skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It hasn't exactly been sudden; people have been asking if Google has been planning this ever since Google announced it's intent to acquire On2. See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/06/google_vp6_open_sour... for example. The buzz picked back up again once Google finalized the deal; they spent a while in negotiation.

One of the barriers to adoption of Theora has been the quality issue; why would Apple or Nokia take the extra risk and cost of going with Theora if they already implement a superior codec? There's a chance that VP8 would help with that, but it's still an uphill battle. It took years for Xiph to take VP3 to something that they wanted to call a stable standard. Google has more resources than Xiph, for sure, but they likely can't just dump VP8 as-is as a new standard. There's also the issue of submarine patents, the hardware issue, just getting this implemented and as widely deployed as H.264, and more, so yeah, it would be tough for this to become a standard.

On the other hand, what the heck else is Google planning on doing with On2? Why would they get into the proprietary codec business, when H.264 seems to be winning out in most places in the market, and they've already bought all the licenses, encoded most of YouTube in H.264, and so on? Of course, those questions also apply to an open codec, but Google has been a big proponent of open, freely implementable standards, so at least that route makes some amount of sense.
West-coast residents have been particularly incensed that they wait an additional three hours after the East coast gets whatever "live" coverage there actually is in prime time, even though they are in the time zone where the Olympics actually are. What this means is that even if NBC is showing "live" coverage of its big events in New York, which is across the continent from Vancouver, it delays them three hours for Seattle, which is less than three hours south of Vancouver.

Is there a business reason for giving the East coast preferential treatment West coast events and vice versa?
I don't have access to the underlying study - the WSJ summary doesn't contain the actual data. Would you be willing to share it?

My claim is not that the SD's are the same, but that they are roughly the same. In other words, I don't think the differences in SD are large enough to affect the underlying argument. If the data proves otherwise, I'm eager to learn why.
My general feeling is that immigrants should be tolerant, hard working and individualist. The second generation should be integrated into mainstream America, rather than clustered into a ghetto.

I am with you 100% here. The good news, if you want to ask an immigrant, is that the U.S. is partly immunized against ghettos. Ghettos are caused by (and often require) two vicious circle type factors: a) An insular culture amongst the immigrants and b) An exclusive (exclusionary?) culture amongst citizens.

The great thing about the U.S. is that from the first day you land here, most people will treat you as an American. In my experience, this is one of the most powerful things America has working for itself. If someone feels like a part of America, the chances that they will harbor ill will for it are negligible and chances that they will want to insulate themselves from it are also low.

I think it is hard to design a racism test, so with the caveat that I don't have a better solution, I have the following problem with your racism test:

There is a high correlation between race and some religions. For example, IMO, the proportion of Muslims who are white is very low, while the proportion of Muslims who are brown is very high. So, in measuring the bias of say people from Pakistan against marrying whites, you might actually be measuring the bias of Muslims against marrying non-Muslims.

Actually, I don't think that is bad. My (potential) children will (and should) be free to marry whoever they choose Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, whoever. (Hopefully they wont marry a Scientologist!) Legally, though, discriminating against a religious group for not marrying outside seems like it may fall afoul of some religious freedom rights. Having said that, IANAL.

Regarding (2), it seems that you are using strong family / social obligations as a proxy for testing how much more 'liberal' or open minded compared to the 1st generation, the 2nd generation will be. I think this is such a warped and complex thing though, that it is really impossible to test.

Coming from a background with strong family and social obligations, and luckily from a family with negligible social pressure, I can also tell you it has many positives.

I also think it would be interesting to see how middle and southern United States measure on (2) vs most of the world. I suspect you won't see as much of a difference here as you expect.

Good discussion!
I have little Android experience so forgive me if this is obvious after using the device, but your description makes it sounds like you can't reliably know if an app will be in the state you left it, is that true? Meaning sometimes the OS will kill the app if necessary but other times it will not.

If that is the case I'd prefer the iPhone way wherein the onus is on the developer to preserve the state and if they have, the app will always return to the way you left it or, if they haven't it will always be restarted from scratch. For me, knowing is better than not knowing.

However, if it is the case that the OS rarely kills apps then the Android method seems preferable.
Great commentary about the actual ramifications of NP problems.

This reminds me of a company I used to do some marketing work - CombineNet. They would basically take a large, multi-participant marketplace (for example, several hospitals buying a billion dollars in goods from pharma companies and medical device manufacturers).

CombineNet's technology wouldn't guarantee the optimal buy to the hospitals, but it usually could, and in the cases that it couldn't, it could get very close to optimal and specify how close the answer was. I'm not a mathematician, but I think they were solving a "clearing problem?"

Coincidentally, the founder of CombineNet was a professor at the same school as Herb Simon... Carnegie Mellon.

Sandholm also wrote a heads-up Texas Hold'em bot that derived its strategy from the rules, and beat a ton of other heads-up poker bots handily. I think articles about this showed up on HN a while back: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1402350
Is it particularly surprising that a company broadcasting primarily to the USA would focus more on its participants? For the average American watching sports they know little about, with participants they've never heard of, it helps if there is something they can grab onto to maintain interest, such as rooting for their home country.

With that said, the other complaints this article raises I agree with.
This is one the primary reasons I have not watched anything sports related on NBC for a long time. The rah-rah, the overly obsessive coverage of only US players and related history, the focus on all the wrong parts of the games, I can (with great effort) tolerate. But once you add the absolutely useless and inane commentary and the tendency to shove the schedule on me, I prefer to switch to other sources and I strongly recommend that to as many people as I can (while trying not to be a grouch).

This was done to such a degree during the last FIFA world cup that I chose to watch it in Univision even though the only two words I understood were pelota and goal. And even that was oodles better than NBC. I wish I could stream CBC from somewhere or at least pay for coverage that just keeps the damn commentators quite unless absolutely necessary. Unfortunately AFAIK the way the whole thing is setup, there really is no choice in the matter.
In addition to that, I get tired of the channel 9 commentators pretending that every moment of whatever they're watching is a dramatic historic event. Can't we just enjoy it for what it is without all the crap?

It also seems like half of the broadcast is just montages and irrelevant interviews like Grant Hackett interviewing Michael Phelps.
One of the comments at the NPR site suggested the IOC not have an exclusive broadcast partner and just open it up for everyone to cover it as they'd like. I think that this is interesting, but hardly a way to fund an event as massive as the Olympics. In order to any changes to work, you'd have to be able to make up the $800+ million NBC ponied up for the games.

So, here's an idea: why not let others (even competitors) bid on individual events. This could work from either the IOC doing to brokering or even NBC itself.

So, for example, if another network wanted to broadcast the USA/Canada hockey game, they could have bid for the rights to show either that game, or all of hockey. I'm sure that would be worth something. Why should a large part of the country have to miss out on a great event, just because NBC decided to show ice dancing?

Split the games up into smaller biddable packages, and I'm sure you'd end up with as much, if not more, revenue for the IOC, and more people could get to see a greater variety of events. Imagine if ABC/CBS/NBC/Fox/ESPN were all showing a part of the Olympics? Wouldn't this be more in the spirit? You'd get a greater variety of events and more depth in individual events.
I have too... especially streaming online. I just didn't think that it was a good call to have curling in HD and hockey in SD.
You point to existing structure that guides human behavior. One of the points of the talk is that game designers can create additional structure that will guide behavior differently.
They're my favorite company. I have Prime, but I find myself choosing ground shipping on items that aren't time sensitive just because I feel like saving Amazon the cost. I usually relish sticking it to most companies I deal with.
Possible, but exceedingly rare. For a theme to provide a top-level script, it would be referenced with a URL like mysite.com/wp-content/themes/mytheme/scriptname.php, which would be ugly, brittle, and contrary to the clean-URL style that WordPress promotes. It is nearly universal that WordPress's code responds to a request first, and then dispatches to the appropriate files in a theme depending on the type of request.
Thank goodness I'm in Canada.

We have three channels that are broadcasting the Olympics probably 12-16 hours a day. And it's not just because they're in Canada this year, it's pretty standard to have great coverage.

I remember being in the US during the Atlanta Olympics and couldn't believe that they were only shown for a few hours a day with limited events.
A big issue for investors is also the survivability of the business. Investing in one founder is a risk. They can get sick or take a long leave due to a family crisis. Investing in a team greatly increases your chances that the business is going to continue to exist.

It's something that investors most definitely think about. Investing in early stage companies is often a decade long investment. A lot can happen in that decade, and minimizing your risk is important.
Cool. Didn't expect so much interest on HN for a highly mathematical concept.

If you're interested in a blog solely focussed on CS, here's one:
http://nuit-blanche.blogspot.com/
I've used the Option class in Scala, which, if I understand correctly, is a direct translation of the Maybe monad, and honestly, I have an extremely difficult time trying to understand your post. I don't blame you, either. I've had a very had time understanding every explanation of monads on the web, even though on the surface they look like they'd be really easy to understand.

http://lamp.epfl.ch/~emir/bqbase/2005/01/20/monad.html has an explanation from scala's perspective. I can understand the first part when the author describes a monad as an object with a polymorphic type, a map function, a flatten function, and a singleton constructor function. Everything they said beyond that goes right over my head.
Please provide some evidence of Germany/Sweden and their economies collapsing. As far as I can generally recall, most of Europe is "socialist" and has better healthcare, education, crime rate, quality of life, etc.
Find the right travel companion
Isn't this a case where entropy shows it isn't possible? Once you degrade the quality/quantity of the information, you can't get it back. You can find a clever way to hide what you did, but this doesn't add information, you're just interpolating. This isn't bad however, as we normally don't use all data we could (do you look at your pictures with 400% zoom factor?), and a rescaled image can highlight some detail you would have missed.

By the way, those bazillion dollars aren't wasted, because if you take the image, don't throw away pixels, but do as if it were a bigger image which had lost pixels, you can get something useful out of it.
Regularity helps, not hinders, but it's surely not going to be real-time. It might be faster than ray tracing every pixel, but that depends on many factors that I don't know/understand.
Yes to all of that. And ..

We use the latest in bank-level 256-bit SSL encryption to protect your information, and your passwords are securely encrypted.

Right. 256 bits, like everyone else, like it makes some critical difference over 128 unless you're the freaking NSA, and like anyone even bothers trying to break into a TLS session. Not encouraging.

First thing I always check is whether the site's behind a gateway, so let's try and connect on 22:

$ ssh etacts.com
The authenticity of host 'etacts.com (173.203.202.141)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is ec:c2:2f:fe:ef:7e:06:a3:a5:f0:a3:54:04:79:2a:16.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added 'etacts.com,173.203.202.141' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
sailormoon@etacts.com's password:
Permission denied, please try again.

Tsk. Early days I know, but .. if you become popular for storing a large database of people's login creds for gmail .. that's a nice juicy target.

And I actually found the mention that they're encrypting the passwords, like that means anything (the key is obviously somewhere on the server, and once they're in, they're in) to be more worrisome than not.
Startup Weekend targets Haiti
The existence of "hooks" further complicates things. WordPress themes are essentially collections of event handler scripts, and those scripts can register callbacks such that when core WordPress functions are called, those callbacks are executed. So, you have WordPress calling the theme calling WordPress calling the theme...
Easy, convenient: In the past I would have agreed with you. But by far, this year's olympics online broadcast has been very well managed. High quality with little to no stuttering (even for live events), content well organized and timely (replay of complete event available only minutes after they are complete).

As for the couch and large TV aspect, I suppose I would have to agree with you.
Basic point is that SD for men in math ability alone is 1.11-1.21x as large as for women.

If you break out your table of normal distributions, you'll see this difference is amplified at the top of the distribution (i.e., for very smart people).

And this addresses only base mathematical ability. It completely ignores risk aversion, persistence and other factors which go into startup formation. A factor of 2 here and a factor if 3 there add up quite quickly.
Is there a business reason for giving the East coast preferential treatment West coast events and vice versa?

It's not preferential treatment per se (east coast is seeing taped events as well), it's just that most people aren't home from work yet at 5pm.
It's a delicate balance. I personally don't want to fill out a massive questionnaire (even 5 questions may be too many) just to rate something, usually these fixed axises don't always fit what I want to say either. People seem to respond well to a simple rating and a free-form paragraph, both as readers and reviewers -- what is the incentive for the person writing the detailed review to actually write it? All the data needs to be boiled down to a single yes or no in the mind of the reader trying to make a decision anyway.
I think part of it is that running a startup going for investor money requires similar social skills to running a startup with a co-founder. These skills are not required, and sometimes don't exist in the lone founder.

The big difference, I think, is that if you have all the equity, really all that matters is your will and ability to go on. Sure, your employees, friends, spouse, etc... are incredibly important, but dealing with a friend, spouse or employee is a rather different thing from dealing with a cofounder
I'm glad it turned out nicely for you guys, given that the Olympics are in your backyard. I would've liked CBC to have Olympic coverage though, as it's the only Canadian channel broadcast in the Seattle/Puget Sound area. I could've then watched the US vs Canada hockey game yesterday, given my lack of MSNBC.
GC tuning is easy with REE, you can set environment variables to change the behavior of the mark and sweep collector. See slides 50-53 for more info.
Because what they are describing is compression, I mean its even called compressed sensing. I'm guessing that somewhere lost in the journalism is the suggestion that its better to place more computation on the decompression, which might be true in some application.

It seems like a great bit of technology, I don't think the author needed to sex it up with mention of compressing images. The applications where its actually hard to do sensing at all (like the MRI example in the article) are much more compelling. It seems like its main use seems to be in turning sparse data into its most human friendly form, but I do wonder about making clinical decisions based on such an aggressive interpolation rather than actual data.
To build off of your idea, what if the IOC had their own camera crews that would cover the live events and rather than bidding out the events? They could license access to the raw footage to buyers (i.e. NBC/ABC/ESPN) who would then choose how to use the footage as well as applying their own commentators and technologies (such as scores, replays, etc.).

Seems like the IOC would benefit from licensing to all the different networks, the networks would all benefit from being able to carry the olympics, and the people would benefit from the competition between the networks to provide better replays/commentary/analysis.
Yeah that "USA-Plus" label applies to us a bit too. Didn't we win gold in something? You can count on seeing that happy event in slow-motion about 3000 times over the next week.
At least you got to see it at all. I don't get MSNBC, so I was left in the cold. However, the Russia/Czech Republic game on NBC was a decent consolation prize. Turned out to be a great game down to the last minute.
This reminds me of some advice that's often given to mountain bikers, "Look where you want the bike to go."

If you stare at the rocks or the cliff, that's where the bike will go.
What it really means is, "Markets aren't as efficient as if God used his omnipotence to organize everything. But they are as efficient as actually possible. It's not like the Government can calculate P=NP stuff better."
My family doesn't own a tv. For the Summer Olympics there was lots of official online content. The winter games? ... not so much.

Sure there are lots of official stats out there, but I was unable to find the figure skating for my wife. In the end, she was reduced to watching it in Greek (we think) on a tiny Justintv station.

NBC paid a lot of money to secure coverage of the games. I wish they had put more effort into making them actually available to people.
Microsoft: Here's why Google Apps suck
I'm hopeful google borrows a few ideas for their next features. Sorry, I'm not giving anyone my password. Next time release it as a firefox plugin, or something client-side.
> Isn't this a case where entropy shows it isn't possible?

Most real world pictures are not random. So you can guess what it looks like from areas near it.
Y Combinator's Etacts steals Ballpark's layout
Watch France24 Live Tv | France24 News Online
I completely agree with this articles description of why apple was able to dominate the mp3 world, and haven't heard this as a description before.

Though I have to disagree with his premise about innovation. A product needs to be good no matter what. In fact, a product needs to be great.
If it is innovative and crap, it's just crap.
But that doesn't mean that innovation should be left out of the equation.
Tell HN: Mixergy Interviewing 3 YC Startups— Tuesday at 11am
I know many people manually track what they eat, how much they spend, how long they spend in the gym, which books they read, and which movies they watch on a daily basis. I think it'll just be a matter of time before people make all this information public in a semantic format. When there's enough information with numbers attached to it, everything can potentially become a game. Schell is right in this aspect.

However, I think Schell goes a little over the top towards the end though- won't humans be sick of all the gaming? There are some information they'd want to use to game, other information they want to keep private. Also, I don't think there'd be that many real-world benefits attached to data mined off people: they'd always find a way to cheat then.
Is http://www.ctvolympics.ca/video/index.html available to those outside of Canada?

Because CTV (Canadian company with broadcasting rights to the olympics) really did an excellent job of presenting the olympics this year.
Go get it from a torrent site. It's easily available. No need to miss out.
I have never heard of such an agreement. Considering I'm a Google employee and am posting on Hacker News, I rather hope it doesn't exist.

The reason many Googlers don't use such social tools is, in my experience:

1.) There're still very strict confidentiality requirements about work-related information. Considering that people tend to make a big deal whenever a Googler leaks anything, and that we come in casual contact with many such secrets during our day, many Googlers just find it safer to say nothing. Witness the media firestorm when someone accidentally leaked the Nexus One in a tweet when it was handed out.

2.) Many of us just don't have time. In past jobs, there've been times when I spent 75% of my time on FaceBook and 25% coding. At Google, I've lately been spending about 120% of my time coding.
I think Candes (and/or the journalist) is contrasting sampling in an incoherent basis with the conventional route of compression (sample the full signal/image/whatever, then try to reduce its size). The former is a form of compression, just not the kind we usually do.
I have to believe that a lot of the action is covered with Olympic provided cameras. There are a lot of cameras on track systems, which there can only be one of. There are also a lot of cameras in venues that only hold a single set of cameras; e.g. curling and hockey rinks.

Other than 'backstage' interviews, I suspect most footage is shot by IOC crews.
What makes a game fun?
thanks, glad you liked the slides.
Creately.com - Diagramming Just Got Easier
This is more of a case where you aren't actually using all the information-bearing capacity of your pixels but are actually sampling from a much lower dimensional manifold. This isn't just interpolation and information need not be lost.
Typeface generates fonts from faces
Isn't it maybe a bit of a stretch to go from the hypothetical reproduction strategies of our stone-age ancestors to the gender balance of startup founders?

A much simpler and more informative approach would be to compare the gender ratios of startups in less techy/programming fields. If what you say is correct, the predominance of men should be more or less equal in these.

It's kind of embarrassing to me that whenever these issues come up on forums like this, people immediately start getting into amateur evolutionary psychology. This is basically code for "I like things the way they are; end of discussion."