skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
proprietary H.264 codec

Can people at least get their terminology right for once here? That isn't what proprietary means, and conflating "patented" with "proprietary" simply serves to confuse people.

Many free software programs are covered by at least some patents--most, I would say, simply given the size of the patent minefield--and I wouldn't call them "proprietary". It seems to me that "proprietary" has basically become an insult to be applied towards anything "less free" than what one wants to advocate.

A proprietary format has no standard you can freely read and implement. At best it requires signing an NDA and/or paying tens of thousands of dollars to look at--at worst it doesn't even exist, with the "standard" being "whatever the official implementation does" (see Microsoft Word for a great example of this). There are tons of these in video: RealVideo, for example, along with all of Microsoft's video formats before they finally opened up with VC-1. Others include On2's video formats (e.g. VP6), Sorenson's (SVQ1, SVQ3), and many others.

One of the biggest dangers of this conflation is the understatement of the dangers that proprietary formats can cause. There has never, ever been a lawsuit over an open source implementation of a "patented-but-standardized" file format--as far as I know, the common interpretation seems to be that the sellers and distributors of an application are responsible for any royalties, placing no restrictions whatsoever on the developers. See LAME, for example.

But proprietary formats are different. The law is very vague and conflicting on whether or not it is legal to even reverse-engineer such formats (it varies between countries as well). Doing so almost always requires access to the disassembled binary of the original application, which violates the EULA and potentially the DMCA. Developers can be hit with legal threats merely for releasing source code, as we saw with RTMPdump.

Of course, proprietary formats tend to be patented as well, resulting in a "worst of both worlds" situation.

Don't mix up the terminology, lest people be convinced that RealVideo or another proprietary solution is no more evil than a internationally standardized, albeit patented, option. The greatest accomplishment in internet video in the past 10 years has been moving away from that horrendous mix of Quicktime, Windows Media, and Real that was used on almost every site on the internet. Even if it means we've been stuck with Flash for playback until recently, it's better than that ridiculous mix of proprietary garbage.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1074237 has a great example of what happens when proprietary and patented are conflated: a piece of proprietary crap can be promoted in place of a free software solution.
Subpixel considerations for AMOLED screens
You're welcome. Shame that we have to.
The way you 'succeed in business' is by creating value. Being closer to large changes in value (e.g., in sales) helps you individually make more money on average perhaps. And if making money is your idea of success in business, then that makes sense.

But creating value also involves not paying attention to what everyone else is doing. Imho, the difference between buy side and sell side is very crucial. You can say there are 'very few exceptions' -- but those exceptions are the beginnings of all new businesses since the idea of business began. The 'buy' in buy side is about taking risk, acquiring risk. It's true that the markets can't afford for everyone to do this. Otherwise we'd be in a topsy-turvy merry-go-round of a place.

But if you have something new and important to say or do: why would you want to be anywhere else?

> So, if anyone here doesn't really have a passion for technology, but just wants to make a lot of money in the startup industry: my recommendation is to go quit your job as a programmer right now, and get an entry-level sales job to help hone your people skills, because nothing will help get you there faster.

Agreed. And also if you do have a real passion for technology, and not just making a lot of money in the startup industry, I take your recommendation as keep on programming.
Interesting little aside in this post, where he talks about hitting a license threshold on the number of projects and this triggering an evaluation of whether they really like Basecamp enough to pay more for it. I'm wondering if this would have happened if the pricing model was a much smaller increase per project. If adding a project is just a small additional cost there is no "threshold" you hit where you have to jump to a noticeably more expensive license.
Given how plastic the brain is I suspect that the limit on social relationships is more logistical than physiological.

ie actually meeting, being social for long enough to develop a relationship and then maintaining that relationship with someone takes a certain amount of time. Above a certain number of relationships the individual simply doesn't have the time or incentive to acquire more.

If there was a real incentive for someone to have more than 150 relationships I would expect that either a), their brain would rewire itself somewhat to handle the increased number or b) they'd make abstractions that would help them to maintain friends more efficiently.
There's also the "try before you buy" argument, where those who pirate typically don't keep what they nab. If you pirate something that you end up disliking, and would never have bought it without knowing if it's worth it (so, wouldn't have), there's definitely no loss to the publisher.

Besides. As many companies who have dropped DRM have found, many pirates are simply waiting for an unencumbered form of what they want. If the only legitimate porsche seller is selling half-crushed cars, and there's a perfect-quality one sitting next door with the keys in the ignition and a sign that says "free to a good home", is it even ethical to buy the crap one? (that said, all "would you steal a porsche" arguments are straw man arguments anyway)
good concept, but the domain name implies that it's the wives who are workaholics, not that they are married to workaholics.
Those pirates perceive the work to have no value. Possible reasons include that the pirate has no money, doesn't expect to use the work for long, or doesn't think they'll enjoy the work very much. The copyright holder loses no money when these people pirate their work and should not complain when they do so.

It's difficult to recognize why a person is pirating. For all I know, copyright holders have priced their works correctly and are complaining about people like this.
Not necessarily. There are a lot of people that are just compulsive hoarders, but their hoarding is directed at digital 'items.'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_hoarding

Comparatively, there are compulsive hoarders of physical items that have their house filled to the brim with items that they have purchased, or run up huge amounts of debt acquiring.
I don't know, but c'mon, they're a $100m/yr foundation. They can find a way. Maybe a plugin or something.
Possibly revisit supply and demand shifts in the first semester.
> "include enough loopholes so employees are the only folks who pay that rate".

I thought it was always was, and always will be, that way :-)
Nah, I don't think it's you, or at least the issue I'm seeing isn't. The examples here don't work for me on Safari Mac either:

http://stcamp.net/examples/kinda_player/

That page works on Chrome, though.

I confirm that songbe.at doesn't work for me on chrome either so perhaps there's two different issues.
WooRank - Website analysis tool
Scary? I think it just shows how good the internet is at routing around inefficiencies. The idea of a domain name "shortage" was artificial and hardly benefited anyone but the registrars.

To pick an arbitrary example: "gcc.com" belongs to a cement company and "gcc.org" to a church, yet apart from typing them in directly a minute ago I've never seen those sites, since Google/Yahoo/Bing all direct you somewhere useful like http://gcc.gnu.org/ instead. Thank goodness!
From http://ycombinator.com/faq.html:

Can a single person apply for funding?

Yes, but the odds of being accepted are much lower. A startup is too much work for one person.

Do we have to be US citizens?

No, as long as you can get here for at least three months. We've funded many startups founded by non-citizens.

Can you get us visas?

No, sorry, we don't do that. You'll have to figure out visas for yourself. If you know people from previous YC-funded companies who came from outside the US, we suggest you ask them for advice. They understand the options better than we do.
Yeah, this is their version of "get 'em while they're young". There's also http://dreamspark.com which gives out free copies of Microsoft's developer tools (Visual Studio, SQL Server, etc) to students.
I just fixed it for Firefox and Safari. It was a load order problem between flash and javascript (SM2 needs a stupid variable set so it can find it's flash plugin or it barfs). Try it out again.
If you need a boss to make all of the prioritisation and deadline decisions, you won't make it as an entrepreneur. But you can take responsibility without having to make all of those decisions on your own.

This is where having the support of people who have walked the path before (like the YC team or even others here at HN) is invaluable, as well as getting the right advice and being held accountable by a specific mentor or coach.
I see what you're saying, but I don't buy it. I think if you look at the contexts where the normative statement appears , you'll find that it is a genuine mix up, not an indirect criticism of restricted markets. I wouldn't be surprised if criticism of restricted markets is part of where this comes from but it is not a rational path.

Even a perfectively free market is not perfectly competitive. Perfectly competitive is a theoretical position used by economics, but it is theoretical. Perfectly competitive means profits are consistently zero, for example. If I have a nicer smile then the girl at the next shop and you prefer to shop at my shop, that's an "obstruction" preventing perfectly competitive markets.

The only markets that approach perfect competition in reality are commodity markets where, by definition, all products are perfectly equivalent.

This makes it even harder to get from "prices equal marginal costs if markets are perfectly competitive" to "prices prices should equal (or sometimes 'reflect') marginal costs." The implication is not just "remove government enforced barriers to competition" it is also "remove differences between you and competitors" and absurdities like "hire the same person as your competitors." Perfect competition requires perfect substitutes (competitors).

Imagine a "product" that uses necessarily non-uniform inputs: a seminar. One has Jimmy Carter speaking. The other has Mohammad Khatami. For this market to be perfectly competitive, the speakers (and the location and the coffee, etc) would have to be exactly equivalent.
Yes, but I also bet that the people who read is blog are almost exclusively a subset of the people who know about the 'brouhaha.'

It seems perfectly reasonable for him to assume people reading his blog know about it.
Especially with uniforms like that!
“There's one thing I don't understand. The thing I don't understand is: every motherfuckin' word you're saying.”

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BaXPg_2FJ4]
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Show me one example of a black market where consumer can get the EXACT same product as available in open market for FREE and if it is as easy as clicking a button on a screen.

Forget free, you will be hard pressed to find an example where black market offers a product which costs less. Black markets happen when consumer want something but they can't buy it legally (e.g. drugs, organs etc.)
All the definitions I can find for "proprietary" allow patented inventions to fall under them. Standardizing and documenting an algorithm or protocol does not allow developers to use it freely and without royalty.

One example of many from define:proprietary:

http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?o2=&o0=1&...

In this case, I believe Chris' terminology is correct. You are instead describing the difference between closed- and open-source.

For x264, an implementation of H.264, it is an open source implementation of a proprietary algorithm. In Theora's case, it is open source implementation of a free (as in libre) algorithm. RealVideo is a closed-source implementation of a proprietary algorithm.
Do the colors mean anything, or are they just random? I think it'd be cooler if it was color-coded by job function or something - all engineers in blue, PMs in red, HR in yellow, sales in green, etc.

Also, the data is out-of-date. The last quarterly report (came out last week) said there were slightly under 20,000 employees.
Maybe a better question is, what makes entrepreneurship so self-involved?

Hats off to the lurkers here who are just building shit.
for those of us that know about it, its a pretty big thing. comscore can really affect how advertisers look at you and your product. i've seen this happen with several notable clients, and the difference between paying to have more realistic numbers published can be night and day.
The YC network is more like a dating site than a polis

Is this true? I may have a utopian view of things, but my impression is that of a community that helps each other out in order to make this new model of work succeed.

If my impression is accurate, then I can see how the society could change or break down once it gets past a certain size. Cliques, subgroups, etc. could form.

I see this support group structure as one of the main reasons to apply to YC. The money would be useful, but the support would be invaluable.
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Flurry also noticed that the Apple device was running on OS 3.2

I believe they noticed that it was a different type of device running a newer version of the OS. It could definitely be a next-gen iPhone, but I doubt it's a 3GS with the newer OS version.
the holiday special is painful even with RiffTrax... and those salvage even some of the worst movies. And yes, I've watched the whole thing, and my friends who watched it with me are still friends (somehow). Though I did warn them of the badness.

(for the uninformed: they're the MST3K guys' current project)
How is an algorithm proprietary if I can go online to the website of the ITU, a division of the United Nations, and download a copy of the standard and go write my own implementation?

ffmpeg's reverse-engineered Real Video decoder is an open-source implementation of a proprietary specification. Depending on the country and legal interpretation, the mere existence of this is illegal.

ffmpeg's H.264 decoder is an open-source implementation of a patented, but not proprietary, specification.

ffmpeg's Theora decoder is an open-source implementation of a probably-not-patented specification.

If a definition doesn't distinguish between something freely available for all to view/implement and something which cannot even be implemented without potentially falling afoul of copyright laws and the DMCA, it isn't a very good definition.
Why bother? There isn't a huge problem here. How often do you click a link and say 'oh, this again?' How often is the front page polluted with duplicates?
I don't think you can compare black market with piracy. In black market, you do not get product for free. In fact, most of the time, you may through your nose for the product e.g. drugs/organs.

Show me an example where black market sells product at price which equals to marginal cost of production.
Awesome breakdown of why Episode 1 is lame beyond comprehension.

Personal favorite: when he asks people to describe the characters. The differences are shocking, and it showed the fail far more than any other, IMO.
I think the idea is that "iPhone OS 3.2" will provide interface changes that will make it more usable on a larger screen. As the article says, no one would want a 15x15 grid of icons.
The author is postulating that the price of a good is determined by its cost of production, which is essentially the Marxist theory of value that has been discredited for over a century. Else, he is proposing that the demand curve is completely parameterized by cost of production, which is a radically new idea that I sadly don't see much promise in.
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Ditto!

Or, if you like, start pushing value out yourself, which again puts you in the "sales" department. The difference being, you get to say who gets how much.
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You can implement it, but you are not free to distribute your implementation in binary form, and users are not free to use your algorithm without the consent of the patent holders. That is the definition of proprietary. Regardless of the availability of the specification and full, compliant implementations, you are not free to distribute this code in the United States of America.

Microsoft has a patent on the openly-spec'd FAT filesystem and are still pursuing royalty agreements with distributors of FAT code:

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/02/microsoft-sues...

If software patents were removed from the picture in the USA, H.264 would cease to be a proprietary algorithm.

Edit: I'm updating this because the reply markers are slowed down to flamewar levels. :)

Re: consent of the patent holders, this is guaranteed by the MPEG LA but only in return for royalties paid. You need their permission, which is granted only by paying the royalty.
"That said, when Grandma first signed up at building-and-loan.com, she probably went to the correct site."

When I first followed this thread, I had this same thought. And it's true for this scenario. Maybe it's even true for most bank customers.

But it does depend on that scenario, a user typing in the address on her own. What gave me doubt was an equally (more?) likely scenario, clicking on an affiliate link. People trust links, and most probably don't look at their status bar on hover.
my recommendation is to go quit your job as a programmer right now

Programmers can do stuff which is measurable, too, particularly when they're building systems that scale at startups which are smart enough to measure the effects of them. See IMVU for this taken to a truly impressive degree.

I think the party is just getting started on this, too. Ten years ago you had to be a quant will a billion dollar bankroll advanced by your favorite hedge fund to demonstrate that your individual programming prowess was causing measurable financial results. Both the leverage and the measuring are now empirically within the capabilities of one-man firms with essentially no capital.

It is a great time to be alive. Salesmanship helps, too, but it doesn't hurt to be selling "My my, look at this graph which shows how I made a previous client tens of thousands of dollars in a week."
How is it different from http://websitegrader.com? It looks like an exact replica + additional features, no?
From Peter Farago, Flurry's VP of Marketing, in the blog comments:

This is a fair question. We feel confident that we are looking at the tablet device for two main reasons, that I can share with you. Also note that, as a company, we have experience tracking new Apple hardware devices in the past.

1) If this were an iPhone we were looking at, the hardware would tell us when we ask it (via the software). So we can rule out that this is an iPhone. Also, we already see verified iPhone devices testing OS 4.0 and these leave (Apple's Cupertino, CA) campus, whereas this device does not. This makes sense given the secrecy around the new tablet device as the launch event nears.

2) The apps being tested match up to what the devices is supposed to feature (e.g., news, books, etc.). We cannot share further detail here due to Terms of Service agreements we have with customers that use our service, but feel that if you were able to see the data we see, at the level of granularity, it would be clear to you as well.

Of course the truth will be revealed on Wednesday, but we wouldn't publish such a report without a high level of confidence.

Flurry is not interested in building a business on rumor, but rather authority, credibility and accuracy.

Point (2) seems less than rock solid, but (1) lends a bit of credence, especially since they've already seen iPhone OS 4.0 devices. It could just be that they're doing less testing of apps on 3.2 iPhones, however.
Just out of curiosity – is there any list of YC participants of past years?
users are not free to use your algorithm without the consent of the patent holders.

This is not true. The patent holders signed an agreement when creating the standard that requires them to license to you under reasonable terms. As far as I know, they cannot refuse. This is how the process is carried out for many international standards: nobody wants to risk one of the patent holders going rogue.

This is in contrast to something like FAT, which was created by Microsoft, for Microsoft, and is controlled entirely by Microsoft.

Quite honestly, I think many of the companies involved would welcome the end of software patents. The amount of legal wrangling they go through in order to avoid legal problems is tremendous, and for H.264, the fee is a mere 10 cents per unit for bulk licensing with a relatively low cap. Hardly enough income for them, IMO, to justify the hassle created by software patents.
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Try "Teddy bear" :)
Sales is and will always be important, but you forget that:

a) Entry level sales jobs can be soul destroying.

b) Selling something you have trouble believing in is really hard.

c) Sales isn't a monolithic field. For instance, compare, selling new cars and high-end legal services; they are fundamentally different tasks requiring different skillsets.

Hence, you could quit programming and go and get an entry level sales job, stuff it up and end up hating sales and being in a worse position to start a business and make reasonable money.

On the other hand, if you build something that you believe in and think is fantastic it will be much easier for you to sell it. This has two additional advantages:

a) Believing in what you're selling will make it easier for you to get over rejection, and

b) If what you've built isn't what the marketplace wants then you have the advantage of both direct contact with your market and the ability to directly alter your product so that it's something they'd like.

Finally it's easier to hire good sales people as a programmer than vice versa because sales performance is easily measured.
I don't really understand how this got down modded.
For me, it incorrectly stated that a site was in DMOZ when it is, in fact, not.
It seems there is a strange rift between academic AI research and game AI research.

One of them has a quirky cultural preference for shipping.
http://ycombinator.com/faq.html There's a list. I'm not sure if it's comprehensive. I know there's another list somewhere out there that also details the status of the companies. Can't seem to find it right now.
Lisp:

Deity / Deities: the Left and Right Parenthesis.
Worship: (NULL ()).
Buildings: paired arcs of varying sizes, always less than a semicircle.
Afterlife: garbage collected.
In my experience it's more like "make interesting content and don't make all the stupid and/or not-all-that-obvious mistakes many web designers make."

Mo matter _how_ good your "interesting content" is, if your web design has it hidden behind a flash splash page or your entire site navigation is in some dynamic javascript menu system with no regular html links for spiders to find, you will not get traffic.

Good content is the number 1 best thing you can do for your website. Not wasting the potential of that good content is, however, equally important.