skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I run click2flash, and I rarely click2flash. Caveats, I don't do casual games, and I don't watch a lot of videos off of different sites.
30 Great Web Geeks
Which still leaves the ability to speed up h.264 / video in general with GPU rendering, which is far more optimized for it than your CPU. It's not ideal, but it's significantly better than nothing.

Granted, it's not "true" h.264 hardware decoding, but it's better than pure-CPU-through-Flash, and as far as I can tell they have yet to take advantage of it, and have been exceptionally late to the game no matter what.
I would like to have an issue clarified: The author mentions that flash is completely controlled by adobe which makes apple uncomfortable. This is true practically, but theoretically, the swf format is open. Apple could come out with their own player if they wanted. Am I missing something important?

Here is the spec for flash player 10.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/pdf/swf_file_format_spec_v10...

There are a lot of open source flash projects. Here is a nice list I found:

http://osflash.org/open_source_flash_projects
My sweet and sour memories of Republic Day
If only the President had as one-sided an audience as Steve Jobs does.
A full sample chapter of Discovering Algebra is available from their website: http://www.keypress.com/x5265.xml
Perhaps a 'window' at the bottom of the page of the 5 newest articles would be enough to bump more stories?
I see. Thanks for the feedback, it's nice to know a little bit more about it.
Is this meant to be used in lieu of a feed reader, or in complement? At some point you should work on nice error pages, by the way: http://www.socialreader.net/blah/
Im 23 and mine has been on/off writing since about 18. Mostly I've written short ideas/chapters and it's only recently they became a cohesive plot :)

Got some ideas for short stories - but writing them has always eluded me!
I think that with the development of small projectors and virtual (perhaps also projected) keyboards, that you'll be able to hack fairly well with a pocketable machine (probably 3-10 yrs off mass availability).
Any kind of JavaScript while(true) loop will lock up the page, so you aren't safe from incompetent coders just yet. Depending on the browser and the OS that can bog down the CPU as badly as Flash.

(And there's no move towards parallel execution of in-page dom-touching JavaScript yet - web workers can't do it. Concurrency is such an issue that you can't even pass a function into a web worker in case it has bound variables - it's separate-script-and-message-passing only.)
They ended up losing a lot of those claims recently if I recall correctly, but that being said I agree for a long time it did and still does hurt the LMS environment.

http://mfeldstein.com/all-44-blackboard-patent-claims-invali... (2008)
Without going into too much detail, format the filtering better. For example, there's currently a mix of checkboxes, font sizes, text colors.. it needs to be more uniform UI wise and more prominent and friendly presentation wise.
Apple has patents on truetype hinting, not subpixel anti-aliasing. Ironically, when working around this patent, it is easier to get results similar the OSX, rather than similar to Windows.
The difference is that you can move from one feudal to the next if you plan ahead. EC2 images may not be easy to move, but your deployment scripts would not be hard to replay on rackspace or any other VM host.
Dropbox is trying to do this, they seem to be making some progress.
I think even a single one would work(as long as it's at the top like reddit)

Submissions aren't really flying here, you get one story every 2-3 minutes. Plenty of time for a few people to like a story and vote it up.
IEEE and ACM also dole out MS developer tools to students for free (price of subscription). For example I got Windows 7 release to manufacturing -edition from ACM this way two or three months before its launch date.
They've since pulled the plug on the offer.
Thinking functionally you C better.
It's not just adoption - if distributed social network is impossible to control it's also nearly-impossible to monetize using traditional means, hence no one is likely to invest like they did into Facebook.
A number of the ubiquitous Tablet rumor articles have quoted inside sources as saying the way you interact with it will be what is revolutionary about it. The patent proposals described in this post would seem to bear that out. (And would be pretty awesome)
Web Filters Cause Name Change for a Magazine
Botnets: "The Democratization of Espionage"
I like this post, as someone who pretends to design its fun to see what assumptions are proven false and true for other people.

I would love to hear more about how you actually performed and managed the testing.
I think the current system works fine. People who want to find new stories just have to click the "new" link.

Usually 1 upvote is enough for a story less than an hour hold to get a shot.
Beso et al. are bullies. btw:

http://webshop.ffii.org/

"Reback often tells the story of how a team of IBM patent lawyers went to Sun Microsystems Inc. in the 1980s and claimed that the then start-up was infringing on seven of its patents. After Sun engineers explained why they were not infringing, the IBM lawyers responded that with 10,000 patents, they would be sure to find some infringement somewhere." The Washington Post

"One could be tempted to consider ever stricter IP protection regimes to provide ever more stimuli for innovation. This conclusion is wrong, however. A prime example is patents on software, which might at first sight be seen as a logical expansion of the classic technology patent. But creating software differs markedly from creating machinery and the like."
Deutsche Bank Research

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today."
Bill Gates (1991)

"The world's patent systems need reform so that innovation can be properly rewarded. (...) It is becoming ever more apparent that the patent system isn't working."
The Economist (11 November 2004)

"Building up a patent portfolio by engaging in defensive patenting cannot always protect against hold-up."
Federal Trade Commission of the USA

"More patents in more industries and with greater breadth are not always the best ways to maximize consumer welfare."
Federal Trade Commission of the USA

"The mild regime of IP protection in the past has led to a very innovative and competitive software industry with low entry barriers. A software patent, which serves to protect inventions of a non-technical nature, could kill the high innovation rate." PriceWaterhouseCoopers

"SMEs are crucial providers of pathbreaking innovations, but would be most adversely affected by patentability. The majority of them is deterred by the costs of patenting themselves, but would have to navigate around software patent portfolios of large corporations."
Deutsche Bank Research

"Many large companies operating on a global scale, including European ones, seem to be in favour of a software patenting regime. But most small enterprises are strongly opposed."
PriceWaterhouseCoopers

Microsoft Corp. warned Asian governments on Thursday they could face patent lawsuits for using the Linux operating system instead of its Windows software.
Reuters (18 November 2004)

"A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors."
Bill Gates (1991)

"Patent law provides to inventors an exclusive right to new technology in return for publication of the technology. This is not appropriate for industries such as software development in which innovations occur rapidly, can be made without a substantial capital investment, and tend to be creative combinations of previously-known techniques."
Oracle Corporation Patent Policy
Ask HN: Anyone ever get a cease and desist while using Google Maps?
I have a customer who wants to use Google maps on a site for their customers to know where a shipment is. I think the use skirts the hairy edge of the acceptable use for the free API because the site would be freely available to anyone - but the only people who would care are people using my customer's service. I tried contacting Google Premier API sales a couple of times and get no response.

If Google won't even get back to me about a potential $10,000 sale, what are the chances they will notice and ask me to stop using their map API?
Probably a good thing for his career. Those bits could be funny the first few times you saw them but 10-15 years later; not so much so. Write some new material.
How the brain encodes memories at a cellular level
First reported here via the National Post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1051497

Some discussion there, although not a lot.
Why not offer both types of instruction and let the teachers recommend which students should learn by which method. It seems like having an option would make it more likely more students would do better. Why limit the students to only one option.
But the magnitude can only be determined by having lots of examples. You are saying that there is no point in collecting any examples at all but when you don't have any then the magnitude could still be '0'.

By showing examples, preferably lots of them the magnitude will get at least a lower bound.
It being a (hypothetical) new product Apple would imply +appstore, -flash. I wouldn't expect anything new from Apple would allow unsigned binary installation as a default.

It sounds like you should probably just tune out anything new from Apple and save yourself the time.
RemoteTweet: Twitter Scripts and Programming Portfolio
I work for a dev company that does a lot of Photoshop and have pointed our head of design at this product.

PixelNovel should look to integrate their ComparePSD product into the plugin as well. It would be quite beneficial to be able to do a granular diff of the photo properties across two versions of the .psd.

We also noted in a discussion, it'd be beneficial if you could overlay two versions of the .psd file and have the system highlight the differences. (E.g. you darken the eyes in the latest version, and when overlayed over the previous version, there'd be a light yellow circle drown around the eyes to make the change apparent).
I've been interested in learning more, but haven't found any real good sources for getting an intro to the knowledge. I asked a question here a while ago and the best advice given was to look into general design and from there move on.
Logging: Unsexy, Important, and now Usable.
The fact that not a single story got an upvote in a 27 minute period, shows that people just don't click the new link. And even when they do, they just don't vote it up.
Apple still makes "normal" PCs (MacBooks, iMacs, Mac Pros), which all allow unsigned binary installation as a default. Possibly the tablet could fall into the PC category rather than the "mobile gadget" category?
Excellent example.

Many camera manufacturers faced similar obstacles, and ended up fragmenting the market with proprietary formats or paying the 'microsoft tax'.
> My impression of UC undergraduate students is that "find the correct formula and plug in the numbers" is the only type of math they know how to do, ...

I believe that Mass has come to his position against Discovery Math precisely because his students at the University of Washington can't even do that.
Ms Iserbyt, according to her bio at that same website, is also 'best known for her 1985 booklet Back to Basics Reform or OBE: Skinnerian International Curriculum and her 1989 pamphlet Soviets in the Classroom: America's Latest Education Fad which covered the details of the U.S.-Soviet and Carnegie-Soviet Education Agreements which remain in effect to this day.'

Now, while I'm no lover of teacher's unions or abandonment o tried and tested instructional methods, her suggestion that american pedagogy is a communist plot is itself an example of 'dumbing down'. I'm reading her e-book, and it's little more than bad polemic, absolutely riddled with logical fallacies and cheap rhetorical gimmicks. Sophistry is unfortunately not confined to one end of the political spectrum.
I didn't read past the 4 or 5th paragraph, but I'll give you the reason: Gamers are afraid of Easy Mode because you alwaaaaays have an excuse for getting killed on the hardest level.

You've got skill. But there is such thing as sheer dumb luck that makes you step out from behind that building at exactly the right (wrong?) instance and you get taken out by that sniper. If you're playing on Easy, that's just embarrassing. Same scenario on "Legendary" and you've got a good excuse :)
No, it shows that people didn't find any of those stories worthy of upvoting.
Flash games only exist because everyone installed Flash to watch video.

Before flash video hit, the installed-base wasn't that impressive/threatening.
A simplistic proposal for patent reform
If your patent ever gets overturned in the future then you will have to pay back all the fees that you have collected under your patent + a 50% fine.

The reason why I think this would work is because it puts the onus of really good prior art searches on the patent taker.

Now it is basically 'whatever you got away with', and if your patent gets voided after years of litigation there is no retroactive punishment for patenting something non-novel in the first place.

So there is lots of sloppy searching and lots of blustering with bogus patents.

If that change were adopted you'd gladly pay for a bogus patent because you'd get it back with a nice interest after you finish killing the patent.
That's difficult to say without benchmarking. Yes, you can offload some computations to GPU (you certainly are not going to parse the bitstream or VLD decode using shader programs), but do you get net gain, when you are shuffling buffers over PCI-E? You also limit your target audience to NVidia 9400 and up when talking about OSX, basically telling the Macbook users with Intel graphic cards, that they do not need to apply (Intel 3100 and 4500 are perfectly capable of decoding H.264 and VC-1, just not through shaders).
The most obvious one that comes to mind is LZW, which basically killed the entire compression scheme.
I believe that there is a "heuristic" to become a successful fiction author, but it is not easy at all. Just write books (not just one) and keep marketing them until you find an audience. Notice that this is based on the idea that for every author there is always an audience, the problem is finding it.

Once your audience knows about you, they will buy more and more of your books (that is why you need to have several books in order to make money this way).

The big problem is that most authors will just stop before writing even the first book. Or, after the first or second book, if they don't find success, they will stop altogether -- they never achieve the critical point after which they are successful.

It is not different from writing non-fiction and market to a niche, but it takes much more effort, because readers in fiction are not so easy to reach as in non-fiction.
Agreed. Especially with the speed at which the 'new' page scrolls by the chances of making it to the homepage are relatively slim (unless of course you want to game the system but that's not ethical).

A potential way of displaying this would be to simply interleave the home and the new page.
No, they know what happens if the ads disappear for them, but if they disappeared for everyone, they would just be replaced with other sources of annoyance and bother. Yes, you could block some of those, but eventually, you start blocking things that are genuinely useful, like images or javascript. Right now, Flash one most sites means one of two things: ads or video. Kill Flash and now the situation won't be nearly as clear or easy to block.
You can verify this for yourself, but it'll cost you the price of both apps: about $7.

1. Buy them, right click on both apps in your iTunes Apps list and choose 'Reveal in Finder'.

2. Copy both to your desktop.

3. Rename them to .zip and unzip them

4. Click on the app file and choose 'Show Package Contents'

5. Compare dublinbus.db with dublinbus.png2

They are not totally identical, but there is a very significant overlap that cannot be down to chance.

Also, his e-mail to me admits that he copied my 'layout'.

Though, I agree that his website doesn't him look 'dodgy' by itself.
I guess it can only be decided on an individual basis after all.

I think there was a similar discussion here recently, about somebody breaking lose all hell because a company screwed him over 20$. On the one hand it didn't make sense, on the other hand society needs somebody to step up and make a stink, otherwise companies that rip us off small amounts of money would proliferate.

I am not experienced with lawyers. It would be nice if it would be possible to just delegate this nasty stuff to somebody and forget about it (for a fixed fee?). I suppose rich people would just tell their secretaries to deal with it... Maybe some Indian company could step up and provide that service for cheap? Or would it work like that if you already had an established relationship with a lawyer you trust? First negotiations with lawyers seem painful.
Really?

I'd say the Sivers and the asmartbear posts would hit the front page, if they were featured there even for a second.

The asmartbear post on what you need to do at a tradeshow is now at 2 points, and no where near the front page.

The Sivers post on building intimacy is now at 3 points, and is also nowhere near the front page
My Thoughts on How To Encode an MP3 Using Twitter
In general, anywhere you find Huffman coding being done, it could achieve superior compression with Arithmetic Coding but is not because of IBM's patents.

This is essentially every JPEG image on the planet. The standard provides for arithmetic coding, but no one implements it because of the patent. Wikipedia asserts that arithmetic coding saves about 5% of the files size.

So that is 5% of every flash card sold for a camera wasted and 5% of the bandwidth costs for images on the internet wasted.

If GATT hadn't tacked on three more years in 1995 these would have expired by now, but it looks like 2012 or 2013 is the date now.

The MPEG series of standards probably could also have benefited similarly from Arithmetic Coding.
We've been doing this categorization for a long time, and if we don't do it, we can't tell if we're really addressing the problem.
No, it means that the small subset of the people visiting the new page in that period didn't find any of those stories worthy of upvoting. But as the relationship between people submitting links and people visiting the new page slowly changes the chance of stuff getting lost gets bigger and bigger.

Mahmud pointed out an excellent example of that happening and I have seen plenty of others.

Go visit the last page of the 'new' section and have a look at all the stuff that was lost. It's really a pity.

And plenty of 'fluff' does get upvoted.
I think Redstone Software would be interested to know someone is duplicating their software Eggplant.
Which btw works really well.
It averages to about 1 in 5 minutes, more during the day, less during the night.
In other news, 100% of violent prisoners were smokers. Thus, smoking is a gateway to violent crime.
Can't help you with the disassembly question, but in terms of making use of the parts, some interesting projects show up on Hackaday (http://hackaday.com/). Click on the cellphone hacks category.
I'm actually quite disapointed by Youtube's HTML5. I had great expectations, I know it's just the beginning and I'm sure it'll be better, but I'm closer to 80% CPU than 20% with my Macbook on Safari 4.
Even though one of my sub was on that screenshot 27 minute period of time, I agree with you.

HN only needs 2 votes to get something on the front page. Not all interesting topic will hit the FP, and not everything I consider interesting is also true for others.

Its not perfect system, mostly because, in this case, perfect is subjective.

For instance I absolutely dislike ~90% of Tech Crunch crap posted here, but I have to live with the fact that others find Tech Crunch drama interesting.
Wow was that off topic.

Guy A: "Doesn't Amazon get software patents mainly to protect themselves rather than enforce them?"

Guy B: "Here's a long, extensive list of actions by other companies proving that software patents are evil!"

Sometimes I think people need to drink less Kool-Aid.
Six Whys – Or, Never Trust Your Network Switch
I think the whole 'open web' argument goes down as soon as Gruber mentions h.264 as the alternative to flash. That's replacing an evil with another evil.
I just finished the book yesterday (for the first time) and don't know why I waited this long. I highly recommend it also.
"We want to be like Geordi in Star Trek, who can see everything on the Enterprise with a few finger presses. I wish there was such a thing! The closest we can get is ganglia, which monitors OS-level events (it can be hacked for apps)."

I disagree. Large software companies already exist in this space: Splunk, LogLogic, Arcsight, etc. The author Sounds like they reinvented Splunk in particular. (disclaimer: I work for Splunk and can see everything in your datacenter with a few finger presses. Call me Geordi LaForge.)
On a similar token, a lot of "high literature" looks terrible when you consider the story being told. My latest example is Virginia Woolf's "The Wave". While it is a beautiful book, the story couldn't be more boring.
agreed. i peruse the new section almost exclusively, and i upvote what i view as worthy of my upvote. people use the system as it is intended. we're just a harder bunch to please, in general.
It works pretty well within its limitations, but other downsides are:

* If your program creates a temporary file on the webdav file system, it ain't temporary, it just became version controlled. :-(

* You tend to get a lot of versions, all looking alike. It becomes somewhat more difficult to determine which version you want to roll back to if you need to. In addition, it takes up a lot of disk space to maintain lots of (unnecessary) versions, especially if they are binary blobs.

Both of the above drawbacks can be worked around by copying the file off the webdav file system, editing it, and then copying it back on. In the case where I saw this done, most (all?) of the users ended up switching to TortoiseSVN and stopped using the webdav interface.
You need 2 votes in the first 3-4 minutes or so. After that the number starts increasing. This is just pulling things out of thin air, but from the looks of it, the system increases the amounts every period.

i.e.

First 2 minutes? 1 upvote.
4 minutes: 2 upvotes
6 minutes: 3 upvotes
8 minutes: 4 upvotes

etc
Spreedly does not have PCI compliance either so it doesn't tick point 4 on your list. In the end he will be just as liable.
Better Off Deadbeat: Getting Bill Collectors Off His Back. He Sues Them.
Hacker builds Tor tracking system
Dual booting Maemo and Android on Nokia N900
It seems to me that the new name might be a bit too generic, and will cause Internet-related issues of its own. "Canada's history" has 11 million hits on Google already- it won't be easy to make their magazine findable.

Admittedly, though, they didn't have a top spot on Google for the only-slightly-less-generic name "The Beaver," either, so maybe it's not a huge deal.
There's only so much room on the front page. If you featured something new automatically on the front page, then something else falls off. No doubt people would then complain about that.

You could make the front page longer, of course, but then I'm sure some set of people would complain about that.