skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Also had a class on probability which was the first time I've had probability taken past the basic stuff you learn in general maths. Didn't get it well at first so it got next to none of my attention, didn't end up doing the homeworks which contributed to the end mark, crammed for it but still just failed. Hoping I find it more interesting this year."

Speaking from experience, probability and statistics will come up again in your life, and it is worth your time to learn them well. The answer to every practical question is "maybe," with varying degrees of certainty. You can't address these questions analytically without invoking probability and/or statistics.

I didn't take my statistics courses that seriously when I first took them, and have been making up for it ever since.
Is this the same concept as the 'Implicit Web'? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_Web
Why did that ruin it for you? Things need not be pointless in order to be fun...
Unlimited free political speech should not be a problem, whichever way you approach it.
We're not talking about people calling your Google Voice number, we're talking about people calling your mobile number. The carrier needs to know where to send your call.
Even if the claim wasn't bogus, we have yet another example of a supposedly objective scientist/official personally benefiting from pushing AGW.

And yet, most of what we hear is that the "deniers" are in it for the money because some of them used to work for the petroleum industry.
try http://pickfu.com/, it's what we've used before
Suggesting that OGG is in any way more expensive is utterly ridiculous. Youtube currently streams video in H264 at some given bitrate, using a Flash player. They could easily stream the same video in Theora at the exact same bitrate and thus use no additional bandwidth. They'd need new storage to keep the ogg versions alongside the H264, but the idea that they would be unwilling to do so seems ridiculous to me, given that they already store up to 3 versions of many videos (360p, 480p, 720p).

You're also completely discounting the cost of H264 licensing right now (estimated by some to be over 5 million dollars a year), and the cost of future licensing once the current license terms expire. You're also discounting the cost that Google pushes off to the rest of the market - like the money other manufacturers of software and hardware pay to support H264. Adobe has to pay for the H264 license Flash uses, and without that license, Youtube wouldn't be able to use H264.

Now, one could argue that since Theora isn't completely equivalent to H264 quality-wise, that Youtube wouldn't be able to provide video at the same bitrates. That's ridiculous. The typical Youtube viewer doesn't even know what a bitrate is and is unlikely to be able to identify encoding artifacts.

One should also consider that Google could easily pay a small team to work on improvements to the Theora encoder for a year or two, like they're doing on Unladen Swallow. The results would pay off on a fairly regular basis, allowing Google to re-encode their Theora videos for improvements in quality and bitrate efficiency. I have no doubt that with a sustained investment of resources, Theora could be highly competitive with H264 - if not superior - for Youtube's uses. Even if they were to dedicate 10 engineers for an entire year to working on Theora, the total costs there would not approach the cost of licensing H264.
that is phones, not smartphones. And the smartphone that can easily be used for creative purposes past taking shaky videos has yet to be invented. If I want to get work done - writing, coding, drawing, planning - smartphones aren't helping.
That's an absurd suggestion. Mozilla can't just "pretend" that patents and licensing fees don't exist. FFMPEG gets away with it because they're not a commercial entity. Do you really think Google would have willfully paid to license H264 if they could 'just use ffmpeg' instead?
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Let users of Google Analytics know YOU went to their site, reverse privacy of sorts.
Flagged--not enough content here.
YouTube Inks First Live Sports Broadcast Deal
Maybe he can also comment on masking ads as user generated content:

http://twitpic.com/z6m8b
Right now, nothing. That's not why this is important.

Think about the consequences of this for just one moment. How much support and developer time is Firefox going to lose if it can't play videos if/when YouTube switches over fully and doesn't use Flash? How much support and developer time is Linux going to lose if there are no browsers for it that can play internet videos, if H.264 becomes the de-facto standard (note that only Chrome works, not Chromium)? If you don't care about that at all, and are happy using IE (or Chrome, these days) on Windows for ever, then by all means move along, there is nothing for you to see here. The rest of us care.
If one of Microsoft's video codecs like VC-1 offered even better power efficiency and technical superiority, and "looked better" than h264 (whatever THAT means), would you still be a fan of using the "best available" proprietary codec? Would you be in favor of Google and other companies paying Microsoft license fees to use the codec? Or would you be arguing for the use of the "inferior" h264?
The Vorbis audio codec is well worth using: slightly better compression/quality than AAC, and natively VBR. It's widely used in commercial video games. Unfortunately for consumer use, the native container formats are awful, the decoder is computationally expensive, and it can't do CBR.

On the other hand the Theora video codec has nothing going for it technically: it's worse than any of its competitors across the board. It was written for the commercial market, but was abandoned after no customers ever bought licenses. There are no independent implementations: there's only a transliteration of the decoder to Java, and a fork of the encoder to not suck quite as pointlessly within the bounds of the spec.

Theora's few proponents are pushing it for purely ideological reasons. Has that ever worked?
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Firefox cannot ship with H.264 licenses, regardless of whether they can afford the cost or not. The GPL is incompatible with that idea.

As a side note, I'm not sure why you want H.264 to become the de-facto standard, given that it would require you to pay licensing fees just to host your own videos.
I'd love to be able to pay for a commercial-free feed, but that's a bigger step than you may realize. The network affiliates will scream bloody murder, for one thing. The set of viewers paying for the commercial-free feeds will be almost identical with the set of viewers the advertisers want to reach the most.
Hows many PC models does Apple/Dell/ASUS/HP have? I don't see why there should be any difference between PCs and Mobiles.
> raise the top marginal tax rate to 91%.

You forgot "include enough loopholes so employees are the only folks who pay that rate".

Basically, the 91% rate is what kept second tier actors like Ronald Reagan working. When folks got to the point where their marginal rate was too high, they turned down work.
But the scientists are faced with a conundrum, here. When they do proper science, "Evolution is a theory", they get attacked for it by bombastic blowhards - "It's just a THEORY!". So they've been forced into adopting some marketing principles simply to get their voices heard.

Meanwhile, it seems that everybody's lost their mind about the whole purity factor. If you give them, say, a 50% chance of being right, when "right" means trillions of dollars of damage, common sense says we should be doing something. Yet we're spending all our time arguing over whether they have a 100% chance of being right or not. That's because the people on the other side of the argument are not arguing in good faith - many of them have a direct financial or ideological stake in the matter and science is the furthest thing from their minds.
Don't be lazy, click through and read his post.. "Summer 2010 will be our 5th anniversary, and since we fund startups twice a year it will be the 11th group of startups we've funded. We've funded 171 companies so far..." Average of 17.1.. it is a bit higher in the recent rounds due to more qualified applicants and a larger pool of available investment funds.
I'm sure they would gladly accept your patch for this!
Especially from corporations with billions of dollars to burn on it and a clear profit incentive. I mean, who do we think should run government, the people? We the people? Pssh.
But you can say this to anything open, "why not .doc support?" for example, there are benefits other than bitrates to open standards. Think video editing and re-mixing/quoting for academic and news purposes (fair use/fair dealing). Think of the open source voice recognition to subtitling that proprietary audio codecs, over vorbis, would prevent (vorbis actually saves you bandwidth vs a lot of the other audio codecs because it is better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis#Quality:_Codec_compariso...). Think of browser, service and device innovators who will be locked out of competition by the big guys. I thought this was a forum for hackers, dreamers and entrepreneurs, not for videophiles making rather picky distinctions (I really don't see what the big deal is, if you look at the ogg comparison page posted elsewhere on the thread there isn't much difference and it's clear this is mainly about Apple protecting their iTouch/iPhone/Quicktime/iMovie/Finalcut video stack from those who would disrupt the market with Google and MS along with Apple for the ride).
If it was already shipping on 97% of computers and had widespread hardware acceleration support in mobile devices, sure why not? I have no allegiance to h264.
You're completely ignoring the licensing part of the problem. Google can use any library they want to decode H264 because they paid for a license. The problem is not the library, it is the license.
You're absolutely right. Your two word snark has really added value to this discussion by clarifying that there is really no reason we should believe that these two things might have anything to do with each other whatsoever. I mean, variables routinely fly up and down by over 100% for no reason.

As xkcd had it: "Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'."
I have been using chrome.jit for a while with conkeror, which leans on the Javascript engine quite hard. It makes it noticeably faster. Not a little faster, but "holy shit, that was fast" faster. Back when JIT was first shipped in a release build, I enabled it on my eeepc, but not my more-powerful 64-bit desktop (since there was no JIT for x86_64 at that time). The interface was much faster on the eee than on my desktop. (Pages loaded slower, of course, because Javascript was not the bottleneck. But the UI was much faster.)

Anyway, this is great news. Who ever thought back in 1995 that their glorified blink-tag-scripting-language would be compiled to native code? :)
The situation sucks if you want to buy a PC that is not Apple these days. There are some good alternatives, but they are impossible to identify among the zillions of crappy offers. Even PC makers that offer good PCs make it impossible to select them (for example Samsung used to be good - I don't even know anymore, they've got like 100 models, presumably some are good and some are bad...).

Apple has been making inroads into the PC market, so the old model of fooling the customer doesn't really work anymore. Why do they all stick to the outdated model, and why would they also try the same thing with mobile phones?
Until W7, Microsoft didn't ship a decoder for H.264. Neither Microsoft nor Apple ship support for MPEG2 (you have to pay extra), and nobody supports Xvid.

Yet Microsoft's Windows Media Player 'just uses ffmpeg' to play these formats when you have one of the many DirectShow packages installed, and has since the beginning. Apple's Quicktime does the same when you have Perian installed. Opera uses GStreamer for <video>, and does the same when you have gst-ffmpeg installed.

Google is mostly paying for H.264 decoder licenses because they were already going to have to pay broadcaster-level encoder licenses.
I can't do it just for the sake of dancing anymore. I know what I would really be doing, and I resent playing the game.
For years I've heard this, and I think I've reached the limit of my credulity with the line of reasoning that goes something like this: "X has billions of dollars! Billions of dollars! They will control politics as we know it!"

Lots of entities have billions of dollars. People who sell peanut butter have billions of dollars. Billions of dollars spent every day trying to get me to do something or another -- buy soap, change deodorants, purchase a new car, go to the mall. Very little of it has any impact. We're a society that is extremely used to outsiders using all sorts of clever tactics to try to get us to do things.

So unless these corporations have "special" billions of dollars that somehow magically control my mind, they are welcome to bring their message to the political discussion. In fact, everybody who wants to speak are welcome. Bring them on. All I require is that you disclose to me who you are and what you're trying to sell. Welcome to the party.

Not trying to pick a fight. I actually held the opposite view and have been slowly changing my mind over the last ten years or so.
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This article has no real substance and just contains amazon affiliate links to just about every book mentioned in Coders at Work.
Ernest38@myspace.com
I think Scala has the potential to appeal to the widest range of programmers. There is something for everyone there, but without alienating any one demographic. (You can write a completely OO app, or you can write a completely "functional" app, or you can mix-n-match. And it does better than other languages that claim you can do both.)

Although I will probably stick with Perl and Haskell for myself, I'm looking forward to a world where Scala and F# are the "enterprise" languages.
YouTube will need to keep its h264 files for Flash (and mobile devices), so Ogg would require petabytes of new storage space. Real money. According to YouTube's engineers to get comparable quality video with Ogg the file size will have to increase. Real money.

If it would be cheaper there would be no reason not to do it. Google built support for Ogg into Chrome, so they aren't scared of the format. They aren't doing it so I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it's not cheaper.
Yeah, most of my consulting is really low-quantity in the hours arena, as it's not my main income stream. Anything more than a week f/t I'm really careful with.

I meant more viable from a legal standpoint I think.
I'm eager to get stuck into a Scala/Lift application, have a few ideas, the enormous amount of positive press I see intrigues me as one currently firmly (and admittedly pretty happily) entrenched in the Groovy/Grails camp.
Somehow I missted that point in history when Open Source, from just an idiom and good philosophy for programmers, turned into big and dirty politics. This is all very disappointing.
The correct answer is that there is no set number. They seem to try to interview as many applicants as they can in three days and then pick the ones that work from that batch. Since PG believes that they are getting better at picking startups that will not die, my bet is that number will grow every year.

Another thought: I seriously doubt that the number of startups funded has anything to do with available capital, but rather the logistics of each startup being able to work directly with Paul.
Anyone have an idea on how this could be made minimally useful? (save image of scratchings to thumbdrive or sd card).
Right. Demand Media has a distributed, virtualized workforce of freelancers. (Read the Wired article on it. That is some of their best reporting. Ever.) Mahalo used to have in-house editors before they moved to mostly outsourced "editors" before they realized editors cost a lot of money and firing them didn't decrease revenues in the slightest. At the moment their editorial staff is a thin pretense maintained to keep the site from getting bounced out of the index.

Disclaimer: As with most other massive content plays which have large audiences of unsophisticated Internet users, I indirectly subsidize Mahalo through AdSense expenditures. To the tune of probably over a hundred bucks last year, but I don't have my numbers in front of me. Like I mentioned in my blog post earlier today, they send great traffic (i.e. it is cheap and converts well) because my ads are the content on their pages.

That is disquieting to me in some ways. I could ban them and start chopping off heads from the Demand Media hydra in my AdSense account, but that would consume vast amounts of my time and just cost me money.
I'm already doing this by simply buying the content I'm interested in watching through iTunes. At the rates I consume television, it's a very competitive strategy compared to paying for satellite or cable.
I can't imagine how the YC partners have time to make this happen, but then again, I'm not sure how they fulfill their current responsibilities.
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I think the actual specs of this thing weren't ever going to live up to their expectations of the geek crowd, so maybe its better to go all out anyway. Personally I think this form factor could be a massive hit for a sort of casual and everyday computing, but I think if it does live up to the hype its going to take a long time.
That's not true at all: the patent coverage has no practical effect.

Chromium supports all the codecs your local ffmpeg install supports, if you put symlinks to the libraries in /usr/lib/chromium-browser/. Everyone installs it this way, and it actually supports way more codecs than the official Chrome (Google didn't buy licenses for MPEG2, Xvid, etc.).
Closing the Frontier
In other words, a CEO of a corporation says his next big product will be very important. Now that's amazing news!
This is politics. Politics has no common sense, it acts in favour of small group of people whose intenations we can hardly recognize.
Wasn't there a chapter in Freakonomics about how, contrary to the popular perception, the amount of money spent on a candidate's campaign has very little impact on the outcome of the election?
He could add my implementation at http://canvaspaint.org -- just a few bugfixes and style changes to do :)
Practically, you'd just need licensing for decoding if Mozilla wanted to distribute the binary themselves.

Even they weren't shitheaded enough to remove their GIF decoder when the encoder was revealed to be patent-encumbered.
Well, here's the deal - corporations are obligated, by statute, to protect profits at the expense of all else, including moral behavior or the good of the country.

And that's fine. I'm not some dreadlocked hippie who wants to burn the corporations to the ground as I'm consuming things that are produced by them. I recognize their value. That's great.

They are not, however, good citizens. They're obligated, by statute, to be bad citizens if that's more profitable to them.

If someone I disagree with wants to influence the process based on a set of principled beliefs, well fine, I'll fight them to the extent I can but I'll certainly respect them. However, corporations aren't people - if they were people, they'd be psychotic, amoral people who only lived to sell peanut butter or whatever. They don't deserve to have more of a say in the process than I do.
Also check out the (now free) Problems on Algorithms: http://www.eng.unt.edu/ian/books/free/license.html
Thanks for that titbit -- I have to disagree that "everyone installs it this way", because I certainly hadn't! (I installed on Ubuntu from the chromium-daily launchpad ppa). That fix makes me feel a bit better, but it's still a nasty blow against the idea of open and free formats.

Edit: I must be doing something wrong, because I can't get it to work. This might be a distro/version/phase of moon-specific fix?
For the sake of preservation of the market itself. If my only option is to make my app free just because others have discounted their work beyond reason, I may opt to no longer deliver any new products to such a market (give up on it), and pursue other markets instead. This benefits neither the developers nor the consumers.
I second that, I had him in '05 and specifically waited to take the class with him as the teacher. Was well worth it, he brings a sense of humor and style to teaching that turned an otherwise difficult class into an absolute joy.
What do you mean by not Chromium ? I'm using chromium 4.0.249.64 right now on Archlinux x64 and can watch Youtube videos using html5.
In fact this demo works on my setup : http://html5demos.com/video-canvas so that's theora & h264
Pretty cool.. I did mostly play snake thought.
Wheres the Clojure love? :)
I have had it stumble a few times. I usually just log out and log back in. Only once has it lost any information from a previous session.

I'll admit there is a chance I've been lucky but I still think it's a great system.
I predicted that my comment would be taken pejoratively, but I didn't correct for it. All I wanted to know is, had C-- been looked at? Thanks for putting it into perspective.
Except that in that case GIF was a mediocre established format, and PNG was a terrific new one. The GIF decoder was never encumbered, just the encoder.

In this case Theora is both mediocre and unestablished, which is not a winning combination.
I'd deploy this more if the copy weren't aimed solely at Australians; which it shouldn't be as globalisation means if you're not an Australian, Australia is just a test-case for wherever you happen to be.
You can't modify and distribute it. The GPL doesn't affect you if you just run the program. (Section 9 of GPLv3 says this explicitly and several sections of GPLv2 imply it)
The connection between Mozilla not supporting ActiveX and the rise of Apple, iPhone, phone browsers, and ChromeOS is tenuous at best.
scala and clojure, it seems clojure is simple and more adapted to concurrent world.

scala is complicated, but it got better IDE support than clojure at this time. Some of clojure's community seems prefer Emacs/Vim more than Netbeans/Eclipse, and they really need a good support from netbeans/eclipse.

it all depends on your personal style.
please port lynx :)
I haven't seen a substantiated claim that shows that Ogg is bigger than H.264. I've see Chris DiBona claim it on WHATWG, but not back it up with numbers or experimentation. In fact, I posted a link above to someone who refutes that assertion:

http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html

That comparison, of course, is six months old and things change rapidly in a short span of time.
Yeah, install the erroneously-named [1] chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-nonfree

[1] Ubuntu's default ffmpeg package has all the decoders turned on without being 'nonfree'.
I don't know how much to trust them but I use http://who.is because it's memorable.
Well, I'm sure you could put together a graph that supported that point, but every single full-time politician who gets elected to a living seems to disagree with them, based on the amount of time they spend fundraising.

The health insurance industry spent 750 million dollars this year lobbying against healthcare reform. That pretty much guaranteed that the bill we wound up with would be a piece of garbage.