skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, if only greedy developers would drop their App Store prices from 99 cents to 25 cents, all the Crackulous pirates would immediately start purchasing apps. They just don't have the extra 75 cents to spare!
If you read that article carefully ("What’s the Problem with Theora?"), you'll notice that while significant research has been made, no one can actually be sure there are no submarine patents. The author doesn't say he "think there isn't any patent problem with Theora", he very carefully says that he hasn't found any.

And that is precisely my point — since you can never be entirely sure, using Theora (or VP6, or any other video codec for that matter) won't solve much in the long term.

BTW, as a related note it should be mentioned that at least Theora developers chose the right license for this kind of code — BSD. This avoids the huge landmine that x264 has set up for itself: the anti-patent clause in the LGPL/GPL (section 7 of the GPL).
yes, this is a good point - I dont want to risk a low conversion rate because users don't have confidence in my payment system.
http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2009/12/analyzing-y-combinator...
How to Use CoralCDN On Demand to Keep Your Site Available. For Free.
Even then, I don't think it really registers as being important. The increased costs are spread over a long enough time that most people will make their decision based solely based on 'iPhone vs iPhone clone' and the sticker price. As long as there's a $30/month difference, it won't fundamentally change the market.

Further, pricing differences are generally carrier based, not device based- once iPhone is on Verizon, the monthly cost for unlimited data will be the same as getting a Droid, negating any advantage. Third rate carriers like T-Mobile and Sprint will offer lower cost plans, but they too will eventually get iPhones.

I just don't see how there are 'openness' advantages this time around- I think last time, 'openness' was really 'pricing'.
Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On CentOS 5.4
Founder Spotlight: Siqi Chen of Serious Business
Yes, it is pointless, because there is no 'best'.

Just like I have 5 different hammers in my toolbox (Estwing, benchhammer, rubber hammer, plastic head and lead shot filled) I have a whole bunch of languages in my toolbox too.

Picking one is based on what I intend to do with the resulting product, familiarity and the speed with which I wish to get my result. If it is code that will run in production for many years I will pick another language than if it is a quick-and-dirty I need the answer now type thing.

Every language, your favorite too, has its pros and cons.

If there were a single, perfect language I do not doubt that it would overrun the world of programming in the time it would take to spread the news.

But languages are trade-offs. Space, speed, readability, maintainability, expressiveness. All of those (and probably more) can be changed enough to give a spectrum of possibilities, and with enough spacing between those in the various dimensions you end up with a large number of viable languages.

And that's good. A lisp programmer will solve something in a completely different way from a C programmer or a prolog programmer. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

In the end all that matters is that your solution produces correct results (and not just in the logical sense of 'correct', also correct for all the other parameters).

As long as it performs well for you everything else is premature optimization ;)

Incidentally, I put out a little challenge on this exact subject:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1073333
> paypal is too evil for me to even consider it

I've never used PayPal (other than as a purchaser) so don't know what they're like to use for the average seller, but that statement seems a little strong. I imagine it's very much the case that the few percentage of people who have a bad experience make up a far larger percentage of the people writing blog posts about PayPal. So it might be that 2% of people have bad experiences with PayPal, and 80% of them write it up on their blogs, while 98% of people haven't had any problems with PayPal but only 1% of them write about their great experience. So something like 60% of the things you read about PayPal will be negative.

All those figures are pure speculation, and PayPal may be absolutely terrible to work with, but I think it's worth bearing in mind.
Actually this is a case of mixing up "IP" laws ... trade secrets are very different from patents, although patents were partly introduced to encourage companies to open up and to discourage the use of trade secrets.

Anyway ... "proprietary" means just what it says ... "exclusively owned by someone" under a trademark, patent or as a trade secret. So to say that H.264 is proprietary is actually correct.

On the other hand, H.264 is more open than Real Video, since you can get the specs of the format, an implementation is already available to you and the patents are currently reasonably licensed.

That said, the concerns of Mozilla are valid ... we could end up in the same situation as with GIF and MP3 ... although I don't think Theora has any chances to take over since it's technically inferior and H.264 is already accepted as a defacto standard (mostly because of Flash).
Tone down the colour scheme. My eyes hurt.
Yeah, you’re right, and I apologise to the OP. Still, if the least of your worries is your name then you’re doing well. There are plenty of other problems that need to be fixed first and foremost before a rebranding campaign is considered.
It's even worse than that... he acts like he's not complaining, saying something like, "I'm glad they've found their work/life balance," but then goes on to say it's a shame that they don't want to put in an extra hour of work per day, because then they could carve out a more interesting and exciting career for themselves. As if what his employees do outside of work is a poor substitute for career development.

I think it's great that he's happy working his ass off making his business succeed. But not everyone defines their self-worth based on their job. Personally, I'm more concerned about making and maintaining connections with the people I care about. Yes, I'm working like crazy at a startup right now, but it's not my life. It's my job. It's a rewarding job helping to build a product I believe in and am passionate about, but there's so much more to the world than the office I spend most of my time in.
How To Calculate A Return On Investment
There are MANY consideration in addition to the technolgy:

1. You'll get killed with currency conversions with PayPal. They're the equivalent of thieves in this regard. If you're expecting lots of non-GBP income, this could become a significant cost of running the business. But they're very convenient and easy to link to UK bank accounts.

2. Don't get married to one provider. Use a "meta" API like Spreedly (http://spreedly.com/ ) so that you can quickly/easily switch if something goes wrong. With all the "PayPayl is evil" stories of late, this is simply prudent. I haven't used Spreedly yet, but heard good things about them, and they answered a quick question I recently asked them.

3. Google Checkout is not as well-known as PayPal. Funny anecdote I can't find the reference for now: A website was using PayPal and thought to add Checkout, with both icons next to each other on the page. Their Paypal earnings shot up significantly, and Checkout got very little additional revenue.

4. If you accept credit cards for payment, ne careful with PCI compliance, even if you don't accept credit cards on your own servers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Card_Industry_Data_Secu... . If you process the CC info yourself, PCI compliance can be very expensive for a sole hacker or small business, so consider off-loading the processing to a provider. You'll still need to have some level of compliance as I understand it, but it's easier. IANAL so get proper advice from your lawyer and accountant type friends.

5. Taxes and HMRC. 'nuff said.
Your mileage may vary, but I think that in many niches the portion of users you have who refuse to use Paypal/GC is small enough that spending engineering resources to integrate more payment options is not profit-maximizing compared to spending the same resources to just get more users.

Anecdote: in three years I've had six inquiries about alternate payment methods and all of them were because "I don't or can't pay online".
As someone who hosts videos, I hope that you don't get control over the internets. Bandwidth is already expensive enough without having to pay licenses per-stream!
Debating which language was best is how I learned to program better, notice flaws easier, and simply argue my case more efficiently.
I've used them for selling physical products. With that I had no problems, because they could track the process, but I had to fax a lot of papers to them.

The problem is when you are selling non physical products, that's a different story because they can't guarantee security.

What is evil to me is that once you are blocked, they can't do nothing. A common point I hear from people who have problems with paypal is that although they have sent fax and spoken with real people, they can't re-abilitate their account. Another scaring thing is that most times (this is very common through ebay sellers, which I was one) is that they can keep your money! So imagine that you go live today and you sell 100 copies of your product for 30$ cad, and your account gets blocked and they keep your 3,000$, that's the reason I'd like to avoid dealing with them in the first place.
First, if you aren't already, get a hosting company that offers IP-failover/shared IPs. Linode, Slicehost (among many) offer this. See: http://articles.slicehost.com/2008/10/28/ip-failover-high-av...

Basically, you have two VPSs (or servers) and if the first goes down, the second jumps in to take its place on the same IP address so that you don't have to change the DNS or anything.

Second, you can turn your TTLs down for your DNS so that when you make changes they happen faster.

Third, you can have an offsite VPS mirror with a different hosting company ready to roll.

That's usually how I deal with the issue of high availability. Have two boxes with one company with a shared-IP setup so that if one goes down, the second just takes over. Then have an off-site mirror with a different company and have my DNS TTLs set low enough that hopefully most people can get access in a couple hours.

The problem is that it all costs money. Rather than one server, you now have three. Costs have tripled to move you from, say, 99.5% reliability to 99.9%. So, you're paying a lot more for a very marginal improvement and the question that you have to ask is whether that tiny marginal improvement warrants paying triple. I think it's worth it - servers always seem to go down when I'm least available. So, that's my 2 cents.
Just to be clear, Alexa ranks = mostly worthless, edu. backlinks = gold. If you've every done any SEO you'd know that .edu backlinks are the holy grail of link-juice passing backlinks.

Also Alrxa rankings are valuable if you measure relatively against other Alexa ranks.
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90% of the ISPs (just pulling that out of my ass) will respect DNS TTL times. However, the other 10% may not, and these are likely to be the large providers (Comcast cable modem customers, etc.) and will often set a TTL in their caching servers of 24hours minimum.

On top of that, most browsers also cache DNS information.

The best way, IMO, to get better than average availability on a budget is to put 2 haproxy servers at a colo provider that offers some geographic diversity, but can route IP traffic seamlessly between the two sites. These kinds of places will often be BYOS, and charge by rackspace used. Some bill in 1U increments, some you may have to get a 1/3 or 1/2 cabinet minimum.

Use the IP of the haproxy server as your "public IP", then configure haproxy to direct traffic to 1 or more budget hosting providers.

haproxy will generally handle all the session-management for something like an ecommerce site that requires a users connection go back to the same server each time.

It's been a couple of years since I was heavily involved in this, but you're looking at about $300/mo minimum in colo/hosting fees to get into something that can offer some resiliency against the common outage.

If a couple of hours of lost business have a value of more than $500, then you probably need to upgrade your infrastructure.
DMOZ has been and still is a human edited directly making it's links very valuable and trsted to Google. Yahoo!'s web directory was paid at one point, now I don't think it is, but all around it's only worth anything because it's run by Yahoo!. Paid directories, heck most all directories are frowned upon by the Google gods.
There were no alternatives to GIF; no one did what GIF did. It seems to me that if every major browser supports Theora and Vorbis in html5 video we will have come out ahead of where we were with GIF: Licensing policies won't change because if they did everyone could switch to Theora. The only problem, then, is getting Theora support in Internet Explorer (it's already in FF, Opera, and WebKit).
IPhone And Android Rule the Web Advertisement Arena on Smart Phones in the US
As per the Market Share Data put out by Admob which is being acquired by Google, 81% of all US mobile ad impressions on Smart Phones in the fourth quarter are via the iPhone and Android. This increased from 55% to 81%. Android has almost doubled its market share to 27% whereas the iPhone accounted for the balance 54%.
My personal experience with Rackspace is pretty horrible. I'd probably recommend running a site off of a mini-itx server using bandwidth leeched from your neighbors unsecured wifi connection before I'd recommend Rackspace.
You could enter it on the site.
Anecdote: in three years I've had six inquiries about alternate payment methods and all of them were because "I don't or can't pay online".

For Tarsnap, I've had all of four people say that they didn't want to use PayPal -- and of those, two ended up using it anyway, and one had a friend make a payment for him. Of course, I have no idea how many customers I'm losing who never complain.
Ask HN: Where's all the spam?
I just noticed something weird today in my Gmail account.

I'm used to getting a lot of spam. My e-mail address has been the same for years and I regularly post it on many websites without obfuscating it. Therefore I get a lot of spam.

Gmail deletes messages from your spam folder when they are 30 days old. Therefore, by looking at the unread count of the spam folder I can know how many spam emails I received in the last month.

At one point I remember the count was around 50,000. I think at one point it was also 10,000. Today I just noticed it's 1,557.

What's going on? Has there been a sudden worldwide decrease in spam?
I use http://www.fastspring.com/. I too am UK based and this solution works nicely. They're US-based, but it means anyone with a credit card (US, UK or whatever) can pay for your software and FastSpring just wire the earnings to your UK account.

I find this to be a far better experience than PayPal, Google Checkout and some of the others. They have great support and a really nice, intuitive backend admin interface. I think their fee (which can be 5.9%+$0.95 or 8.9% flat) is well worth it.

It's certainly a good starting point, even if you then build a custom solution later.

Good luck with your venture.

EDIT: Spelling :P
But for such a debate to be meaningful you need context.

Without context (application, and all the other requirements) it is just so much hot air.
Using Subversion for graphic design files and other binary assets
Anatoly Paraev talks about how his company, PixelNovel, is getting their developers to use Subversion.
The amount of intellectual dishonesty here is staggering.

On the quality side what we’ve been able to do at Mozilla, with the help of the rest of the Xiph community, is to show that even though Theora is based on older, royalty-free technology, it does at least as well as H.264 in practice (although not always in theory.) If you don’t believe me check our Firefox 3.6 introduction video which is available in both Theora and MP4 formats. The MP4 version of the file is 13 and the Theora version is 8.2MB – about 40% smaller. (We actually think the Theora video looks better, too.)

Not only did he intentionally encode the MP4 really badly, which might be theoretically excusable--the MP4 file has two hint tracks as big as the entire video and audio stream, doubling the size of the file. In short, he intentionally bloated the file with junk data to make it larger.

Lying apparently means nothing when you're trying to promote your pet file format. Why are we letting these people be the voice of the free software community?
What You Should Know About Hosted Phone Systems 
A hosted phone system is a budget sensitive and simple solution for many small and medium size companies. Here are some of its advantages and disadvantages.
Maybe, I don't think that would be easy from a graphics chip point of view.
+1 for Spreedly. I'm going to be using it along with Paypal Payments Pro UK. Then later down the line I plan to swap out Paypal with someone more reliable, eg. Sagepay.
The economic equilibrium.
http://www.senderbase.org/home/detail_spam_volume?displayed=...
>Google has a near-monopoly in online video thanks to the ubiquity of Youtube. This means that they are the effective arbiter of codec choices for HTML5 video

I don't believe that to be true, and that the true arbiter of web technologies is client support. Look at CSS3, XHTML, Silverlight, or even the "q" HTML4 element which IE didn't support until IE8.

The world revolves around what the clients support. This is why Mozilla's decision is so important. You can bet that if tomorrow Microsoft decided to support one codec over another, you can bet that everyone would move over to that single codec, regardless of its technological merits.
I don't think he claimed to be proud of it; he just noted that it happened. Sometimes that's how things go: you think you want to take one path, but then soon realize it's not the one for you. It sucks, but would it have been better if he had stuck with software engineering out of some sense of obligation to the admissions director, which would have probably made him a miserable, mediocre student?
Didn't he just start this a week ago? The fact he's on front page already says to me, he doesn't need it at all.
Not quite. Google divides paid directories into 2 types: those that guarantee inclusion and those that don't, but still ask a non-refundable fee. Yahoo is the latter, which makes it trusted by Google. There's a video (probably Matt Cutts) where they say exactly what I just said.

Note: I wasn't asking for rationalisations, I was asking for anecdotal evidence. Does anyone have experience in improved rankings that they would attribute to Yahoo or DMOZ?
Maybe it's someone with the surname Ogg who doesn't like the opinion that their family name is "actively stupid-sounding word, reminiscent of a particularly moronic caveman's grunt"?
> And that is precisely my point — since you can never be entirely sure, using Theora (or VP6, or any other video codec for that matter) won't solve much in the long term.

That's just silly.

It's easier to defend against a submarine patent of which you knew nothing about, than to defend against MPEG-LA in case you just breached their license. Not to mention that nothing guarantees that you won't get sued with a submarine patent even when you have a legally licensed H.264

Plus ... we simply don't have too many patent threats that go to trial. The best case scenario would actually be for Theora to become a widely popular standard, and then for Mozilla to get sued for it ... the public needs such trials, and the supreme court of justice also needs such trials ... how else would could they realize that software patents are so dumb? The reality is that such threats are usually settled out of court.

Not to mention that when a company has the resources and the trial goes public gathering lots of supporters, the patent troll tends to get screwed (see SCO vs Novell).
It wasn't always that way. They used to only show google it, but if a regular user came along they couldn't see it. Google got a bit mad and what you see is their current hack to appease google, and screw users.
The Apple paradox -- how a fanatically secretive company fosters open innovation
Apple's tall order may be making tablets viable
I'm based in the UK, and we use HSBC for payment processing on http://kutoken.com/

The API documentation is a bit frustrating, but the service itself is good and gives you the option of recurring payments. We can also accept payments in multiple currencies, which a lot of customers appreciate - if you bill people in GBP but they have a dollar card, how much they actually pay is an unknown.
My point was that settling for prosperity as well as refugees was natural part of human history and that usually when two cultures clash it is not a peaceful event.

If one would not blame the Mexicans today for their peaceful search for a better life (which could latter turn violent on both sides), then why would they blame the pilgrims? Just because they are white?

When the story is told by someone whit a bent the white man had murderous intent from the second he set out from Europe and that is the furthest from the truth. The fact of the matter is that most where refugees and the impoverished looking for a better life, in a land that (to them) had a lot of vacant space.

My point is not that the Indians where the devil and that White man where saints, it has been that history is history and it has no room for revision and when you see someone taking different views for the same event with different parties being the actors, you can be sure that they have an agenda. A very popular one is the white man butchered the Indians and robbed them of their land. While also being a supporter of the Mexican migration.

The Mexicans may have not been the best example, as they would be an example of someone who has a more legitimate gripe about white Americans than the Indians.
Can you give some details as to what you found Crummy in the User Experience?. Just curious.
Is it possible for this guy to get his point across without sounding like a total douchebag? I guess it worked, though; I read his stupid rant.

Not that I don't agree with what he's saying, of course. I hate getting interrupted when I'm "in the zone." But I don't think it brings out any violent tendencies.

The IRC idea is a good one, though sadly I'm not sure I'd be able to get my team to actively use it.
Because Flash has 99%+ marketshare, whereas the H.264 video tag has <1% marketshare, so Mozilla are in a position to influence the latter but not the prior.
10 Tips (+1) to Get a Pay Raise
I doubt it was an oversight. I suspect Apple starts to relax their procedures as they near an announcement. This allows a controlled flow of "leaks" to emerge and build buzz.
Ask HN: Why so many SEO posts all of a sudden?
This morning I have observed three SEO posts in the top 15 links on Hacker News:

- Black Hat SEO Case Study: How Mahalo Makes Black Look White

- Some SEO Advice For Bill Gates

- Strategic SEO for Startups

Is this a coincidence, or can it be explained by something else, such as a sudden influx of SEO types to this forum?