skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If someone handed you $100,000 today, how would you spend it to maximize future profits?

I still find turning off the tight-fisted switch to make strategic investments difficult. Warren Buffet makes it look easy -- and the author's routine prompting is of course superb -- but they remain as poorly-reconciled opposites in my head. Until there's enough cash for delegation and perspective...
I think you have the right idea but the wrong phrasing. If the top 20% are earning 80% of the wealth, they're getting 80% of the benefit of the country's system of laws, infrastructure, resources, etc and should pay accordingly.

That doesn't mean they should pay 80% though - in a world where people and capital can move, the price you can charge people and businesses to be in your country is subject to market pressure. And assuming proper pricing, markets are the best way to efficiently allocate scare resources.
Releasing Early Is Not Always Good? Heresy
They're not going through conniptions. A markup reader already can display images with the <img> tag, and video is to the web what images were in 1995. However, the spec has an easy fallback - anything inside the video tag will be displayed on the older browsers. SO, as you said, that's where a link to download the video could be.

However, that's not what content producers want. They don't want you to be able to directly store the video on your machine, that's why they obscure it behind ridiculously obfuscated Flash players, making you go through all of these conniptions. That way you can't (easily) get it on your portable player or your home theater computer.
The definition of fiat currency is the currency that a government mandates for payment of taxes and which courts require you to accept as payment of debts. What country are you thinking of where gold is used by fiat?
Pretty hard to say.

I'd say it's just MS's size that has done them in. When you get that big, it's just too hard to change your dominant technology and business cultures.

Plus, I'd say there's a general lack of elegance about the whole MS empire. It's more "hack it until it works," at all levels of their software stacks. Not that there aren't a whole bunch of brilliant folks laboring there, nor that there isn't good software in their stable, but I think they're laboring without people at the top who have some clear sense of "taste" as well as some clear sense of long-term technical vision.

Or maybe they do have those people, and their vision is just out of date or wrong-headed.

Windows Mobile is probably the best example of this. Who in their right minds would think that just subsetting Windows itself would be a good idea on a mobile device? Including assuming a little mouse-like pointing device, so the whole WIMP stack could be used unchanged? People who are blindly convinced that the Windows API is the best and doesn't need to adapt or change or grow to move with changing environments, I guess.
Source please. And define "control". Investment bankers might "control" my retirement fund but they certainly don't own it. The difference is rather important.
Old Time, Bluegrass, and French Canadian trad fiddle.
I'd presume you'd have some grapevine contacts with your chief competitor, but I'm not in HR, nor have I ever been involved in sniping competitors' employees...
But see that's kinda stinky cos it's not semantic. You're not embedding the video element in the document so it can describe the content. It would be really cool if the js somehow could remove the video element or something and add it back in... but I dunno how possible that is.
Actually, your comment clearly illustrates why the choice Firefox et al. made is completely wrong. The only reason the video doesn't show in your browser is that he had been forced to use javascript hackery instead of a plain video elements to override this braindead default behavior. If they had made the correct choice, it would have worked for you, too.
Keith Ferrazzi's recommended reading on relationship building
> The rich should be taxed. After all, when the top 20% are taking over 80% of the money, they should be paying 80% of any nation's taxes too. If they're not, the system is unfairly biased to keeping the rich rich.

Actually, the US federal income tax rate is far more "progressive" than that. If you're at/below median income, you're probably not paying any federal income tax. (You are paying social security, but you get that money back with a decent return. The rich don't.)
This is a problem with education in general. It needs fixing; OTOH, these days inquisitive kids (and adults) can find out anything on the Internet.
As an ex-Big 4 auditor, I have experience of auditing both private and public US firms. Even without Sox requirements, there are enough complications in the audit legislation to make a private company audit less than straightforward. Trying to squeeze those regulations into a start-up type company structure is what makes up the time and cost of an audit.
Ask HN: Why is HN not allowing me to submit this URL?
I tried on all browsers but wouldn't work.I found this interesting article ( a little old but valid) http://joshbersin.com/2009/02/06/deep-vs-wide-the-new-career-strategy/

But every time I tried submitting HN just asked me to "Please try again".
New Features in Wolfram Alpha: Year-End Update
For about the same price as the quarter eating vending machine, a 7-11 style soda dispenser could probably have been installed and the price per soda would probably have been around 2 cents each for a big gulp size. It is very cost effective, much better than bottles or cans. It might have been viewed as a step up in benefits vs. a takeaway. Pennywise, pound-foolish.

http://www.sodadispenserdepot.com/dispensersused.html
Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too
The point is that marshaling energies of that magnitude is actually pretty routine for our culture.

In particular, two million pounds of SRB propellant plus more than 500,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen is not comparable to 64,225 U.S. gallons of jet fuel.

In particular, you are acting as if the fundamental problem is represented by the Shuttle. That's just one particular configuration of one possible solution. What you're doing would be like someone from the early 1900's showing the in-feasibility of the performance envelope of a 747 by quoting the stats of a Curtiss biplane.

Abandon the idea that you have to use chemical propulsion, or that you have to carry your own power, or even your own reaction mass, and you get fantastic improvement.

Here's what you get when you only keep doing the 3rd thing:

http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/library/meetings/fellows/mar0...
Automatic Wordpress Backup
Is this the greatest Xmas album of all time?
Yes but I talked with them and fortunately, they were pretty accommodating. I now work from home (which is something I wanted) and don't have to work on that project.
There is no reason anyone should have to lose months of hard work in writing quality articles just because you didn't back up.
This is a great idea.

My original thinking was to suggest a combination of enforcing a minimum number of trusted users and then reporting a weighted average of your trusted users + the mass' rating but your solution is conceptually nicer since it adds the same noise to the vote but while extending the idea of valuing a particular user's judgement.

The big technical issue will be computing these "trusted ratings" for every comment. The trust graph could be done asynchronously so that wouldn't be an issue.
His argument was certainly not rational.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007809
Yes, fraud has always been criminal. However, SOX says that the CEO can't escape by pleading ignorance to the goings-on of his company. If his company commits fraud, the CEO is responsible, and can face jail time because of the fraud.

I've no problem with that. I doubt it will stop innovation, except perhaps the kind Enron was involved in (that is, innovation in fraud).

You conflate a lot of issues here by introducing medical innovation and jet engine technology. However, the common denominator is jail time for fraudulent behavior. We're not talking about jailing failed attempts. We're talking about fraud.

As I mentioned above, SOX goes too far in dictating how the company should be transparent. I don't really care. But: the CEO (or, as a reply in the thread above advanced, all of the officers EDIT: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1008571) is (are) responsible. They can't simply testify, "I didn't know about that" and get away with it.

I actually think that by spelling out all of these rules, even though they are expensive, they just give bad guys a set of rules to be gamed.
It's an Office Space reference.

In the movie, the PHBs hold a meeting in which they solemnly instruct all their employees to ask "Is what I'm doing good for the company?" before they do anything.

The audience rolls its eyes in sympathy, for the reasons you've pointed out here.
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1005281
Then do you punish the rest of society to bring the rich up? You can go around in circles here.

My opinion is that no matter what you call the oligarchy of corporate wealth and public influence that runs the United States, you can't call it fair. The playing field is tilted toward those with power to tilt the playing field. People are profiting from the unfairness in the playing field.

So the moral thing to do is to tilt it back. You don't have to nationalize Nabisco or send millionaires to debtor's prison to improve the situation. But you can tax them disproportionately compared to the poor, and use the money on social programs.

Put another way, above the line of FU money, the marginal value of the millionaire's last dollar is lower. It takes more of their dollars to make a proportionate impact on their income, compared to the impact of the payroll, property, and income taxes on the middle-class salary.
Running a CouchDB cluster on Amazon EC2
Is it a good thing or a bad thing that it took them so long to start getting things right? How many of these things are right by design or accident?
Here's an idea:

Why not just add an onclick that puts in the `<source>` tags?

that way you still have a `<video>` tag but it has nothing to preload until you click it

note: I havn't tested this approach

Edit: Ok so I tried that in firefox and it doesn't work. But What if you make a video with 1 frame and a resolution of 1x1 and make that the source. Then you can replace that with onclick? (this one is more work than I'm willing to do out of curiosity, maybe someone else will try it?)
GUI Magnets - useful for prototyping
Having worked on and off in restaurants over the years, you have to clean these things nightly - and thoroughly - or else they get disgusting very quickly. That's the biggest problem with most of this kind of thing, espresso machines too. We have a single-serve automatic coffee maker right now that's not supposed to require regular cleaning, it's a little better about it but it can still get really gross.
The window management for OSX sort of... sucks. I've been using Windows for years and just bought a Mac and I was pretty shocked at how much effort it took to tile two windows.
Rage Against the Machine? Raging within the machine will do for now
OAuth WRAP support in FriendFeed for feedback
Well, it won't be long till whatwg find another usability issue with `video` and stuff, and expanding HTML5 to a full featured bloated media player stack.
> Over the months though the apples took a larger and larger portion of the delivery

I have to ask, was this over the winter months when many fruits are out of season?
Use rsync to deploy your website
I think it was a major case of student syndrome. With no date set to deliver, they had no incentive to finish.

If you hire me to paint your house, I'll say "sure, happy to help." If you hire me to paint your house by Friday, I'll say "where's the paint can?"
I'd really like to know who modded these comments down. The fact that every comment of mine on this thread was just modded down and every reply to my comments were just modded up seems highly suspicious.

If you really have a beef with what I'm saying actually debate it with me rather than this passive-agressive BS.
I like having my servers named things like HQDC01 instead of something like MrSpock or Samantha, but I do know others who prescribe to the Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (Full Metal Jacket) style of server naming--"Tonight, you p*kes will sleep with your servers. You will give your server a girl's name. Because this is the only...etc...".

The HQ is for Headquarters, DC for Domain Controller, 01. HQDS01 for Headquarters Development Server 01, etc... It's an MCSE best practices naming convention to locate and indentify servers.
all right, all right, kool-aid drinkers! ;-)
I wish it were "Take the Skinheads Bolwing" getting all this 'underground' support instead...
How so? I take a pretty dim view of most organized religion, and found this to be one of the more rational sermons I have read or heard.

He suggests that in a dire situation, stealing from the shelves of a major chain store is a less evil alternative than violent crime or prostitution.

The obvious flaw in his argument would pointing out that this is a false dilemma, that there are many other alternatives. But for the example of the recently released prisoner he cites, I'm not sure which obvious ones he's failing to consider. I'm not pro-shoplifting, but given his scenario it seems better than robbery.
And might these be the two best Christmas songs?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFUgRRYmLvk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCr30OVMjHA
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/12/10/malaysian-company-mo...

Friendster was bought this month for more money then should ever have been spent buying something nobody uses.
Duke Nukem Forever isn't dead. It's just hanging out with Elvis for a little while, before the time to come back is right.
It was, I think.

Having exhausted every legal avenue, what is the most moral (socially-acceptable/least-harm) illegal option you need to do in order to keep alive?

His answer: steal the bare minimum required from places where you will do the least damage to individuals, i.e. large supermarkets where the cost is spread thinly over many people.

It sounds like the sort of thing you could model with game theory if you wanted to "prove" it.
It seems like the big problem was that they were trying to be on the cutting edge by licensing other engines. But, by the time a engine is available for licensing, the flagship title (Doom 3, Half Life 2, whatever) has already shipped and set the new standard. At the same time, they wanted to have the best looking game available, despite always being behind the curve in their base technology.
Could Google get upset with this approach?

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...
Fail early. Fail often.
I've been thinking about this issue a lot more since Jeff Atwood lost his data.

What I like about this option is that it goes from the cloud to the cloud.
The problem being patents/licensing. mp4 is patented up the 'wazoo' and has onerous licensing terms.
How can Firefox distribute the H.264 codecs without infringing on patents?
You will never legislate away corruption no matter how high the penalty or how onerous the regulations. The goal is to achieve an acceptable level of corruption with minimal interference on the good guys. It actually reminds me of the questions that DRM raises.
"Today's web" works just fine without Javascript if you browse around. One can easily enabled it per-site in good browsers for the sites where you actually need it.

It has the nice benefit that a lot of distracting annoyances (just to mention snap.com, most advertising, those pesky "2000 social web icons popup" footers) simply disappear.

If you want '"today's web"' with all its glittery blingbling and distractions, then go ahead. But don't fall for the illusion that you would miss anything by browsing with Javascript off by default.
Single Page: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_duke_nukem/all/1
Your constant Theora bashing is so wrong. H264 is patented, patents are bad, Theora seems the best alternative. Get over it.
You don't roll your eyes at Office Space because you think "oh no, how will the employees know about the unintended consequences?! What a silly request."

You sigh and roll your eyes because it's a patronising request which stamps the bosses authority and makes it clear that the boss thinks all the employees are a bit slow. (Or perhaps because you think it should be up to the boss to decide what's good for the company then organise the employees to do it, and by asking the employees to do that he's trying to avoid work by pushing his job onto the employees while still keeping his position and salary).

The parent post I was responding to was suggesting "try to see the unexpected consequences" and I was countering "that's like trying to find all the bugs - you'll never know when you've finished; more helpful would be managerial humility and willingness to notice negative results and revert the changes".
13 Gigapiksel’lik Harlem Panoraması
Fransız yazılım şirkeri Kolor AutoPano Pro adlı panaromik fotoğraf yaratma yazılımlarını tanıtmak amacıyla, fotoğrafçı Gerard Maynard‘ın da yardımıyla tam 2045 ayrı fotoğrafın birleştirilmesiyle oluşturulan ve toplam 13 Gigapixel büyüklüğünde bir Harlem panaroması oluşturmuş.
Turning off Javascript is not insane. JS opens you up to a wide range of possible security problems. Also, you can think of it ideologically - websites should still work with JS turned off. Building an accessible, semantic, well-formed website means building a website that works without Javascript.

The only exceptions are Google Maps or anything equally as rich. And I do mean equally as rich.
FTC paves the way for Nvidia's x86
How does the title call out the video element as "effectively unusable" when in the end Gruber actually crafts a page that works with the video element?

Sure, no client respects the autobuffer attribute, and there's no way to use a poster image without resorting to javascript, and you have to encode the video two different ways. But it still works. It works even if you stick to one format (you're just excluding clients) or don't play the javascript-dom-switchout game (the video autobuffers, you don't get a poster image at all).

Better title: HTML5 Video Element Has Glaring Issues, but Usable.
At my present company the free sodas (and beers, on Friday) are simply delivered in pallets and teams take a week at a time to be responsible for the fridges. Peer pressure is enough to make this work. There was the time Luke's team didn't restock the beer fridge and to this day he's known as Luke Warm...
see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law
second system effect?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
You know, times has changed recently. Now we have not only web sites, but the web apps too. And there different rules apply.
"As for why I refuse to embed Flash, let me put it this way. I use and highly recommend ClickToFlash, which blocks all Flash content by default. Why would I publish content using a technology that I personally block by default?"

Soon you will be blocking <audio> and <video> by default too, for the same reasons.
Netscape the product was disruptive, but was it ever a great company?
How do Linux distributions distribute H.264 and AAC decoders? Debian does, Ubuntu does, Fedora does, basically everything in the world except GNUsense does--yet they do just fine with themselves.

The best solution would be to simply use system decoders, like Safari does. On Windows, this would be Directshow, on Linux this would be Gstreamer, and on OS X this would be Quicktime. The browser should have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with video and audio decoding.
Are More Netbooks Bad For Computer Makers?
I think the author of the blog post misinterpreted the lyric in number three. It isn't Jay-Z talking about himself. So it's not really contradictory:

The first verse is rumored to be about Jaz-O, his former mentor and business partner, or about long-time friend, business partner, and co-founder of Roc-a-fella Records Damon Dash. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_One

He's saying that they should have kept a low profile, while he, the 'business, man' developed his personal brand.
> you could take the view that Google should have never entered the market relying on a tax loophole which was never supposed to be there in the first place that lawmakers were unaware of.

If lawmakers are ignorant of the laws they make, is that Google's fault? You'd think politicians would have by now realised that laws often have unintended consequences.
i don't really read his posts as prescribing "fault" per se.

its pointing out the fact that the party in question, which is the government closing a loophole in this case, is actively and intentionally breaking the equilibrium, therefore bringing on the consequences (or benefits).

the example was intentionally worded as it was to show how one party won't always take other parties under consideration. a successful, deliberative decision under nash equilibrium is much more boring and not a very entertaining example.
Chuck Norris can Search Better than Google
> After all, you could hire them back if you offered them enough

This is typical HR thinking, and is only valid for a certain demographic (i.e., the people on the mid-to-low end of the bell curve). In my experience the absolute top-level engineers cannot be retained with just money.

Let me put it this way - you're an ace engineer with oodles of experience. You are in high demand, and if you were unemployed, you probably would have recruiters banging your door down by week's end. These are the "top talent" that all companies claim they want to hire - and they will make top dollar regardless of where they go.

Having known some of these people, the motivator is not money, because money is not why they do this, and honestly they're swimming in it already. To hire these guys you need to do something more - a great working environment, a kickass team, a sane management structure, etc etc.

Money can only motivate someone so far.
Or make the execs and shareholders responsible, e.g. by ruling that limited liability doesn't apply when companies commit crimes.
But we also hear "Ship it when it's ready." These conflicting messages are so confusing... ;)
I haven't seen Avatar, but at the very least it seems to be a masterpiece of PR. I forget, now, how many articles I've seen describing every random aspect of the production. How do they manage to get these written and published?
Neither was yours.
Hmm. I find the process of shaving on a daily basis painful, so in a way, yes.
When did I bash Theora?

There's a lot wrong with Theora, but it's irrelevant to the discussion: what matters is what people actually use. If today it came up that there was a big patent on JPEG, would you propose that the entire web stop using JPEG tomorrow?

No matter how good or bad Theora is, the internet will not simply drop the existing standard formats and switch. It doesn't work that way.

This is also why browsers should use system decoders: it would make it easier to use a different video or audio format, since one could use anything that people had decoders installed for. This would stop the internet from being locked into a single format.
well, all i get is a blank page right now, so assuming this site was deployed using rsync, this isn't a real good advertisement for the process.
Please explain where the rest of society is being punished. I hope your answer does not include anything similar to "they have to pay for things."

As for social programs, if you give a man enough money to live for a day, he's not going to work for a day. Welfare encourages people to do absolutely nothing.