1gor

I think you are the only one here enjoying reading PR releases. This sure looks like spamming (or a good PR work):

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+w...

Since when polluting valuable community information resource with paid commercial fluff became acceptable?

Aggressive promotion poisons the well for everybody. People come to HN for the honest information and opinion exchange with the like-minded, not to be bombarded with PR.

And by the way, I remember time when NH core were not get-rick-quick wannabes but engineers and, well, hackers. Which does not exclude being entrepreneurial. It just means being not easy for some 'smart business' to manipulate.

If the odds are worse without promotion, what rational human wouldn't use it?

The one that is familiar with game theory. Defection does work in the trusting, cooperative environment. First time. After that the community switches to 'tit-for-tat' strategy and bans the aggressor into oblivion. Or core of the community decamps to greener pastures leaving 'smart businesses' and their shills to their task of filling communal cesspit with more crap.

Which may not be a bad thing, except it all comes at a price of credibility. Why does one need to create all that fuzz? Isn't it because the revolutionary product/idea cannot win followers and reputation solely on its merits?

Same applies to his book. With a bit of modesty its impact could have been so much greater. Especially since its subject is indeed fascinating.

Mac OS X is UNIX alright, but to pull most of libraries from MacPorts is the only sane way to manage dependencies.

If you run Tiger (and see no reasons to upgrade) - then you are stuck with old Java release for ever. There is no way to upgrade Java other than buying Leopard, and then you are still at Apple's mercy for future upgrades.

A simple task like doing 'sudo emacs' requires some custom shell scripting, since emacs that came with the operating system is old and useless.

My initial excitement about Mac hardware is also dented after battery and graphic card both failed only after a year on my MacBook Pro.

A web developer would be much more happy on Linux if he/she could live without eye candy.

I find the trend towards quick character assassination (rather than looking at the facts) quite annoying. We see it in climate debate, for example, way too often.

Just look at Google. There is no graphic design to speak of.

This is important because Dyson's opponents as a rule try some sort of character assassination instead of sticking to the subject matter.

There have been centuries when gold was legal tender and nobody complained (apart from some emperors who found debasing gold coins by adding copper was a bit difficult; but printing press has not been invented yet).

And would you please stop using labels.

In the original article there is an arguments that GPL makes corporate clients reluctant to use the software. This may be inaccurate, but this is a fact of life.

We are talking about merits of MIT license vs GPL, not about proprietary vs. open source. On the last issue the debate has been closed some time ago, and open source won.

Supply of gold is fixed. Supply of paper money is at the whim of greenspans.

Let me try to argue not from ideological (closed source being immoral etc.) but from the economic point of view. We are talking about commoditization of software here.

There are two types of software - one that contains competitive advantage for the business, and one that is a commodity. And software has a tendency to migrate from the first bucket to the second very fast. And by the way, 'commodity' is not a bad word. Software may be very smart and complicated, but it would not be unique in what it does.

For example, if you have written the first social network software -- you have something unique and you'd be mad to open source it straight away (or you'd be very passionate about software freedom, like RMS :) . But when there appear tens of social network apps floating around, you should act like ning and give away your software for free. Why?

This seems to be the rational choice for commodity software. To become king of commodities you have to compete on price. 'Free' is the ultimate winner price. And MIT license is the ultimate free license (less restrictions than GPL).

When your free application grabs large enough slice of market share (mind share) it will start paying for itself in many ways. It 'develops and tests itself', it provides free marketing for you etc. And you are free to build another unique value-adding application on top of this commodity layer.

So, for example, 37signals are very happy with RoR being free and under MIT license. They are using it for their in-house proprietary webapps, while it is being developed and tested now to the large extend by the community. I am sure 37signals would be ecstatic if Microsoft decided to 'grab' Ruby on Rails and integrate it into their next OS.

Gold exists already.

Meanwhile, ESR's point is an excellent one.

MIT license has proven to help a project to achieve commercial critical mass, and GPL is becoming an anachronism. Most of recent open source software that managed to build up market- and mind-share quickly was put out under MIT license.

GPL-like licenses are becoming an off-putting factor nowadays simply because you expect to be offered a 'double-licensing' option somewhere down the line. Why would people invest in a project when they are only allowed to play with it, but never to use in a commercial environment? (Until you pay for a commercial license that is).

RMS has been proven right. Software wants to be free, so it does not need chains attached to it, even when they are meant for its own protection.

And what is there exactly so advanced that you want to do? You have a problem domain object model that you have abstracted as database tables. Is there anything Rails-specific in there? No. Your call, your design.

Then you have to present the objects to the world. Rails gives you REST. You may take it, or you may chose to increase complexity by adding your own methods... Hell, you can even put logic in the controllers, do as you like.

What is exactly bothering you with Rails? Rails just marshals http requests to database and back. Sinatra does the same, but then Rails have more community support and much more of those little snippets of code that just make your life easier. Nobody prevents you from writing your own helpers, if you don't like the Rails' ones.

Rails is just replacement for all the mundane, repeated and brainless tasks of handling those http calls - it lets you focus on the business logic, that's all. I challenge you to invent anything 'advanced' for which Rails (or Django, or Sinatra) are not good enough. The thing is - they are not there to make anything 'advanced'. They release you from managing infrastructure of your app. And 'advanced' stuff is completely up to you.

The US debt accumulation process runs like this.

A Chinese exporter of electric goods (for example) has its revenues in US dollars but his costs are mostly in Yuan. As he receives money from his American customers, he sells dollars to buy local currency to pay his workers, to pay taxes etc. Without Chinese central bank intervention the collective activity of exporters would drive Yuan rate up vs dollar very quickly and that would make their exports less competitive.

Chinese central bank wants to keep exports competitive, so it buys US dollars from the exporters at artificially high rates. Its 'foreign currency reserves' keep growing as long as there are exporters bringing in piles of export revenues in dollars. All these dollars needs to be bought up in order to keep Chinese exports competitive. And then all these bought dollars need to be invested, the US Treasuries being the natural place for it.

This all works as long as US consumer is buying. But the US consumers have stopped buying like they used to for many years and some say forever. No major revenues are expected from exports to the US. No need to buy dollars for the Central Bank.

In fact, the opposite is likely to happen. Chinese domestic consumption is growing fast. Very soon domestic Chinese market will become the biggest target for the world's exporters, just as US post-war consumer was. Chinese central bank may want to stimulate local consumption and capital inflows by switching to 'strong Yuan' policy, just like US did with its dollar. There will be no point of spporting the USD and holding dollar-denominated securities (US treasuries) for them.

To summarize, Chinese investment in US treasuries is not a result of desire to find a 'safe heaven' for extra money. It is because they need to park all that greenbacks the accumulated during years of keeping the Yuan down. Today they do not need to support USD anymore. They have no reason to buy US debt either. Prepare for a nasty surprise.

Do you think this would restrain consumer credit card/mortgage borrowing and prevent people form getting into the current mess?

Emacs shortcuts will soon be wired into your fingertips and you will be efficient on any platform - windows, linux and mac. In fact, you will very soon forget about the platform and focus on your work at hand.

That's the reason old hands prefer to stick with traditional emacs keyboard interface. Dumping some Mac idiosyncrasies is a small price to pay for the freedom and power.

It is almost by definition that any fresh and promising idea meets hostility from the masses. But the thinking minority is always ecstatic about it. Good ideas and views are like a breath of fresh air.

HN has been a refuge for new and controversial ideas from the start. Which is understandable, given that pg himself created quite a stir with his view on 'hackers' as artists and on lisp as an abstract essence of any programming language (making it a superweapon in right hands). So people escaped from reddit and digg and came to HN to share controversial or complicated ideas. At that time karma points were a badge of honour.

But then of course in came the masses and HN has changed. Now arguments don't win on their merit. Banalities are repeated ad nauseam and the winner is the one who can capture the crowd's lowest common denominator. HN is not that much about ideas anymore. It is more about commercial promotion and quite a lot about entertainment.

In this environment positive karma should make you worried. I actually quite enjoy getting negative karma nowadays. Of course there is a huge risk of being labeled a 'troll'. It has happened a couple of times. Which I think is as honorable as being labeled a dissident in communist Russia or a non-believer in fundamentalist Iran. Just make sure you are 'trolling' by challenging a consensus while having sound arguments and facts at hand. <sigh> But not many people cannot even read your arguments after they fade to gray under merciless and mindless downvoting.

Also, this website needs more lifestyle, social and political topics.

Vote this up if you want to rename it Designer News.

And by the way, JungleDisk simply passes Amazon S3 bandwidth/storage charges to me, no caps there; I can bypass it to access my data on S3 buckets; it is available for win/linux/mac etc.

Actually, Unix succeeded after it was rewritten in C. (Not counting the very first Unix version which was done in assembler. See http://www.livinginternet.com/i/iw_unix_c.htm )

Imagine that GOOG has a few projects in the pipeline. A few bad ones, and a few brilliant ones.

When GOOG share price is at 700, GOOG can issue 100 shares and raise 70000. Plenty of money to throw at good and bad projects.

If GOOG share price was at 200 they would raise less than 1/3 of the money, and be very picky at what projects to fund. Only the best project would get funded.

Think about how much resources are wasted in the society though misallocation of capital due to inflated asset prices. You may look at short sellers in a completely new light.

???

He created $15 billion of value for his shareholders.

>The banks had created value

The banks have destroyed their shareholders' and depositors' money by investing in junk and failing to prepare for a downturn.

Your 'moral' arguments are upside down.

No, it is not. The California Public Employees’ Retirement System (Calpers) alone had more than $10 billion invested in hedge funds in 2007.

So your average Joe should not wish evil to hedge fund managers, his retirement money is at stake.