jabkobob

So are you saying I can copy and paste some useful functions from your GPL code into my BSD code? And then the next person can use my code (with the pasted code from your project) in their proprietary software, given they stick to the requirements from my BSD license?

As far as I understand, the viral nature of the GPL does not allow this.

I expect that tracking every single transaction would be a great deterrent to corruption, theft, and tax evasion. On the other hand, a lot of corruption, theft and tax evasion already occurs with electronic payments.

I'd go further and say that even with context my comments on hacker news are practically useless. I see online discussions as a pastime, not something that needs to be conserved on triple redundant backups.

I must disagree with the command-line part. I don't think that the command line is fundamentally more powerful than any other interface.

Why is the command line powerful? Because it offers a large number of utilities that are highly configurable and that can be linked easily.

But you could have just the same expressiveness if the interface was eg. a circuit diagram, where you connect configurable commands with lines.

You know why the command line uses text input? Because it is the simplest to implement. The only people who need to know how to use the command line are people who need to use software where it doesn't pay off to make a more intuitive interface.

While numbers don't lie, the conclusions you draw from them can still be incorrect.

Look at the second graph (website visits peaking on Dec 24th for giftcertificatefactory.com). The author concludes the following from this peak: "People favor doing things at the very last possible moment."

But this is nonsense. Such a conclusion would require a model for how people's preferences affect web page statitics. If you don't have a model, your intuition is going to fool you. Let me illustrate this with a simple example:

Assume that in our model world you have two kinds of people: Early-Buyers and Late-Buyers. Early-Buyers buy presents on a random day from Dec 1 to Dec 20. Late-Buyers on the other hand buy presents on a random day from Dec 21-24. Assume that 80% of people are Early-Buyers and 20% of people are Late-Buyers.

If you looked at the number of presents bought per day, you would see that the rates are 25% higher in the days from Dec 21-24. Your intuition will tell you: "People favor buying presents late". But that is not true, because in our model world 80% of the people are actually Early-Buyers!

Now, to explain the web page statistics shown in the article, we would need a more elaborate model; but constructing such a model and working with it is difficult, and that's why people avoid thinking about models, just post raw numbers, and then write whatever their intuition tells them, and then claim that it must be true because "numbers don't lie".

I find it funny how they try to use iTunes and the music purchased from iTunes as an example for how this legislation would affect people, even though music purchased from iTunes has been DRM free for a few years.

> you probably won't know your restrictions until you've already put in the work

Do people really start putting significant effort into projects without thinking about legal issues, distribution, etc.? (I don't consider downloading an app and creating a two page test book as 'significant effort')

I'm amazed how many people actually complain about that funny letter. To me this proves just how right she is. Apparently making fun of Oxford is off-limits for some...

The Objective C runtime on MacOS 10.7 also does this for NSNumber objects.

The problem with his 'noob' example is not only that the comments are overly verbose, but also that his variable names are generic and totally useless. 'counter' and 'pos' or 'ref' are so generic that you always have to look at the whole code before you know what's going on. Rename the 'counter' variable to 'bytesProcessed', and rename the 'pos' variable to 'startOfBuffer', and use a variable named 'currentByte' to walk through the buffer... With descriptive variable names many comments become unnecessary.

Microsoft did it exactly right if you assume popup notifications are necessary. I firmly believe that popup notifications are unnecessary and distracting, and that's why I prefer the "notification system" of OS X (red badges in the dock). These are a standard. Growl and menu bar status icons etc are just useless cruft introduced by developers who don't want to adhere to the standard. I could care less if my OS notifies me that it discovered a new input device, or that someone sent me an email labelled "urgent", or whatever.

Of course, OS X is not as clean and notification-free as I'd like it to be: It annoys me every other week or so with some useless software update, and every 10 days it complains that I didn't plug in the backup drive for some time.

Now, it might be possible to configure and disable all these notifications, but I just don't want to bother. I want my computer to act on my command, and in my eyes there is almost no excuse for putting up an unexpected notification or alert or dialog for anything.

I didn't have such a flawless experience. I was first baffled because I didn't understand what kind of website that is. I thought, well doesn't matter, it looks nice, let's try iOS. Then I watched that intro video that promised a first look at Objective C. I clicked "Lets go" and ended up at an XCode tutorial. Huh? So I clicked the breadcrumb navigation, and thought "App Life Cycle" sounds interesting. I clicked that. I started watching the video, but after 30 seconds the video suddenly stopped. Underneath it says the video takes 7 minutes. Well, obviously somethings wrong. I looked around, and saw something about signing up and unlocking badges, and I thought, hmm, I just want to watch the rest of this video, I don't want to bother unlocking any badges, so I gave up, went back to hacker news, and wrote this rant.

I'm so happy that OS X doesn't do notifications. Dock badges are already distracting enough...

I always like it when someone gives a talk, attaches his windows laptop to the beamer, and is then constantly distracted by the yellow notifications in the bottom right corner "You are now connected to the internet", "Your virus definitions are out of date", "New hardware detected"...

In my eyes, configuring growl and tweaking notification settings are part of the "impossibly distracting productivity suck". I feel that configuring notifications is a total waste of time, when I can just turn them off.

This is truly mindblowing. But apart from the obviously neat 3D effect, this is the first time I see aerial photos that look beautiful. Those you find on Bing and Google often suffer from ugly colors.

I have contributed a little bit to Sequel Pro, and I'm a bit familiar with the codebase. Adding support for PostgreSQL is not trivial, a lot of MySQL is hardcoded into the user interface. There have always been many requests for PostgreSQL compatibility, but it would require A LOT of refactoring.

(Disclaimer: I haven't been involved much with SP for almost a year now, so possibly there has been progress in that time)

It reminds me both of Microsoft, but even more of Google. Can anybody clearly state where Google is going today? There are so many projects at Google that it is hard to see a coherent vision for the future.

Of course the difference between Google/Microsoft and Apple in 1997 is that Apple didn't have a profitable core business (Windows and Office for Microsoft, Adwords for Google). Google and Microsoft can afford to spread out, but Apple's only chance in 1997 was to focus.

It's also interesting to note that in their early days, both Microsoft and Google were very focussed. They started to spread out when they started earning more money than they could spend. Apple, on the other hand, stayed focused. There is no Apple product that doesn't have a clear purpose.

Yes, you are totally right. But don't overrate the language barrier: I sell a software product that is English only (localization is too expensive), and the majority of my customers are from non-English-speaking markets.

But the ajaxload spinner is evil and they still haven't fixed it! http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/10/spinner-rage/

Please spell out the month name. In many countries dates are formatted as DD.MM.YYYY rather than MM/DD/YYYY. For example, a native German speaker will have a lot of trouble recognizing that date. Especially if it is something like 8/7/2011 (is that August 7 or July 8?)

If you write the date as "August 8, 2011" it should be trivial to parse for everyone. (Except for people using different calendars)

Yes, I take responsibility for my own feelings. I know what it's like from the other side too: as a software developer I can't accomodate every user request. It's difficult to tell a customer that I think they are wrong, or that their problem is not important enough in some grand scheme of things. And it is very easy to insult someone without using any expletives.

I'm not saying that a developer should leave bug reports open to avoid any possible offense. But they must be aware that the act of ignoring a perfectly valid issue reported by a passionate user can be demeaning in itself.

In defense of the bully, at least he is completely clear about his feelings, and it is obvious that he is just insulting.

I know from experience that is is extremly frustrating and deeply insulting when a developer marks a valid bug report as "NOTABUG" or "WONTFIX", no matter how friendly he is while doing so. When somebody closes a bug report without taking any action whatsoever, without even acknowledging the problem, this feels to me just as if he said: "Shut the fuck up, we developers have better things to do than care about stupid users." It doesn't matter if the developer uses polite wording, I'm still insulted.