skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll state up front I think that patent-royalty free codecs are the future, and that Theora is the best of that class at the moment.

But codec comparison is a complicated subject. That link isn't H.264 vs. Theora, it's the particular H.264 encoder and particular settings used at that time by Youtube versus some similar bitrate Theora. It was prompted by an ill-informed comments by Google's Open Source dude who basically said that Youtube using Theora would melt the internet. The test only shows that Theora isn't a ridiculous choice for most web video, not that it's better or even as good as H.264 in general.

The idea is that open trumps closed over time. That's why we're using linux on our servers, and web technologies on top. These were (and are in some cases) toys compared with the competition, but got better by being open. It's only a matter of time till video codecs go the same way, supporting Theora will speed this up and we'll all benefit.
And has over 50% market share in some locations and about a third globally. And both Chrome and Opera are supporting Theora too which adds to the total for this particular fight.
This is one of the most radical changes I've ever seen in a website- it seems like it would have made more sense to add it as a an option, and slowly make it the default. At the very least, they should have had a ton of tooltips all over the site. "Remember X feature? You can now do it here." GrooveShark did a great job of having little helpful popup boxes when they redesigned.

I can't think of a single site I currently use that could pull off such a massive redesign. It would be like Digg replacing the whole site with something from http://labs.digg.com/. Pretty? Sure. Usable? Not so much. Users don't necessarily dislike the new site, they're just confused.

And nobody likes to be confused.
In theory yes. But let's say 80% of company X shareholders wanted a large one time dividend payout but the executives of company X don't want to do it.

At the next board election they simply choose two candidates but both who agree with what the executives want.
I just wish I could simultaneously give up my right to vote and my obligation to pay taxes.
Chrome supports Theora <video> and it has both huge budget and rapidly growing market share.

Chromium supports only Theora <video> and it has both huge budget and growing market share.

Google is in the process of paying $100 million for On2, a company whose business model was building video codecs that didn't infringe on anyone elses patents, and the original source for VP3 which was the basis for Theora.
I'm not sure why everyone is so up in arms about this. I was actually very pleased when I got the email. Yay, they haven't folded! Yay, I'm going to get my WakeMate! Yay, they're giving me a free month of their premium analytics (which implies that there's a standard analytics that's free, just as previously advertised). This seems like a tempest in a teapot to me.
Optimising the Haskell program "HLint" (30 secs to 1.3 secs)
Yeah -- I think this is an example of a place where the language breaks down thanks to the different connotations that "invent" and "discover" have. It seems like math has some properties of both, and the choice of word says more about the person using the word than it does about the phenomena being described.
When and where was it taken?
It is a shame they haven't caught on, but I believe there's a positive-feedback mechanism in advertising these ideas. Once an ingenious idea is made, it is only disseminated to a smaller percentage of people. One of these people then has to be inspired enough by the idea to borrow from the original creator.

If the idea is borrowed, it is likely to live on for longer. If it gets borrowed in a movie, the idea will go global due to the sheer amount of people who will receive the idea compared to reading a sci/fi book.

Once the idea has been spread enough, it will get borrowed enough. Before Asimov, robots were basically a chromed Frankenstein. However, now it's rare and rather dated to see a Frankenbot. Now it's typically benevolent robot/AI hurts humanity to help it, which was a frequent element in Asimov's own work.

Megastructures haven't really appeared in Hollywood movies before. There was the Deathstar and the planetary ring in Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, aside from that I seriously can't think of another without seriously stretching it. So until we see an actual-factual ringworld or dyson spheres, which are far more recognised ideas, I doubt we'll see a matrioshka brain, even though it has the biggest uses.
That's because of the earnings report.
I laughed at the crappymode as well and a friend pointed me to this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwxN8sCIOOE Half-life with a voice plugin :)
Ask HN: product roadmap drawing app?
My partners requested that I prepare and give them a product roadmap, with high level features described, time frames, etc. I'd like to be able to make this a little more detailed -- maybe diagramming out the existing relationships btwn the current database, show the request flow for a user, etc.

I've tried UML and Visio, and even Omnigraffle. None of those are quite what I want, which is more of a mix between omnigraffle, visio, and being able to show/reveal blocks of text.

What do you guys use for this? Is there a cool software package out there that makes this simple?
The arcicle promises to answer this question:

What makes Japanese design so special? Basically, it’s a matter of simplicity; a particular notion of simplicity, different from what simplicity means in the West.

It doesn't.

It talks about a German-made knife vs. a Japanese-made knife, but the Japanese-made knife simply is more simple. They aren't "simple" in different ways.
I already got mine. But I have no time to play with it right now :(
Auto Technology That Kills
Scala for Haskell programmers
I quite liked the way the street looks. It's intersting. I really don't see where you get "malevolent beings trying to overload your optical pathways."
Amulet 3, an asynchronous system-on-a-chip, ARM compatible
This sort of things makes me wonder about the difference between business code and UI code and the effect of splitting them. Right now the argument is that it's too expensive to maintain two separate user interfaces. But as more and more pages start moving all their business code behind web services that might change (since the cost to maintain a UI would go way down)

You could even get situations where third party companies agree to maintain an older interface while paying the company a small cut.
You missed the money quote:

"After a firefight it looked like you had wiped out an entire orphanage"
Whatever the reason I doubt it has anything to do with closed software or his free software philosophy. There are plenty of completely Free ways to get online. Perhaps he lives in a place where you can't get broadband, and only bothers to dial up a couple of times a day. Or perhaps he simply doesn't want a permanent Internet connection because he doesn't feel a need for it.

Actually there have been at least a couple of threads about working without internet on a some of the RV/nomad threads here, and based on those I'm considering trying pulling the plug on my internet connection for 4 hours at a time when working to see what it will do be my ability to focus on the task at hand and not get distracted by hacker news. Perhaps Stallman has a similar approach.
I was once cheated out of $15 by a phone provider. I spent $500 and a lot of time and went to court to get the money back, which I did. I also got my costs recouped. I have spent more than $500 on karaoke in Asia without blinking. Money does not matter to me, but nobody fucks over Max. I'll chase it down till I get my money back. To quote Arnold: nobody gives me a raw deal.

It has never been about the money.
_why the lucky stiff on The Setup
Perhaps the association to science fiction removes perceived rigor from the idea.
I'm not sure you're right about Mencken. I have the impression that he was more of a cynic than an elitist, not a groveler before wealth and power. There's a series of interviews with him on YouTube, done by a protégé of his as a kind of oral history. I dabbled with listening to them a few months ago and remember one anecdote. Mencken described how he enjoyed walking through neighborhoods of Baltimore at night, looking into well-lit living rooms to learn what he could about how people lived. For the most part he thought people's taste was appalling, but he mentioned that one poor black woman's house had struck him as being arranged with some of the best taste he had ever seen. I don't know that much about Mencken but my guess is that "good taste" was high praise.

About Buckley, on the other hand, I agree with you. I've watched some of the interviews he did in his prime and seen nothing but an oily, pretentious jerk, sure that his establishment platitudes are convincing arguments. Those pieces really have not aged well. I'm thinking of the ones where he "debates" Chomsky ("I'd smash you in the goddamn face") and, infamously, Gore Vidal ("Now listen you queer, stop calling me a crypto Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.") Some intellectual hero.
This is exactly how we ended up with things like ActiveX and Flash in the first place. It's not enough to make things just work today. Mozilla is right to be thinking about what happens a few years down the road.

Mozilla has enough market share to make it relevant to web developers. Who will have to learn about the issue, and support Firefox. The users don't matter nearly as much.
Er, that's a “last updated” date, not a “posted” date. Presumably the first part had revisions after they were all written in or before 2008.
Props to them for responding this quickly though.

Also, the apology actually sounds sincere.

(follow up on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1071623)

It's amazing what a little media attention to your support issues will do.

We should institutionalize that somehow. Like the public wall of shame of old, a vetting board decides if your issue gets pushed down the pipeline and all the news outlets subscribe to it.

That could create some serious consumer power.
From personal experience I'll say this: nothing makes Facebook move faster than bad press (or the threat of bad press).
and probably the guys selling the bombs his device doesn't detect are more evil, too. although it might be more difficult to blame it on one person in that case.
Entrepreneurs Must be Totally Committed
This is much like saying that Smith & Wesson shoots people.
"Jim Von Ehr, the president of Zyvex LLC, has publicly stated that he believes that Zyvex will be able to do diamondoid nanoassembly by 2010."

oops guess they missed their deadline. i would like to see a graph of how these predicted dates keep receding as a counterpoint to all the exponential graphs of progress.
I think it's usable. It's like a radio station that plays awesome music.

Of course, I never used the site before the redesign, so what do I know?
"Stop government intervention in our lives! Let the invisible hand take care of this one!"
Microsoft cites Apple Macs as a defense in Xbox antitrust case
Asynchronous CPU, MIPS
China fires back at cyber attack charges
If that's giving up his name, then all the other Harmans on facebook had their name stolen by this particular Harman.

A more accurate statement would be "clearly they think somebody not using one particular variant of their name as a facebook vanity URL is not a big deal". I would tend to agree.
I agree that a lot of them do look like copies. Of course when you are doing the shotgun approach to developing utility apps I think you should be ready to compete on the rate that you can keep adding apps. I see it hard to claim the ownership idea on something like a level when it is a very common object in everyday use.
Yes, lightspeed is a bottleneck. A particular problem is that the computing elements are presumably vulnerable to radiation damage, thus placing a lower limit on the internal radius of the MB's innermost shell. If MBs are migratory, that's a good reason for expecting them to be associated with cooler, dimmer red dwarf stars -- or to be concentrated some way away from their stellar energy source, leaving a classical Dyson sphere in place to harvest energy and beam it to them via laser or maser.

(This stuff got chewed over a lot on the extropians list in the early 90s, when the subject of "Jupiter Brains" -- what you get if you dismantle Jupiter and turn it into computing material -- was first raised. Googling on "neuron star" might provide some transitory amusement ...)
Sure, let's blame the computer scientists, not the dangerous Wall Street culture of getting rich quick with essentially regulated gambling. That'll fix things ;)
I guess what I meant was that the number don't lie. Revenue went up, and all the haters can go STFU. If it's too expensive go play another game.
geocoding?
Minitube 0.9 su Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic
I'm sure Ruby's design is worth study, and maybe there are things identifiably "japanese" about it. But surely simplicity and symmetry are not among them. It's a very large language, with many non-orthogonal features -- cleaner than perl or C++, but certainly nothing like, say, Lua or Clojure.
Prediction #21 is more of a statement than a prediction. Just saying..
I want to use PS3 as a compute node for shits and giggles because I don't use it anymore as a senior in computer science.
Maybe there wouldn't be so big a shipping delay if WakeMate focused on shipping the product they promised, instead of cooking up premium features while everyone is waiting.

That's why people are mad... not the premium features, not the delay, but rather the implication that people pre-ordered a product and they have to wait for something they don't want (and didn't know was being built), while what they were promised is delayed as a result.
We should institutionalize that somehow. Like the public wall of shame of old, a vetting board decides if your issue gets pushed down the pipeline and all the news outlets subscribe to it.

Or, one could run it something like how Stack Overflow is run, with a community voting on what issues are most deserving of attention, and helping to solve the issues and get the word out. Then the media could just skim the issues that were voted up the most from time to time, when they're having a slow news day.
The problem isn't the quants, it's the people that doesn't understand what the quants do and that a model is only a model.
Institutionalizing this kind of attention would normalize it. It would remove its extra-ordinary nature, its very newsworthiness, thus diluting the effect.
that is is tremendous opportunity to solve this particular problem. Whoever does will make a lot of money, just that this goofball shouldn't hsve.
It's down, does anyone have a mirror? It's been down for a couple of weeks now.
Isn't it a fallacy to benchmark by running a program over itself?

If you find a redundant line of code in a function, you'll not only save on its execution but also on the execution of its analysis.
Oh, sure, blame the guy that made you the billions in the first place for not knowing that you were fucking around with the underpinning factors. Real mature, Wall Street. Real mature.
I like how you present the developments as filling in logical gaps - almost a kind of deduction. It seems inevitable that some practical application using the basic system will eventually also need one of the logical consequences. A little bit like having different operations in a UI - eventually, each combination will be tried by someone, and it's reassuring to find that they are orthogonal, and do work as expected.
I hope you're right about Mencken. Maybe its his German sensibilities that I am reading too much into; I can understand why someone with an enlightened continental leaning might find American then, and still now, barbaric.

And thanks for reminding me of Buckley's youtube disasters. I now have enough material to entertain a crowd this Australia day BBQ :-)
Transparency Tracker
It reads somewhat like "The Occult for The Arcane", doesn't it?
So lets see. A bunch of people bought stock. Stock rises and a bunch of people get rich. Somebody sells stock. A bunch of people get nervous and sell their stock, sending prices plummeting.

This story is as old as Wall Street itself. That quants were involved was incidental, thought it makes for some interesting twists.
Nice, I'd been using google "Site:Ycombinator -----" to find articles of interest. Thanks.
You're right, and Daniel Tenner is right. That happens sometimes.

Yes, Hacker News is not a great market to extract money from. Yes, most of the people here don't want to pay for software.

But Wakemate did screw this up. Simple example: there's some form I'm supposed to go fill out now. What? If I don't, where's my $5 going?

I think Max Klein's gone a bit over the edge on this one (I understand the perception that buying v1 is going to get you v2, I totally believe Wakemate played into it, and I don't care --- people should get used to paying for added value).

But I think Max Klein's point about getting this stuff straightened out on Hacker News before straightening it out with the broader market is very well taken. Worse favors have been done to companies than to give them a Model Irrational Customer to practice on.

I'd like to know what happened to my pre-order, Wakemates.
$750,000 is a lot. I have known people first hand to invest only $125,000 and get a long term business visa to US.
Never used the site before, but I kind of like it. Perhaps they pulled off a coup by getting all this press?

I like the idea of it just being a Pandora for indy music, the simple interface really appeals to me there. But ya, I never saw the previous version so who knows.
It's up for me.
If it was redundant, it wouldn't be needed in general - it doesn't matter if you removed it because of profiling on program X, or Y - as long as the code is correct, it would be a right thing to do.

If the list of features is set and you're not doing a complete refactoring (only 10 or so lines out of several thousands were changed), I don't see a problem with this approach. You can (/should) always go back to the profiler if you find a better test case...
I think that depends on how you bring it.

If you were to bundle the facebook complaints, the google complaints and so on then by virtue of the cumulative effect it would be newsworthy again.

But you're right that 'making it normal' would detract from the newsworthiness, so you'd have to combat that by sheer volume.
People probably won't pay for access to wire reports, but they might pay for longer form texts. Shanda, the company that just acquired MochiMedia, runs a paywall business called Shanda Literature in China. That's more like novels and comics I think, but the model might work.
I want to see it get out :-)
A religion based on programming might make sense if you were an AI bot or something. Other than that the metaphor doesn't work for me.
That is a general tendency of blaming whatever cannot be explained or understood.

The primitive men blamed natural phenomena and diseases on the gods and witches. Today we blame it on the nerdy guys with glasses and pocket protectors.

When they make money, the financial giants quickly take credit for it: "oh look we are making money, _we_ are so awesome", when the nerdy guys screw up, then they are scapegoated, "oh look, it is those damn nerds and their voodoo, that screwed us."
I still miss _why and wish he would come back in any form he chooses.
Who is GNU founder Richard Stallman?
Yeah, down for me too, but http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/_why.usesthis.com says it's up. Weird
You don't get it. As somebody noted up-thread, real apologies start with "I'm sorry I" not "I'm sorry you."
No the blame is not on the traders, it is on the people who brought mortgates they couldn't pay, they should simply not have brought the good forsaken houses.
There are other _why-like programmers, teachers out there.
A better test case would be several arbitrary pieces of code which do not change between the the benchmarks. Even if just a few lines change in the test case of thousands of lines of code, you cannot expect the change in analysis time required to be proportional. It might not matter in this particular case though, who knows.
It's ridiculously lame. They've turned their fuckup into an attempt to up-sell people to a monthly service, and all without ever really apologizing.

One month per month? That's a really bad joke.

It's as though they're trying to make sure their early adopters are unhappy, and don't recommend them, or generate positive publicity.
I think this is clever <notes>
That's what wget -r is for.

Pretty sure Stallman isn't going to show up in this thread ;)
Hardly, the whole military-industrial complex is corrupt. I wonder how you can get into that market...
How can we have a problem with this guy but are happy for "psychics" to play havoc with people's emotions in exchange for cash? It's the same thing.

The response has interesting echos to the US government's response to being hacked. It's the hackers fault! Not the fault of our security!

The fact remains as a purchaser you should be cautious about what you choose to buy. To blow millions on this guys stuff is utterly hilarious to buy it without expert approval is just dumb.

Makes me wonder if the military ever blew millions of dollars on x-ray specs or Charles Atlas's book but kept hush about it.
I enjoyed doing the quests when I first started using thesixtyone, which got me used to the features and the layout pretty easily.

I'm a bit surprised that they haven't done 'redesign intro' quests to acclimate people to the new design.
I seem to recall there being some browser/OS combination that could not handle underscores at the beginning of addresses. What are you using, and can you access it with another browser?
How to Steal a Botnet (Video Lecture Summary)
Ask HN: What do you do w/ a big idea, when you are working on something else?
I'm wondering what you guys do when you have a big idea while working on something else.

i.e. you already launched, and then suddenly it hits.."oh shit, this could be huge!".

Do you continue building your other business? Do you decide...to jot it down for the future, and wait till you have free time. Or do you put your other idea on hold, and dive in on the new thing?
You're the inspiration for the current crop of 'clock-free' articles, I really got interested in it that particular aspect of our conversation after M's visit here.

I think I can see at least one way to crack that 'nut' of doing without a global clock, which would scale to arbitrary large systems.

The downside is that it is a purely theoretical solution for the moment, I'll try to do some simulations to see if it is actually viable.

The tricky bit seems to be to not fall in to the 'pit' of thinking that you have it working without synchronization when actually the test system has some underwater property that makes the likelihood of a failure vanishingly small, but which when duplicated 'in real life' would lead to an error almost immediately.

The classical example is two circuits that are 'independently' clocked from some master clock that gets divided by different factors.

You'd need to test this with local clocks that are varying wildly comparing the output of the system with 'known good' output over many cycles to gain some confidence.

It's amazing how the devil really is in the details with this stuff.
Japanese aesthetics: bright, loud, ultra-cute, with a mascot character and a theme song.

Oh, you meant the other Japanese aesthetics.
I am wondering, why Australian machine was called SILLIAC
It's not working for me in either Chrome nor Firefox.