skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not unprecedented at all. People know people. You just call up some mid-level or senior PayPal rep, if you know one - and I know plenty of people who do. If there's a media shitstorm brewing, PayPal will also be responsive - it's business 101. PayPal have no interest in blocking Wikileaks, they're just caught up in their own bureaucracy and fraud protection measures.
yes, but sadly websites cannot get around using a flash plugin or ogg theora on other platforms for streaming movies.
Mozilla is not a small business. Businesses play games with each other because they are competing in an open market. End users do not have to do this. I don't work at Mozilla, I do not know what their situation is, but saying 'no way' to the whole thing and using a technology that they know nobody else will use and fragmenting web video is not helping end users.

If we're lucky, this is all actually maneuvering on the part of Mozilla to get the MPEG LA to lighten their terms with Mozilla.
bit bare to be so high on hacker news, but I would also suggest setting the keywordURL in about:config to

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourc...

then you can get rid of the search box entirely and search from the url bar, somewhat closer to chrome, there is no need to have seperate url bars and search.

(btw, anyone else able to hide the menubar in firefox 3.6pre on ubuntu?)
Decisiveness
Right. This is how Chromium works. Chromium does not build with H.264 compatibility out of the box. Projects using Chromium (not the Chrome package Google defaults for end-users) must explicitly enable H.264.
Don't forget the $30B for Israel to keep occupation of Gaza. So a total of $63B for foreign occupation, and a total of $8B for domestic infrastructure transportation.
Just because they don't pay a fee, doesn't mean they don't have to. However, they seem to be passing on the responsibility to the end users:

"... Hence there is not need to obtain any patent licenses for VideoLAN software within the European Union. In other venues, please check any applicable law."
http://www.videolan.org/support/faq.html

The VideoLan organisation may be based in the EU, but there are a number of companies in the US whose servers act as VLC mirrors. Would they be potential targets if the MPEG-LA decided to do something about VLC being unlicensed? With its widespread popularity it can hardly have gone unnoticed.
one reason for moving away from flash:

iPad, iPhone and some other mobile devices cannot run Flash content.
It's not about the image. It's about the use. If Woolworth's were using the image to sell a line of canned corn there would be no case on Apple's part.

These stories are all about page views. There's absolutely no effort to clarify. Instead the effort is to obfuscate for the purposes of controversy/traffic.
My understanding is that Apple and Google cannot use Theora because they are targets for patent trolls, and would be sued by a multitude of companies claiming to hold patents that cover Theora.

correction: It's just Apple/Safari that does not support Theora, not Google/Chrome, which does.
Apple iPad [Tablet]
Because they are based in France and EU does not recognize software patents. If you are using VLC in US/Japan, it is your responsibility to pay the fee.
I'm not sure if this division makes sense. Are Android phones "Old World" or "New World"? They have an open development model, and yet have most of the attributes and advantages of a New World device: applications are sandboxed, no need for virus scanners, etc.

I think people are conflating Apple's locked-down restrictive policies with the OS design of iPhone and Android which prevent installing a bad app from breaking your device.
These are pretty good. I really liked #6, the tip for template_tags. I hadn't thought of that before and will definitely do that. I will also look into extensions of the template system as suggested at the bottom. Those were really helpful, even for someone who has been using Django for a few months.

I disagree with #4, the suggestion to not include business logic in views. What Django calls 'views' are what other frameworks call 'controllers' (MTV=MVC), and the business logic should reside there. I'm totally for separating the code into helper functions in other files, but putting business logic into models definitely violates the idea of MVC.

For #5, I would recommend the second approach of having a separate settings.py for production vs development. Or at least code it where DEBUG=False is only overridden if socket confirms you are on a development machine - not the other way around. Debug contains too much info to risk exposing in production, but maybe my fear of socket screwing up is unfounded.
Ask HN: How big is the social media market?
Any estimates, guesses, link to reports would be most welcome. US and global in terms of dollars. I have tried searching and cannot find any.
Because for Mozilla it's not a case of side-stepping the law. It's a case of their moral intentions. They want the web to be usable for people who want to run free software, or at least for it to be possible to write a browser stack based on open code.
I'm pretty sure you have to pay $100/year to sign up to the iPhone dev program and I imagine the iPad dev program will be the same. So your idea works fine except for the part where everybody who wants to install your package will first have to pay Apple $100. I'm not sure how many people will be willing to do that just to start learning about programming.
Ask HN:iPad and chrome-os might be disruptive, how can Microsoft react?
If we assume iPad, tables, chrome-os computers would find a crowd among non-techies. How can microsoft react to this ?
It's neat, but it's not a new idea. http://sourcefrog.net/projects/meantime/
Why the scare quotes? It's a bona fide solution. When you kill yourself, the problem goes away. Also, why terrible? It may be terrible for the friends and family, but the person committing suicide certainly has nothing to lose by it. A loss is only a loss if you perceive it as such. You won't perceive anything after you die.

Theory: we'd all be better off if suicide were socially acceptable. The people who commit suicide "out of blue" probably consider talking to someone about it, but they know it will be seen as a cry for help, and met with banal pleas to not do it. Maybe they'd like to have a rational conversation instead, one where their right of choice would be respected. Inability to have such a conversation leads to alienation, which makes them more likely to kill themselves.
The choice for Theora, by Fronteers
That's a red herring. Precisely the same wording could be used for any software publisher and any algorithm. Even with H.264, the fact that you're paying one patent holder does not preclude other patent holders suing you for other parts of your software. You could just as easily say, "My understanding is that nobody with deep pockets can distribute any software because patent trolls might show up."
Microsoft should built some controlled version of it's os, using applications verified for safety , speed.

And then use those applications to conquer many vertical markets for the non-techies crowd.

for example: Microsoft should built some platform using mathematica or similar software to sell interactive educational math books. With right way of selling it to colleges this could work very well.
At its core, the iPad is a web browsing box. Viability of that form factor has never been a question to me. It was so much not a question to TechCrunch's Mr. Arrington, that he devoted significant resources to making "a Macbook Air-thin touch screen machine that runs Firefox" [1].

Ignore the walled garden closed ecosystem problem, though it sucks a great deal. The question on the viability of the product, to all, but to skeptics especially, is "can /you/ surf the web without flash?" And I'm not talking about Hulu, which I bet there'll be an app for, soon enough; I'm not talking about youtube, as I assume the iPad will have the same level of compatibility as the iPhone. I'm talking about everything else. The sprinkling of flash on many sites, with no 'alt' text, that say see the pretty animation here, and sans-flash just has an empty box with no explanation. The non-youtube video sites, the 'designer' flash-only sites with no alternative for navigation.

[1] http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/21/we-want-a-dead-simple-w...
"if you distribute h.264 videos on a large scale (>100k viewers), you need to pay licensing fees."

Clearly, the likes of Youtube and Vimeo don't care about this. They do seem to care about using a codec that is standard, widely supported and with good and varied implementations (both encoding and decoding, with or without hardware acceleration). Theora has neither of these characteristics.

"Only if you use the OS' native decoder, you don't need to pay. But Firefox is multiplatform. WinXP, Linux do not support h.264 out of the box."

Well, WinXP and Linux do not support Flash out of the box, but that doesn't seem to pose any problems.
Yes, that's right, to a degree. The amount of software patent litigation that exists now is absurd.

The reason H.264 is more secure for Apple and Google is that the technology is already covered by an existing patent, which is licensed out by the holder. If someone wished to claim ownership over technologies covered by H.264, they would have to go up against MPEG/MPEG LA and many others.

With Theora, as far as I know, the burden for legal defense would fall on whoever is using it, namely Apple and Google. The situation is ridiculous, but there you go.
I disagree with the main premise: That as long as you provide the "90% functionality" (i.e mail,chat e.t.c), no casual user will miss the last 10%. Sure, most of the time this will work fine, but occasionally people want more. Maybe upload a video to youtube, or chat on that new up-and-coming social networking site? "The user" is not quite so simpleminded as some here seem to think. More importantly, since the web market can change so fast any static set of features could get sidelined by a new application/web page et al, and it's very hard to predict in advance what the user will want. Therefore, one makes devices that can do everything. This is not an anachronism, it's the only logical solution to a market that changes too fast to lock people in to a very small subset of a computer.
Microsoft sold a large amount of Windows 7 licenses - see: http://beta.thehindu.com/business/article96694.ece

People use Windows because they like it and they can do a lot of work with this operating system. Stop believing that people use Windows because they are forced to.

As for the rest of this article, I have the feeling I'm being fed with a list of peremptory choices based on little or no field experience.

I'd like to see more examples of strategic choices of choosing an OS vs another and the impact it had on a deployment.
I'd think so, this is very much in the same domain as Apple's new product. It was the change of domain that exposed apple (computer) to the apple (music) trademark.

But this is actually as if Apple named the Iphone out of the gate as an "Apple Razr". Sure, one might not have buttons, but there is a clear in domain example of infringement.

They'll end up paying Fujitsu a pile, I think.
Don't hash passwords? I say yes. Hash them And correctly
>>I'm not sure how many people will be willing to [pay a tax of $100/year] just to start learning about programming.

Huh, learning? That is like saying people won't buy a car so they can learn to drive... :-)

A user could have an iPad to write and/or run suitable scripting programs. Like emacs. [Edit: Or other programs written with Perl/Python/Ruby/Lisp etc.]

If that is worth a tax of 8-9$/month will vary between users.
Well, given that Microsoft is on the list as well, 98% of all desktops are covered. The remaining 2% are welcome to purchase licensed third party codecs.

I don't want to sound offensive but just because some tiny portion of people would prefer a free/open solution, the large majority of the people (who actually use a commrecial OS and and don't really care about the whole thing just want YouTube working on their desktop) shouldn't be "punished".
Cydia, the app store for jailbroken iPhones has a backgrounder app. Give it a try. What they don't tell you is that it sucks, maybe because the iPhone doesn't really have the ram to run apps in the background or maybe because the iPhone OS wasn't designed that way, but for some reason I'm leaning towards the former as an explanation.
If you think Sunsolve was bad, wait 'til you try Metalink.
"A lot of women when they hear the word ‘pad’ are going to think about feminine hygiene."

Much like they do when they go in to a stationary shop and buy a "pad of paper"? I love how half the world have managed to transform themselves in to pubescent teenagers over this name.
Study: Cell phone bans don't reduce accidents
Motivation and other minor miracles
FTA: "Lund said the Highway Loss Data Institute is trying to determine why the ban does not have an impact on the rate of accidents.[...]drivers [...] may be resorting to using hands-free devices, whose accident rates are the same as hand-held devices, he said."

So what's next? Cell phone jammers on the highways?
I am 24 years old.

Quite interesting. Perhaps I am assuming that the availability of media for most of my formative years is the reason I had never taken extended periods to simply think before. A poor assumption, since obviously other forms of media have been around and constantly occupying peoples attention for much longer.

Either way, I have come to the same conclusion that you have, and I embrace that 5 minutes where I can get it.
IPad has missing features, yes. But it's the touchscreen, stupid.
Elltube 0.3 su Ubuntu e Debian
Ask the candidate if he has contribute to an open source project. If the candidate has contributed (preferably non-trivially), it means that his code has been vetted by some very experienced software engineers and found acceptable. As well as the code vetting-by-proxy, you should be able to judge his "passion" (the current evaluation buzzword) by discussing what the projects were and what he did on them. You don't need to know what he is talking about in detail, although that would be good, in order to get a feel for his passion level for programming.

If the candidate has not contributed to an open source project, this test is inconclusive.
(Until we get that micropayment setup going, I'm going to need your home address to send these two pennies in return for your two thoughts. Or...if you deem it an agreeable alternative, I'll just give you my "two cents" instead.)

Yeah, that's probably what I'll do. Obviously, I have little experience with security coding...probably should've figured that. Humor the ignorant by answering another question, if you (or anyone else) would: what seem to be the primary reasons 'security by obscurity' fails so often? I can surmise, of course, that the cleverness of the many outweighs the cleverness of the few...especially when compounded with the depth and breadth of testing of the many vs. the few. Anything beyond that?

If it's any in-cent-ive (oooh I like that pun :D), should you respond to this question as well, I hereby release any and all intellectual property rights I hold (i.e., none) over the phrase "Penny For Your Thoughts" should you want to ever use it.
Exactly. If you want that access, go over to Slicehost (also owned by Rackspace), get a 1024 slice, and you now have full root access to everything.

I've been running several WP blogs on it for a while with no problems.

I do agree that Wordpress isn't the best platform any more. It's too big, and with over 100k lines of code, it's tough to keep it as secure as it needs to be.

Also this guy doubts the WP-Supercache plugin as the vector, but wasn't that the vector for the Techcrunch hacks?
The Ideal Computer Converges on Invisible
At one of my jobs, I worked in a small office with four desks. Two of the walls were glass, looking towards two interior walkways - one was a hallway with a mirrored office across the way, the other was a main thoroughfare with the break area across the way.

It was a fairly open office, so there was /some/ natural light. Not much, but some. The office used pretty bright/natural-looking lighting anyway - it wasn't flickery, dim, or harsh. We hardly got distracted, because we covered almost every inch of the glass with whiteboard marker diagrams, notes, et cetera. One of my officemates used the window behind him as his todo list.

It was by far the best office situation I've been in in the past five years.
Cool science toys | science toys
Incredible Science toys and experiments.Fun and educational products and kits that make you say WOW! Incredible science fun
No because this time next Tuesday the Chinese will be pumping out OpenIpads with all open source software, USB, cameras etc.

This iPad will be regarded as quaint in a few years anyway.
> The same thing could happen with Theora if someone claimed to hold a patent covering it, and you'd be equally screwed.

This is key. Theora is just as likely to be a patent target as h.264. You really can't do a competitive video codec right now without stepping on somebody's patent.
I, virus: Why you're only half human
Google do use Theora: it’s baked into Chrome by default.
Please, go read the Trademark applications. Apple's is very broad while not including a use as retail sales platform while Fujitsu's is very, very specific to include only a use as a retail sales platform. There isn't an overlap in actual use no matter how much the devices may look/act alike.

In the Beatles case, Apple wanted to change the name to have a much broader TM to include music use cases. At that point the trademarks came into obvious conflict. It's not about domains, it's about uses. You pay for each category of use. When you look at how those categories are broken down it becomes obvious why it's set up that way.
Phone Curbs Don’t Cut Crashes
Microsoft weren’t on that list when XP came out, so it’s hardly 2% of users.
So my question is, what video codec should we be using? Is there a codec of sufficient quality that is completely open and free?
one purpose is webtracking, especially in the affiliatemarketing niche, which "suffers" from cookie deletion because the cookiebased-tracking then does not recognize visitors and thus affiliates don't get paid... fingerprint methods are another alternative, although less precise and more difficult to implement.
That's a really good suggestion, definitely one for the interview process. Thank you.
Camps around Delhi, Adventure Camps In India, Corporate Training Camps
Camps around Delhi, Adventure Camps In India, Corporate Training Camps
Installing MacPorts is trivial.
Oracle's Java Strategy [pdf]
That patent protection theory is wrong since Theora is "already covered by an existing patent, which is licensed out by the holder".

One of the avenues Apple was exploring in order to discount Theora was checking whether the Theora patent licence applied to independent implementations or just the xiph version.

Google made that point moot by buying the original patent owner.
I Love Walled Gardens
Yes, I got somewhat emotional(?) too. It was a birthplace of so many great ideas-- Java being the least of them. I personally feel "The network is the computer" was one of the most important ideas of the last century (the other being "a computer on every desk"), and one that Google and others are capitalizing on today.

It's really sad to see such a company dissolve away.
Theora. Whether it’s of ‘sufficient’ quality is debatable, but for normal YouTube style videos it’s fine. For higher definition videos there’s Dirac, but that’s not really field tested yet.
Is there a reason Mozilla cannot work this way?
There is a huge misconception about cost-plus contracting. It's actually the least expensive way to develop new technology, that's almost exclusively where it's used, and it's designed as a risk mitigation factor. In essence, if a company had to bid to develop some new technology, it's essentially impossible to estimate, so they would have to inflate their numbers pretty drastically to ensure they could cover their costs. In other words, to mitigate the risk of overruns, the company would inflate their price to way more than it should cost, since they are uncertain about realistic time-frames.

To mitigate this, the government will pay a company their actual cost plus a reasonable profit. This transfers the risk to the government, reducing their overall cost. To prevent abuses, the government must approve all costs, so they will place an engineering team with the contractor to perform this task. Contrary to popular belief, this system makes a great deal of sense as it relates to bidding risk, and is actually quite difficult to abuse.
French correct British scientists: G spot does exist
NY investigates Staples, Orbitz, and 20 other firms in marketing "scam"
I don't understand it. I only know companies that started small and eventually bought their suppliers. For example I read about Matsushita who started with bicycle lights and eventually bought the battery manufacturer.

How does this even apply to Google? They didn't own the internet infrastructure (still don't).

Apple is hardly a newcomer, and only now have they bought a chip manufacturer.
That's the second time in this thread you've implied that only Mozilla is affected by H.264 patent fees.

Apple and Google have already tried to get MPEG-LA to freely licence a lower quality subset of H.264 to break this impasse. The individual patent holders of that subset weren't impressed by this suggested compromise and even if they were it would still be a bait and switch technique that leaves open source products as second class citizens.

One more thing, you call it an open standard elsewhere. If a standard is described as "open" then that traditionally means no patent fees. H.264 is a standard, but it is not generally held to be an "open standard": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard
The author admits to having little math ability and makes cryptographic recommendations anyway? Cryptography is math. If you don't know math, you don't know cryptography.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/28/private-sales-site-beyo...
clickable link
The article is taking one of two stances, but never formally (or clearly) states which. Either it's arguing that Windows is irrelevant because there is comparable software for no cost, or that the continued existence of Windows as an OS is pointless.

I'll freely admit that I host all my websites on a Linux machine. As a web server Linux is just better for PHP & Ruby. My development is on a Dell Studio 1555 with Windows 7, since I cannot afford the Mac price tag (I even got this one on a $150 off sale!).

But I still don't see why a $20 billion market is "irrelevant".

Now, that $20 billion is partly due to the fact of all the pent up demand for a working version of Vista. Remember that when ME flopped XP sold quite well... so it's not irrational to assume that W7 has prospered thanks to the failure of Vista.
I love django-evolution, I'm using it on AppRabbit.com to regenerate dynamic models and it's been a lifesaver. The only hitches I've found (granted the relationships between my models are fairly restrictive) are related to adding null=False fields and such. But really, it handles most things seamlessly.
So why doesn't Google, a significant stakeholder of H.264 with both YouTube (don't want to reencode) and Android (H.264 is better on battery life due to hardware considerations), just sponsor Firefox's H.264 license?
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Thanks to everyone for reading. As @nedwin says below, the quality and quantity of the responses here demonstrate the quality of this community.