skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
According to the following the white-on-black display uses less power. Also, I found that once I altered a little bit of the default color scheme I had to alter ALL of it somehow, like changing the background and text color would mess up the border and highlighting color. It's an area where I need to do some more learning.

http://blog.javia.org/nexus-one-display-and-subpixel-pattern...
The current version of the official Theora encoder does allow you to achieve perceived visual quality comparable to that of the current h264 encoders at not that much higher bitrate in case of, at least, the typical "Internet Video" content.

Yes, to reach certain quality targets using Theora might mean increased bandwidth cost, but it will also be the only major cost left, for a moment leaving aside the question of adoption. That seem to be a much more predictable cost model than what MPEG LA offers. It might, as well, turn out to be a more affordable model for smaller companies not reaching the MPEG license fee caps.

Paying more for a better product? I'd chose the, possibly higher, price of pushing Theora adoption and Theora-encoded bits now to get a promise of a better "quality", in more aspects than just the visual appearance, down the road.
I don't see that as much of an excuse. Investing in a company isn't like paying taxes; you voluntarily decide who to invest in, and ethically (if not legally) you have some responsibility for their actions.
As a Pythonista I have no idea what the Ruby snippet is doing. Readability depends entirely on context.

Oh, come on. You're just disagreeing for effect here.

I've never used Ruby but that snippet is clear as day.

The Python 3 snippet suggests to me that the output would be "/hi" though :)
This is one of those times it makes me sad that YC is so unconventional/lean (though I understand the decision and I'm not sure I'd do anything different in their shoes). If they hired a young/good writer whose job it was to maintain and curate a list and profile page for each company as well as post "where are they now?" posts for the 6 month survivors who want to be profiled, it would be a nice SEO/awareness boon for the young companies. It would also be a good/easy reservoir of reporter-targets (anything that helps reporters be lazy is good, IMO).

Of course, that content/awareness/traffic would also help spread the word about YC. I'm still stunned at how many geeks I talk to who have never heard of it.
High quality KBA (knowledge based answer) systems from RSA
> Ruby takes full advantage of the Lisp chainsaw.

I always get a little sad and slightly irritated when I hear people say things like this. This is a statement born from ignorance and misunderstanding.

What ruby does to present micro-DSLs are what any language that lets the programmer influence the scope of single dispatch and has a lightweight syntax for function calls can do. They are not what Lisp macros do, and do not even approach all the common "easy" uses cases for macros. Further, they also incur a much larger runtime performance penalty, whereas macros incur none.

Ruby has so many merits on its own. There is no need to drum up nonsense about how it's a "lisp without the parenthesis".
Is Android Forking from Linux?
Go stick them on here; http://startupwiki.co.uk/ and I will add a freature to tag the startup's as dead or alive :D and have it show up here http://startupwiki.co.uk/investor/ycombinator
Carter,

Where did you get the idea that fusion power is functionally free?

The fuel you burn is nearly free, but you also use up a ton of material and make it radioactive so it's hard to recycle. The structural and shielding elements of the reactor will likely degrade (for we haven't tested this) on a similar timescale to the degradation of wind turbines, solar collectors, and the other components in the balance of the plant.

The heat from the sun and at the core of the earth is functionally free, in the same sense: the question is how expensive it is to get it out! I've never seen a really reasonable and measured study of what commercial fusion might cost to produce power.
That's marketing, not advertising.

Google matches ads with audiences, not products with customers.
Wow, I've never seen that before. I'm also not sure I'd say a solution that uses bytecode rewriting is really working within the language, but that's a pretty interesting package anyhow.
yeah sure. I first wrote "arc" and then replaced it with "a variant of lisp" then replaced "another company" with "a company" so the sentence reads oddly.
It's inexplicable:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B-K4NGo2HE&NR=1
Firefox on Android renders its first web page, no plans for iPhone
Thanks for expanding.

As for why not: well, because it implies that you believe people who are Christian are racist and white. Perhaps also because the disjunct suggests that you believe race and religious choice to be equivalent with regards to discrimination - one is a choice the other is not.

Plus the story is about removing those with dissenting views from a social invitation only event in a private location.

Suppose the president practised homosexual sex and the bumper sticker was a "God hate fags" one. Do you maintain your view?
Portfolio theory, anyone?

Investing isn't 'gotcha' politics or rhetoric. There's no reason why all a person's investments have to advance some unified self-consistent theory of the world. In fact, it's almost certainly better if they don't.

If an investor is choosing well, their investments altogether can be like a roulette wheel where red, black, and green all have positive expectations. No, they can't each come up at the same time, but that exclusivity doesn't make it irrational to bet them all simultaneously.
It's uncited but according to the Crunchbase page for Xobni [1] they (YC) invested a further 80K in Angel funding in Dec 2006.

1. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/xobni
Or he was excluding the US. since everyone knows by now that their space program was done in a hollywood basement.
Hacker News OnePage for Google Chrome
Some rather arbitrarily chosen factoids there, hardly the "state of the internet". I'd like some bandwidth usage figures, for example!
usually smart people try to avoid things that would result in them being put in jail
I have one data point for you: for the last two weeks I've been collecting user surveys. I want people to participate, but was unsure whether altruism or incentivization would work better. Enter the A/B test: group A got told "Do this and I'll give you an increase in your print quota", group B got told "This will help us improve the product for our users." (Everyone who took the survey got the goodie.)

This has been the most decisive A/B test I've ever run. 2.62% of incentivized users in A convert, versus a mere .73% of non-incentivized users. That's waaaaaay pay 99% confidence that incentivization works.

It is pretty trivial incentivization, too: I'm giving them more of something which is too cheap for me to even describe a way to measure how much it costs and, even more weirdly, essentially nobody is helped by the freebie. (Normal print quota is 15, incentive is +5, number of users printing between 15 and 20 is below miniscule.
World hottest news: US wary as Iran president agrees nuclear deal terms
Importance of hubs in social networks is overstated
I'm still stunned at how many geeks I talk to who have never heard of it.

This hit me when Drew (Houston, Dropbox) had to tell geeks about it here as if it were still 2005: http://vimeo.com/9100565
We just haven't gotten that far. Our goal is to introduce concurrency and parallelism through practical examples. We'll get there, honest. We just decided we'd "release early, release often." :)
Why do you need lambdas to do this? Why wouldn't an inline function work?
I'm not sure I get the lambda issue. If you want a > 1 line lambda why not just define a function?

def a(x):
def b():
print x
return b

Not sure what a prototypical ruby usecase would be.
Switching between languages based on context is good; you might have a favorite pet language for desktop work, embedded work, iPhone work, and web work. But splitting your brain cells between languages for the same sort of task, in the case web development, isn't very efficient.

I have to do it, for different platforms, but that means I'm constantly switching between design techniques and I can't reuse one body of common code.

It just makes sense to put all your eggs in one basket and make the switch. However, it's important to have a healthy respect for other languages and their pros and cons compared to your own choice.
A misleading title, a shameful tease.

Not available for HTC G1. I believe most Android phones out there in the wild are 1st generation, be sure to let us know when you release a version for us early adopter-types..

(Edit) I didn't intend to sound so snarky here, I just really wanted your app, its very beautiful.. Thank you for building it.
For the PDF avoidant.

MPEG LA’s AVC License Will Continue Not to Charge Royalties for Internet Video that is Free to End Users

(DENVER, CO, US – 2 February 2010) – MPEG LA announced today that its AVC Patent Portfolio License will continue not to charge royalties for Internet Video that is free to end users (known as Internet Broadcast AVC Video) during the next License term from January 1, 2011 to December 31, 2016. Products and services other than Internet Broadcast AVC Video continue to be royalty-bearing, and royalties to apply during the next term will be announced before the end of 2010.
MPEG LA's AVC Patent Portfolio License provides access to essential patent rights for the AVC/H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10) digital video coding standard. In addition to Internet Broadcast AVC Video, MPEG LA’s AVC Patent Portfolio License provides coverage for devices that decode and encode AVC video, AVC video sold to end users for a fee on a title or subscription basis and free television video services. AVC video is used in set-top boxes, media player and other personal computer software, mobile devices including telephones and mobile television receivers, Blu-ray DiscTM players and recorders, Blu-ray video optical discs, game machines, personal media player devices and still and video cameras.

For more information about MPEG LA’s AVC License or to request a copy of the License, please visit
http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Intro.aspx
ماهواره بر سیمرغ

To echo the sibling post, "Satellite-Bearing Phoenix" is an acceptable translation.

Literally, it is "Satellite upon Phoenix", where Simorgh is a Persian mythical bird roughly equivalent to a phoenix of western literature (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simurgh).
Clubs do well financially when they go mainstream. It means much more liquor sales. This is a lot like websites who also love it for increased ad sales. The problem is that the masses do eventually tire of the same club. That, or they simply get older and move on to do other things. Because the club is no longer the cool place, there are no/fewer replacements for the existing clientele who are shrinking.

The problem with Digg is its a social spot and subject to the same dynamics as clubs. Going mainstream isn't a problem. It's what they do afterward that is. Not to worry, just like in real life, the owners will make bank, leave/sell the old spot to naive buyers who think it'll be a good buy. They will then start something new. This happens all the time with entrepreneurs in similar industries like clubs and restaurants.
If I were teaching high school students I'd probably start with HTML and Javascript.

I think Javascript is a great intro language, you can start really simple (alert("hello!")) and dive deeper into some pretty complex programming without leaving Firefox/Firebug. Plus webapps are very accessible for High School students.

For CS students its really hard. Dynamic languages are nice because it simplifies much of the work you deal with in Java and C. But eventually you'll need to know what static typing is and how to allocate memory. I like starting simply and building on that base as opposed to diving in the deep end.

My college's first programming language was C++. Spent the first few weeks understanding bits and bytes and core programming concepts w/o even writing much code. It seemed overly complex for an intro, but maybe it was poor instruction.
Why HTML5 Isn't Going to Save the Internet
I figured there may be some of you who use the Firefox greasemonkey version of this, and would appreciate a chrome version as well. I have found myself using Chrome a lot for my normal browsing and breaking out Firefox for web dev.
Adobe Flash is simply not a viable option. period.
http://fritzw.com/media/misc/flash2.jpg
Python versus Ruby has always struck me as one of the absurd battles ever. The two languages seem to address a very similar space and have broadly similar features sets.

Yes there are points of variation but both seem to work really well. People build cool and useful stuff in both. People are productive in both.

As for me - I personally like the syntax of Python better. That could be because I learnt it first - or it could just be something in me. Who knows?

and who cares...
BASIC on an 8-bit computer?

I would go with something interactive that would make seamless switches between writing a program and running it.

Even REPLs like Python's and Ruby's seem overkill.

A dialect of Lisp would also seem appropriate.
Win $10,000: AT&T announces developer Contest
It is the other way round, at least in Germany. During your interview you will always be asked how much you got at your last job. Then there is a magical cap at say 20% above the last salary (depends on how much they want you of course).

So it is very important to have a good salary at the beginning, because it will always be a reference point.
Is Farsi difficult to learn?
No, this is not a correct translation. The correct one is "Phoenix Satellite Launch Vehicle" or "Phoenix Satellite Carrier". It's just a mockup at this point.

This was just a sounding rocket, nothing more. No ICBM test, nothing like that. Third in a series of simple sounding rockets to test telemetry and command. First launch of such a rocket since Iran put a small satellite into LEO last year.
I wholly agree that, where feasible, wind and other renewable energy sources can and should be employed in preference to non-renewable sources. That said, as far as I understand, there are cases where such renewable energy sources are not feasible solutions, and in those cases, I think that we should prefer nuclear power to coal, diesel or any other fossil fuel power.
DC motors are very efficient, so, I'd have to see some numbers to buy that.

Also, a big plus for DC motors is that the controllers are simpler. AC motors require a high-power adjustable-frequency inverter.

The only downside of common standard DC motors that I know of is that you have to change the brushes every n years, which I'll gladly take over oil changes. :)
Syntax is human. Syntax is ergonomics. A programming language is the bridge between man and machine. Lisp, I would argue, is far more about the machine than the man and that is the simple reason why it's not more popular.

Python was cool before the libraries; that's why those libraries got written in the first place. Lisp has been around forever and is still lacking in libraries and other support.
I thought this article explains it pretty well: http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/volume_9/v9i39_yaffe.html
Yes, but the plugins in Ultimate Edition tend to lag behind the ones in RubyMine quite a bit.
"simplicity, immediacy, and interactivity": yes, absolutely. I used to learn with VB code, many years ago. Dragging a button onto the form, double-clicking it, and entering

MsgBox "Hello!"
Command1.Caption = "Hello!!!"

And then clicking Go, and trying it out right there -- that's real programming, it's got the properties you asked for, and it's much more discoverable than a command-line shell.
She makes enough to pay 200 news reporters $75,000 a year
I'm not sure your link supports your assertion. The negative reports seem 3-6 years old and perhaps based on 3rd party software vs the software they came with.

A more recent set of figures shows that implementation can have an impact, but that if you've got control of the software you'll probably do better with Vorbis. Note the test is on matching bitrates, but Vorbis is more efficient per bit.

http://tuomas.kulve.fi/blog/2009/11/07/n900-battery-duration...

It also shows that FLAC has longer battery runtimes which I'm guessing is because flash based players no longer need to spin up disks more for the larger filesizes.
I know what you're thinking. "Does the nucleus have six electrons or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this uncertainty I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is an isotope of uranium, responsible for slow-neutron fission, and would blow your city clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?
Your mental model has been rapidly deteriorating probably even before you formed it.

Spam is intent, not form.
My bet is 90% of that traffic is lazy programmers using "1.1.1.1" or "1.2.3.4" as the default, "empty" IP address for their application.
My guess is that it's their version of FizzBuzz.
But I thought the United States and Russia spent billions of dollars on their space programs for the Tang and cutting-edge science!
The guidelines suggest that whereever possible you should link to the original:

> Please submit the original source. If a blog post
> reports on something they found on another site,
> submit the latter.

Here's the article as posted on the Leeds University web site:

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/news/article/707/excessive_internet_u...

I found that because it was submitted earlier:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1097476
I would love Google App Engine support.
What's the book he mentioned? The video is not subtitled or captioned so I couldn't watch it at all.

Thanks
"However, I'm at the stage of my career where I'm optimizing for experience, not for earnings."

In my experience, "optimizing experience" is not a stage with our kind of job, it's the whole career.

As such, I've always cared to optimize earnings at the same time. Not ask huge amounts of money, but remain careful about that.
You might be taking the statement out of context, and you are certainly quoting it out of context (although brevity is appreciated.)

The statement in the talk was made to illustrate the differences between Ruby and Python, and it was not made to suggest that Ruby was replicating all the benefits of Lisp.
Star Your Favorite Story On Google News
There is always (emerging) market(s) with lots of smart people who want to work for much less salary because they enjoying of what they are doing. =)
I have the definitive impression that the Pythonistas are more interested in this fighting than most other language cultures.

I might be wrong, but I really can't mention any other group of people trolling Perl discussions. It is the same for Ruby?

It really seems strange for a language which got the name from Monthy Python. (-: Is it some inferiority feelings to environments which are fun? :-)
Smuxi - IRC client 0.7.1 su Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty e 9.10 Karmic
Ok. Maybe even tonight.
The real problem is that an artificial language processing engine will find a parse for it.

One actual example I remember is a parse of "New fans run." About the operation of recently acquired fans, right?

Well, the lexicon in our system found an instance of "New" as a proper noun (a band or something), the use of "fans" as a transitive verb, and one of the definition of "runs" as a noun (think baseball, for just one example). So you had this proper noun New fanning this abstract usage of runs as the parse that the system selected.

This more than anything demonstrated to me the necessity of statistical techniques in NLP (now taken as a given, but a fairly recent development relative to the history of NLP research).
This should be in the iPhone app soon.
Extra fun for colorblind people.
1. Yes, this is true in IntelliJ (the root for all these projects) as well. As these things go, it is a pretty lightweight project - just point it at a directory and go. But yes, required.

2. On Mac: Option-Command-F11 toggles this.

Overall, I really like this product, but I've been been an IntelliJ fan for years. Things I like:

- diff tool
- scm integration
- todo list
- refactorings, although obviously the current set is limited
- very keyboard friendly

Still need to try the debugger and figure out how to set multiple Python paths.
"People in all fields are willing to take less money for work they enjoy more."

I definitely agree. But I know there is also a widespread misconception (at least here in France) that you can't have a job that is both fun and financially rewarding, at once.

I think it's just not true, in my experience at least.
Slow motion in film seems to approximate this density of memory. Rather than making a moment so memorable that it is drawn out when we think back on it, they can just slow the moment down to begin with.
We had techniques where we try to minimize the "telegraphing" of our own punch. You practice that with a partner, and try to hit the partener's open hand before they can react to it. If the partner notices you moving first, they drop their hand and they "win". Its an effective drill for the partner too, because they have to learn to read your body motion.
If I start every conversation with Python developers with a rant about how their language/frameworks suck I'm sure they wouldn't be very friendly with me.
Global Twitter: Tweets Translated Into Any Language
K-12 Technology Trends for 2010
Shouldn't there be time and arrows in there somewhere?
A few things I hope this IDE will eventually handle well -

1. Allow project organization and imports

2. Refactoring across files - at a minimum renames and function signature changes

3. Intellisense/auto-completion

4. An emacs like pabbrev mode

Its good to see that intellij looks at the python market as an opportunity. Good tools will help python in a big fashion
Tell HN: My side project, Startup Wiki
Thanks for the Option-Command-F11 tip. They should give an icon or something when it's in full screen mode, it seems to interfere with all other Mac keystrokes. I ended up quitting the app to get out of it.
And, on the side, how about a Manhattan-style project to produce a commerical scale Thorium Reactor within five years?
Football Tickets Online
News, commentary and opinion on American Football including the NFL, College Football and the NFL draft
The familiarity of faces in media presents a level of comfort on a psychological level. Typically your news target audience consists of older generations who demand consistency. So, a prime face in the news = more views = more ads = money = happy viewers. She doesn't do anything special or have some third eye, but everyone knows her.

They could hire 200 new reporters, but if the person presenting the information doesn't get viewed, what is the point?
Something weird is happening in that layout though. Maybe it's just Chrome/Webkit but if you double click anywhere a grid overlays itself onto the page. It seems to be on purpose ( background-image: url(http://blog.peepcode.com/images/grid/27px-leading-w-60-80-gr...); ) but it seems quite bizarre.
I don't think the fights should be vicious, but I think the stakes are fairly high, and even though Ruby and Python are close cousins in the grand scheme of things, they really do represent profoundly different philosophies when you look more closely at the languages. It would be nice if these differences could always be discussed with civility, of course.

I use both Ruby and Python enough to appreciate that both languages generally make important tradeoffs with good intentions, but I don't always agree with the results (in either language). I also find Javascript often has an interesting relationship to both languages.
> Thanks, checking out PEP 3107 now. I've always seen annotations done with the @annotation syntax like the Python 2 snippet has.

The @ syntax is for decorators. Different beast altogether.