bipin-nag's comments

2 issues here:

1. You can't package GPL stuff into another and then sell the new product.

2. If it is required for Intel's commercial BLAS and they are giving it away for free, it would be a great loss to Intel. So whatever they are giving away must be available for free. Otherwise it makes no sense.

Edit: Open version makes use of non-commercial license MKL, which you can get anyway, see https://registrationcenter.intel.com/RegCenter/NComForm.aspx.... And most likely they are using commercial version for enterprise. But again can you compile R like that and charge for it.

Can you give a source. That looks very made-up.

See my above reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8486513.

I would reiterate that the parent was just sensational, and it is a far cry from the surveillance done by U.S.

Also downward spiral is not very clear in context the article discusses.

Will the downvoter exercise his freedom of expression to tell me what is wrong with my comment above.

What do you mean its a monarch until next election. Head of state is often elected for the term period. Also it maybe one of the cases reported, it doesn't imply voting is entirely corrupt.

What you describe is not democracy but tyranny of majority. To curtail it minorities are given extra rights. The ban has to do with hurting religious sentiments of minorities.

Democracy sometimes requires sacrificing a privilege for public benefit. India has a very diverse culture (I would say no other country in world has such a diverse demographic) and co-existence can be uneasy. Non-Indians may not understand the compromises one has to make, to coexist harmoniously.

I checked their site. Revolution R has 4 products: Open, Plus, Enterprise, Cloud

1. Open: "This one’s not a difference at all: Revolution R Open 8.0 beta is based on R 3.1.1. No modifications are made to core R".

Simply put it is a repack, comes with extra packages like Reproducible R Toolkit, and has a mirror for CRAN.

2. Their Revolution R Plus is what is RHEL to linux. They provide technical support on top of the Open distribution.

3. This is where it smells fishy. "Revolution R Enterprise Workstation is licensed for a single named user, and available in two editions:". But is it a modified R version. They mention no change to core for open, but not for this. If they use R which is licensed under GPL how can they sell it ? Else if it is proprietary why call it "R"?

4. They provide assistance in running Revolution R Enterprise on a Server.

You should google it before asking (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude).

There are many point-of-views that one could(should) factor in to explain the circumstances:

1. Mindset due to poverty: There are many people below the poverty line so it makes sense for the scientific programs to aim for the cost-effective solutions not cutting-edge.

2. Experimental: If it was your first space mission, you wouldn't exactly load it with gadgets. Missions have a chance to succeed or to end in failure. Investment would only make sense after tasting some success.

3. Cost of living: If you are well-off in India, you may still be poor outside of India. Cost of living is lowest in India (http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_by_country.jsp). So cost of research and development will be lower than elsewhere too(maybe not everywhere).

4. Media attention(somewhat): It started with the headlines from British news "We pay for India's rocket to Mars" which raised a lot of eyebrows in India. Even though money from aid was used for intended purpose, it was questioned if India needed the aid. (To me its not worth the brouhaha. They will fancy paying for nuclear programmes next.)

5. GDP: US GDP is the largest in the world. They can afford to spend loads of money without worrying (lets say debt crisis was an exception). India has GDP which is smaller by orders of magnitude.

"Less than persons" has a different in meaning in the post. Generally when someone says that it implies person is less humane or has less of "good human virtues". The author describes it in terms of social interactions. Both have different contexts.

It's like the APC in GTA 4. Corvette certainly is no match for the BRDM-2.

Most awesome thing ever seen on HackerNews !!!

RRAM's are memristors. If you check both their wiki pages, you will see Crossbar's RRAM lined in 2015 and HP's own giving in 2018 for commercial availability.

Memristor is a theoretical term. And RRAM is (arguably) an implementation of memristor. So RRAM seems to be a type of memristor.

Anyways it will be interesting to see the competition. Crossbar will be releasing product much earlier. Lets see if they can seize the day (and the industry). Otherwise HP will deliver. Hopefully the competition will benefit the consumers.

He is one of the topmost contributors to the node.js ecosystem if not the most. He has given a plenty of good libraries. Besides the reasons he gave to leave node.js, I feel that he was under-appreciated and over-worked many times. With components he tried to create a toolchain, wrote express and koa for server, jade for templating, mocha for debugging etc.

He tried to do a lot many things single-handedly. Which is why he needs a lot of maintainers. I don't blame him for overloading and stressing out. That is the way how it goes in node.js. Working in node.js is like battling a multi-headed beast. The core javascript keeps evolving, node.js isn't even in version 1.0, API changes a lot. There are lot of blanks to fill and too much time goes into boilerplate stuff and managing existing code.

It is just not rewarding and fulfilling to contribute to node.js. On top of that he faced a lot of friction from other contributors. He had some really difficult times, like express-connect conflict, bower-components conflict. Having handled conflicts too many, some people also consider him as being rude and too self-centered. Besides he is young and is probably one of the first things he has done he is serious about.

Many times before I asked to myself how does this guy do it. In a community where to contribute even a little one has to put in a lot of effort, his contributions are gigantic. I hope he continues to work, although not at too many projects . His experiences will definitely be handy.

It could be true, that open source meaning is different now. But still I would use open-source by its current definition. Open source's meaning has expanded than what you describe. Which is why we now have Free AND Open Source Software(FOSS).

If you would look around there are lot of licenses built around this point. All open sourced software are not free. Some allow owner to restrict its use like not allowed to be used commercially.

If I had to sum it up these two would be orthogonal: 1. Closed-source vs open-source 2. Proprietary vs free.

Well that sucks. It should not happen, yet it does. And it should not definitely spread to more industries.

But that really is no argument. I am sure the car manufacturers did not downgrade the car so that it runs at half its speed/milage. Then they came up with a fake benchmark to prove to the world that it actually does (even if it does not). Come on that is an insult to one's intelligence. These guys are ripping their customers. Whatever reviews for the product exist are based on the specs that no longer are. That is pure evil.

What can someone do to stop this ? Besides not buying their products.