jakobe

Thanks for the link, those were some good thoughts on the topic. However, I disagree with Stallman. (probably because I make a living from selling something that he might call a 'proprietary extensions')

I think the problem I have with the practice of selling exceptions is that it gives more rights to the owner. I feel that open source licenses should give equal rights to everyone. Dual licenses undermine that equality. I understand that people want to stay in control of their software, but for me the words 'free' and 'open' somehow imply 'equal rights for everyone'.

> ensuring that only the original author can sell forks of the product

I consider this the absolutely worst reason to use the GPL. Quite a few companies (large companies like MySQL/now Oracle or small ones like Macromates) require contributors to sign an agreement that allows the company to distribute the code under a different, proprietary license.

Doesn't this circumvent everything the GPL stands for? If I contribute to such a project, what guarantee do I have that the owner doesn't just distribute the software, including my contributions, under a proprietary license and stops making improvements public?

I don't think that this is something he would need to worry about. Implementing complex algorithms is extremely difficult, even if you have detailed instructions (eg. from a published paper). I've read his website before and if I remember, he only published high level details. To steal his ideas, you'd need to have a similar background, and you'd need to know just as much about compression etc. as he does. And even if you found someone with the right expertise, it would still take a very long time to "steal" an idea like this.

Someone I work with was abroad for a few months, so I also had to skype about once a week in the evening. I brought the laptop home on those days.

Concerning security, all my hard drives (internal & external) are encrypted, and my laptop is secured with a kensington lock. Those locks don't offer much protection, but I know everyone who has keys to the office, these are more or less just precautions to deter casual thieves if someone forgets to lock the office doors at night. My laptop is pretty old, and most of my work is stored in online repositories. It would be annoying if someone stole my stuff, but it wouldn't be the end of the world...

Yeah, I often really get into "the zone" when I look at the clock and I see that I promised to be home in an hour. It's amazing how you stop wasting time when you have less.

One thing to note is that being self-employed doesn't mean you need to work from home. I always had trouble staying focused at home, and since I have kids working from home is almost impossible for me.

I now rent a desk in a shared office, and I work regular hours. I work 9-4 four days a week. I leave my laptop at work, so I can't do anything except answer the occasional email from home (when the kids let me).

It makes a tremendous difference. When I'm home, I often think of something I want to fix, but since I can't work at home, I have to wait until the next day. When I arrive at the office, I'm already eagerly waiting to get started and most times don't even think about checking HN.

(It doesn't always work. Sometimes I still have trouble focussing, but that was the same when I worked a "normal" job)

I'm pretty sure that the whole notion of A-players, B-players etc is just an easy way for people in dysfunctional teams to put the blame on those idiots they have to work with.

Some people work great as a team; some don't. There's no magic formula that will predict that. Classifying people as A-, B-players etc assumes there is some well-ordered relation describing the productivity of employees; but such a thing does not exist.

There are people with good leadership skills, people who are great when guided, people who prefer working on their own. Some know every tiny technical detail of the platform they work with, some have a talent for hacks that work great in practice. If you try measuring all these people on an arbitrary one-dimensional scale, and pick only the A-players, you'll more likely then not end up with another dysfunctional team (but someone will then just measure along a different axis and declare that the team failed because of all those B-players)

If I were a city planner, I'd require that all new (or renovated) appartement buildings include a percentage of "affordable appartements", with fixed limits on the cost per square foot. That's how cities like Vienna keep rents affordable.

When I named my apps, I just tried to come up with the most descriptive name possible. ("MDB Viewer", "PG Commander"). I really want people who look at search engine result pages and app store listings to immediately recognize what my app is good for.

To me, the most revealing part of this post is how much of a difference the profile picture made: adding a fake beard increased response rate threefold!

I am often told that I look very young; I am 27 and people think I'm 20. I've never really thought much of it, but it might explain how disrespectful some people (especially in academia) have been treating me. Maybe I should grow a beard.

Discussions on HN are never strictly on topic. There are always lots of meta comments, and many very good comments I've read were only tangentially related to the submitted article. Instead of complaining what HN should and shouldn't be, try writing good comments, upvote good comments and downvote or ignore bad comments.

Also, if you read the article, you'll see that the author talks a lot about SEO and conversion optimisation, and chmars' comment fittingly points out how annoying it is when people go overboard with conversion optimisation.

Apple already locked down app access to personal data (like contacts) in iOS 6. In iOS 7 they are just going further (eg. now a dialog also pops up for access to camera and mic)

The main difference is that Android has this all-or-nothing approach (accept giving the app all these permissions, or don't use the app at all), while iOS asks you for each permission individually, and you can use an app without granting it specific permissions. (eg. the weather app -- disallow access to location, and you can still type in place names manually)

Here's a good article on vulnerabilities in Thunderbolt: http://www.breaknenter.org/2012/02/adventures-with-daisy-in-...

Turns out OS X 10.7 and later at least disable DMA access while the computer is locked (unless fast user switching is turned on).

Even worse than USB is Firewire, which, if I am not mistaken, gives direct memory access to whatever device is connected.

However, manufacturers are already realising that blindly trusting every USB host is a bad idea. For example, iPhones now ask if you want to trust if you connect to a previously unknown computer via USB. If you chose not to, your iPhone will take power, but won't allow data access. Therefore it's no longer possible to create a device that looks like a charger but that actually downloads all the photos from your phone.

Github recently introduced a "Releases" section where you can tag releases and provide binaries: https://github.com/PostgresApp/PostgresApp/releases

It's a great way to distribute Open Source software. (Previously Mattt hosted it on a personal Amazon S3 account which he paid out of his own pocket; now bandwidth is generously paid for by Github)

Actually, this answer isn't by Jeff Atwood. See http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/95172/old-problemati...

Actually not. I'm the maintainer of a popular Open Source project that is hosted on Github. If someone stole my credentials, they could replace the current release with a binary containing a Trojan.

Looking at the security history page I see a lot of failed login attempts. Makes me glad I enabled 2-factor-authentication!

Also, I'm really flattered by osrc.dfm.io. According to http://osrc.dfm.io/jakob I'm a "high caliber Objective-C coder" in contrast to http://resume.github.io/?jakob calling me a "newbie github user".

I've seen credit card readers that act as a hull for an ipod touch and connect to the data port. (Necessary in austria because the audio trick wont work with chips)

About 4 years. As another commenter said, the problem wasn't loading time, but choppy scrolling/resizing. I am on Mavericks/latest version of safari.

They use a webkit CSS extension: "-webkit-filter:blur(5px)"

Awesome demo, but unfortunately rather slow on my (oldish) Macbook.

I also recently made a page with frosted glass effect, but opted for pre-rendered images because of those performance issues: https://eggerapps.at/pgcommander/fancy-index.html (But I decided the effect was too playful for my website and so it's not public)

Yes, and all these things already require a lot of people to work on the weekend. Blood transfusions are delivered on weekends just fine. But that's no reason to allow consumer electronics to be delivered on Sunday...

If we allow shipping companies to work on sundays, we should also allow some warehouse employees to work on sundays. Now all these companies will need electricians and mechanics that work on the weekend to fix stuff that breaks on weekends, because else they would have to wait until monday to continue working. These technicians will need to get their spare parts somewhere, so their distributors need to work on the weekend too. With so many people working on the weekend, it'll be necessary for typical white collar workers to work on the weekend, because a business owner doesn't want to wait until Monday for his accountant to do the paperwork for his new weekend employees. At some point the IT system of a shipping company, or a warehouse, or an accountant will fail on a sunday, and then some HN reader will have to go to work on sunday and miss the delivery of some parcel they ordered and they will have to wait until monday anyway.

Oh how I wish the wayback machine would ignore robots.txt... So many websites lost to history because some rookie webmaster put some misguided commands into the file without thinking about the consequences (eg. block all crawlers except google)

I strongly disagree with Joel here. It's true that storage is much cheaper today, but every piece of software I use is downloaded from the internet. Not everyone has 10MBit connections. If you make software, and especially updates, unnecessarily large, you will cut off a percentage of your users.

I'm not saying you should axe features to make the app smaller. But please, if you distribute software, spend a few hours and try to make the download size as small as possible.

I like Fmail because it is the alphabetical successor to Email.

What's the difference between your "fact" and an "axiom"? It seems to be the same thing: a starting point from which you derive everything else.

Yay!

Short explanation: You can use multiple monitors just fine in extended Desktop mode.

However, there are two issues that drive people crazy:

1) When you go enable full screen mode for an app, the app fills one display and all other displays are blanked with a gray linnen texture. That's may be useful if you are watching a movie and don't want other displays to annoy you, but it's really annoying if you just want eg. Mail full screen on a secondary monitor.

2) Mac OS Lion also added a feature named "Spaces" (I think this is called virtual desktops or so on other platforms). The problem is that when you switch between spaces, both screens switch simultaneously. Now let's assume you use your secondary monitor to show an IM client, or to show some live error log, or similar, it's really annoying if that disappears when you switch between spaces on your main display.

So OS X 10.9 finally makes two features introduced in 10.7 (Full screen mode, spaces) usable for people with multiple monitors.