skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know someone who sued Microsoft because they didn't list his Excel add-on in one of their catalogs. It competed with MS Money. I have no idea how that went, though.
why proprietary binary blobs and not FOSS ffmpeg/libavcodec?

edit: but I like that idea... Would it be possible to create an Fx extension/plugin to enable h264 playback? I mean, QT and Flash plugins do already play h264 video with Firefox in <object>/<embed> -tags.
The biggest problem with these things is [...] when you're going to debug.

Since Parenscript is one of "these things", I have to disagree. We've been careful to make PS generate readable, debuggable JS code. It's not what you'd write by hand, of course, but it is not a problem to debug. I debug it every day using standard JS tools. (The biggest problem with PS is the impedance mismatch between Javascript's semantics and Lisp's, but that's another story.)

As I'm sure you're aware, sophisticated C++ template code can be nightmarish to debug. Easier debugging is actually one of the goals of the OP, so if what you said were true then his whole project would be a why-bother.
I've had the same thing happen numerous times with new domains. They'll pop in and out of the index a couple times before stabilizing.
i hope no one is taking this seriously, becayse the logic/"science" presented here is well... science fiction i guess.
Heathen! You preach to us in your archaic ABNF, and give us RFC edicts. The poor have bought you Suns and SGIs in alms and tributes, and they see nothing from you in God's graces but more requests for payment.

Father Stevens has given us sight, and the wisdom to speak in the Unix tongue. With Linus, Becker and McKusick's help, God has breathed in my little endian heart.
Technology Predictions (Cisco) [pdf]
Mozilla really has to stop this pre-fetch obsession. It was a bad idea when they started it and, given how much malware there is and how many malsites there are, prefetch has become indefensible. I wrote an article a while ago pointing out a Google search plus Firefox prefetch interaction: http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2009/07/should-your-mom-use-g... .
Add GoTo's to the list, and you're set :)

At the assembly level, everything is boiled down to (basically) bne, mov, and jmp.
You essentially sell a promise for $5

Even worse -- you're selling a blank slate, into which the customer gets to inject whatever hopes and aspirations they have about your product. Then, when you don't deliver on the things you never promised anyone and had no clue were expected, you're a dirty lying thief.

Compare this to the experience of the guy who bought the $250 Nook earlier today. He got put through one of the worst CS wringers I've ever read about and kept coming back to get the issue resolved successfully for months prior to snapping. But if you've got $5 (refundable!) skin in the game it had better cure your sleep apnea, make you the heart's desire of all women, toast bread by radiating pure awesome, and cost no more than $1.47 or you'll be on Twitter about it in five seconds of reading the email.
'Nobody picked up that it was a parody'

Closely related quote: "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." --Henry Mencken
Wow, Charles Stross, I didn't know you were on HN. I'm a big fan. I love the sheer intensity of your work. Props!
The Straight Dope is a website based on people submitting questions to Cecil who, in turn, does the research and presents the findings for you along with some of his trademark witticism. It's been a wildly successful website.

That's exactly my point: he did a little research, found one primary source upon which to rely, and then proceeds to disagree with that source, based solely (as far as I can tell) on his opinion. Why wouldn't I just listen to that source directly, which is based on actual expertise?

And its success is completely irrelevant to whether he knows what he's talking about.
That's exactly what I'm trying to ask. Not if it were technically possible, but if it would be worth the while.

Why bother using a FOSS implementation of a patent-encumbered technology? FOSS for EMCA standards (.NET, Java) is great, but FOSS for h264 is kinda pointless (which is part of the argument in TFA)
Can the Web save newspapers?
Ask HN: market size -- how to estimate?
How do you estimate the size of a market? As a marketing/business newbie, I don't know how to go about figuring out how big a market may be, especially if there aren't already statistics and numbers already gathered. We might be able to find out how big the market is for small business accounting, for instance, but for more niche markets -- as a business development person, how would you go about figuring out a market size in size and potential revenue?
Finally a nice, basic reference (which doesn't also flame about other VCSs). Very easy to read in general. Bookmarked in case I need to work with any git-based projects - I'm sure it will come handy one day. (definitely easier than chasing after the right command in `man`)
It probably means linux & homebrew games (games that can be developed without the often expensive and exclusive commercial, licensed SDKs required to develop for consoles) are coming soon for PS3. Maybe a port of Boxee (like XBMC for original Xbox) as well, unless Sony is wise enough to officially partner with Boxee...

Edit: yes, there is currently "linux" for ps3 but AFAIK it has limited access to HW, done on purpose by Sony. Running a true native linux would unlock the full capability of the hardware to the OS.
The coming U.S. population boom will bring new economic vitality
Never ever do that again while I'm drinking sparkly lemon juice. You owe me a new keyboard and some tissues.

An SGI keyboard no less.
Really? This much surprise and outrage? I agree it sucks, but how can we all feign so much surprise at Facebook doing this? They've never pretended to be a good, or even neutral party.

Yeah, stupid that they claimed it was a TOS violation, but the whole "our system, our URLs" policy should be pretty clear to anyone who signs up. That's the gamble you take when you put down roots in someone else's system.

I just hope that it gives people pause before putting any marketing dollars behind their facebook vanity urls.
Microsoft did get taken to court for their business practices, in a much bigger way than what you are talking about.
It is even funnier- the NYT seems to want credit for implementing a paywall without the revenue. The announced the wall goes up in 2011, and in web time scales that is equivalent to "some day in the future." Likely they need some excuse to put a fictitious "anticipated revenue stream" into their income projections (to boost growth and the price of their stock) but even they know the paywall will not work (so they don't want to actually have it up).
This topic has been discussed here before, and I'm sure will be discussed again - I found this article interesting because it gives an overview of the strategies newspapers are considering.
Google likely looked at DNS records to know there was a domain to index (just a guess, I don't speak for Google). So while there may be no inbound links- there may be known public references to your site.
iPhone users don't depend on iPhone per se; rather they depend on a cool device that can make calls, play music and run some apps, which at the time of this writing there's at least one other major provider (quality, market penetration notwithstanding).

There, I fixed that for you.
Good sets of articles, but:

1) The timestamps on them are seriously funky. Parts 1 and 2 are from 2009, but part 3 is from 2008?

and

2) It uses Hunchentoot 0.15.7 API. Hunchentoot 1.0 under went a clean rewrite, and it's far more modular and extensible now (so much so that it's distributable across multiple boxes with 2-3 lines of code.) The two are mostly compatible, skim the new manual to get a feel for the diff.

Bonus

3) It uses CLSQL with Elephant. A good backend. However, an excellent db option for Lisp is Postmodern which is a library for Postgres. Industrial stuff.
> as the jihadist threat receded

Seriously?
Unless you control hypervisor you can't see what games are doing in their virtual machines. Once you do - you can, and that means you can start cracking their anti-piracy code etc.
This is spot on. I purchased the WakeMate with the understanding that it was planned to be released in Jan. I am 100% OK with the fact that manufacturing issues is causing a delay in meeting their Jan 25 commitment. Shit happens. And for a 10% commitment on my end, I don't feel at all betrayed due to the push back on date.

It's the whole "Premium Analytics Features FREE for EACH month their delivery is delayed" that rubbed me the wrong way. When I read that, my first reaction was "Wait, did I miss something?". I then went to the wakemate site and saw no mention of this paid plan. That's when I realized I was being taken for a ride. Bait and switch anyone?

This is the response I got last night before any of these HN threads started:

http://twitter.com/wakemate/status/8102380070

It's disingenuous to tell me you have new features when I don't know what your existing features are.

So, I guess we'll see what we end up with.
The technical problems are trivially overcome by requiring the user to press a button to activate Flash and/or providing an option, so that's pretty much moot.
Because most of the world is not under US jurisdiction.
How is cross-language debugger support? I have looked a few of these options, but in the use case I have in mind, the most likely place for bugs to occur is after crossing between languages multiple times, and not being able to move through the stack is pretty much a show-stopper for moving the high-level logic out of C.
? Flash is amongst the worst examples of 'stuff that works'. Flash doesn't work. It pegs your CPU at 100%, crashes, and generally ends up in mess.

IF they can get flash to work, and not crash, and not eat battery, and not peg CPU, then I'd probably welcome it. But they haven't managed to do that in the last 10 years with the standard versions of flash, so I think it's extremely unlikely they'd manage it on slimmed down hardware like the iPhone.
anyone have a mirror of the download?
I try and read the newspaper daily. Usually a local paper (If you're from NYC area: I read the NY Daily News, although I used to read Newsday before the format change), during lunch/dinner. The newspaper is something (usually) with lots of topics to read on. Plus its cheap and I don't care about it, so if I spill liquid on it, its not the end of the world.

I like it. It lets me keep up to date with what the politicians in the area are doing (plus my Senators/Representative to Congress) in slightly more detail than a paragraph buried in a CNN article. Plus the sports section is entertaining (during baseball and football seasons, at least)
What about when you come up with a buggy algorithm? Did you do a bad job at inventing an algorithm, or a great job at discovering a wonderful, previously unknown (though incorrect) one? :)
To imply this is some victimization perpetrated solely on Arabs is just wrong. Businessmen con governments out of money on a regular basis esp. in the United States. Here's one recent example.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/montgomery-2
Sony advertised Linux support on the older PS3 (the new slim model removed this feature). But even then there was no access to the GPU (Sony was afraid people would make homebrew games). This made is impossible to get even things like video playback working acceptably.

With the hypervisor out of the picture, a real, uncrippled Linux system is possible on the PS3.
Why Twitter Matters
Original post: http://geohotps3.blogspot.com/2010/01/hello-hypervisor-im-ge...
Population ponzi a sustainable productive economy does not make.
No denial has been posted.
Spare the Rod and Spoil the Programmer
If you are not eligible to vote, you should not have to pay taxes.

I'm with you on reporting donations. Sunlight is still the best disinfectant.
If the person broke the law then you can punish them, if they didn't then you can change the law and say thanks for teaching me an important lesson never to do business with you again.

The use of force is not something that is thrown around lightly, and what if that guy thought what he was selling worked? I mean are we going to lock up all the homeopath people?
Because if you compromise they're not principals...ok, bad joke. Mod me down.
Life is Short Get a Mac | SaveDelete
Thank you HN! I really appreciate all of the positive feedback and creative suggestions. Your comments have given me lots of ideas and the encouragement to keep improving the site.
Just now seeing this thread. I posted my thoughts regarding the reply here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1072131
A quick note for non-Catholics: there aren't "official" patron saints of the Internet or anything else. Sainthood is an official designation. Status as a patron saint, on the other hand, is bestowed by popular acclamation and use among the laity: if enough people involved with the Internet ask St. Isidore for intercession regarding it, then he is the patron saint of the Internet, but it could just as easily be St. Patrick (or the two of them simultaneously, for that matter).

(St. Patrick is popularly held to be the patron of a few dozen things of things, including -- totally not making this up -- engineers, expatriates, and the Irish, so I hit the trifecta there.)
In Paris it's common to nestle mostly into the space, gently (and sometimes not so gently) nudging the bumpers of the cars in front and back to widen the space.

When parking in Paris, leave your handbrake off and the car out of gear to avoid damage.
This only tells you the minimum space required to park your given car behind a car of a given width. The actual doing is left as an exercise to the reader.
Why X.org? Even if you ignore the fact that it is an XFree86 fork, there are plenty of Linux systems with no X at all. In fact, that would be most of them, since there are certainly more Linux servers than desktops out there. Now add the embedded systems, and desktop installs are a drop in the bucket. Also, a number of GNU tools predate the Linux kernel.
Thank you will do that.
NVidia GF100 Fermi silicon cost analysis
Thesixtyone Unveils a Gorgeous Redesign, Users Predictably Revolt
"Karl's book takes clockless concurrent process to be fundamental(as it is in nature)." - from a review of Computer Science Reconsidered:

http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Science-Reconsidered-Invocati...

From the same author:

http://www.amazon.com/Logically-Determined-Design-Clockless-...
45 Ícones grátis de alta qualidade
Uma coletânea completa de vários ícones de alta qualidade. Há um uso ilimitado para ícones, não só com Webdesign (Sites, Blogs, Fórums etc.), mas também em seu Desktop.
That's my not thoroughly examined interpretation. Spend some quality time with your favorite search engine, e.g. using R. Stacy McCain as a starting point (CJ claims he's racist), and you'll find plenty of others.

Or are you questioning my "as the jihadist threat receded"? In that case, I mean that it's receded in the minds of Americans due to a lack of successful attacks in the West or on Westerners (e.g. Bali). India, for example, has a rather different interpretation on that, and of course we in the US have seen at least three serious attacks in 2009, two successful (at that Arkansas recruiting center, Ft. Hood and of course the Knicker Bomber).
Chrome supports H.264 <video> and it has both huge budget and rapidly growing market share.
The author is doomed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability_in_electronics

In short if your digital circuit is going to accept arbitrary patterns of inputs then there will be cases that cause it to produce non-stable output for arbitrary periods of time. Curse you, laws of physics.
That kind of opportunistic behaviour reminds me of Milo Minderbinder. I wonder if they've found any Egyptian cotton in those "detectors"...
I never thought I would say this, but what does this his to do with HN? I come here to HN to get away from all the politics discussion everywhere else.
Hmmm. I think this depends on your DNS provider. This link is broken for me: I think my ISP does not like hostnames starting with underscores.
Occam's razor says that this is essentially embezzling reconstruction funds. You pay me a buck of Uncle Sam's money for your dowsing rod, I make sure 10 cents finds it way into your Swiss bank account, everyone is happy.
Hacking signs: Anamorphic images to assist navigation in car parks
Each cell could implement a Phase Locked Loop that locks to one of its neighbors. This would decentralize the clock while the system remains self-referentially synchronous. You would still need a reference signal to start the system's initial frequency and phase, but then I think you can remove the reference and the system would continue in sync.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-locked_loop
I've always found this dichotomy interesting. Japan is revered for spawning a deep, simple and beautiful aesthetic sense.

Yet, Japanese streets are a virtual assault on your senses. Like malevolent beings trying to overload your optical pathways.

http://maps.google.co.jp/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=ja&#...

(maybe not the best example, but I picked someplace pretty random that looked like a commercial district).

And I've noticed this same visual clutter in Japanese website design.

http://car.nifty.com/

http://www.guesthouse-apartment.com/

etc.
Why is that unfortunate?
My radar went off on this one, because I've heard it attributed to both Mencken and P.T. Barnum. But it turns out Mencken did say it - or rather, he said something that resembled it:

No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. (Chicago Tribune, Sept. 19, 1926)

This is another case of a quote that mutated over the years into a pithier, more rhythmic form. An interesting divergence is that Mencken never explicitly said the American public.
From that same wikipedia article:

> Metastable states are believed to be inherent features of asynchronous digital systems and systems with more than one clock domain, but careful design can often make the probability of a system failing very small indeed.

Which is more or less what I'm getting at, I wonder about the 'careful design' domain. Not perfect, but good enough to get the job done.
This is idotic. By not supporting h.264 and not getting in trouble if and when MPEG-LA decides to cease and desist, they are making it much easier for h.264 to become completely ingrained because h.264 is what works NOW and it is what is widely supported NOW. Why? Who among the vast majority of blithering idiots in the world knows or cares about the patent issues with h.264? Outside of Hacker News and the Mozilla corporation, I'd put that number at just about nil.

Yo, has anyone started work on a Mozilla fork that does support h.264 either through native support or plugins?

edit: Also, if no one does sue, then the whole thing will have been simply an exercise in idiocy.
Sounds like a chicken and egg problem to me. If we collectively ignore ogv because there are no current hardware en/decoders, then why should anyone build it? These things are built when enough demand is present. For that, the push from the Mozilla foundation seems to be reasonable. Once there is more demand, the tech comes automatically. If we clinge to H264, nobody will ever build the right hardware. It's basically a demand based resource allocation problem, and Firefox is doing the demand part. Seems reasonable to me.
> mathematical structures are not invented, they are discovered

This is a doorway to a pretty abstract philosophical discussion, not a statement of fact. I don't think that math is actually real in the strictest sense, so I'm on the fence about invent vs discover. While I think that mathematical constructions are idealizations similar to Platonic Ideals, I don't believe like Plato did that there's a perfect Plato-space where these idealizations live.

When an artist arranges common-place paints (or sounds or dance moves or whatever) into a novel combination, he is said to have created rather than discovered a new work of art. Is there a good reason why this should not be true when a mathematician takes common-place axioms and makes a new arrangement of them that validates as a proof?
Nicely done. I notice the author used uthash. I can't say enough good things about that software. When you find yourself in C and missing the keyed lookup data structures of higher level languages, reach for uthash.

If you are more interested in the result than the process, aptitude install driftnet.
The incentive to hack it was much less since Linux was mostly available anyway.
Once google completes its merger with On2 (February), we'll get free and open video codec for free on youtube. Firefox and chrome will include it. This is why I think we'll never get Theora on youtube, but all hope is not lost thanks to vp7 or whatever they end up calling it.
Under CHEAT CODES:

> crappymode = all guns are now my voice (kudos to my compatriot in crime)

bang! bang!
From the article: It pushes the software freedom issues from the browser (where we have leverage to possibly change the codec situation)

This is what it's all really about: trying to use Mozilla's leverage to foist an unpopular and inferior technology on an unwilling web. Remind you of the antics of any other company with a popular browser?

Power corrupts. Thank god Firefox doesn't have the same market share as IE did. Webkit ftw, here.
Excellent news, if true I might buy one.
Reminds me of what my last isp did to me with email, to an extent. Every account got 5 email addresses. The default was the bill payer's first initial, last name. I had one of the secondary email addresses of my first initial, last name too. One day, someone with the same first initial and last name as me signed up, and they assigned him my address and removed my access. That was really frustrating since I had that as my primary email account at the time.
How Islamic inventors changed the world
Well, I suppose a lot of it has to do with online social communities can form around social issues, the power they can exert, and how they can be destroyed. I found it quite interesting, but perhaps it's little borderline.
Paper map zooms in as you unfold it
Bingo. Look at how Washington State persecuted the DeFoley8 people or in California the people who waged a campaign against Roberti and Roos.

With any luck this ruling will eventually result in an environment where people like the above who are merely expressing their dislike of powerful politicians will find it easy to follow a straightforward set of disclosure rules (and only that) and therefore the establishment won't be able to then ruin their lives.
Hack your watch - Texas Instruments releases watch with wireless dev kit
That's already the case, though. JS performance and flash is far superior on windows than Linux already. So saying they don't want to make the windows experience better is not the case. Something like 80% of firefox users are on windows, and that's their primary target platform.
I'll mod you up for the joke, but down because it was the same as the one I made.