skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would really, really love to know the answer to this too.

It's hard to describe my surprise that my 5-year-old PC, with a low power 1.6Ghz CPU, can easily breach 100fps while playing JamLegend, and my 9-month old, dual-core 2.66Ghz MacBook Pro can barely squeak out 40fps.

Speaking of framerate in Flash, setting the framerate on a particular SWF does not actually make the SWF run at that framerate, even if the client machine can run at that framerate. Rather, the framerate seems to be more a measure of CPU resources dedicated to running the SWF.

For example, back to JamLegend: My MBP can run JamLegend at 40fps, but not if the framerate is set to 40fps. If it's set to 40fps, I'll get 20. It it's set to 60fps, I'll get 30. In order to get 40fps, the framerate has to be set to 100. Meanwhile, on my old XP machine, setting it to 40 gets 40, 60->60, and 100->100.

So, very good question, why is it that Flash performance is so different on OS X than Windows?
My parents have an old G4 iMac. Despite its age, it has no trouble with high-resolution h.264 videos in Quicktime.

And yet QVGA Youtube clips play at about 3-6fps.
I think it's one reason browsing the web can be so much better on the iPhone (try ESPN on the iPhone vs the desktop as an example). I hope the tablet doesn't support flash either and forces web sites to provide non flash versions of their sites.
I agree that the Supreme Court got this completely wrong.
I've noticed that either using Snow Leopard or using the "Play fullscreen in QuickTime" option cause better framerates. I think it has to do with support for the <video> tag.
They support this for Vimeo now as well.
Yes, in the press. My question was more about people ("real people you meet" versus "people you read about"), but I agree -- the press has played with the "don't be evil" at leisure, and rightly so (imho).

Still the question about the real people stands.
"""Your over-analyzing makes your post seem very cold and callous."""

It does, but it shouldn't (or maybe it should and I am?). The parent post was exhorting me to act without thinking, and that sets off my skeptical spidey sense and makes me ask what's in it for them? It's a pressure tactic that people selling things use to get me to make a worse decision than I would otherwise make. In the case of helping people, making a worse decision is, well, worse.

A read of the article suggests that donating to some cause would be of no particular help, donating elsewhere might go to a celebrity's recording studio fees, and doing it one way might lead to it sitting in a bank account for five years being unable to help anyone. How far is over-analyzing and how far merely analyzing?

"""Yes it's getting a lot of media attention and people are pouring in money...so what"""

So the need for me to act immediately is less. So it's presenting a distorted and unbalanced view of problems in the world with the potential of over assigning to one cause and at the same time increasing suffering elsewhere because resources are reduced. So the media has a habit of turning everything into extremely opposed black and white views and a huge media fuss makes it more difficult to sift out accurate and detailed information on a topic. So a huge media fuss increases social pressure to 'donate now' without thinking and without regard for whether lack of cash is a main bottleneck or not.

"""the alternative would be to simply ignore everything like the rest of the world suffering year-round"""

That's another issue. Why is it that we happily go about our lives every day doing just that, but it's not OK to do that now? Isn't that part of the media fuss generating social pressure so that people act to be seen to be donating rather than for any other reason? Very much an 'ends justify the means' approach?
it's better for everyone to become pleasant, collaborative and respectful, then for everyone to become jerks. i'd rather live in the former world. "when in rome..." is a little too simplistic and immature in this scenario. it's almost like seeing injustice and deciding to come out on top oneself, rather than fighting for social change. "man up!" seems somewhat appropriate for everyone involved.

as a techie female, the change in culture that i've seen has been crucial and awesome. i've stayed away from rails in favor of the awesome python and django communities. i've had excellent mentors. i've taken my time to accrue skills and confidence, and i've come to terms with what ego-ism and arrogance i do encounter.

before i was pulled into my first startup i had so often turned away from the perceived negative environment of hackers and startups and mean people. i assumed i wasn't l33t enough. like hell! i'm not afraid to say i've had encouraging guidance along the way, nor that i'm a master of my limited domains.

very early on i saw that we were all of us somehwere on the same continuum trying to get better. our paths might diverge based on goals, but there is no point in static comparison.

i see hacker news as milestone in social tech news. reddit was unbearably self-centered and negative. coming to hacker news, where people wanted to be intelligent and amiable, share and listen, was what proved to me that the tech culture had truly changed. maybe it's the entrepreneur influence that makes people more cognizant of networking and bridges.

shirky might have some good advice, it's just taken to the extreme. there's no need to stoop to the lowest denominator. be authentic to yourself, but don't put yourself down. build yourself with the long term in mind. competence shows, confidence follows. anyone can be competent with enough man-hours.

everyone always says startups are a roller coaster of emotion, but after two startups and nearly 3 years, i have to disagree. sure, i'm as emotional as the next woman, and starting out did come with a lot of doubts and stress, but at this point very little phases me. but yeah, maybe my balanced view doesn't help someone who feels very emotional about work.
One idea: disconnect the visible down-votedness of a user's comment from a user's visible karma- which seems to upset people. I often see posts regarding 'why are you down voting my comment?'. Not allowing a post to get publicly, visibly, lower than 0 would prevent meta discussions about 'why'- even though the hidden negative score would move the actual comment down the publicly visible thread hierarchy.

Not showing downvoted scores on comments would never cause a user to exclaim 'why aren't you upvoting me?'

Disconnecting a user's visible karma from the hidden negative points a user acquires from negative/poor comments would be important for this idea to work well.
An interesting comment from the article: "From the genius, to the anxiety, through the social awkwardness, Esther Reed is a classic case of Asperger's Syndrome! Anyone who has lived with family members who have this condition, as I have, should be able to instantly recognize it. The clues are all there. Her father was a "shy and reclusive man" who had his family living out in the woods isolated from society. There is the source of her autistic spectrum disorder; she probably inherited it from him. She is not amoral as one person previously commented, but rather, as Esther admitted, she didn't realize her actions would hurt others. Again, this is classic Asperger's -- the inability to put yourself in someone else's shoes, the lack of empathy, the self-centered egotism resulting from an inability to generate a theory of mind, i.e. see things from someone else's point of view or understand how what you might do or say would affect the other person. Esther had personal problems a normal person would have been able to handle by confronting and facing her family and expressing her feelings to them and if necessary, just openly leaving to start over, i.e. without running away in the way that she did -- making her paper existence vanish -- and without snapping and acting as she did. People with Asperger's try to hold it together but often snap and act out. In children, it is tantrums. As an adult, Reed snapped and impulsively grabbed a co-worker's purse -- not the act of a genius criminal, since obviously the suspicion would fall on co-workers. She could not handle pressure and personal problems a normal person would have been able to handle without Esther's extreme behavior. Even as a child, she had a hyperresponsivity to stress as described by her teacher which was echoed in her adult life when she became completely dysfunctional when stressed at Columbia and on the run. Ironically, her defense attorney was right, but apparently he didn't have a clue as to the correct diagnosis."
Too bad the original post doesn't accept comments.

Yes, Mac performance can be an extra challenge -- think of discussions in 3D, video-editing, or gaming communities. Things get more complicated when you're in a browser -- particularly on a Mac, you can see changing performance when changing browsers. Video will continue to further improve on PCs with hardware decompression, but on Macs Adobe is still hoping to persuade Apple to open those APIs to browser plugins. Adobe's own goal is to make things transparent across hardware/OS brands. And Adobe is interested in adding authoring-support for "HTML5":
http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2009/06/adobe_on_html5.html
The 10.1 beta2 for OSX is slightly less horrible (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/). It's still just as crashy, but slightly less CPU-killing.
> "assertive, self-promoting, and self-confident."

true, but slightly more balanced than self-aggrandizing jerks. i hope people of both genders shoot for what you said rather than what shirky said. it's self-aggrandizing arrogant (mean, self-centered) jerks that are impossible to work with and quite frankly turned me off from programming for a long while.

think of what "hacker" used to mean and then think of what it means now. there's a way to have positive energetic confidence that doesn't demean others, and in fact helps others.
Could be. It feels that Google is the "in" company in more ways than one.
Try Flash on Ubuntu. Things like VDPau are open source and can be leveraged for GPU acceleration, yet it's still not there. Besides video and games, I have zero clue what it's useful for. Shitty band websites?
"Luque said the project was intended to be a type of motion-detector device." That's all I see about it from the article. But yeah, I am curious why an empty half-liter Gatorade bottle is needed for that. As a reflector of some kind? To make it look cooler?
Better Internet Bureau
Has protected us from many bad sites scammers, a must have! www.better-internet-bureau.org
Precisely. QuickTime on Macs can use hardware-based video decompression. If Apple allowed browser plugins to move video-decompression out of the CPU too, then that would be great.
I'm relatively new here, but if I may offer a suggestion:

I don't care much for the points on comments at all. Comments that float to the top regularly defend commonplaces, and while they certainly deserve a positive vote, there's not much to learn from those.

But interesting comments, that I gather new insights from, are often written by the same commenters (->commentators? my English is lacking). Thus, a system that would work well for me, would allow me to rate individuals, so that on the next thread it will show me my favourite commenters first.

(edit: wow, suddenly lots of replies in this thread - maybe I forgot to refresh. I believe jefffoster's idea of Bayesian filtering may be more powerful than mine)
Only if read robotically. The whole piece is about "NYC vs. elsewhere", so "difficult" in that first sentence means "relatively difficult".

English is not rigorous machine code; readers should meet writers halfway with generous interpretations, rather than stretch to find possible 'gotcha' interpretations that were unintended.
I guess my reply to you would be under 'meta' because my questions to you are:

What do you mean by:
'more room for nasty rules lawyering("This is not Hacker News")'?

I like your idea; how would I choose between 'information' and 'related'- or 'opinion' and 'related'? Would 'factual' and 'insightful' be more useful as labels?
Sure, you don't see science-related injuries yet...

...but we don't want the first science-related injury to be a mushroom cloud.

</sarcasm>
Chrome uses Safari's Web Inspector directly on all platforms. It's a little buggier than it is in Safari, but it's nowhere near as bad as Firebug when it comes to crashy freakouts.

Now that Chrome works great on Linux I basically never have to suffer Firefox. The way Mozilla promoted their useless "Web Developer Toolbar" and ignored Firebug for years was always a great disappointment to me.
Heh. I just used a terminal on my laptop while trying to figure out why the airplane I was just on didn't want to let me have internet access. Guess it's a good thing I look normal....?
Is 10.1 going to use hardware on the mac? I've read conflicting reports on this.
Ask HN: Is the SSL/Certificate Authority business a scam?
A lot of websites that could otherwise use SSL encryption don't because web browsers issue scary warnings when a SSL certificated is not signed by a trusted Certificate Authority. SSL certificates can be expensive and not every website owner is willing to pay for something a lot of users won't even notice.

Don't get me wrong: I understand the use of Certificate Authorities for establishing trust relationships. However, I believe that this mechanism should be an additional layer on top of SSL (like it should be). Sometimes, simple encryption is good enough to prevent passive packet sniffing.

What do you think: is the SSL business a scam ?
The article says it was a motion detector.
The bit of missing data I am curious about would be the number of people who are turned away, or leave the hospital because of the long lines. i.e. if they had stayed the lines would have gotten longer and longer implying that there simply were not enough doctors not that they needed to be clever.
The documentary Very Young Girls may change your viewpoint. In particular, the median age of [corrected: entry into prostitution] in New York is 13. Typically they are runaways or neglected/abused children kept in 'the life' by a combination of threats, violence, and pseudo-romantic attention. A John caught by police is sent to John school, with the possibility of getting off in a few months with nothing on his record. The girls are often times tried for prostitution as adults, even when they are held against their will, even when they're below the age of majority, even though were it not prostitution they would be, legally, the victims of statutory rape.

Much of this is possible because perpetrators have the easy out of saying that 'they didn't know.'

In general, I think that you're right, but there's a loophole here damaging enough that it might merit a special case.
I, on the other hand, went to a public highschool in a well-to-do Los Angeles suburb. The year before I graduated, a senior girl was expelled from school two days before her graduation because she brought a swiss army knife on the senior trip.
The BBC had a good intro to this subject called "The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu". At least I liked it, but I had no idea about any of this stuff before I watched it. It was repeated a few days ago and is available on iPlayer for one more day:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hkb0z

I'm assuming that it was the inspiration for the new series,
The Lost Kingdoms of Africa which just started and focusses more on art history:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pv1m4
True on the framerate -- it's an upper gate. Static video which overburdens a configuration can drop frames to keep up. But interactive presentations need to display each intended frame, and so will drop framerate instead. More here:
http://www.kaourantin.net/2006/05/frame-rates-in-flash-playe...

For the "why", that's Adobe Corp's tale to tell, but I haven't yet met a person inside Adobe who wouldn't be very, very happy if Mac/Win performance differences could be made to disappear.
Given my experience with many solo RPGs and with a couple MMOs besides WoW, I'd say modern WoW is actually pretty gentle on the grinding curve than most games. (Try playing Etrian Odyssey or FF XI, gads...)

I stopped playing after WoW after about a year not due to boredom, but frustration with end game content and game play emphasis during holiday events due to the new achievements system. It really ruined what really was, for me, a laid back, semi-relaxing game turning it into a grunt fest.

For some, the "boring" content is more meditative instead.
Google and China: Silicon Valley Is No Longer King
"But there is another story here, more prosaic but no less important to the future arc of global business and the global balance of power. Google has not been doing all that well in China, as many have noted in recent days, badly trailing the domestic Chinese search company Baidu. But it isn't just that Google has struggled. All of the New Economy western companies in the media and information business have failed to establish themselves in China."
I still think that the girl was stupid for bringing it to an airport of all places. She had putty in her hand, that could be mistaken for plastic explosives. Terrorists have been known to detonate explosives with hand triggers when confronted. A 19yo MIT student should know better

IMHO An 11yo school student would be more deserving of the benefit of the doubt on his project, than the girl at MIT
Flash is much less efficient than other video formats on all platforms, not just OS X. My netbook (when it's running XP) can handle most 720p video well enough, but has trouble with flash videos that take up less than half of that area.

It's just worse on OS X (and Linux, too).
I've worked in Flash for a decade. My experience with it has gone from dabbling with it in high school to experimenting with it in college to doing serious AS development in professional design work. I've come to a certain level of familiarity with and acceptance of its shortcomings, while trying to hone my sense of where it is and isn't appropriate to use.

And alas, it feels like that "is" part gets just a tiny bit smaller every day. For all its quirks and annoyances, Flash is a great environment and it opened the door to really rich web experiences long before the W3C ever imagined them. It still has a lot of advantages today, but the W3C is quickly catching up, and I get a definite sense that Adobe is losing the focus that Macromedia once had. They're continuing to develop Flash as if today were just a futuristic version of 2003. But Flash isn't going to stay relevant in a vacuum.

One of these days, someone (maybe even Apple) is going to come out of nowhere with a beautiful, visual HTML5 Canvas + JS authoring suite and Adobe is going to realize just what they've been taking for granted. And by then it may be too late.
The idea is to sell to intermediary agencies (such as human relief, NGOs) and government contracts.
Strangely, ClickToFlash makes Flash crash more on my Mac. Whenever I click on it the browsers stalls for two or three seconds, my hard drive goes crazy and then it might work. Or crash.

Since crashing Flash has become relatively painless in recent times (just reload the browser) I still leave ClickToFlash on, but it's a strange behavior nonetheless.
I think for a business guy to NOT know design is un-excusable. Meaning how the user interacts with the app. He/she doesn't need to be able to code but to be able to mock up the UI for sure.
Flickr discussions in three essential sentences:

"Great composition"

"Nice shot!"

"~~o 8 You've been awarded a useless online award by a self-proclaimed expert, join the group now! 8 o ~~"

I agree to the author that faceless communication does not stipulate understanding of finer engineering points. But, sorry, just about any (troll-ridden or not) group in comp.* on my memory was vastly better with quality of comment than that. Flickr is just one big circle-pat-on-the-back.
It was a scam, but now you can get free certs from StartCom.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1054299
If you're willing to get rid of all gifs, toss this in your user stylesheet:

img[src$=".gif"] { visibility: hidden; }
Are they trusted by all browsers ?
> the median age of prostitutes in New York is 13.

Has this been confirmed by other sources? Any URLs or studies you could point to?
Ford's faster horse fallacy?
China begins massive monitoring/censoring of SMS traffic
The entire system, as described is horribly broken. Underage girls working as prostitutes should be treated as victims, not criminals. Statutory rape should be an available charge in that situation, but there needs to be a state of mind with respect to the defendant's knowledge of the victim's age. Criminal negligence (a reasonable person in the defendant's situation would have known) seems appropriate.

With strict liability, even examining a seemingly authentic government ID card or passport wouldn't serve as a defense. That's wrong.

Edit: this is an issue of policy and mechanism. The policy of trying to punish those who don't care that they're abusing very young or enslaved girls is a good one. The mechanism of strict liability is extremely flawed, and the precedent of having any strict liability laws on the book opens the door for less clearly black and white policies to be applied using that mechanism.
Even better - the print version: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/31770765/the_girl_who...
I have a few ideas:

1) No comments on a post until its at least an hour old

2) More time to delete my comments. I made one just a few hours ago I'd like to delete because of its tone.

3) A "stop being a jerk" flag. It would only be shown to the commenter, anonymous, and have no impact on points.

4) Alternative to #3: same flag, still anonymous, but too many flags "mutes" the commenter for 1 day.

Ultimately, of course, its a culture problem. We all need to take personal responsibility for our behavior. Whether or not that can persist in a forum of size remains to be seen (I am optimistic that it can).
Sorry, I haven't heard of any progress on this yet... here's the best current guidance I've seen:

<em>"In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under either Linux or Mac OS X. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. The Flash Player team will continue to evaluate adding hardware acceleration to Linux and Mac OS X in future releases."</em>
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/fplayer10.1...
You can model waiting room arrivals same way you can model server load - using the Poisson Distribution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution

As long as you can calculate the expected number of people that arrive you can adjust your operations to handle the worst case as you define it to be (ie, do we want to handle 70% within an hour? 90% within 2 hours?, etc.)
Advertising distilled: selling chances of user leaving your site
The value of a point
If Apple allowed browser plugins to move video-decompression out of the CPU too, then that would be great.

What prevents the plugins from using hardware? They're binaries that can run anything they want, aren't they?
Boston Arcology Is a Climate Change-Ready Floating Mega-Structure
> "lame excuses like charity work"

Buzz off. How is this at the top of the front page on HN?

Also, it's idiotic to to perpetuate the "rock star programmer" meme. All the great developers I have ever known would never consider themselves rock stars, however most of the biggest assholes I've ever known did consider themselves rock stars. As a developer, I'd never work somewhere that looked for rock stars, ninjas, or what have you. It clearly shows they don't understand programmers and programming.

edit: language.
Check out http://www.open-pandora.org/

They are well on their way to completing a production run of 3,000 consoles based on an open software platform, and have documented a lot of the steps along the way to getting the device through manufacture.