skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From a mayoral point of view, thats the only thing that matters to him and the most important reason for choosing to use OSS.
Does anyone remember when businesses started off trying to make money? This HN-fueled "startup" mania is getting ridiculous.. just because you have an idea and built some minimal prototype thing doesn't mean you're some brave entrepreneur.
A Big-Picture Look at Google, Microsoft, Apple And Yahoo
Where do Microsoft, Google, Apple and Yahoo compete? Chart helps answer this question.
You can browse to any web app.
"Limit" is very relative - there are more on-the-metal apps available for the iPhone than any other phone, no?

And not only that, but you get probably the best mobile phone browsing experience; although I have not tried the Nexus One yet (because there's no customer support), but I am willing to eat an onion if the Nexus is better. I know the BlackBerry sucks at browsing.
> They do not have a license to use h264, and even if they did, they could not afford to share it with you. Distributing patent-encumbered GPL code violates the spirit of GPL-2 and the letter of GPL-3.

Mozilla wouldn't need to distribute h264 decoder. It should allow using 3rd party decoders, either by using system APIs (GStreamer, DirectShow etc) or exposing somekind of plugin interface.

> As they say: Patches Welcome.

Patches haven't been welcome.
Don't get me wrong, but if some people choose to live in AppleWorld, we might as well put them all on a spaceship together and send them off into space. I don't mean it in an evil way - just saying they would probably be living isolated lives, only interacting with each other. So they might as well live on another planet.

I for one wouldn't want to live in Disney Land, and not in Apple World either.
Except that's bullshit and you're attempting to paint critics of ham-fisted attempts to promote an ideology through user punishment as not valuing freedom, rather than actually explaining why the dumb move should not be called a dumb move.

Let me be clear: I welcome your rebuttal, and I will read it with an open mind. What I will not do, for you, for Mozilla, or any of the multitude in the Free Software movement and elsewhere that use this tactic is sit and wring my hands about how I'm no longer in the freedom-valuer's club or try to claw my way back into proper thought by hemming and hawing and qualifying my opinion until it is meaningless.
Apple (QT) and Microsoft (DirectShow) pay the license fees when they distribute their Operating Systems.

Nobody gives a shit about distributing the x264 source code, and only the fosstards even have a hiccup about distributing binaries, especially from hosts outside the US. Ubuntu may not ship with the gstreamer plugin, but it does prompt you to download it the first time it's asked for by an application.
From my very superficial reading of the article it would seem like the win is that you're getting huge amounts of density.

I think their argument is that a typical web-style datacenter is throwing up hundreds and hundreds of commodity servers to do some sort of distributed processing tasks (think of something like a hadoop cluster or a ton of app servers behind a load balancer).

With this setup their argument may be you're no longer in need of a giant network/switching infrastructure to do these types of compute tasks. Plus all the power/cost savings of only needing a couple boxes just to get those thousands of CPUs. I wonder what kind of RAM these things are going to have, as obviously that's pretty crucial.

But yeah, losing one of these things would cause more than a little headache of an outage. Seems like an interesting approach that's worth more thought though.
Ruby Rendering in WebKit
Webbynode Takes on Heroku with Rapid App Deployment
I actually wondered today who at Google sets their tone/vision?

I think one of the companies that relies the least on a persona for their facade in the market is Adobe.
better than flash
Ah, yeah I should have read the article. Oops.
Don't many people have multiple phones?
I appreciate you doing what I was too lazy to do.
Ask HN: Do musicians profit from RIAA lawsuits?
Whenever a music label gets $5k for sending threatening letter because somebody used bittorrent to download the latest Lady Gaga song, does Lady Gaga get blood money out of that?
True, but still ...
Actually, Zoho will pull from a web accessible CSV. I don't know if you can use their reports directly, but if so the GAE parser could add another model to capture all fields from the report and make the daily CSV available. Then the Zoho Reports would update automatically.

Add in some new reports for rankings and you have quite an App Store dashboard.
The First Tweet From Space and Other Twitter Firsts
>Why not? It might make you worth a little more as a human being, all other things kept equ

No, it wouldn't make you worth any more. To make this more concrete, are you seriously suggesting that given the choice between saving the life of someone with bad skin and saving the life of an otherwise identical person with good skin, you could cite skin quality as your justification for choosing to save the one over the other? Clearly, the dilemma in this case would be just as acute as in a case where you had a choice between saving one or other of two precisely equal people -- it would be grotesque to suggest that skin quality could act as a tie-breaker in such cases.

I suppose it might look from your perspective as if there is some kind of weird "taboo" on judging people, but really it's just that you're doing it wrong. People aren't valued according to a weighted sum of their qualities and virtues. (Of course, you can weight their qualities if you like, and you can sum the results if you want to, but the result will serve only as a measure of your callousness.)
I am an infallible bureaucrat working at the Ministry of Justice in Communications and have judged that your comment should be deleted. Let me remind you that while the system is not perfect, it is better than nothing. Never mind the fact that I've worked out a deal to go work for R. Murdoch once my stint at this shitty job is over.
Infoblox Opines on Infrastructure 2.0
I thought this might be similar to the incredible Baltie programming language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Baltik3-screenshot1.PNG

(it isn't)
What licensing fees? h264? Well I'm not entirely sure how, but lots of FOSS projects support h264, most prominently x264 and ffmpeg, and software building upon them. Just do it like they do.

... or just use system codecs.

besides I'd guess Google would be happy to have h264-supporting Firefox, and end this farce, so getting some kind of sponsorship from big G wouldn't be that improbable.
The first rule of engineering is to set realistic goals. Because this is very public, it encourages him to be conservative in his time estimates.
This does introduce some fairly fundamental changes in the API. Breaking every book ever written about your framework is fairly ballsy.

In a lot of ways it's the inevitable conclusion of Rails' trend towards named_scope'ing everything. Chaining everything ends up being pretty flexible, even when you're building up things dynamically (I'm seeing a lot of `.send('the_scope')` in my future). And the lazy-loading should be quite helpful.

And the weird side-effect is that you can now write it somewhat as SQL: User.select().from().where(), etc., which conceivably could help those new to the framework.

Really, though, I'm still surprised at the rather large change here. At least it seems we have ample time to start the transition before 3.2 (and, as one commenter mentioned, you could start building your own .where() named_scopes today to somewhat ease the transition).
But it wasn't created for this purpose. It was originally created by On2 to be sold commercially, but nobody bought it because it sucked. They dumped it as royalty-free abandonware, and some free-software partisans picked it up, changed some strings, and released it as Theora.

Nobody wanted it then, nobody wants it now. The dumping could even be seen as a brilliant strategic move to troll the hell out of the market for codecs by building a community of earnest activists yelling at everyone.
x264 is a h264 encoder implementation. Mozilla couldn't "just adopt" it, mostly because they have little use of an encoder. Its the decoder what they need.
The Internet of 2009 in numbers
Well, we have to mangle names somehow, otherwise how are you going to google things up? :-)
Over the long term, stock price factors in earnings expectations. So to assume P/E will be 80 is incorrect.

Also, Google stocks are more expensive than Apple's at a current P/E of 37.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=apple+google

But yeah, the article is really bad "financial analysis".
You're right on the former, I was under the impression that it was an economy-of-effort thing rather than an ideological thing. However, I'm not sure I agree that it would be as hard as you think. The mime types are registered here[1] and the impls are here[2]. Each media type is implemented as a state machine that could wrap ffmpeg. That's where I would start, I suspect.

EDIT:
Looks like someone's already blazing that trail[3]. They're using gstreamer, but the research they do for that will show anyone how to add a new one.

--

1) http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/b27f05c8743b/cont...

2) http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/b27f05c8743b/cont...

3) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422540
You do not remember that whole thing? Microsoft swooped in with their marketers and lobbyists and got the Mass government to change its mind. The ostensible reason was that open source software was less compatible with certain devices for blind people. So Microsoft won that particular round, and it will be interesting to see what will happen in SF.

However, MS cannot keep throwing millions of dollars at lobbyists and politicians every time a government decides to look at open source. If they keep doing it, some governments will go open source just for a slice of those MS lobbying money. So eventually something will give out.
Humans May Be Biologically Able to Run 40 MPH, New Study Shows
Ask HN: Comparison of type systems?
Factor is missing a character type, Haskell is missing dependent types, Java doesn't have a function type, etc.

Is there some page I missed that compares the type systems of various programming languages?
Whether it's magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs

I suppose, if most cars don't have bombs in them, and it never detects bombs, it is right most of the time...
Google’s Founders File to Sell 5 Million Shares Each
Sorry, my US bias is showing. I totally forgot about the "screw patents and just ship it from Europe" solution.
The Apple Tablet rumors the other blogs are afraid to publish
The most interesting part of this for me was at the very end, where he mentions a trend of chess masters taking up poker instead; has anyone else heard of this?

It isn't really explained, except in association with the earlier paragraph comparing the complete-information, brute-force-able game of chess to a game which involves probabilities, bluffing, etc. This obviously makes it a more interesting problem these days for researchers, but it's the first I've heard of it being a human trend too. Unless, of course, it's just about the money, which is also hinted at.
"In what respect does Android integrate these features better than the iPhone does?"

Way, way better on Android. This is the main reason why I'm not switching to the IPhone.

Your phone contact list is the same as your GMail's. When you add/edit a contact online, it syncs with your phone.

You can add a Google Calendar widget on your Home Screen.

The best is the GMail app which according to most people is better than the Mail app on the IPhone.

Basically, when using your Android phone for the first time, you login with your GMail credentials and you automatically have your contact and calendar on your phone.

"PS: Apple doesn't do maps."

They will soon. Apple bought PlaceBase last year.

http://blogs.computerworld.com/14835/apple_purchased_mapping...
Staggering numbers:

Social media
126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
84% – Percent of social network sites with more women than men.
27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
57% – Percentage of Twitter’s user base located in the United States.
4.25 million – People following @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s most followed user).
350 million – People on Facebook.
50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day.
500,000 – The number of active Facebook applications.
The Brompton: The bike every commuter wants
I often use lists in the development of a new feature, and do not consider it a creativity killer. Start with an insight, and break it down into simple steps or components. If this list is crap, it is obvious at that point and can be scrapped and the process can be tried again. For me the creative aspect of a feature is the original insight, and it is usually easy to judge a proposed implementation against how well it achieves that insight.
It sounds like he's doing all kinds of later-stage things like opening business bank accounts, marketing, and so on, in the first week.

Personally, I'm surprised at the $500 budget. Maybe coffee costs more in Australia.
Doesn't it usually take at least 10 days to get a short code for 2-way SMS? And it's going to cost more than $700 based on my research.
VLC is one of the most popular open source programs in the world. Over 100 million copies have been downloaded since the 1.0 release, with an all time download count of nearly 400 million.

They support not only H.264--which has a relatively reasonable, low-cost licensing system--but many formats whose licensing models are absurdly overpriced and unreasonable (e.g. MP3). And furthermore, VLC not only supports open standards like H.264, but also plenty of proprietary formats, like VP6, MSMPEG4, and Real Video.

They don't pay a cent to anyone.
Firefox won't use system codecs because they might be insecure, they might be buggy

This does not address the original objection. Calls to the Mac and Windows are not known to be any less buggy or insecure than calls to the h264 APIs. So why accept one and not the other? The only sane answer of course is that you can't build an app at all without calling the OS basic APIs of your host machine, but you can try to have an ugly work around h264.
If it logs your miles from a text message, that's a bit more complicated than a website.

SMS to web gateway, process the data, update the database, connect database to website, make functional website.

These are not super complicated on their own, but having them work together well and meet user expectations/needs is another matter.

He can then sell the service or advertising on the page. Sounds like a startup business to me. Not huge or sexy but money in the bank if done well.
The "ogm" file format is an old, unsupported, deprecated variant of the Ogg container. Do you mean "ogv"?

Sorry, this may seem like nit-picking, but such a fundamental mistake makes it harder to take your strong claims about Mozilla's design and intentions at face value.
The number of comments trashing the FOSS position towards video codecs is strange given that it's equally popular to trash the proprietary flash player. Maybe this thread is a statistical anomaly or people are just inconsistent.
Very true. While researching my illness, one of the more promising companies dealing with hearing loss and other associated illnesses is this one (based out of Seattle):

http://www.soundpharmaceuticals.com/
Communication networks inspired by slime mould
Why Bushwhacking Your (Video Game) Players Is A Bad Idea (Jeff Vogel, Avernum)
You mean software freedom, I guess. Personal freedom is greater with BSD than GPL, and with public-domain software than with any of them. Personal freedom includes the right to sell software at $0.20 or $200, and the customer's right to buy it or not. For the record, I'm against software patents, but also against being forced to publish one's code, which incidentally maximizes personal freedom.
This is pretty much accurate.

There are plenty of other containers, audio formats, and video formats that are believed to be mostly patent-free; the same status as Theora. Firefox won't support any of them. Not Dirac the video format, not Matroska the container format, not FLAC the audio format, and so forth. Despite the fact that, for example, Matroska is far better-designed, more capable, and more popular than Ogg.

Mozilla could care less about patents: all they want is to promote their pet solutions at the expense of everyone else.
It's a little bit light on detail, and the article it's referring to (in Science) is pay-walled, but here's the abstract:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/327/5964/439
"Were". The Seattle biotech industry is in shambles. Icos is gone, Rosetta is gone, Zymogenetics has scaled down, and so on. The debris is pretty visible. The non-profit research side is going great guns though.
I think he also cheated by opening a bank account and incorporating. That's overkill at the stage he's at, but it gives the impression of "making progress", which surely impressed his readers.

I should know, I designed http://fairsoftware.net to prove that you don't need a corporation or even a bank account to build successful multi-founder software startups. And this guy is alone, so even less of a reason to waste money.
I still don't understand why Mozilla doesn't just use the codecs already installed in the Operating System. Then you don't have to ship any codecs.

Separation of concerns.
Steps to Walking Fitness
What "FOSS position"?

The vast majority of people I know in FOSS, both users and developers, could care less about patents. The apparent "FOSS position" comes from a vocal minority, not the majority of FOSS users and developers.
What company does allow you to pull out information that they didn't already decide to say?

...correction:

What well run company allows you to pull out information that they didn't already decide to say?
Notice that there are 3 times as many internet users in Asia as in North America. Food for thought.
This series is one of the best "refactoring tales" I've ever read, looking forward to part 5 and 6.
Pat Metheny's Orchestration: A mechanically controlled jazz ensemble
360° video (street-view style video) - drive through Port-au-Prince
Given who bought them, there's probably some higher-up getting kickbacks as part of the deal.
All this talk of apple's new device is killing me with suspense. It's hardly even worth saying, but apple's ability to create hype is amazing.
The results from PlanetLab et al. may not be deterministic, but you should be able to reach the same conclusions based on repeated experiments. Otherwise, your results may be a little too fragile to form the basis of sweeping conclusions.

This may not be ideal, but it is no worse than any branch of science which is not purely digital.
Google Co-Founders Plan To Sell Up To 10 Million Shares Over Next Five Years
It may not cost anything for land, but the same thing goes for a regular tent, table, and chair. I think the greatest value proposition this product offers is the modern indoor office setting, which alone should attract quite a few buyers. Other than that, it really doesn't offer me anything much more than what a regular tent, table, and chair can do. I must admit, it is nice eye candy though.
Just curious if you've noticed any difference in your health since taking the Vitamin D supplement?

For comparison that's about how much Vitamin D your skin will produce by being in the sun for 5-10 minutes (assuming you're in normal latitudes and have uncovered face, hands, arms - not always true in the winter).
So. And?

Why are they telling me this? Can I call my boss now and take a week off because there's too much terror?

Is it so they can say "told you so" when something blows up next week? Is it to deter the terrorists ("We watch your every step, yes we do")?

I don't get it.
VLC's faq should give you some answer :

Regarding Patentable Inventions, the second paragraph of article 52 of the European Patent Convention (EPC) states:

The following (..) shall not be regarded as [patentable] inventions: scientific theories and mathematical methods; (...) programs for computers (...).

The VideoLAN project only provides software, i.e. "programs for computers". Those are outside the scope of patentability. 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.

Please note however that the combination of software with hardware may yield something patentable. As such, if you do make a hardware product with VideoLAN software, you may conceivably need to obtain patent licenses for the hardware parts.
Just call it iCanvas and they are not that happy anymore. Considering that both canvas.com and icanvas.com are already owned, at least icanvas.com seems to have its owner information hidden, so it could actually be the case.
You have to count power consumed in the whole box, not only the CPU. This reduces the gap between C2D and Atom. OTOH, the Atom is not that much slower than a C2D when you are not doing SSE operations. Their box can be a cluster of servers, not a shared memory monster. 8 boxes with independent SATA, memory and net connections usually perform much better than a single 8-socket box if what you are doing does not involve a shared dataset for all processes.
Scroll down a bit, the only reason it's alive in bugzilla is because it's intended solely for use in Fennec, the current attempt at "Mobile Mozilla": https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422540#c105
Apple tablet could earn $3 billion in a year
bankrupted != killed

You can always get some more money and start a bankrupted corporation up again.
Great point. I think 'entrepreneur' off late has become more of a sexy label to give oneself. It's funny how the term businessman(or woman) is never used, almost as if there's a dirty connotation to it. I think saying that I do business implicitly puts the expectation that there's cash flow.

I've been guilty of this thinking too, mostly influenced by such articles and the media fueled frenzy over "entrepreneurs" and their nice little website toy thingies built over weekends and in dark rooms. At best they're hobbies and fun projects.

==this comment is more of a reminder to self than a judgement of another==
Why would Brin and Page sell enough shares to lose their majority vote? Google's IPO, and their insistence on keeping control of the company via two classes of shares seems contradictory to this move.

Obviously they don't need the money, and don't need to diversify their holdings to have a luxurious life. So why do it?

Also, a majority share held by Brin and Page was what was supposed to keep Google from doing evil.
I hope it's called canvas.
The 2 sides of 3D TV