I agree 100%. His response doesn't make sense from the entrepreneur's perspective. Using his strategy, no one would ever make cold calls because they are annoying to the recipient. But the bottom line is they work enough time to make it worth the effort. In this case there is no downside to the asker. I have no idea if asking for such a referral would ever work but it seems to me this is a good example of nothing ventured nothing gained.
Of course there's a downside to the asker - the VC might actually make the referral. "Hi, I passed on this guy but you might want to take a look at him" is not how you want to go into a first meeting with an investor.
Indeed. I commented on something and only discovered accidentally that my comment could only be seen be me, which is a horrible way for things to work. Your comment is hidden and you have no idea. I emailed the contact email (cant remember the address) and never got an answer. It really made me never want to comment again and seemed totally capricious.
You're correct ... but only if it's absolutely fair ... to the point that if I were PG, I'd require a human being's double check before dropping the hammer (ADDED: at least, if the account has been open for very long).
To echo hank777, the very fact that HN has this well known silent technique of "hellbanning" (new term to me) is going to drastically change my posture towards contributing.
(Just how, I can't say yet (too early in the morning), but it will be significant. I know from my behavior in other forums after I learned that they do this (e.g. GrokLaw) that I won't be making many more contributions, for this drastically changes the risk/reward ratio.)
This is incorrect. The difference is that lazlo and flex are tools that build fixed binaries. They are the equivalent of a c++ compiler. This is designed to be like html. That means that you can, from a web server, create pages on the fly. You cannot modify or change code on the fly in lazlo or flex. In html, you can dynamically create a page based on information in the database or other state related info. This is a fundamentally different model (and one that most of you should be familiar with) and entirely different than flex (which most of you are not familiar with).
As far as swfmill goes, that is an entirely orthogonal concept as is haxe. swfmill is a tool for organizing assets, and haxe is a compiler. That is like comparing an apple pie to a shoe.
what a whacko. I should allow you to access my servers and services for free? I should allow you to control how you use my resources in a way that guarantees I loose money? Stallman is a digital socialist. The idea of services (or anything other than direct labor) that people charge for offends him. That offends me.
> I should allow you to access my servers and services for
> free?
You can charge for Free software. If you're using any Free software in your web application stack, if you're using any Free documentation, and Free data sources, then isn't it a little hypocritical of you to lock-down what basically amounts to a component assembly of Free software?
> I should allow you to control how you use my resources in
> a way that guarantees I loose money?
Make all the money you want, companies are making billions out of Free software. And nobody wants to use your server, bandwidth or material resources. However, the _software_ should be given to the people who USE it. Giving the public a freebie web service for now, until you figure out how to sell their information and useage stats to advertisers, does not make your service free.
People are typing their twitter logins to little apps that are poping up everywhere. Wouldn't you rather have these web apps open, somewhere in github, with a transparent database backend that you can see is not hoarding any personal infromation about you?
> Stallman is a digital socialist.
And that's a label many would self-attribute, with pride.
> The idea of services (or anything other than direct
> labor) that people charge for offends him. That offends me.
I don't see anywhere where he demands free-of-charge access. Stallman supports "free software" where the "free" means that the user's liberty to manipulate the program is preserved.
In Stallman's dream world, you would be free to charge for your service, or put ads up, or whatever you like. But your service would use standardized file formats, and the user would be able to modify the application (both server-side and client-side) to suit his needs.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the two ideals (being able to charge for your work VS. being able to modify others' work) contradictory?
I have zero experience with Firefox extension development, but everything I _have_ seen about it points at it being very difficult to mirror in a closed source environment.
These are not contradictory. People still buy services. Also, you don't have to charge users directly. Three simple examples:
- firefox - open, free, gets money from google
- openmoko - open mobile, you can even download their pcb design and CAD files, but they do sell the product
- specialised apps - company I work for releases some code as open-source, but that doesn't mean that our users have resources to provide the same service themselves, so we don't lose anything
Of course, but we already do this. I block all ads, which means I'm modifying your app to not make any money off of me. Such is the reality of the Internet and general purpose computers.
No, you just think you block ads. It's extremely naive to think you actually block all ads. I'm sure a lot of people have made money out of you online from advertising you don't recognize as advertising.
edit: Sure, downvote me if you like. If you like to think adblock etc actually block all adverts I guess it's up to you. It blocks a small class of 'obvious adverts'. Several websites will pass outgoing links through a jump script which may or may not then go through affiliate links. Adblock is useless against such things. There are several such examples.
That's fine. I use flashblock and adblock to block annoying flashing animated noisy colourful page disrupting ads, to block ads and ad servers tracking me and giving them power and commercial gain with no gain to me, and to stop FireFox playing noise from background tabs I can't find quickly.
I don't do it to stop site owners 'making' money from me. If you can get non-annoying ads to me, and make money from me, that's brilliant. If that's all anyone did, I'd get rid of *block altogether.
If you can arbitrarily modify the server side of any instance of the application then you can also just pay using someone elses credit card details.
Although I think what Stallman would probably prefer is the source to the site / web application being available so that people can run their own instances.
HN and reddit have their source available. I don't see anyone using the reddit code in a way that's any threat to reddit, mainly since the size of the community is an asset that's hard to compete with.
Potentially off-topic, since I'm not familiar with the prevalent licensing, but the various django applications look pretty nice for this kind of thing.
The idea of services (or anything other than direct labor) that people charge for offends him.
Actually, no. He is for totally abrogating copyright on works which have "practical use" and for maintaining certain forms of exclusive economic control on entertainment and advocacy.
Essentially, he thinks he should be able to redistribute my software for free, for any purpose whatsoever, but that I should not be able to commercially exploit his speeches or modify them, because that "misrepresents" him.
But let's turn to the next category, works that state the views of certain parties. Now here my answer is different, I don't think modified versions of these works contribute to society, all they do is misrepresent the authors. So I propose a compromised copyright system which says that everybody is free non-commercially to redistribute exact copies. But modifications require permission and commercial use require permission. So this compromised copyright system would provide revenues more or less as the current system does.
I see. I wonder if this philosophy works at Apple. Do you really think apple products would be better if Steve Jobs always deferred to his staff by saying "you're the expert." Ridiculous. All of this stuff is very situation specific. I am sure that is what he does at Pixar (probably less) and not at all what he does at Apple, and rightly so.
Based on the article posted here on rent control the other day,it does indeed seem as though greenspun uses the same unsubstantiated assertion strategy for building arguments as does the cato institute. I guess I have to give him credit for being no worse than folks that get paid to write this crap.
lol.I am not going to opine about their entire body of work. But if you think they never have the problem of which I speak then clearly you didnt read the rent control article which explains new york's and other big cities high rents on rent control. Whether you agree with rent control or not, this is an insane unsubstantiated assertion.
I read it, I disagreed with it, but it didn't seem insanely unsubstantiated, just wrong. For it to be insanely unsubstantiated, it would at the least need to be true that rent control was a stunning success, which it is not.
I disagree. He bases his argument on the idea that rent control causes high rents as demonstrated in places like NY. This is patently false in my opinion, but my opinion is not what counts. The reason I say it is unsubstantiated and therefore insane, is that he provided no argument for the idea that there is a causation between high rents and rent control. The author falls into the all too common trap of mapping a correlation to a causation. That may be a good strategy to throw red meat to right wingers, but it is not a well constructed argument.
Are we talking about the same article? In the one I remember, he backed his argument up with a survey of deviation from median rent in markets with and without rent control.
Yes, he observed a correlation. In this case, there's a very reasonable argument to be made against a causal relationship: cheap cities don't institute rent control.
While I disagree with the article, that argument is probably easy to respond to; there are relatively expensive cities that don't have rent control, and his measurements are deviation from median, not just the median rent itself.
Neither of those is an effective counter-argument:
1) The existence of expensive cities without rent control doesn't tell us anything about the effect of rent control on rent (cities can be expensive for lots of reasons unrelated to rent control), unless you do a study comparing roughly equivalent expensive cities, some with rent control, and some without. The author didn't do that -- he compared cities with rent control, to cities without, and found that cities with rent control are more expensive. This was bad experimental design.
2) His measurements found that the distributions around the median were different for expensive cities vs. inexpensive ones. But it doesn't really matter that he was comparing the shapes of the distributions, and not their medians, because one can reasonably expect that expensive cities will have a larger contingent of really expensive homes than inexpensive cities, even without the effect of rent control. For that matter, rent control might be the only thing giving the expensive cities a stock of inexpensive housing at all!
Again, for a proper experiment, the author needed to compare equivalently priced cities, varying only the factor of rent control. He didn't do that.
These are nothing but assertions of fact which are really unsubstantiated opinions. It is striking to watch people engage in this level of intellectual onanism.
I dont mind people making arguments that are reasoned and carefully successively built. But to just start with one opinion, pretend it is a fact, and then build another assertion on top of that is a bit much. I do not believe that you have to have a degree in economics to opine about economics, but whatever your arguments are, at least make them as arguments as opposed to "I am smart so everything I say must be true" style pronouncements.
