skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, maybe that speech was the first step toward a proposal to change the law. That's hypocritical of Clinton to say that, I agree. That is besides the point though, here we are talking about the actions of SF as they relate to the law and the GPL, not the actions of the American government.
How about a more relevant analogy to Flash? It has the same insecurities and platform-dependence plus being encumbered by the same patents (and more!), but Mozilla took exactly the opposite approach!

Since 2004, Mozilla has had baked-in support for automatically installing Flash on the first encounter if the plugin is not found. A nice little yellow infobar pops down (a brilliant UI innovation), prompting you to install it with a few clicks, even without root access on both Windows and Linux.

They've also recently implemented automatic update checking for Flash. Since it's their biggest security hole, they throw up a big nasty "update now" warning on launch if you're using a known-vulnerable version. Mozilla even initially distributed the Flash binaries under license themselves via addons.mozilla.org -- I'm not sure if they still do so.

Flash is shitty, nonredistributable, closed-source, restricted-platform, proprietary, and patent-encumbered but they're willing to go to great lengths to help their users use it. Why not do the same thing for ffmpeg, which is merely patent-encumbered?
You make a very persuasive case -- much more than I would make if I tried to argue the other side of this.

I'm left with the conclusion, however, that I'm free to associate with other people and pool money to run political ads. Whether or not I do that as a corporation shouldn't factor into it.

Let's assume five of us play poker every Tuesday night and we're all plumbers. A new candidate is running for office that wants to license plumbers, which we're against. So we pool our poker earnings and start running some radio spots calling his mother a fat alcoholic. So far pretty standard political fare.

But if we were a corporation of plumbers, suddenly the rules change.

Or another example. Let's say I'm General Motors and I don't like Candidate X. So I just tell MSNBC to run negative stories about him right up until election day. No harm no foul. But if I'm Ford? (which doesn't own a cable news network) I'm crap out of luck.

There's just too many self-contradictions here. The basic theory says that I'm fine pooling my money with others to speak out. Whether or not that is done with a corporation or not doesn't seem to come into it. Yes, corporations are single-minded. But so are PACs. So are all political organizations. In fact, the entire purpose of a political organization is to be single-minded about something or another.

So I like what you're saying, but it doesn't carry the argument with me at the end of the day.
We're hoping this move will cause that to happen de facto. The fact that YC etc have cycles with similar, fixed dates makes it structurally like college applications, so customs should be similar. It is much worse to use exploding termsheets in that context than in something asynchronous like VC series A rounds.
That's a good argument for why Apple should allows you to set a lower price, but I still don't understand why other developers should raise their prices. Especially if $0.99 is the optimal market price that generates the highest revenue, and the only consequence is you leaving the market.
IIRC, the iPhone version is H.264, but at a lower bitrate, so they have 3-4 h.264 files per video:

* 720p version for hdtv videos
* 480p version for non hd web viewing
* High bitrate version for iPhone streaming on wifi
* Low bitrate version for iPhone streaming on 3g or edge.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1067421
lobbying != political advertisements
The apply link in the footer below is now dead as it links to the w2010.html page. Should be s2010.html

Also clickable link to the apply page at: http://ycombinator.com/s2010.html
Congrats on finding a way to move off Basecamp. Despite the 37 Signals halo- Basecamp was, in my opinion, a pretty crummy user experience from the start.
Theora is not exactly mediocre, it just isn't the best. But the "best" is expensive to license, and Theora is a reasonable substitute that is completely Free.

People complain about the extra CPU power it takes to decode Theora, but if I have to choose between paying extra for a more-powerful CPU or a patent license, I would choose the former. At least I can make use of the more-powerful CPU when I'm not watching videos of cats flushing the toilet.
I welcome your suggestions on how browsers can help protect Grandma from the phishing on the computer she already uses.

Using someone else's computer for secure access is always problematic, for reasons far deeper than we're discussing. I will think more on what happens when changing computers though. I don't think the "initial intercept" you're talking about is as dangerous as you suggest. If Grandma gets a brand new computer and types in "building-and-loan.com", she'll reach the correct site. She will trust it once on her new computer and forever after be invulnerable to phishing attacks for that site. That is the ongoing, routine, every day, incredibly expensive problem I want to see solved, not the relatively remote possibility that she'll type "building-and-loan.ru" on a brand spanking new computer.
will world peace be achieved with something like this?
I've never quite understood why the resistance to the various Ogg formats?

My guess is that because there's no support for Digital Restrictions Management. Apple has already widely deployed software and devices that can play restricted h.264, and that's what the media companies that produce the content "want". (Of course, I never watch "media-company content" on Youtube. I doubt anyone whose videos I watch on Youtube would want Restriction Management on their files.)

Incidentally, all of the music I've bought recently has been in FLAC format. Seems like everyone I listen to offers it in addition to mp3s.

(It's just video-producers that think I am going to pay them $2 for a TV show I can't watch on my portable device. Haha, fat chance.)
Still just an idea. I've considered applying to YC with it but I can't devote 100% of my time to it.

Plus my contacts in the travel industry are slim. I know some people at 1 boutique hotel chain but that's about it.
Um, okay, so what? Re-read the article. Where, exactly, does it claim that dropping DRM is responsible for the increase in sales? The only thing I see is blurb pointing out that dropping DRM didn't result in everyone copying instead of buying.
Good on the Aussies for making a stand!!!
I really hope there is significantly more engagement this time. I'm not real good at explaining things the first time so a question-response type situation would give me a good chance to properly explain my self a one-time application wouldn't.

I do have a question for Paul Graham though: should I assume you guys know nothing about previous applications?
Unless something like early admission happens...

It's advantageous to be early in the cycle, so you could have a continual creep up of deadlines, and continual asynchrony.
Here's the full PDF of Purely Functional Data Structures:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/theses/okasaki.pdf

(From CMU, so apparently with permission.)
You hit on the exact point that I left out and was wishing I had covered -- I have no problem with individuals, or politically organized groups of individuals, mobilizing politically even if they have more money than me, and regardless of where that money came from.

That applies to PACs, too, as long as they aren't blatant fronts for corporate interests, which we have a bunch of today anyways.

I suppose my real issue is that if you can't motivate individuals to give money/time out of their own pockets, you don't deserve to be part of the political process. If we remove all restraints on the ability of corporations to influence the process, it rapidly becomes something that they can't afford not to do -- then we get someplace where corporations "just doing business" have 10X the impact of individuals who are genuinely motivated by their principles or even their selfish interests. The damage from that scenario isn't really quantifiable -- either you get what I'm saying, or you don't. I'd consider it another major leap on our trajectory, as a nation, towards idiocracy.
That's good to know. I'll have to look in to that. Thanks.
I wonder about that too, but we may not hit a limit. I think limits like Dunbar's number are consequences of hierarchical structure, and the YC founder network is completely distributed.
Learn how to get featured in Entrepreneur Magazine.
No, that's just Okasaki's thesis. The book expands upon it.
Interview w/ Amy Cosper, Editor-In-Chief, Entrepreneur
the password for root is...root

Interestingly, I ran rm -rf / as root, and it acted like it wiped out everything. reboot made it act like it was rebooting, and refreshing the page showed "you broke it!" until I deleted the appropriate cookies. Fun!
Tinnitus Treatments eBook Review 2010
In fact one of them already has something they call early admissions. I can't imagine why any startup would think it was to their advantage to limit their options that way, though, so as far as I can tell it is just a negative IQ test and thus nothing to worry about.
Hardware decoding makes h264 usable on low-power devices like phones which Google sees as the future of the internet.

This is true. But, if I had to choose between paying $20 extra for a better processor (that can play Theora) or $20 extra for a patent license (to legally play h.264), I would pick the former. At least I can use the better processor when I'm not watching video; the patent license only works for the 10 minutes a year I feel like looking at Youtube on my phone.

It's technically superior and also supported out of the box by 97% of new computers.

Nice statistic. What percentage of Internet users have "new computers", though? (I work at a company with 300,000 employees. We still use Windows XP; two versions behind the latest stable version of Windows!)

You are right that h.264 is technically superior to Theora. The Space Shuttle is technically superior to my bicycle, but due to cost concerns, I have to ride my bike to work rather than fly there on the space shuttle. Sometimes the best solution is not the one you can afford.

(I can't afford an h.264 license. Or rather, I won't afford it. I don't care that much about seeing a cat flushing a toilet on my phone.)
That's a good assumption, though we sometimes look at previous applications.
In the US, it would be copyright infringement for them to use a GPL'd decoder.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patents_and_GN...

(I should say, "it is believed that...". Nobody really knows for sure.)
Actually it's not that unreasonable a question. We tend to grow each year, and there are 27 in w2010, so the number will probably be at least that. But it's unlikely it would be over, say, 40.
Links of London Earrings
Definitely Scala. I've worked with Groovy/Grails, which is nice in a lot of ways (mainly ways that are borrowed from Ruby/Rails), but I think the language is hindered by being overly Java-compatible. That makes it easy to learn, but limits the language's capabilities. I'd be very happy if some of the syntactic sugar of Groovy were simply made a part of the Java language (e.g. default scope is getter/setter, lists and maps have their own syntax); that would cut down on the ridiculous amount of Java boilerplate. I'm not as big a fan of the dynamic aspects of Groovy, which can make debugging painful. In Grails, if something goes wrong, it's not uncommon to see a 30-line stacktrace that gives you no clue as to where the error actually occurred, because the error-prone code was added dynamically.

As to Scala: It's extremely elegant, and the community has its act together as far as positioning the language to go mainstream. I'm expecting the 2.8.0 release to be a major step forward, thanks in part to a completely rewritten Eclipse plugin. That kind of tool support will be crucial in getting the language to critical mass. One thing that worries me, though, is that Scala projects tend to be built using Maven, which is awfully complex. Perhaps something like JavaGems may prove to be more important to the future JVM ecosystem than any single language.
No DRM support. Media companies are not interested in "freedom", they are interested in the opposite.

(Google is the same; they are just another media company. If you think Google is about "openness", ask yourself why Google can crawl your site, but you can't crawl Google's site.)
I would like to think clojure, but am old enough not to get my hopes up about "a lisp" approaching the mainstream. So that means scala (self preservation?)
Thanks! That's good to know.
Rio weather forecast
Leaf-like sea slug feeds on light
It probably makes sense for those founders living in that specific geographic area that can't move for whatever reasons.
I don't either. It seems there is a strange rift between academic AI research and game AI research.

Try "ai planning" search on Google scholar:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=ai+planning&hl=en...
when you have more than 5 million uniques, you qualify for Adsense Premium, at that point Google pretty much tailor fits the ads for your site
Does anyone here seriously believe Bin Laden is still alive? Why are these tapes posted as fact when circumstantial evidence points strongly to him having dies in December 2001?

At the very least it should be entertained that they may be fake.
I agree with you, but a few minor points:

Flash managed to evolve with the bandwidth (and came across as sexier than Java Applets) and by doing so more and more users had it installed and eventually it got to the point where you "just could not" go to a website without being prompted to install the plugin (yes, plugin, not part of the browser core).

At this point you could not stop it (from a vendor's perspective), so run with it. With the lessons of the past in mind and HTML5 still not being widely deployed, yeah, I'd say stand your ground. And from that angle I'd say it's more similar to ActiveX than Flash.

It's semantics. But I think it was a non-bad decision to include it in the default installation procedure.

(edit: Actually, reading back, one might say that I don't agree with you! :)
Read the comments from:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_fr...

Robert's opinion is that flash is equally evil, but dropping it would be even more damaging than never supporting h.264, so the damage is already done.
Remote Control Car driven over the internet
I agree. They should be making the case for canvas, canvas-3d and SVG (SMIL) based animations with equal conviction, correct?
Fantastic news and timing. :)
Piracy is a Market Correction.
Further along this line of thinking and encouraged by the results and comments here; Does anyone know of any opensource Scala/Lift projects?
I honestly think part of it is the stupid name. I think it's an outstanding technical achievement and generally wonderful, but while 'Vorbis' sounds (somewhat) hip and cool, talk of encoding your audio as 'ogg files' is a one-way ticket to nerd Siberia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis#Name

This obviously has nothing to do with companies like google and their licensing decisions, but I do honestly think it's a major reason the format never caught on with the general public.
SBT, the Simple Build Tool, is a pretty good step in the right direction for building Scala projects, and I imagine it would work pretty well for plain Java code too.

It's been mentioned on the mailing list that Lift, for instance, will eventually move from Maven to SBT when it's functionally complete.

http://code.google.com/p/simple-build-tool/
they provide a command line tool for running sikuli scripts without the IDE
Another (shorter length) OTP implementation:

Perfect Paper Passwords: https://www.grc.com/ppp

I've created a v3 compatible Ruby implementation of this for use in webapps etc: http://gist.github.com/74551
Looks like you can even use vi.
Is there a name for the branch of history that deals specifically with "pop culture" of past societies?
ESME is an Apache incubator project that's based on Lift, and I believe was originally started by the Lift founder. Recent licensing drama aside it seems to have a pretty dedicated team of developers and good momentum.

http://incubator.apache.org/esme/
Volunteer developers supporting US Department of Defense efforts in Haiti
It isn't an exactly what you're asking but in terms of giving away software and still making money on it with games - there are some people making money with free flash games. If I remember right the desktop tower defense guys made a little under 100k in a year and I read an article not long ago which suggested the ninja kiwi games website was making something near $30k/mo.

Or how about the farmville / zinga games offers where people do certain trial offers to get points in the game?

These seem like reasonable answers to your question (though these aren't open source they are still free to play).
I'm pretty sure the Green Dam is still withdrawn:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08...

And apparently it was stolen technology from a US firm:
http://www.tgdaily.com/business-and-law-features/45303-us-fi...

And of course said firm was cyber-attacked afterwards.
I think HN is getting at a point that it needs some clever ajaxy thingy when posting a link. E.g. on Stackoverflow when you post a question you get a list of similar/related questions when you start typing in the question title box.

Since most people copy and paste the blog/news titles anyway as the link title, the chance will be pretty big for a perfect match when you post a link.
What section of the GPL do these rules keep you from your obligations under?

Remember that the GPL does not require that you distribute to anyone. Instead it says that if you do distribute then you must provide source and cannot prevent the recipient's freedom to further redistribute. But regulations saying that you cannot personally distribute to person A don't prevent you from distributing to anyone else, so long as you follow the requirements of the copyright license.
See, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and I did quite well in school. I think a lot of it has to do with personality. I'm a bit of a perfectionist and an overachiever. I strove for A's in every class; if I was getting B's I took that as failing. The CS classes were easy, but I also had teachers who were good at keeping it interesting. I learned that I generally didn't need to bother with assigned reading, my jobs as TA and lab assistant meant I ended up helping everyone else with the coursework anyway, which was all the prep I needed. Since A's were guaranteed on almost all tests in CS, I would race other similarly cocky students to see who could finish fastest.

I went to a liberal arts school, so there were a lot of classes I had to take that were completely unrelated to my major. These were the worst and the least interesting to me in general, but I had enough free time from not having to study for my major that the extra work required to get by in those classes (it takes a lot longer to study something you don't care about) wasn't a problem. I got 3 non-A classes: 1 for missing too many classes (always hated morning classes), 1 because the professor didn't understand basic math and nobody got an A, and 1 because I got the date of the final wrong, missing it by a week (yeah, that really hurt, my only C).

My girlfriend, OTOH, went to school for an engineering degree mostly because that was what her mom pushed her for; she didn't really know what she wanted to do. Her financial aid didn't cover room and board so she had to work nearly full time at Starbucks. She was a very hard worker and her managers loved her, but school often fell by the wayside, partly she didn't have enough free time to give it the attention it needed, and partly because there was a lot of family drama that was affecting her emotionally at the time. She now works at an engineering firm where they love her because she's a fast learner and incredibly hard working, but her GPA is low enough that she's not sure she could ever get into grad school.
I find pretty much all paper maps work that way.
Ink4art.com Coupons Discounts | Ink4art.com Valentines Coupons & Coupon Codes
Just give a hit on the above link and get more and more Ink4art.com Valentines day Coupons Discounts, Ink4art.com Valentines Coupons & Coupon Codes.
Why yes it can. Following laws leads to people doing silly things. A US based mirror is supposed to not distribute to certain countries. But it can distribute to a third country that can distribute anywhere it wants. So no transmission of data is actually stopped, but the US based mirror has successfully followed US law and caused some annoyance to a handful of countries the USA does not like.
One might argue that the perceived value (by employers or universities, if seeking a PhD) difference between 2.x and 3.x is greater than 30x
http://jetsetter.com by Gilt Groupe?
I seem to disagree with you about much on this issue, but here I'm with you: They should just say: "Yeah, we f.ed up." instead of trying to spin it.
I migrated from working pretty exclusively with Groovy/Grails to Scala/Lift over the course of a year or so, and have no regrets at all.

One of the interesting things I found is that it's remarkably easy to port plain Groovy code to Scala with only minor changes. Once you get over the (somewhat steep) learning curve of the Scala type system I've personally found that I'm about as productive as with Groovy, but end up seeing far fewer runtime errors.

It's not that easy to move existing Grails applications to Lift, however, since the frameworks are so fundamentally different. I've found the best bang for the buck is in moving as much Groovy code as possible to libraries outside of Grails, and subsequently rewriting them in Scala as needed.
Tor project infrastructure servers hacked
Paper imitates digital!

The idea is clever and it's a little surprising how no one did this before, especially when considering how much about reading maps consists of folding the damn thing!

I've been cursed at more than once because I didn't fold a map the right way. And like andrewljohnson said in this thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1074300), the complication of folding could hardly have been the limiting factor of coming up with this. :)
I never noticed the supposed speed improvements of Firefox 3.5. In fact, it was the slowest browsing experience I've had in recent years (and yes, I tried disabling all the add-ons!). I don't have much faith that 3.6 will be noticeably faster.

Firefox, thanks for toppling the IE monopoly, but I'll be using the faster Google Chrome now.
Spicing Up Your Life With Canvas Prints
Are you bored with your routine life and with the regular things of life? Now and then we need something interesting, something out of the way to spice up our life and to break the boredom. Do you know that ennui or boredom can even push people up to suicide? It is not an exaggeration. Though such things happen only in extreme cases, all of us hate being struck by boredom. So we need to look for things that will help us deal with boredom in a positive way using things that are at our disposal.
Haha, that makes me think of 'voting' for clojure as voting for Nader.

Funny, since I wrote my blog in clojure/compojure and found it easy going compared to Rails (which, to be fair, I had attempted to learn before having any real programming experience). That was my first experience with "a lisp", and it went well. Unfortunately, I think self-imposed cynicism about lisp is a big part of what keeps it from going mainstream.

EDIT: however, I respect that experiencing lisp not going mainstream for years would kill pretty much anyone's optimism :)
Care to enlighten us on why you think so?
Comscore, Calacanis, Quantcast, etc
Steve Jobs Says Apple Tablet "Will Be The Most Important Thing I’ve Ever Done."