skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You work in a building full of men who look ridiculous.

Dude, you do realise that "fashion" is just a consensual hallucination, right? I work in Hawaii. Nobody looks ridiculous wearing shorts, they just look... normal. Go back and read what I said about local cultural norms.
Perhaps... but the idea of cross-platform web plugins should not go away in the process. There's still a lot of room for innovation on the web. Let plugins be the prototype, and let HTML eventually adopt the ones that succeed.

Apple is moving in a direction where you cannot write browser plugins.
Yes, I'm familiar with those details of the U.K. system, but even if you spend your first year in US "studying many things not related to your major" you probably still do some core major requirements at a college level of rigor.

But mostly I'm just repeating what I've heard; if that perception is held by others in the schools you applied to, it might help explain your failure to get in their graduate programs (then again, the acceptance rate at the top schools is very low. At MIT it's like 12%? 2.5%? I forget exactly, but I think more like the latter of those two figures).

The comment about real research wasn't linked with anything having to do with the U.K. per se, just that you now have an serious opportunity to do "real" research undistracted by school.

I'd approach professors not as a student pe se but more as a potential research associate (e.g. full time lab worker) who's happy to do coding and the like for free. Make it clear that you're establishing a foundation for your post-graduate study, but focus on what you can do for them.
I think you've just misunderstood the semantics of how jQuery labels it's releases. 1.4 should really be 4.0 for your internal purposes. Point releases can break (and have broken) APIs.

Or are you saying Prototype is more stable to develop on because it's own development is at a near stand still?
What would they counter-sue over?
If you want to know anything more about this system, we are having a get together at PyCon tonight at 10pm in Room F (thanks warner!) and then presenting at the RSA Conference at the beginning of March (search the agenda for "tahoe").
Your ISP will only get a DMCA notice if you were UPLOADING a cracked version of an app -- which you would be via most current p2p, but the vast majority of App Store piracy is hosted on Rapidshare clones via HTTP.
On what grounds? MPEG LA specifically disclaims liability for any patents they don't have in their pool.
"no deal, amatuer" - unknown.
Because the abuse is precisely what makes the ecosystem as user-friendly as it is. They want any iPhone user to be able to pick up your iPhone and have it behave the way they expect. They don't want users to be scared of them the way they are of their PCs. They don't want the massive fragmentation present on Android. They don't want all the coolest software that would otherwise be AppStore-friendly coming out via user-hostile ad-hoc channels.

The beatings will continue until usability improves.
Sorry for aside post but are the original video lectures available online? I could not find them on Stanford Youtube channel.
Unfortunately this approach could create a mess in the future when dynamically reconfigurable computing comes into its own.
Nehe OpenGL Tutorials in Clojure (via Penumbra)
Actually, if anyone has direct control, it's the Secretary of the Treasury. And as we learned from the confirmation hearings, he doesn't know how to pay his taxes any better than the rest of us.
EFF's Checklist for Digital Book Rights
The default file uploader widget in almost all of their apps.
glBegin(GL_QUADS);
glVertex3f(1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f);
glVertex3f(-1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f);
glVertex3f(-1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f);
glVertex3f(1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f);
glEnd()

Becomes

(draw-quads
(vertex 1 1 1)
(vertex -1 1 1)
(vertex -1 -1 1)
(vertex 1 -1 1))

Thanks to Zach Tellman's wonderful Penumbra, http://github.com/ztellman/penumbra

Please fork and port more Nehe tutorials!
That's true. Flash has served us well over the years but it's just not needed any more.
I think the other area where AAS makes sense is in distributed algorithms, there is a genuinely large amount of work in writing parallel versions of algorithms and they also require clusters.
Google already maintains a large number of copies of YouTube videos, one for each quality level and now they've been adding h.264 and they may have some special ones for different devices I don't know about. Asking for one more in a codec that they own is not much to ask.

Not quite true. They have the following from what I've seen:

1) fmt=6 FLV with ffmpeg ~350kbps (legacy)

2) fmt=18 H.264 Baseline ~500kbps, now with x264 (iPhone support + current default)

3) fmt=22 720p H.264 High with x264, ~2.2mbps

4) fmt=somethingorother 1080p H.264 High with x264, ~4.5mbps

Note that options 3) and 4) don't exist for the vast majority of videos, and thus likely don't cost much disk space. Option 1) is being phased out. Their primary default is 2), a single format that works in Flash, on iPods, on iPhones, and on many mobile devices. They could have saved 30-50% on bandwidth by offering an H.264 High stream for PC viewers, but they didn't because it would have required they keep around a separate stream.

Any argument that Youtube should keep around a separate format for some Purpose X has to confront the fact that Google has thrown away staggering quantities of bandwidth explicitly to avoid offering a separate format.
Interesting...

The guy crashed his plane at 10am that day. Might this article have been the final straw?
Oh, so it's artificial flow. Great.
They have the nuclear option -- refuse licenses of the in-pool patents to anyone licensing an out-of-pool patent. Most of the patents involved are unusable independently -- you have to license a chain of predecessors.

There's a reason why patent owners just join the pool when they discover they're eligible for a nice easy income stream.
Is there an end to the process? Is there some "omega resource" for which cheaper substitutes can never be found?
A Haskell Journey
And to reduce the 700Kloc to 300K.
Is it correct that (1) is VP6, not h.263?
No, it's H.263. As far as I know, Youtube never used VP6. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1132933 for some possible reasons why.
"What Is It You Do Again?"

This one is always a big pet peeve of mine. Taglines need to describe what you do, not how awesome you are. I hate seeing ones like "Together. Create. Share." or whatever. I'd much prefer "Create slideshows with a group." or something similar.
Bespoke = designed for you, made-to-measure = existing design made to fit you.
I would agree if the brand would really be so strong. I created this Startup School before even knowing about the ycombinator startup school - as it is unknown in Germany. Plus there is many Startup Schools all over the world that existent before the ycombinator startup school ;)
Car Bibles
I agree with you, I was just interested in the bit about the code and GEB. That said, earlier in the summary the FBI does lay out some decent evidence of guilt. DNA testing shows the anthrax almost certainly came from a flask in Ivins' possession. He also spent an inordinate amount of time in the lab in September and October of 2001. There are still some loose ends (like the amount of silica in the anthrax) but I'm guessing the FBI doesn't want to say, "There was probably someone else and he made a clean getaway."
I think it makes more sense if you think of the perceived difficulty of a challenge being relative and linked to the skill level for a particular person. That is, for a person with low-middle skill there is a challenge level that creates anxiety. Give that same challenge to a lower skill level person and it will create even more anxiety. So the scales are different between people of different skill level. I don't know if that helps at all.
This, by the way, is the reason why even non-litigious companies tend to accumulate huge quantities of patents: they serve as potent weapons against anyone attempting to sue them.

Equally, it's why productless patent trolls are so dangerous: since they don't make any products, such patent portfolios are useless as deterrence against them.
Got some really good leads for my personal projects from this one. Thanks.
Yeah, at least that has multiple independent implementations.

All the On2 stuff just has the one, especially since they only ever released new incompatible codecs instead of improving their older products. Funnily enough that applies just as much to Theora (née VP3), which right now is a only an open standard in theory, not IETF-level reality. There's a few forks of the original On2 code and a transliteration of the decoder to Java for applets (Cortado). I guess people have been working on writing a new DSP decoder, but the whole thing feels like an even worse recapitulation of the ODF lie.
Or the lack of Vorbis encoded media failed to prime the pump for widespread adoption (whereas here, everyone is counting on youtube/follower adoption to do so). Surely the forever-free aspect of the software decoder isn't what held back widespread adoption - it was lack of Vorbis users (which was due to lack of users .. etc)

Still, I'll amend my above plan to include some period of royalty-free hardware. The real trouble is device manufacturers not wanting both On2 and H.264 hardware (it's unfortunate that MPEG-LA won't just step up to the plate with perpetual royalty-free software and make the whole issue moot)
This is IMO the core problem with proprietary-based "standards": even if the formats are opened, people rarely make independent implementations of them and bugs often persist for years before being found.
Kevin Rose's 10 Tips for Entrepreneurs
Wikipedia says: "Tremor, a version of the Vorbis decoder which uses fixed-point arithmetic (rather than floating point), was made available to the public on September 2, 2002 (also under a BSD-style license) [1]".

[1] http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/vorbis-dev/2002-September/00...
Sablan encourages eligible students to attend Junior Statesman Program
Is it true? I would like to know and joint if there is one.
It's true for me but I'm self employed and work on my own projects.. I know quite a few regularly employed people I'd pin this on too, though.

I'd argue that it's due to the structure of work life versus home life. At (office) work, you typically have set hours and a certain set of activities to perform - the reality vs expectations gap is quite small.

In your "free" time, however, you expect to have a good time, yet usually have to wash clothes and dishes, cook food, go grocery shopping, and 101 other dull activities that merely wrap around the occasional fun things like watching a movie, going out, having sex, whatever. The reality vs expectation gap in your free time is gigantic for many people.
That's a good suggestion, and I'll definitely think about it. Early on in the tutorial I'd prefer to keep it as-is for simplicity and to help motivate instance variables. Also, it seems that setting instance variables in controllers for use in views is a common pattern. But switching to content_for at some point might make for a nice example of refactoring. (Good thing the book has tests for page titles. ;-)

EDIT: Come to think of it, this might make for a good exercise.
Most people use a fake plastic knife to get around Scottish restrictions on carrying blades.

A bigger concern is that most sporrans are made out of sealskin, which is effectively impossible to take into the US. The one time I looked at taking my kilt with me to the US I decided it would be much easier to buy an all-leather sporran, even though they don't look as nice.

Here, at least, a full dress kilt is acceptable as 'black tie' in place of a tux.
Not really.. "Bitstreams" are software too, which is why I explicitly included FPGAs in the software category. Purpose-fabbed circuits will always have better performance than reconfigurable ones. Reconfigurable devices with fixed blocks for video coding operations pay royalties; the ones without, don't.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=839288
I've had this theory for a while that successful consumer-to-consumer webapps (Blogs, Forums, SNSes, etc.) are almost never well-engineered.

I came up with it on the cuff at a MetaFilter 10th anniversary party where Matt Haughey was mocking me back for having commented online about how shittily written his site was -- I realized that I probably wouldn't be standing there drinking his beer if he were a better programmer, the site just wouldn't have taken off when it did.

On the one hand you have both LiveJournal and Facebook as examples of big successful apps that were technically terrific very early -- everything else I can think of never got used.

On the other hand you have everything else: Frontier, Movable Type, Blogger, Wordpress, Twitter, PHPbb, vBulletin, Friendster, Myspace, MediaWiki, etc. -- all heaping piles of shit code, some of which had the grace to either be completely rewritten or abandoned en-masse for the next heaping pile.

It's extraordinarily difficult to execute well with users socially and execute well on the engineering.
New Python,PHP,Tcl Recipes by Activestate & O'Reilly
Along similar lines, you can look into the pomodoro technique, which involves a 25min period of work (1 pomodoro) followed by a 5 min break. After 2 pomodoros you typically take a 10 min break.

http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/

Windows (and Mac too) - http://www.focusboosterapp.com/

Mac version - http://pomodoro.ugolandini.com/
Public Praises Science; Scientists Fault Public, Media
In clusters working on large amounts of in memory data, the approach is often to load the data, then move the code (e.g. a java class implementing some data procesing interface) to the data as required, rather than move the data to the code.
At least if it's a library you're not really increasing your chance of failure. Whereas as you add external dependencies, the odds of one of them being down and taking your service with it increases. So you had better thinking about how you handle failure situations gracefully and so on, so the service you call had better be doing something special (e.g. giving you access to some huge dataset) to make it worth that additional complexity.
I think they may have changed their application. It was about three times as long last time I looked at it.
Video lectures are only available for the current quarter (at least that used to be the case) and only for registered Stanford students (or affiliates.) Look up SCPD.stanford.edu to see if that's changed...
A web-focused Git workflow
Spike In Power Grid Attacks Likely In Next 12 Months
It seems to me that the media want stories about what global warming is affecting right now. Which is ridiculous, because the point is what might happen in the future and how quickly we can adapt if the rate of change is high.

Unfortunately other people pick up on the fact that most of what the media report about bad things that have been caused by global warming is rubbish (true, as far as I can tell) and extrapolate this to "proof" that nothing bad will ever be caused by global warming (non sequitur).
http://developer.android.com/reference/java/lang/Compiler.ht...

"The Android reference implementation does not (yet) contain such a JIT compiler, though other implementations may choose to provide one."

I thought that was one of the complaints about Android/Java - the VM runs the code; there's no JIT. That's why the prototype Dalvik JIT that was announced very recently was big news. It certainly wasn't announced in the 90s, anyway.
If they want to be taken seriously they should not make the claim that Theora is as good as H.264 when that is clearly false. Theora is better than H.263, but worse than H.264.

http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo7.html

Check out the last graph on the page: when measured using PSNR, Theora tweaked to the max is roughly 50% worse than x264's default settings.
Has much more to do with use and display.

Ad rate CPMs are good for mobile, use http://admob.com/ (I spent months testing) and integrate it right on top of the user experience.

EG - FORCE your users to see it.

If you have high application engagement (Eg lots of play) you'll earn some decent money.

Average is $3 - 5 CPM (thousands of views) and if you have a sticky game that can boil down to $3+ per uer lifetime value, which is better than app store.
Keep in mind that x264's defaults have quite a few psy optimizations that dramatically decrease PSNR, since by default x264 optimizes for your eyes, not the benchmarks.

This now applies somewhat to Theora as well (in current SVN); they ported over a similar optimization to x264's Variance Adaptive Quantization, which dramatically increases SSIM but lowers PSNR.
It is bizarre to me that the author is cutting down Stack and at the same exact time defending his message (but not his actions). So you really think you'd be writing this piece if he didn't take dire actions, Aaron Greenspan?

I have said it before, but there is a certain point where things are not terrorism or insane but instead revolt and rebellion. I, for one, understand his actions (although I, myself, would not choose to die over money). Perhaps he understood that only making a dumb, cruel decision would give his message weight to appear on major news sites. We do not know.

What exactly should a man that has tried to financially change things, politically change things, and fallen back on trying to avoid getting in trouble do?

In any case, I do not like the IRS and it's veil of mystery. I use tax software because it takes me tons of time to do the paper form by hand and figure out what forms I even need to submit (it still took me around 2 hours to get everything in order to do my taxes and complete them with the software - just personal taxes and no state taxes). What does it say when the IRS Commissioner can't do his own taxes yet this guy was financially penalized for using an accountant to try and get his records right?
> all that matters is power. the distinction you make above can easily be handled in terms of power: someone who can throw you in prison has more power over you than someone who cannot. restricting that to "government" adds blinders.

Since the power to throw me into jail is restricted to govts ....

> of course, java is (probably) the largest oo language, just as the us government is (probably) the largest source of power. but that doesn't stop the more abstract approach from being more useful.

As I've shown, govt power is qualitativively different.

Moreover, you're trying to use "they have power too" to ignore govt power.

And, interestingly enough, almost all of the examples of corporate power are actually govt acting on behalf of govt. And yet, you seem to think that more govt, that ignoring govt power, will solve those problems....

Yes, abstractions are useful. Yours is an excuse to ignore the big power problems of the world.
How to Write a Marketing Plan
Django Deployment Workshop
I'm not quite equating what happened in Texas with war between sovereign states

It's only a matter of scale. Nations have gone to war for less righteous reasons; such as religion or taking stuff from weaker nations.
They're still working in govt or are in Congress. Most of the ones whose terms are up are running for re-election. (Dodd, D-CT, is one of the few who are retiring.)
What happens when you microwave a plastic cup
What happens when you microwave a plastic cup.
Facebook Is the Web’s Ultimate Timesink [STATS]
Boring, indie movies.
Facebook Acquires Contact Importing Startup Octazen
Edit: only $99
Write a Resume the Easy Way With JobSpice
> that is, no company with more than a couple hundred employees --- will show any flexibility on this; they're often legally obligated to have you sign one.

What law(s) obligates them and why doesn't it/they apply to smaller companies?

Yes, many companies have agreements with third parties regarding the proprietary information of said third parties. If you're talking about more than that, please explain.
Domains About to Expire
Just thought I'd drop this offer here. I have a few domains that are going to expire on Tuesday, and I have never gotten around to actually using them. If anyone is interested in getting them from me before they go back on the market, drop a note here and I'll get in touch with you. I'm not looking to make any money off them, just want to give them a chance to see a better use than a spam page.

shoplist.us
losethepen.com
forgetthepen.com

Cheers
Y Combinator Seattle Meetup, Feb 25  
Come by the RescueTime offices at StartPad.org from 6.30pm on February 25 to talk with Harj Taggar from Y Combinator and several Seattle based YC alumni. Harj was a founder of Auctomatic, acquired by Live Current Media in 2008. Tony Wright of RescueTime, Mike Miller of Cloudant, Niall Smart of Echodio and Phil Yuen, founder of TextPayMe (acquired by Amazon in 2006), will also be there.
We'll be bringing in pizza and beers and hanging out all evening to talk about startups and answer any of your questions about YC.

This is a great opportunity for those who have applied, or are considering applying, for the next YC round to tell us more about your application in person and learn about YC from founders who have been through the process.
I'm curious as to what blogging platform you'll consider well engineered. You've already called out Wordpress and Movable Type.
This doesn't really make sense. It's fine for Apple to release their phones a certain way because of those concerns. It's not fine for them to log into my phone and reset everything I've done because it doesn't match their overall vision for the device. It's my phone and I can do what I want to it.

If that doesn't match with Apple's philosophy, they should at least be upfront with the idea that you're leasing the device and that Apple reserves the right to override anything you do to it because it doesn't match their "vision".

If only there was a way Apple could ensure there were no stickers, skins, or markings on individual iPhones. Then they could really make sure no one got confused and thought the iPhone was ugly!
I'm not sure about the others, but one of the interesting things is that wordpress grew out of b2. The code quality in b2 was about what you'd expect given wordpress' initial security reputation.

I find it particularly interesting because you'd expect OSS that will be picked up by others to have good code quality though. Add to that the fact that at the time your typical PHP user probably had more technical competence than most (webhosting, particularly supporting PHP was rarer then)
This would work very well for memory/computation intense algos with relatively small input and output. For example, a semantic analysis engine that accepts a URL and returns the extracted meaning from a web page. Input several bytes. Output less than a k. I think this is totally feasible and worth it as long as customers can monetize the output. To me a service like OpenCalais is AaaS. Sure they have software but the hard part of what they do is semantic analysis.
Continuing on the theme of building game mechanics into our projects... couldn't we do this if we wanted to?

Post-deploy hooks are available for your source control system of choice. You could have your computer tell you "Nice job" for one commit (if automated tests pass), "Keep it going!" for two in an interval, "He's on fire!" for three, "BOOM that's amazing!" for four, etc etc. This would incentivize yourself to do "just one more commit", in the same fashion as Civ and whatever get "just one more turn."

(If doing it over a work day wasn't working for you, you could bump the visualization to your dashboard and create a chain, with one link for every day you do task X. Don't break the chain, as per Seinfeld.)

This assumes, critically, that a commit is a measure of forward progress towards business goals.