission compliance incidents and will provide a streamlined management process, a central repository, and metrics data to support root cause identification and trend analysis.

I'm rather surprised they've been in existence for this long but apparently do not yet have a centralized way of submitting and tracking misuse and leakage incidents. Even small organizations dealing with data that's not nearly as sensitive usually have systems in place to do this.

I interpreted this to mean they don't even seem to have a centralized internal incident response team at all? Or if so, perhaps a very small one. It almost sounds like they're just relying on managers and analysts to report incidents to their Office of the Inspector General by "good faith".

It's possible I'm wrong and they do have an existing system for this, but it's just mostly restricted to pen and paper instead of a database.

Either way, that doesn't sound like a good thing to me. An organization like the NSA should have some of the strictest oversight and compliance requirements imaginable, not this ad hoc "whoops one of my subordinates emailed TS data to some random people, sorry about that" via a phone call.
Date posted: December 23rd. Enough to tell you the NSA would love this, as pathetically obfuscated and incomplete as it is, to be ignored.
I don't know if Mr. Stallman is exactly a socialist, but he's not pro-capitalism either. So I don't think he really concerns himself with actually getting people to pay software developers. To him, that's an afterthought.

This makes him a revolutionary. Unfortunately, when the mainstream absorbs the revolution, what does the revolutionary do? Basically try to get them to adopt the ideas that aren't very good because all the good ones have been taken.

The best thing we could do is just say he was a great contributor to software, and ignore whatever drivel he writes now, much like we do with ESR.
We built this ourselves internally at Streak and I wish something like this had existed at the time instead.

The idea of using tools I already use to say what I did is valuable. In our summary email we send out everyones responses but we also include every commit that was done by each person that day.

If standupmail included other sources of data (manual email, github commits, gmail messages sent, zapier integration) - we'd def switch.
Mathematician Found a New and Cheaper Way to Reach Mars Safely
Your site seems to be down temporarily.