skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, why would MPEG patent holders Apple and Nokia refuse to implement a competing video codec? It's a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

But I fully believe them when they say it's patent risk. Just like I believed Nokia when they said it was because Theora was "proprietary" and that it was impossible to implement DRM with Theora.

http://www.w3.org/2007/08/video/positions/Nokia.pdf

In that position paper you can see that Nokia is really keen to push MPEG towards patent-free licencing, but their big strategy to achieve this is to lock themselves into MPEG. Not very smart, but maybe Google can get some momentum going in that direction.

(Related fact: Nokia also argued for Software Patents in Europe.)
I don't buy that they are as efficient as actually possible. I wish there were some means of trying out different resource allocation strategies, but I think people who are doing so well in the current setup will do whatever it takes to maintain status quo.
Unusual Lamp Design By Dark « Lighting Universe
Parthian shot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Benchmarks don't say anything when it comes to real memory usage. In my experience Perl is a lot more memory hungry than Ruby. All the data structures take so much memory. Defining a single, empty function eats 1.5 KB (!) of memory. I had a Perl program of about 30k lines, and it ate 25 MB during startup, most of which is consumed just by storing the Perl optree. During runtime memory usage would jump to 35 MB as it loads all kinds of data into hash tables and stuff.
summary of discussion: the top 5 are sorted by passing a comparison function to Array.sort() that returns a positive or negative number at random. at first glance this seems reasonable, but in fact whether it actually results in a random order depends on how the javascript sort function is implemented (and the initial order).
Ask HN: How to avoid sore wrists
A while ago I switched to coding entirely on a laptop, along with that I started learning emacs + keyboard shortcuts and got rid of my mouse.

This was all good, I work a lot faster now and think about using the desktop ui a lot less. However I have noticed its beginning to affect my wrists, I dont have much pain yet but I can feel it coming.

The main culrit is my right wrist, while my left one sits in the same place over its keys all the time my right wrist needs to arch back to press the arrow keys / pgup / pgdn constantly.

Anyone else hit the same problem, have a good solution?
Sure people care about design, but they care about it most in a negative way, when it gets in the way and prevents them from getting to what they want. To me, the point of the article was that people notice bad design much more than they notice good design, and usability should come before shiny.
Two things seemed to help me: 1. Wearing a wrist brace (a cheap one from the local supermarket) made me notice when I was bending my wrist too much, and allowed me to train myself to not do that (i.e., to move my entire arm when I needed to reach other keys); 2. using an external USB keyboard allowed me to keep my wrists straighter while typing.

I haven't used the USB keyboard for many months, but I still bring out the wrist brace whenever my wrists start to twinge, and they rarely get beyond that point.
The way I solve this on my Eee is to actually move the hand when going for the arrow keys instead of twisting it. Bending the fingers is also much less evil than twisting them. Beyond that, regular joint massage helps, try and find someone around you who knows how to do it, and get them to teach you. The biggest amount of stress on my wrist comes from sports/martial arts rather than computer use, so I need to massage my wrists regularly anyway, but it definitely does help with the issues caused by computer use as well.
edit: this comment was not correct, while parent and reply are; apologies for the confusion =]

In an attempt to provide something non-incorrect, this is probably the simplest way in most imperative languages of doing a correct shuffle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher–Yates_shuffle
One of the things I've been contemplating is incentives, though not to the point where people will just fill out a lot of reviews to earn points or anything, more along the lines of random prizes or discount codes for hosting packages. Although then I have to be careful not to trivialize it and turn it into a game since I still want it to be a good resource for prospective customers.
Are you building something like Yelp, Mahalo and Stack Overflow or something like Gmail and Basecamp.

If you have a site full of content - then you should be designing around SEO. Spolsky's thought that the front page of SO is Google.com is very true. Discoverable content is useful content.

If you have a Private web-app (think gmail) then Search Results aren't all that important.
Google Earth on Nexus One
Oh for fucks sake I am so tired of this headline coming up. And who are these quoted idiots that can't do even basic research on the topic? fuuuuuuuuuuuu--
> It only become deeply unsatisfying and misleading for people who do not understand how to translate this information to the real world.

Not really. The OP is arguing that translating this statement to the real world adds nothing we did not know before. In comparing markets with NP-complete problems an interesting (but still trivial after you get the idea) paper "Computational Complexity and Information Asymmetry in Financial Products" by Arora et al.

And, also, the point of this paper is not really interesting. Even if it takes exponential time for the market to reflect _all_ the available information about something, all the efficient market hypothesis says is that the market will incorporate the information as fast as the fastest agent in incorporating that information. And this has nothing to do with P and NP (since a quadratic market can still be beat by a linear agent, and this is a market that is definitely in P).
EXCELLENT.. great work Phil... already using it :)
Yeah, being filled with negatives would be annoying although I'm hoping to come up with something, probably along the lines of discounts/coupons regardless of whether they left a positive or negative one (as long as it's an informative one).

It's definitely something to think about and it's a pretty difficult balance I'll have to achieve but I'm confident I can figure something out.
Making Subversion Agile in a Distributed Environment
Look further.

/resources/scripts/page.js, towards the bottom: function GenerateBrowserOrder()
I got the analogy, and the story may or may not be accurate. I have heard the name Charlie Munger before, but I don't know what he stands for. I just don't like the general approach of convincing readers with fiction. It appeals to the subconscious rather than logic. I prefer logic in such matters.
First, for this gift card thing, where is distribution and SOM? Those are cornerstones and as my Mama always said, "Bridges without cornerstones are fally." I'm not saying the guys behind it have done something wrong. Their mandate is "pay the bills and buy a lottery ticket at the same time." I hope it works out for them.

But you didn't ask about that. You asked, "What makes CouchDB a better investment?" Well, it's technology. And even if it doesn't get the business case, it can lend a role in someone else's business case. You've advanced the world a little bit. You've fought the good fight.

I mentioned Hanson. What if a record company, founded by good musicians, had Hanson and Glenn Gould sitting on their couch and said, "Sure Gould is amazing, but will teenagers buy it? Let's fund those Hanson boys." You would question their intentions and if they really ever understood music. You would be embarrassed for them. You can't always fund the Goulds of the world, but there's a level of superficiality that you can always rise above.
"Artists use lies to tell the truth"
Bloom Box: What is it and how does it work?
However, there might be classes of web apps where Search Results can help attract new users, albeit maybe not at scale.
Taxes in sql-ledger are configurable. You can add taxes with %ages etc. A large number of people are using it in Europe.

SQL-Ledger has really helpful user community behind it. I would suggest you to join the mailing list (http://bit.ly/bsCbV5) and ask your questions about your concerns there. There must be someone with Danish experience.
Being a single founder is great for building amazingly great products. The same person is leading the product vision and also obsessing over every detail.

If there's more than one founder, somebody has to be in charge.

Would a painter ever co-paint an oil painting with another painter?
In my own experience, wrist pains didn't actually come from wrist action, but from wrist action with my arm in an unnaturally high position: on a high desk, with your shoulder kind of "locked", you bend your wrist to reach for the arrows. At the right height, you'd instead move your elbow backwards and not bend your wrist.

Also, people often point out that vim-controls are wrist-friendlier than emacs-controls. I use vim more often than emacs, but when in emacs, I user viper-mode to have vim key-bindings.
Agreed. Most papers, even good ones, are hard to understand because the subject matter is hard. They are written with the assumption of a certain amount of prior knowledge of the field, and depending on the intended audience, very little background might be explained.

Writing clearly is also remarkably difficult and not everyone can do it. I have often found that the initial exposition of a scientific concept is not the easiest. After it been been digested by the community for a while, clearer ways of explaining it might be found.

Now, there are controversies like the Bogdanov papers, and even successful hoaxes like the famous Sokal paper, but I think these are exceptional, and usually reviewers _will_ say that a paper is "flat out bad" despite, or even because of obfuscation.
http://searchyc.com/

It wouldn't necessarily have helped in this case, but scanning through the previous 12 entries in the "new" listing would've found the duplication.
I would usually agree, but the techniques of rapid learning that he introduced make a lot of sense. I've been studying neuroscience recently, and it is well known that the brain learns by linking new information with existing (metaphors and analogies) which is what the article is basically pointing out.
Summary of paper:

A.) First several pages are random fluff: Explains P, NP, NP-Hard, NP-Complete, history of P=NP, examples of NP-complete problems, examples of market efficiency, and other very uninteresting stuff that feels like it's trying to fill out pages.

B.) Makes this central argument:

1.) If markets are efficient, then no one can come up with a consistently profitable trading strategy based on analyzing historical data.

2.) Model historical data as a sequence of days where the market can go up or down on any given day.

3.) Model a trading strategy as being long, short, or neutral the market on any given day, to be started after recognizing some pattern for the previous N days.

4.) To determine from historical data whether a profitable strategy exists, you'd need to try all combinations of being long, short, or neutral over some time horizon, while looking for all market patterns. Trying all such combinations is O(3^N) or O(2^N), depending on whether you believe the expensive part is finding the strategy or finding the pattern.

5.) To verify that you have a winning strategy, you merely need to simulate the strategy over your historical data, which only takes O(N).

6.) Therefore, it is in NP. Similarly, it is NP-Hard because we can reduce 3-SAT to a market / trading problem. Therefore, "does a profitable strategy based on historical data exist?" is in NP-complete.

7.) Because our model shows finding the existence of a profitable strategy is NP-complete, then either P=NP or markets are inefficient.

C.) A few comments of my own:

1.) Suppose we believe the argument. The amount of historical data is finite, so maybe some hedge funds brute-forced a solution and removed the market inefficiencies they've found.

2.) I think SAT and travelling salesman are the wrong analogies, because solving both optimally can involve lots of backtracking. A* search on a landscape with reliable heuristics might be a better analogy. In trading markets, you don't need to try all 3^N combinations because just as in search algorithms, you have heuristics that can help prune large parts of your search space (if a strategy starts off losing money, no need to keep exploring all the 3^N combinations under it).

3.) The author assumes everyone represents and models the market his way. Maybe a more clever representation makes the problem tractable. Checkers is a solved game now, even though there are in theory infinitely many possible game histories to test.
This Is Why I Want To Have A Paid, Premium Section Of Mixergy.
> In such cases, just do what you feel is the right thing: if you feel your business will only do well with a particular type of person, stick with that type of person.

I don't think that's legal in the United States for a sufficiently large company.
Personally I would have said "432, thank you" which would have been more polite, but still wouldn't have helped.
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This is nice. I have a piece of paper stuck to my wall that says "FIRST MAKE IT WORK". This goes right under it :)
Is Apple's New Maiden, NC Data Center Really a Data Center?
As a completely uninformed person, can I ask whom "the good father" in the parable refers to?

I have to say that while parables can be very powerful, this one only so thinly veils reality, that it confuses more than it helps.
but some of us designers think usability and good design are the same thing! therefore, one cannot come before the other (in some hierarchical sense).
Explicit, short-term rewards trump implicit or long-term rewards. Immediate feedback with points will enable much faster & more effective behavior change.
Larry Summers would publish that paper. What about all those researchers who already have tenure? There are plenty of academics who are willing to challenge the status quo on thinking if they believe they found evidence to the contrary. It would then be their duty to explain why something like that might happen. In your example perhaps it could be associated with a white people generally still having more opportunities throughout their lives in education (better schools on average), job experience (better jobs on average) and perhaps other factors. They could even spin that into people aren't being given an equal chance based on race and there is lasting effects throughout people's lifetime. The RESULT is the same: people hire more white people in blind tests, but the call for action is different.
" I just don't like the general approach of convincing readers with fiction. It appeals to the subconscious rather than logic. I prefer logic in such matters."

The idea behind a parable is to encourage you to think for yourself, not to explicitly convince you of an argument.
I wonder if internet explorer is really the world's most widely used browser? I don't think so but I wonder if there's any data about this.

I have different data:

On one site I own, there are 50k visits, only the 12.56% were using any version of internet explorer, only 48% of this the version 8.

On another site I have analytics access, on 500k visits, 31% were using explorer, and of these, only 16% the version 8.

Both of these websites are not technical. The first one is a blog and the second one a social network website.
"... However, the US market has a tendency to affect people outside its borders and force the system on others via treaties. ..."

That is an understatement ~ "IIPA would rather people "pirate" than switch to legal competitors" ~ http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/5115 The http://www.iipa.com/ represent publishers, music, picture, entertainment software, business software. All American
Well, much of this week's HN discussion, to my satisfaction at least, held up Mahalo as an example of what you don't want to do. ;-) To my mind, building a returning base of satisfied users ought to be the main goal: what is missing on the internet, and how can I provide it? That is, what's missing for actual users? The other approach seems to teeter on the edge of the gray-hat SEO abyss.
Free Software Foundation urges Google to kill Flash
This is one of those ideas that seems obvious the second you see it. And wish you'd come up with yourself.
That's what I thought he was getting at, but near the beginning of the piece, he describes Basicland as "rich in all nature's bounty except coal, oil, and natural gas". But the U.S. has enormous coal deposits, and in the 19th and early 20th centuries was the world's largest oil producer. Its natural gas deposits aren't too shabby either.
I ought have phrased it "why many people who shop at Wal-Mart in the U.S. and other 'first-world' countries where manufacturing and some other sectors have been decimated are poor in the first place."

My view on the poverty-reducing effects of globalisation are somewhat less optimistic than your portrayal.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1133880
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1133831
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1133712
True, but (regardless of your stance on if drugs actually should be illegal or not) do we punish the drug dealers or the users harsher? In cases of exploiting a vice, the precedent is to punish the exploiter harsher than the exploitie. And in America unrealistically low prices seem to be more habit forming than heroin.
For a much better explanation of this stuff from Terry Tao (mentioned in the article as being responsible for much of the theoretical basis of the technique; Fields medallist; very very smart chap) see http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2007/04/13/compressed-sensing-... .

One important way in which I think the Wired piece is Just Plain Wrong: you don't sample a small fraction of the individual image pixels. You take a small number of samples, each of which is a kinda-random combination of image pixels.

Some examples and further quite-friendly explanation here: http://www.acm.caltech.edu/l1magic/examples.html .

More from Tao: http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2008/12/05/the-uniform-uncerta... and http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/05/25/reflections-on-comp... both of which are mostly links to more detailed things, well worth reading if you don't mind mathematics.
Wouldn't

multiclamp5 :: Ord a => a -> a -> a -> Maybe a
multiclamp5 lim1 lim2 = Kleisli (clamp lim1) >>> Kleisli (clamp lim2)

be even cleaner? The composition looks more obvious to me that way (plus, I like the symmetry).
In what way is this better than or different from micro-CHP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_combined_heat_and_power)?
As if flash is just a video codec...

The only people that can kill flash are those that market it, in other words adobe. The rest of the world can compete with flash, maybe leading to reduced market share and eventual reduction in to insignificance. But they can't 'kill' it.
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It almost feels like it should be a hoax. The Bloom Box appears to be genius and has massive funding and backing, but the web site is so cryptic and it has come out of no where, I keep thinking someone is going to say "gotcha" at any moment.
Many modules are already imported, including Data.List.
That's been linked at the bottom of every page since just about forever.
I looked at the new ones and just didn't pick it up. (I did see it later.) I think I was expecting the original title.
Thanks for the link; that made a lot more sense. The way Wired described it made it sound like the L1 minimization was almost irrelevant. The closest to a pseudocode I could get out of their article was something like: 1) apply an L1 minimization to do a first-cut noise reduction on some random noisy data; 2) apply an iterative algorithm to the result until convergence. That made it sound like all the magic was in the invention of some crazy algorithm for #2, which isn't really the case.
Are you using your laptop in your lap or on a desk?

I've found for myself that it's essential not to have the keyboard too high... my elbows should be comfortably at 90 degrees and my wrists comfortably straight. This means for me with a keyboard using a keyboard tray to bring the keyboard below desk height, and when using a laptop having it in my lap.
Bash by example, Part 2
Quite a good analogy (special forces) although maybe a little stroking self ;)

It's probably worth mentioning the "T" skill set where startup employees can do lots of tasks very well, and also dive deep in a specific skill.
Better: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUFkb0d1kbU
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Surely it would be against the Google mantra "Do no evil" for them to actively engage to kill Flash.
More details:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=756176
I guess it's an amalgamation between Benjamin Franklin, Lee Kwan Yew.. and I can't recognize the third (Google suggests Paul Volcker)
It was excellent of Rand both to give this presentation and for him and YC to post it publicly, because I think the startup community has a giant blind spot where SEO is concerned. It isn't just black magic, goat entrails, and snake oil.

My one qualification, on advice #7 ("you should have sources of traffic other than Google"): while it is certainly dangerous to have 90% of your traffic coming from Google, in certain niches you have little other choice. If you're pitching a product in a niche with lots of linkerati in it, you're going to have lots of non-Google traffic. If you're pitching a product on Facebook, you're going to have lots of non-Google traffic. If you're pitching a product to forty-something ladies, you're probably not going to have lots of non-Google traffic, because Google is the Internet's navigation for these users. They don't have a regular blog they trust, they don't spread links around themselves at nearly the velocities y'all do, they don't tweet. But they do Google. The sites that they might click through to you from? They got to those by Google, too.

Since I tend to pitch to non-technical users and need marketing that scales out of proportion to time invested, Plan A: Google. Plan B: AdWords. Plan C: I've been looking for a good candidate for 3 years now. (P.S. If your startup has an option I will pay you money for it.)
Another article that recently reaffirmed my distaste for software patents is this article on the future of web video by an x264 developer:

http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=292

In a summarising comment: "The best choice [for web video] will always be a deeply patent-encumbered format until someone gets rid of software patents. There is no other feasible solution."
I agree usability should come before shiny.
I think we're pretty sure he's the top dog for this IT, he certainly talked at length about this feature and how great it was (http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1559200&cid=3123...).

The only question here is that did he realize the laptops have to always be in phone home mode for this to work? The anti-theft feature obviously doesn't work if the laptop doesn't make contact a server after the former is stolen.

Plus there's the blink of the green spycam light; school IT knew about it, we won't know until discovery or its criminal equivalent if they realized that it was due the actions of their spyware.

But I insist on saying "this system will inevitably create child porn" and that his not realizing that is no excuse. The child porn laws do not care about mens rea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea).