I don't think open source is really about making money for most companies, it's more about improving quality and keeping costs down. At a former employer we did follow the give-it-away-and-charge-for-a-service model, but we also worked on several of the open source libraries and frameworks we built our products on.

We shared all of this work with the upstream projects, as we had no interest whatsoever in maintaining private forks and because better quality infrastructure attracts more users, which again leads to further improvements or at least ensures the project stays maintained.

> it's more about improving quality and keeping costs down.

Yes. This point seems to be lost on the author of the article. Even the founders of the Open Source movement thought that.

I can't find it now, but I remember once reading an essay by Bruce Perens where he pointed out that the vast majority of software that's written lives on the cost side, not the revenue side, of a company's balance sheet, because the vast majority of software that's written is custom in-house software. If you can share those costs with others who have similar needs, everyone benefits.

As a kid who had only ever thought of software as "something you have to pay for when you want a copy for your computer", this was eye-opening for me. The idea that the software I was familiar with was the exception, rather than the rule, made it plausible that there were other ways to get high-quality software through besides paying a license fee to Microsoft. As a result, I found that idea very attractive.

There's no extreme right in Norway (at least not in the parliament). The so-called "extreme right" progress party are left of the US Democrats in all(?) matters.

With only 16% of the votes they also lost 1/4th their seats from the previous election, which was won by a labor/left coalition.

Norway is the same.

The norm is 37.5 hour work weeks. We're entitled to a 0.5 hour lunch break every day, but that's unpaid unless you're required to spend it on-site.

4) They were on a power trip and looking to destroy things for the sake of it, just to make some point. 5) Extending their "field time" for personal reasons, e.g. because it pays really well. 6) The people in question were just completely clueless about hardware.

It seems to me that they simply destroyed everything that contains the word "programmable" in it's description, including switching regulator that is "programmed" by choice of external resistor.

I like Clojure, but this looks rather painful.

If you're dead set on adding type declarations, perhaps you'd be better off with Haskell or something?

I agree, this looks terrible. It seems every discussion about static vs. dynamic typing on HN ends with the following realizations, spread over multiple comments:

- its hard to safely refacture without static types (and the help of the IDE that often comes with it)

- dynamic languages must compensate the missing type checking support from the compiler with additional unit tests, negating the productivity gains

Sometimes it would be nice to have both worlds in the same language, but the way Clojure does it does't appeal to me at all.

I'm actually trying to address this in my current language experiment: https://github.com/mikera/kiss

The idea: add static types to Clojure without compromising on the dynamism / flexibility / convenience

4096 bit keys only make sense if they're asymmetric and those won't capture anything close to 4096 bits of entropy.

As for the strength of 256 bits, the Wikipedia page on brute force attacks should tell you how infeasible attacking even a 128 bit key is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute-force_attack

I like it this way. Less intrusive, but easy to find when you want it.

I think this 13-part series by Erik Meijer is great: http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/C9-Lectures-Erik-Meijer-Func...

More material here: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Video_presentations#Intro...

For anyone trying to go to the Erik Meijer link, the correct url is: http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/C9-Lectures-Erik-Meijer-Func...

I think vasquez put an extra right angle bracket by mistake.

Thanks. I did fix it soon after posting, but guess the incorrect one could be cached for a while.

Erik recently announced that he will re-do this course in one of the online course websites. (no twitter from work so don't have details)

Personally I use Xmonad for my desktop (all servers are headless, of course -- running screen but tmux looks interesting). It's a no-nonsense tiling WM for managing all your xterm windows. I also have dmenu installed, launching apps directly from the WM is more convenient than you'd think.

I guess the two of you refer to not having X installed at all, but while it does provide some distractions, I can't see myself getting shit done (i.e. procrastinate on hnews) without a real browser.

This prize was created by bankers to celebrate their own pseudo(mostly)-science.

Everything I've come across suggest that Alfred Nobel detested their ilk, and wouldn't want his name associated with the prize in any way, shape or form. That's why the title matters.

Thank you, this award is really a joke.

Economists, generally, don't use their models in the real world. And when they do, they lose billions of dollars.

See Myron Scholes. He did it twice.

Because his "science" was flawed.

It drives me crazy that these guys not only get awards, but influence government financial policy.

What should influence government financial and fiscal policy if not economics?

Economists, not economics.

The current people who are the "top economists" in the world, are, generally, ill-fit to their jobs.

Their abilities to assess risk are horrible.

They are making the world a more dangerous place, not safer.

Economics is very complicated, much more complicated than most leading economists think.

I am talking about people heading the leading economic and financial institutions today.

They are dangerous because they are overly confident of their horrible "predictions".