How does it work when an open source project is acquired? What's the benefit for RH compared to just forking the project?
I guess the choice of license can get really important in this situation? Are there any old decisions by the founder that now turn out to be especially important?
> Isn't the reason you use that service (waste less time here) specifically to avoid getting drawn into the discussions? Serious question! :-)
No, not really. There is usually ~1 article each day where I get interested in reading the discussion. When that happens, it is often disappointing to find the discussion high-jacked by a top-voted comment that goes in a direction that doesn't interest me. I'm sure there are interesting comments further down the page, but on this site it's hard to find them. I think Slashdot handles this a little better by letting you set a point threshold.
In the even fewer cases when I want to join the discussion, it is pretty meaningless to add a comment to the bottom of a page which is more than a day old.
> I think the issue isn't curation, since Slashdot is technically an editor curated news service, but the timing. That is, how do you have a good discussion when the timescales are so large rather than over the course of a few hours?
Haven't used those sites, and it was hard to get a grip by taking a quick look. How do they solve it? I think single threaded is great, but in my experience it breaks down when the number of comments get too large.
Manually or semi-automatically curated discussions would probable be very valuable.
Thanks for the tip! I personally use http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/, an automated feed of the ten new articles with most points. Since it comes once a day, it helps me spend much less time here, just look it through in the morning and be done.
The downside though, is that it gets close to impossible to join in on, or even read, the discussions. When I see articles usually ~24h after they were posted, the discussion page is so full of nested questions that it's really hard to find anything more than the highest voted comment. How can curation be combined with possibility to discuss, in a better working way?
The argument is usually not that "bits can't be stolen" but that "copying is not theft". If people broke into RIAA's servers and removed their data, I think most pirates would agree that it's comparable to theft.
That is an erroneous comparison. Regarding our own bits, it is the right to access information that we store on devices that we own or rent. Regarding "RIAA's bits" it is our right to copy information that was made publicly available. Regardless of political opinions, the contradiction that I think you are suggesting does not exist.
I'd say, yes numerical is often just as good, but not always. Also, in my opinion, whether information is displayed numerically or visually, the key is to be as minimalistic as possible.