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From the article:

But free web services are not like free software. If your free software project suddenly gets popular, you gain resources: testers, developers and people willing to pitch in. If your free website takes off, you lose resources.

teaspoonon New Color.com

Nitpick: you might call that envy or schadenfreude, but it's not sour grapes. Sour grapes would be if someone were talking down the desirability of $40 million itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes

teaspoonon Full disk encryption is too good?

That's certainly true. If you're being held without trial, you're beyond the help of most technologies and pesky legal restrictions.

teaspoonon Full disk encryption is too good?

Are you suggesting that the FBI tortures every suspected pedophile and spammer who uses FDE?

teaspoonon Sean Parker: “Little Startups Are Ridiculously OverFunded”

There's a rich tradition of self-interested complaint in this industry. This reminds me of Fred Wilson's complaining about startup lawyer fees[1], Aaron Greenspan's complaining about the Money Transmission Act[2], and pg's Patent Pledge[3].

Not that people shouldn't speak for the causes of their choosing, but you do lose some rhetorical impact if you only do so once you have a horse in the race.

[1] http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/03/a-challenge-to-startup-lawye...

[2] http://www.quora.com/Aaron-Greenspan/In-Fifty-Days-Payments-...

[3] http://www.paulgraham.com/patentpledge.html

teaspoonon WikiLeaks: Out of time and money

The burden of proof is on the accusers, but "not proven" is a long way off from "clearly false".

teaspoonon Nest - The Learning Thermostat

"Second guess" is UK/US English expression meaning "to attempt to predict or anticipate", so I think you and the parent have the same understanding.

teaspoonon Is Tumblr a bot fest?

The "Like" and "Follow" buttons on Tumblr require JavaScript, probably to make CSRF harder. A bot that automatically likes posts would need to evaluate JS.

teaspoonon Mailgun API 2.0: forget MIME

Half a day of development costs at least a few hundred dollars in the US, so I don't see why a business can't make money by saving you that time.

And some argue that there are other ways to compete than on features and price:

http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Build_Less.php

teaspoonon Why Not Haskell?

Wow, that's cool. It even works for non-Bounded argument types, as in fn [0] = 0:

  Warning: Pattern match(es) are non-exhaustive
        In an equation for `fn':
            Patterns not matched:
                []
                #x : _ with #x `notElem` [0#]
                0# : (_ : _)

teaspoonon Why Not Haskell?

Non-exhaustive patterns are one thing the compiler can't catch:

  fn 0 = return ()
  main = fn 1

Giving an empty list to head/tail is another:

  main = head []

teaspoonon Why Not Haskell?

Whatever symbols you're seeing in RWH that aren't on that wiki page are probably functions, not keywords. For functions, you should use Hoogle.

For better or worse, there will never be a complete list of infix functions for Haskell because new infix functions can be defined by the user.

teaspoonon Why Not Haskell?

You won't find :: and => in Hoogle because they're keywords, not functions. For keywords, see the the wiki page that gtani posted:

http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Keywords

I recommend reading Learn You a Haskell instead; the keywords were second nature to me by the time I finished.

I agree that there's too much "symbol soup" Haskell out there that uses infix functions excessively. Even if you recognize all of the functions, you still need to have their precedences memorized to decode the soup.

teaspoonon Why Not Haskell?

Special operators out the wazzoo...Google doesn't help here - I don't even know the verbal names for some of them.

Operators are just functions, so try Hoogle:

http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/?hoogle=%3E%3E%3D

teaspoonon Why The 99% Should Protest Against Y Combinator

buy your milk in Canada - or anywhere else in the western world - where rBGH has been determined to be too dangerous to add to milk

rBGH isn't added to milk; it's injected into cows. The misconception that the milk itself necessarily contains rBGH is precisely the justification that Monsanto claims for restraining "rBGH free" labels. I don't think that's an adequate justification, though, and I agree with the thrust of your point.

teaspoonon LinkedIn Product Manager interview review

It would also be awkward if an interviewee wanted to come back to my apartment for drinks. Interviewing and dating are two different social situations with different codes of etiquette.

teaspoonon LinkedIn Product Manager interview review

For the author, weeding out employers with that culture might be an upside. It depends what he's looking for.

teaspoonon D3.js ~ Voronoi Diagram

Each colored region contains one circled point, and the region itself is the set of points to which that circled point is the closest circled point. When you hover over the diagram, your cursor acts as yet another circled point with its own (yellow) colored region.

teaspoonon LinkedIn Product Manager interview review

I don't know where you're getting that LinkedIn asked Jason to keep his mouth shut about anything.

teaspoonon LinkedIn Product Manager interview review

Why work for a company that would "use" a dry, factual account of their interview process against you?

teaspoonon I want to pay for TextMate 2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_caf%C3%A9

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSx86

I'm not trying to be pedantic here. Both of the above are commonplace in China, for example.

teaspoonon I want to pay for TextMate 2

We're talking about people who already ponied up $60. From that alone, you can't infer (a) that another $60 is a pittance to them, (b) that they own a MacBook or any computer at all, (c) that they are professional developers, or (d) that they are capable of using vim. If you think that any of those is a given, you're spending too much time on HN.

And how the concept of "charity" is relevant to paying customers of a product, I do not understand.

teaspoonon I want to pay for TextMate 2

You're making the same faulty assumption that Marco does: that everyone who bought TextMate is a fellow software developer living in a wealthy nation. Many of the "cheapskates in here" are happy to pay twice, but recognize that it's a privilege to be able to do so.

teaspoonon NaN does not equal NaN

blah is now NaN because (5 + NaN) is NaN. We want this because we want to know if there's been some kind of error in the making of blah

Commence countdown to frontpage submission "Float is a monad". I agree with your justification for 5 + NaN evaluating to NaN, but it would be even more useful if NaN == x (and every other operation on NaN) would evaluate to NaN as well. That's obviously not possible in statically typed languages, but it is in JS.

teaspoonon Direct the Patent Office to Cease Issuing Software Patents

In case you're not aware, a patent's title isn't an indication of what is actually claimed, nor is it a unique identifier. There could be several patents titled "Method to retrieve backups from the internet", each claiming very domain-specific and non-obvious techniques.

teaspoonon Speed-of-light experiments yield baffling result at LHC

At one lightyear distance from the lighthouse, the angular velocity of the beam is 2Pi lightyears per minute*

Actually, that's the linear velocity. The angular velocity would be 2*pi radians per minute and is independent of distance.

teaspoonon Notepad of all my startup ideas

An idea is one thing; ideas multiple things.

teaspoonon Standing desks are on the rise

I decided to prototype a standing desk before buying, to make sure it was something I'd really use. The prototype is just a cardboard science fair display on top of an adjustable keyboard stand:

http://distillery.s3.amazonaws.com/media/2011/06/22/f59c2c49...

It actually fits me so well that I haven't bothered to upgrade.

teaspoonon Ask Slashdot: Could We Deal With the End of Time Zones?

Ask anyone who's lived/worked in Antarctica, and they'll you that humans still sleep when the days are 24 hours long and still wake up when the nights are 24 hours long.

If you really want time zones that tell you when the sun's out, they'll have to be defined latitudinally as well as longitudinally, and they'll need to vary over the course of the year.