skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's very true. I think two factors have helped in these kinds of cases:

1. There wasn't a "boss" or someone dictating what they should do. Creativity reigns and ideas simmer for a while to mature into good ideas.

2. They have a mentality of "if I were to solve this problem from scratch, what would I really need?" This question expands into "What is my wish list of things that are hard to do now but me/everyone has asked for?"
Why Amazon needed to control Kindle's book prices
You can patch the open source libraries to add automatic failover. Clearly it's a requirement for many people.
Yes, economists these days don't talk about compensation so much but "utility" which is the aggregate of salary, cow-orkers, short commute, nice office, meaningful work, yadda yadda. People will always act to maximize utility.
At 3am, he won't think about the rewards.
Some News Outlets Ready to Try Charging Online Readers
On VP6 is still the most widely used codec on the web... almost all live streaming is vp6. (Flash web cam chat is Spark codec).

So the opportunity still exists for you or your sister to encode web videos for commercial use and have them playable by the majority of users today with no legal hassles.

The issue tends to be with the HD quality video craze thats happening now. VP6 is fine, but its noticeably different in quality to h.264. Most people wont notice the difference when encoded at high bitrates unless you know what to look for.

What bugs me is Apple is part of that whole h.264 consortium that owns the h.264 patents, yet the also serve on the web standards group defining html5... I don't think they can be impartial there, also denying flash on apple products is more to do with protecting the codecs that can be used to the ones they own. If you sell a app on the apple store that uses h.264 video then you better be sure you own the commercial license as apple know who you are.
Where has this order of magnitude difference been "proved"? I would say that even developing in forth is not one order of magnitude slower than ruby, as long as reasonable libraries are available.
Therefore, there are times when the Python developers decided to just implement something practical and simple over something that's ideologically consistent.

Which cannot be stressed enough.

Python acknowledges that the programmer is a human more than any other language I have seen. That's why you can get stuff done and keep it maintainable so easily in python. It gives you just enough rope to be very flexible, but tries very hard to not extend it to the length that people normally use to hang themselves.
Aw, man. :( I really wanted an Aptera since the first time I saw them, years ago--it was the first car that was both as awesome as the concept, and planned to be affordable. But I had a feeling they wouldn't be able to make it anywhere near on time at their target price point.

Whether it's because they planned their initial release solely for a state that's sinking in red ink, or because of inherent unviability, it's a sad day for cool cars of today and the future.
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight (Making Light) is routinely in the 200-1000 comments-per-thread range. They manage okay, mostly due to have a strong sense of community and several moderators and having Teresa Nielsen Hayden to ride herd on it (one of the folks who moderated BoingBoing when they reinstated comments).

Here are her (very cogent) thoughts on how to moderate massive discussions:

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008856.html
So much for first-mover advantage.
You can't skip the story about Niels Bohr at the bottom.
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Wouldn't that make it a really good attempt at satire?
If you want to run any kind of community on the web these days, you need a chief of secret police.

"Benign dictatorship" works. Anything short of it is asking to be rules-lawyered to death by trolls and griefers.
I'm taking the author's arguments at face value, that their project is of limited value to others because most PHP apps aren't CPU bound, and that they only handle a subset of the language.
The new iPad. Now with over 300 cameras.
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Apple and Microsoft are the barriers. Neither one is going to adopt Theora.
Developers, and even device manufacturers, don't really have much of a say in this. The problem is that many applications these days are in processing power constrained devices - netbooks, smartphones, set top boxes.

For example, at the moment I'm working on a set top box. The processor is simply unable to handle 720p decoding. We need to rely on the decoder built into the chip to make it happen. And that decoder only does license-encumbered formats.

Because there are a lot of devices that fall into this category, content providers are pretty much constrained to generating content in the formats handled by hardware, which in turn reinforces the use of these formats in hardware.

Really, the only way out of this loop would be for the big-league device manufacturers - Apple, Sony, Samsung, etc to decide to change format. They don't seem to want to, so the rest of us are stuck with h264...
Yep, been there, done that in 1997 (not my plan, was hired when the first angel got cold feet due to another investment going sour).

You really don't want to have a long stealth period, trust me, your idea is not all that unique and getting attention when your product or service is ready is very hard.

You may get only one shot ... in our case, there were three ways to use the service and the media obsessed on the only one that, if it was the only method, would have caused the venture to fail.

Did our marketing guy screw up? Maybe. Did the media only hear what they wanted to hear? Could be. But if we'd been talking about it from the beginning we could have focused on what the market required (ideally punting altogether on the 3rd access method and figuring out who are true customers were (way too much time was spent speculating on that)) and we would have had plenty of time to focus the media on the trivial to use method that didn't pose any problems.

Ah, well.
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Is this a spam blog?

Not in my opinion. For me, the defining characteristic of a spam blog is copied content surrounded by adverts. This design stays true to daringfireball.net, to the point that it still has ads from the Deck with DB referral links. So no, not a spam blog.
Not trying to defend python's decision here but I have honestly yet to see an example where anonymous function really led to better code.

In my experience (mostly JS and AS) they rather usually lead to little pieces of logic scattered all over the place and insufficient decoupling.
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And I think you've completely missed my point.

My assumptions:

* Server built around async I/O

* Clients with low bandwidth and high latency, but in aggregate insufficient to saturate the server's bandwidth

* Caching etc. on the server side so that server-side I/O bandwidth isn't the limiting factor

* Sufficient concurrent connections that you need more than one webserver

Under these assumptions, each webserver doesn't wait, in the OS blocking sense, for any given connection. It processes I/O completions as they come due, as fast as it can. It is this process that is CPU-bound; if less than 100% CPU is utilized, it means that there are periods where no I/O completions are currently due.

There are memory costs per concurrent connection: whatever is needed to pick up processing as the related I/O completes, and for some structures representing the open socket in the kernel.

But these costs don't magically add up to "waiting". To the degree that the webserver is tied up in "waiting", it is that the kernel is idle between CPU interrupts generated from the networking hardware. In other words, it's doing nothing, and if you have too many machines spending their time doing nothing, you can eliminate some of them.

Now consider the same assumptions, except in the synchronous case: what this does is move the memory and CPU costs around and increase them. The memory cost per concurrent connection increases, to store the stack etc. The CPU costs increase because now context switches are required in between each I/O completion. These costs can be substantial; they can add up to being a limiting factor in themselves - but as part of either the memory or CPU limits of the machine, not I/O.

Consider this: why would one need more than one webserver if the servers were "I/O bound", and not on server-side bandwidth, but rather on spoon-feeding clients?

Since it's not server-side bandwidth, it can only be because of either memory or CPU bounds. And where do those bounds come from? They come from the CPU or memory cost associated with concurrent connections, as well as the CPU and memory costs of processing any given request. You can minimize the costs associated with concurrent connections by leveraging an async I/O design of the server. But minimizing the CPU and memory costs of per-request processing is pure gravy in terms of reducing the number of machines you need to keep running to process X concurrent requests.

And it is here that the myth lies. Just because you may need to keep spoon-feeding very slow clients, such that decreasing the CPU cost of any given request would not visibly affect the client's perceived latency, that doesn't mean that optimizing the server for CPU usage is pointless. The less CPU usage you spend, the less hardware you need for the same load; likewise for memory.

Another way to think of it: how can e.g. nginx work as a reverse proxy, if it runs on a single machine and is spoon-feeding lots of slow clients? Async design, and offloading CPU/memory requirements to other machines, that's how.
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Isn't this somewhat equivalent to flapjax[1]?

[1] http://www.flapjax-lang.org/
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And what if you have around 8 petabytes of video (http://beerpla.net/2008/08/14/how-to-find-out-the-number-of-...) in H.264? What would you do, double your storage? How long would that take to re-encode anyways. The reason why Youtube is using H.264 instead of Theora is because they already have the videos in that format.
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I tried clicking that with my G1 and it doesn't download anything.
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Will Apple's iPad kill Flash?
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Problem is, we just don't know when Peak Oil will hit. It's been predicted for decades and decades (long before the '70s) ... yeah, someday it'll become true, but will we perhaps have enough cheap power then to simply make hydrocarbons out of cheap feedstocks (in the short term, tar sands and oil shale, then coal, and eventually pull CO2 out of the air?).

Huge new oil fields are being discovered, or did you miss the deep one off of Brazil? Or how in most countries the government owns mineral rights, so property owners do everything they can to discourage oil exploration and extraction? Or the ban on oil extraction off of most of the US coast?

There's also the potential for new extraction methods, look at natural gas in the contential US in the last few years.

A review of the whole '70s "Limits to Growth" obsession and its total failure to pan out might be in order.
> Drinking and driving is the bug, not any individual. Societies with access to alcohol and cars have that bug.

That's rich. That's another way of saying ... societies with people in them have bugs.

Yeah, my wife last night had a bug ... she kept wining that I work too much. If this escalates we'll probably end-up like other people getting divorced ... which could lead me into getting drunk and into a car crash. If people only automated those cars, I wouldn't have to worry about it.

Problem is, that's not a bug I can fix ... next time I'll get some automated robot that doesn't mind me working so much ... hope she doesn't BSOD on me though.

> We are limited in our ability to fix bugs of that kind. Banning alcohol would probably the wrong thing to do and probably no work. What might work is automating transportation. We can at least fix the bugs there.

No, it would only give those people with God-syndrome some sense of control.
There are existing studies which show that people react faster when startled than when not. There's a nifty little online test to check your own response times: http://www.mathsisfun.com/games/reaction-time.html

As far as I know this is the first test to show that startle response extends beyond reaction time, it's an interesting piece of data. It's worth noting that it's possible to force yourself into a state of mind similar to being startled, which may very well eliminate the advantage to "shooting" second.
Looks like an article about politics to me.
Courts move to ban juror use of Blackberry, iPhone, Twitter and Facebook
Which is why overloading and type inference aren't very good friends.
Looks very nice, but where are the vote counts / buttons?
There are obvious problems with H.264, but I don't believe MPEG LA's plan is to sue regular people for not complying with the license agreement when they did that video that one time.

Not because I think they're not evil enough to do it, but because that kind of money-making scheme just doesn't scale.

Also, whenever they've sued one or two people, people's eyes will open and they'll just use an other codec. No big deal.

As a means to make money, that strategy simply sucks. A more likely turn of events is that licensing H.264 becomes quite a bit less good of a deal when H.264 has truly established itself. But even then they're not going to sue millions of people, because that doesn't scale, they're going to sue big vendors and service providers.

Certainly, that's not great either. But no, MPEG LA are not coming after "_you_".
I know I'm going to get downvoted for this, but I agree with Joel on this one:

"They don’t care about money, actually, unless you’re screwing up on the other things. If you start to hear complaints about salaries where you never heard them before, that’s usually a sign that people aren’t really loving their job.

...

That doesn’t mean you can underpay people, because they do care about justice, and they will get infuriated if they find out that different people are getting different salaries for the same work, or that everyone in your shop is making 20% less than an otherwise identical shop down the road, and suddenly money will be a big issue."

An employer could really take advantage of me monetarily if they provided a work environment that was that cool. Aside from that, as long as I make enough to make a decent living, I don't care. When I'm considering working for a new company, money really is a secondary issue.
Judging by how well global warming articles have been doing on HN, I think it is pretty safe to say that hackers are interested in the intersection of science and politics. Myself included.
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You're making two points, either or both of which may be good, but they are two different points. First, are they hard or easy? Second, are they distracting because they're fun/engaging? Either "problem" may lead to them being a huge time sink for startups and either may lead to them being perennially unfinished.

The good news is that a language for in-house use need not be finished to be useful. For example, FB's PHP compiler can't compile "eval." No problem, don't use eval in-house. If they were trying to "finish" it in the sense of writing a compiler for every possible PHP app, they would have to address that somehow. But instead, they punt on it and carry on using it in house.
Am I the only one to think that "social news" websites, from the perspective of the content publisher only work when the site is small enough?

I mean, the quantity of information being submitted to Digg, and maybe Reddit, is so huge it roughly gives a new story about 5 minutes of exposure in the first page of the New Stories section, and only in the specific feed, not the global one...

It makes me think that somehow, spreading something over Twitter, using our friends to do it, might achieve a better result...
Niels Bohr should know something about reactions and reaction times - in 1905 he played professional football (soccer) for Akademisk Boldklub, playing goalkeeper.
Maybe this would have been better as a hack/framework on top of Javascript

Did you see the bit where they can drop into raw Javascript at will?
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Sigh. I've recently been doing a lot of Theora encoding as I experiment with HTML5. I agree that Theora is immediately noticeable as worse quality than h264, and it's not a subtle difference. Even when the situation should have tricked me into thinking it was not Theora - for example, I was testing on Mac Safari and it should have been playing h264 but accepted the Theora because Perian was installed - I instantly noticed the unexpected codec because the quality was so inferior. Those people claiming the two are of comparable quality should get their eyes checked.

I hear a lot of talk about how it's "good enough" but quite frankly it's not. If my videos look bad, I look bad. It matters, to me at least.

Frankly at this point I wish the governments of the world would just hand the licensees $100m and annul all the patents for the public good. The cost of worrying about the damn licenses seems likely to eclipse the economic contribution of the IP itself.
Hackers, being inquisitive, thoughtful people, are interested in a great deal of things, politics and economics included. They're topics that are best avoided on internet forums as they generally turn into flame-fests and attract people interested in discussing politics. In my experience at least.
Voting would require allowing you to login, a whole 'nother degree of difficulty, especially given the architecture of going thru the proxy at heroku.

If enough people seem to care, I might attempt supporting logging in. And charge 99 cents for it....
Casually browsing around the site, I'm having a difficult time figuring out how to download MySQL for free...

edit: http://mysql.org redirects to http://dev.mysql.com.

They've completely segmented the navigation between the commercial and developer sections of the site.
Yeah, but I would really like C02 not to be classified as a pollutant. I think that's just too extreme.
You're right, and this is not even a good article to function as a framework for a discussion of global warming, which is much, much more complicated than the article makes it out to be.
Why is this being downvoted? The site was down and the parent was just trying to be helpful. I admit the formatting is a bit bad but does that deserve punishment?

edit: parent was at -1 when I posted that.
Obama Questions from YouTube Reveal Google Moderators True Potential
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Try this link instead. Don't ask me to explain, but I had to rename the file here .zip instead of .apk, so rename it after you download it:

http://ifdefined.com/HackerNewsReader.zip
That's also true, but not a very good reason to submit more global warming articles here, unless the article has something actually new to say about global warming.
When building the binary, set target/use SDK for Android 1.5 (or even 1.1, if you can). The older handsets will be able to run it too.

Android 2.1 is currently running only on Nexus One, 2.0 is Motorola Milestone/Droid, HTC G1 and HTC Magic are 1.6, HTC Hero and Samsung Galaxy are 1.5.
Oracle scores a few points for ruthless efficiency. No more Sun.com and no obvious way to download MySQL for free in just a couple of days. PostgreSQL is going to blow up.
Google Pours “Incredible” Computing Power into Drug Discovery Via Startup Deal
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[1002.0200] Energy-Entanglement Relation for Quantum Energy Teleportation
It's good to hear that you were smart with your money but also did get a chance to enjoy it.

We have a neighbor who is a heart surgeon who recently went into bankruptcy. It's almost unbelievable that would be possible with someone making that kind of money, but it really is as simple as revenues minus expenditures.
Vietnam hosts third round of 2010 Kiteboard Tour Asia 
The third round of the Kiteboard Tour Asia (KTA) wrapped up at Mui Ne Beach in the southern province of Binh Thuan on January 31.

The first and second rounds of the tour were held in China and Hong Kong.

Mui Ne Beach witnessed tough competition among 70 outstanding professional and amateur athletes from 19 countries around the world, including China, Russia, the US, and Vietnam.

KTA’s Executive Director Neil Godbold said Vietnam was selected for the first time to host Kiteboard Tour Asia at Mui Ne Beach for its beautiful beach, good weather and large number of sports lovers.

In the women’s 5000m course racing event, Nuvia Gomes of Spain won first place, followed by Katarin Bogwardt of Germany and Ally of Australia. In the men’s event, first place went to Jo Narapichit of Thailand, while David Gomes of Spain and Lai Hoang Phi of Vietnam finished second and third respectively.

In the women’s performance event, Katarin Bogwardt of Germany claimed the victory, followed by Nuvia Gomes of Spain and Julia of Vietnam. In the men’s event, Jo Narapichit of Thailand took his second victory, while two Vietnamese athletes, Nguyen Ngoc Kin and Lai Hoang Phi, won second and third place.

The next round of the tour will take place in the Philippines at the end of February, and the finals will be held in Thailand.
I would say reasonably easy to start with, but needing a lot of ongoing effort for improvements, bug fixes, and so on, which is exactly why I think it's a dangerous combination for a small company.

I think they're likely to be an ongoing distraction for the above reason, and also because of the fun/intellectual challenge reason.

> punt on it and carry on using it in house.

Over time, that kind of thing can (if you're not careful) lead to dangerous cruft, where the in-house divergences pile up to the point where it's no longer so easy to go back and forth between the public/open version. And thus is born a new species with a far smaller ecosystem than the original.
Anonymity and the Internet
[1001.3732] Stochastic modeling of Congress
I can't help but wish for a similar sql-solution. In-memory, with writes journaled and close enough to mysql that porting wouldn't be a nightmare. <sigh> one can only dream...
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No, they are probably not out to get you and me... Unless you fall into one of the "still to be specified categories". I guess my biggest problem is that there are questions begging for answers.

I admit that I went a bit over the top in the scare mongering with "_you_", though.

(the comments at the end of the article linked above is quite interesting, by the way)
I would buy a company that makes video codecs that don't infringe on the MPEG patents for 133 million dollars. Coincidentally, so did Google:

http://www.on2.com/blog/2009/08/google-and-on2-to-improve-vi...