skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yep, you nailed what I meant but didn't spend enough time writing. I just get this feeling that, given the number of companies involved, the patent situation is a known quantity for MPEG-LA, whereas the situation around Theora hasn't been as well researched. Unless someone with a massive amount of lawyers starts the ball rolling, I really don't see hardware people building accelerators into chipsets for Theora like they have done for h.264.
Personal Relationship Manager
Legal resources for entrepreneurs
Yeah but this is an article about American colleges, and Americans don't read 'college' as 'community college'. College = undergrad. If people from outside the US don't understand this, then here is a chance to learn the vernacular.
Unit Test in Python
Yet FIRE has determined that 71 percent of the 375 top colleges still have policies that severely restrict speech. And the problem isn’t limited to campuses that are constitutionally bound to respect free expression. The overwhelming majority of universities, public and private, promise incoming students and professors academic freedom and free speech. When such schools turn around and attempt to limit those students’ and instructors’ speech, they reveal themselves as hypocrites, susceptible not only to rightful public ridicule but also to lawsuits based on their violations of contractual promises.
Committing Location Based Service Suicide
I used to believe that too. Until I saw all my Orkut friends switch to Facebook in a jiffy...
Not sure I agree. Conservative talk radio has long been gaining momentum even when the situation was reversed (ie Republican House, Senate and White House). Air America was never able to find a viable audience.

I suspect it's more because conservative views have long been an underserviced market (whereas much of the mainstream media tilts left - and quite openly so as per pew poll performed annually if I recall: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1919999).
Levitra Maker Says SCC Are Wrong
http://jguru.com/guru/viewbio.jsp?EID=1531264
Levitra
This article is worthless. There are no technical details at all, and the FUD is mostly wrong.

The idea of Hyperthreading is to keep the processor utilized at all times. Modern processors have many different components for each core, and not every thread of execution uses all the components. Enabling Hyperthreading lets the OS supply the processor with more work, potentially reducing the amount of the processor that's unused at any time.

The article is right about reducing performance. If you have an 8 core machine, and you have one app that only runs on one core (hello, kcrypd...), it will run slower than "normal" when you have 7 other jobs using the CPU. But, if you have a job that scales linearly across cores, then you will almost always see a speed increase. (I tested this on my machine with a "make" on the Linux kernel. The CPU time used by the whole build is the same when you run with -j1 to -j4. The wall-clock time decreases linearly. When you start adding "hyper" threads, you see the wall-clock time decrease more slowly, but the CPU time increase. This, I think, is what scares people. The processor becomes slower as you add threads beyond the number of actual cores, but its overall throughput increases.

I can't think of any workloads where this is a bad thing. I don't know of any server workload that leans heavily on one thread. (Databases, maybe.) On a workstation, you are only going to "starve" normal processes when you are intentionally doing something intensive, like encoding video. For normal workloads, you will never use even the 4 real cores completely.

(As I type this post, the only things that could possibly want to run are kcryptd, my music player, the X server, and the web browser. Hyperthreading is enabled, but there is no way I can possibly get the processor into the state where it starts slowing down. But when I run "make -j8", I really enjoy the speed benefit at the expense of making firefox 3% slower.)

Anyway, Google around for various benchmarks showing the results of Hyperthreading enabled and disabled, and I think you'll want to enable it. I did my own, and I'm glad I did -- it even makes my eeepc slightly faster!
The cost of living and working in an RV full-time
Why go with just wireless? It could just as easily be hooked up to 3G and Edge to access eBay.
Stop, or the Universe might implode! (Ohhh, that's why it's called that.)

It's the ultimate pyramid scheme. Like which, it could do worse than deceive and slaughter, it could fizzle.
Yeah, and in a related note, FOX News _REALLY_ took off during the Bush years.
http://jguru.com/guru/viewbio.jsp?EID=1531264
Levitra Maker Says SCC Are Wrong
Indeed. I have a geek friend that runs his popular blog from a server in his closet. He lives in a very high-end luxury apartment... but when you walk in, all you notice is how loud that damn server is. (I guess some people are not bothered by noise. Lucky them.)

Anyway, if you need a loud server, you can afford a virtual server or a colo. Otherwise, just get a nice quiet HTPC or something, and put it under the couch. Nobody will ever know...
I would begin with a constitutional amendment redefining a corporation such that it does not have personhood (as was given in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad). It is that personhood which provides the basis of a corporation's 'free speech' argument.

That personhood obscures the fact that a corporation, as a profitable entity, has access to far greater resources than almost any single person, and does not suffer the same consequences of their actions as a single person. For example, if a person kills, the person is tried for murder and punished according to the nature of the crime; if a corporation kills, they are at best assigned a monetary fine which is often hardly a drop in the bucket and subject to a lengthy court process.
Makes me wonder who userx was in that article.
The question becomes how does one associate the new auction with their account?
Smith is looking at the socio-economic health of the nation in aggregate. His overall project with The Wealth of Nations is to try and redefine what people thought of as 'wealth.'

Part of his book is a sustained critique of the mercantilist view of national wealth, which thought that increasing the stock of money (in this case, gold & silver bullion) was the measure of increasing national wealth. Wealthy nations had a positive balance of trade and increasing stores of wealth, according to mercantilists.

Smith wants to get away from the idea that money = wealth. In his view, increasing production and increasing wages are the signs of national wealth. So, state intervention into production and trade with the object of increasing the stock of bullion controlled by the state is actually counterproductive in terms of increasing national wealth, according to Smith.

In Smith's view, the state should have a mostly laissez-faire role. Setting high tariffs on imports and intervening in the market actually decrease national productivity and hurt wage levels. By decreasing competition they also allow for profit levels to rise. For both Smith (and David Ricardo later) the key effect of competition was to kill profit margins, whereas competition to increase production would raise wage levels by making the labor market competitive.

I think the linked article and Smith's ideas are both taken from a macro perspective, viewing the economy as a whole. From the national point of view, low profits and high wages and low prices are a good thing. For the individual firm, the opposite is the best: low wages, high profits, high price points.

Smith notes this contradiction between the individual capitalist businessman and the overall capitalist economy later in the same section I quoted above:

"Their superiority over the country gentleman is, not so much in their knowledge of the public interest, as in their having a better knowledge of their own interest than he has of his. It is by this superior knowledge of their own interest that they have frequently imposed upon his generosity, and persuaded him to give up both his own interest and that of the public, from a very simple but honest conviction, that their interest, and not his, was the interest of the public. The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always in the interest of the dealers...

"The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order or men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."
Pardon my ignorance, but how big of a deal is this? It seems pretty much anyone can make something a "well-known port". My quick check found at least 5 more (non-Dropbox) ports added today.

In any case, I'm sure this can only be good for Dropbox and its users. Congrats to the team!
Drupal, jQuery, Chrome
Absolutely. Projects fail all the time, outsourcing makes projects harder by requiring people to pick up a phone, so you would expect outsourced projects to fail at a spectacular rate.

From his list...

Buyer’s unclear expectations up front - This happens on every single project due to a lack of crystal balls.

Poor governance - I was talking to a guy from a Big 3 US car maker today who was griping about this very topic related to their US ops.

Poor communication - This is in every project failure report I read, US/UK or anywhere in the world.

Poor cultural fit - Have seen this on contracts between large and small companies, although it's usually not that much of a big deal.

Interests become misaligned over time - Apple/Google is a good example of this. Google/Mozilla will be soon. Plenty of All-American examples here.

Not mutually beneficial - Don't think this is just an outsourcing complaint either.
I work on detecting and exploiting interesting patterns in data.
This isn't describing "post-functional", it's just plain old "multiparadigm". Multiparadigm languages generally have a "base" language type that is at least slightly preferred or possibly what everything else compiles down to, with the tradeoff that anything you can't get without being "pure" in some paradigm won't be available to you. In practice this is often a good choice.

Lisp, Python, C++, Perl, it's a pretty well-populated space and nothing in that article leads me to believe that there's any particular innovation in the paradigm arena there. That is not to say the language itself is good or bad, just that this article is based on a really weird premise.
The fact that Amazon has a stranglehold on distribution of dead-tree versions of books is precisely why publishers hate Amazon. As the buzz in the book biz around Apple's "agency" model for ebook distribution is starting to show, publishers would love nothing more than for Apple to scare Amazon. This lame SDK announcement and the recent change in the cut that Amazon will demand shows you just how scared Amazon really is.
RapidShare: 1-CLICK Web hosting - Easy Filehosting
Python boolean coercion gotchas
This is what happens when we cede terrain to these idealistic and demented pressure groups, such as the feminists and the racialists.
Very few companies grasp the idea of intellectual capital. There is an amazing amount of value in a developer that knows a codebase backwards and forwards. Hard to monetize that though.
Google is not going to de-censor search results in China. China doesn't back down from the private sector and Google knows that the sheer volume of people in China will result in positive cash flow regardless of the results censorships. They have no financial motivation to face up to the empire and as buzz dies down they'll have little political/social threat either.
@spydez thanks for pointing out that my site was hacked. any idea how i remove it? (i'm just a musician, not a webdev)
I'm wondering the same thing too - how did they build this ?

ZFS (after pool ver. 21 I suppose) has deduplication - are they building on something similar ?
It's just a side project (mainly to become familiar with the Rails dev environment and tools).
Maybe it has its own account.
Why you should use OpenGL and not DirectX
Not from French. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca)

I can't say much about French. I do know that German is alive and kicking.
That's why you're not supposed to use spinlocks in userspace. At least you should spin for a short time and then block.
While I'm not entirely convinced by the 'PDI Theory', I find it very persuasive.

That said, the article's thesis presentation of the state-of-the-industry with respect to outsourcing is very, very well and accurately described. I have seen precisely that sequence of events and communications.
I think that "I teach computers how to learn" is more indicative of the chicken or the egg nature of the problem.
Congrats enki!
So it's more than just a number on a web site... it's the ability to influence other numbers on that web site!
There is a beta version of uTorrent for Mac OS X, but it does not have a preference option to uncheck. It simply has "Check for Updates" -- no mention of "detailed information" or the ability to disable it.
The principle of setting expectations low or not setting them at all (officially) can apply to startups as well as large corporations. Startups that fail often try to please too many people (web developer opens biz to build more websites and applications only to realize that different markets need different expertise, only to let people down, etc.).
Certainly an interesting discussion of some algorithms here, however...

"In fact the number of checks grows quadratically with the length of your list"

No, no this is not necessarily true at all? If you are talking about an interview-style question where we are discussing a linked list in memory not some giant implicit list of integers, then it is very easy to beat O(n^2). If the list size is known, it's very easy to construct a hash table or hash set where collisions are extremely low and O(1) lookups are expected, giving an O(n) algorithm. A binary search tree would give O(n log n)
A long delayed WebGLU update, some 360 degree video
That would only be true if karma doesn't effect the visibility of your comment compared to the opposition.

It's an issue of freedom of speech, and unfortunately, isn't just another "number".
Isn't that only true for micro-benchmarking, though? Tiny little programs that fit in cache? I was under the impression that HT could provide great gains with a tiny executable (the bit of code being used, anyway) but with larger chunks of code that didn't fit in cache it was mostly useless.

I certainly know that in my own testing running ruby servers on both i7 and i5 iMacs that I see nothing close to a 50% speedup. More like 5-10%, max.
[I work at flickr and gave the presentation linked to above]

You don't need to test every permutation. Pretty much all of the flags in the codebase are independent of each other - someone might be working on changes to our admin interface in some files while someone else is changing the way comments are displayed elsewhere. There's no overlap in the changes.

If the flags do interact with each other then in most cases the features will launch one after another, so you only need to test a handful of states (foo off bar off, foo on bar off, foo on bar on)

If the flags interact with each other and the features will be launching at the same time (or the betas overlap) then you have to do the same amount of integration testing that you'd have to do with landing several branches into trunk at once. This is complex, we don't do it very often.

And we clean up flags once they're not needed any more, which minimizes the possible combinations.

I was skeptical about this before I started working at flickr, now I can't imagine working any other way.
Intel App Store for Atom-based Netbooks
the new site is nice-ish, but without question the prior site is superior...vastly so. why make such a huge divergence from the prior design? its a step backwards - I hate to say it. The new site is a tv station...that's not progress.

However, I do see how - like a tv station - they may be looking at this from an ad persepctive...
Math.NET Numerics: http://numerics.mathdotnet.com/

Merging of the two largest open-source .NET math libraries...should be an excellent library when it's complete.
Ignore everybody
I'm guessing not at the moment. But, if you are intrepid you could fire up Wireshark and start dropping/sharing/deleting files and see what happens. This actually sounds like fun, however I am otherwise indisposed right now.
True, but as a marketable name bluebream leaves a lot to be desired...it doesn't roll off the tongue very well.

And what was with the weird YouTube video with the wedding song ?

A name change is a good idea - there was too much confusion between Zope 3 and Zope 2 - but they should have spent a little more time on thinking up the new name.
On reversing/anti-reversing techniques and running security competitions
I've worked at a face recognition startup for 5 years now. I've already solved this guy's problem. You have the correct answer. My response is slightly modified in that I open with "I work at a software startup... we do face recognition". And if they ask how it works, I say "We don't teach computers how to recognize faces, we teach computers how to learn how to recognize faces" and most people tend to light up (and/or have their mind blown).

If you mention "startup", "face recognition", and "teaching computers how to learn", virtually everyone has something they want to talk about.
This is called "code switching" and is just something that happens (with all people, but particularly children) in multilingual environments. A former teacher of mine was writing her dissertation on it when the students she was studying went home for holidays and returned speaking only their native language.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching
I've spent more time on the site today than I have any other day in the past.

My problem before was that I would quickly scan through artist names/song titles and listen to one here or there and then move on. Now I give almost every song a chance before I go to the next. I get instant visual connection with each artist via the high-res pic, and i'm diving deeper into learning about artists with the little bios and pics that pop up during playback.

This is a win for music discovery UI's, even though it may be a loss for the social network aspects of their site.
Wow this is incredibly timely. A coworker and I listened to the sixty one non stop last summer in the office and it sort of dropped off after a few months. Today of all days we wonder what that site is up to and cry when we see the new UI. I can't understand why they made such a huge UI shift but I really can't stand the new design.
Even with no cache misses, SMT can still be a win, since it can increase instruction level parallelism - a single thread can may not have enough instructions being able to execute in parallel to completely fill the pipeline. But with SMT, multiple threads have the chance to fill all available execution units which is much more likely.

There are probably pathological cases where disabling SMT would be an improvement but I think in general, it should always improve throughput. The main question is whether using the transistors to go towards SMT would be better spent elsewhere. But already the cores on the chip take a very small percent of the die - most of it is cache. And adding SMT doesn't increase the core size very much (a couple percent IIRC), so it seems like a no brainer to me as long as the OS scheduler can do a decent job.
The first title puts the relevant information in the 6th word.

The second title promotes that to the 2nd (first to most people since they ignore RE:)
"I'd like to see Twisted take advantage of the hype around Node.js -- They're the same! Except Twisted is mature and does more. And is Python" -http://twitter.com/progrium/status/7900106071
What you need, my friend, is an Internet Online Website
1. The Katrina death toll was about 1800. So it in no way compares to the destruction in Haiti.

2. There are significant differences in the two disasters. Haiti has been destroyed while in the US only a major city was destroyed, those in the city can easily move to other cities it's much harder to leave Haiti.

3. The US military is has significant limitations on actions it can take in US and rightly so.

4. The majority of the problems with regards to Louisiana were due to complete incompetency of the state government not following it's own plans and a lot of the controversies were generated by the media merely repeating rumors.
Facebook never scrapped their entire UI and eliminated wall posts.
At my last job I went to the local university salvage yard and had a choice of half dozen fully enclosed racks with locking doors. I think we spent $30 and with a bit of elbow grease it looked like new.
Emacs' diary-mode and automatic editing of GPG-encrypted files:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AutoEncryption
You actually type searches into a text box on a webpage?

I figured someone might mention this, and probably make me sound like a Luddite in the process. :-) The short answer is that I use both. If I'm at the keyboard, I will do command-T command-K to use the search box in a new tab, but often I'm using the mouse, in which case middle-click home is more convenient.

In Chrome the address bar is a search box.

I don't use Chrome; I use Firefox. The address bar in Firefox typically goes to the first Google hit for the search terms in question, which is often what I want, but it isn't a general search.

Now you can bring on the You actually use Firefox? comment. ;-)
An excellent point. As soon as I work for/with someone who outsources to one, I'll follow up. :)
I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, I understand the case he's making in the article. But on the other hand, a private university is just that: private. If someone comes into my home or a small shop that I own and says something that I consider derogatory to my family members or employees, shouldn't I have the right to eject them? Shouldn't I have the right to fire an employee who is disrespectful to other employees? How is a private school any different?
That's silly on several levels. See my comment on how the death penalty is easily applied or more often threatened to corporations.

Plus you are forgetting that this case is about a non-profit corporation that was blocked in promoting a movie about Hillary Clinton for the 2008 election (the case is Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission). You're promoting trampling on freedom of association as well, preventing a group of like minded people combining to have a voice in the political process (note that for this ruling, unions have also been freed from that appalling 1990 decision as well as McCain-Fiengold's censorship).

Bottom line for me: the answer to speech you don't like is more speech, not outright censorship of core political speech. If the First Amendment means anything, it means the Congress can't ban core political speech.
PDFs in Pure Ruby
MYFOXNY.com: Microsoft Admits To 17 Year Old Bug In Operating System
Microsoft admits to an over a decade old security hole in the Kernel of all NT based operating systems
Yes, money is just type of incentive. You want to experiment and measure what works best, maybe even let authors choose what they want.
Try check out Cramp. http://m.onkey.org/2010/1/7/introducing-cramp.

It's built on top of EventMachine - Ruby equivalent of Twisted.
Cramp - http://m.onkey.org/2010/1/7/introducing-cramp

Ruby equivalent of Tornado?