skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Chromium on Linux uses ffmpeg's (open-source) h.264 implementation. Firefox doesn't use it because they are making a policy stand, "Theora or nothing." Technically, h.264 would work fine, it would just be illegal to distribute in countries with software patents.

mplayer also uses ffmpeg's h.264 code, and I am sure VLC does too. In other words, every open-source video application that can play h.264 uses an open-source h.264 implementation.

Remember, there are no technical problems with h.264. It is a good algorithm with plenty of good (and Free) implementations. The problem is that the group that patented h.264 wants money every time you encode a video with h.264, upload a video encoded with h.264, and play a video with h.264. Because the Internet will suck when this happens, people are trying to ensure it doesn't. (Killing Adobe will help, because they make money from giving away h.264 licenses that they already paid for, and hence are demanding that Theora not be in the HTML5 spec they are writing.)
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 124 - A Rack On A Stick
Sometimes when I'm doing some calculations I know the O(n^3) algorithm will run fast enough, but I also know that if I use the O(n.log n.log log n) algorithm then my laptop battery will last measurably longer. That matters on long journeys without power outlets.
A preview of ClojureQL
Mozilla Ubiquity dies an incredibly quiet death
I've seen worse apologies, but the weaselly wording still leaves a bad taste in my mouth:

He learned of "the challenges" fabulis faced.

He apologizes for the "confusion about the status" of the account.

He regrets the "unintended message" that his employees "may have" conveyed.

That's weaselly. I know he has to cover the company's ass, but the fact is that the "challenge" was that one or more citi employees are homophobic shits who should be removed from a position that gives them this sort of authority now that they've demonstrated their lack of good judgment in this area.
This is great news. Congratulations to Fabulis for getting this resolved, and props to Citi for recognizing a grievous error and moving rapidly to correct it.

I'd like to say that Citi's callout of LGBT support was smart. The gay community and their supporters is a massive group, and quite sensitive to this kind of bullshit. We're also in activist mode right now, so being perceived as anti-gay can be rather costly for a big business.
Scapegoat comment ... if you upvote the submission and don't want me to get the karma, feel free to downvote this comment to balance it out.
I think you misinterpreted my "pants" comment. My point is, if you can create 5 jobs in the US, you shouldn't need anything, except perhaps a clean criminal record, to get a visa. You certainly shouldn't need the "sponsorship" of a "super angel investor".

Please stop taking this so personally. I'm not. How could I? I have no idea who you are.
Hopefully Google starts selling a developer version. I want one.
i personaly avoid to code for startups because of previous experiences with crazy hours and insane amounts of work.

(But i do plan to hire some people soon and demand that from them)

The point is that a better compensation migth, well, compensate this.
Why do you think they bought you guys then? I'm assuming the product has been shut down, and the team has since moved on - what did they get out of the acquisition?
Google User Experience Research
Hg - 8.1s/clone, 1.5s/pull
git:// - 8.7s/clone, 2.8s/pull

Again though, I was curious if you had some numbers. I'm not here to argue which is better, because, really, it's a subjective argument.
If your goal in a startup is to become rich, become a founder.
> Decentralization may be nice, but it's generally much less efficient.

Depends entirely on the business in question and the technologies and human factors involved. There's a reason most dentists work in small practices, but electrical power and processors are made in large capital-intensive plants.
Any word on which posts/content were deemed inappropriate by the compliance officer?

All in all, this is probably a net win for this little startup. They got tons of great free PR thanks to Citi's incompetence, and it was resolved quickly enough that Fabulis probably suffered no real damage from the incident. A lot more people are now familiar with their site and brand than would have been otherwise. It'd probably behoove them to hurry up and launch their site before the mindshare fades away with time.
Paul Graham ranked No. 11 in Bloomberg Businessweek Top Angel Investors list
This American Life did an excellent piece of "Rubber Rooms" (mentioned in this blog post). It's quite an eye opener to the sorry state of the NYC public education system:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=128... (see act one)

Let me also qualify this by saying I have the utmost respect for educators there. I have a close friend that teaches 4th grade in Harlem--some of her stories are pretty unbelievable.
Opening the Internet — with an Axe
I wouldn't work for a startup without a significant amount of equity - startups are infamous for extended crunch mode, a complete lack of work/life balance, etc.

Sorry, if that's the expectation I think I rightfully expect at least a "best case" scenario of getting rich.
Daring Fireball: Tits and Apps
I guess I don't see the point. Windows isn't hard to learn, neither is OS X.

Exactly. Apple fanboys have gone from "Macs are easy to use", which is largely true, to "all existing computers are unusable unless you're a total loser geek", which is rather less so.

And to the extent that the iPad is easier to use, that's not because it denies control to advanced users. Mac OS X wouldn't be easier for novices if Terminal.app were removed and Apple prevented all other access to the Unix shell.
Hmm, two on there I use:

1. Vitamin E for nerves. Not nervousness, but things like a little random twitching, especially right below an eye. Clears it up in a few days.

2. Melatonin for sleep regulation. Never more than 3 days straight, but it's a really nice reset switch for sleep if I've been hacking late nights recently.

Of course, ymmv..

(edited for formatting)
Expanding Our Commitment to Facebook Credits
Should your source code be in one folder or should it be nested?
Err, sorry to interject, but could you e-mail me at anfedorov@gmail.com about a question I had about your comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=940485 pls?
i'm waiting to see his cap table. my guys get paid market rate, i'm paying myself less than a teacher; the least i've ever made in the last decade. i also work about 20-30 hours more than my team.
I'm pretty sure that position, if fleshed out, would seem crazy to me. Can you try and flesh it out?

Basically, I don't see how being employed by 'the public' means that contracts that you agreed to and signed can be ripped up at will by the other party.

Don't get me wrong, I think there is something wrong with the situation NYC finds itself in, but this anti-union response seems like a non-sequitor.
Have been using Ubuntu on HP notebook exclusively for the past 2.5 years. Programming with GCC + Python + several browsers and multiple web servers.

Apt manages all the upgrades, patches fine. Upgraded from Ibex to Jaunty to Karmic without having to re-install anything. Just follow the release information.

Although the HP has only 1.5GB RAM, single 1.8GHz Celeron. I run the notebook screen and an external 22" LCD without problems across 4 desktops and typically have 10+ apps running concurrently. Gimp & OpenOffice are fine for typical uses. With more up to date hardware you won't be disappointed.
The Bechtolsheim one had some great info.

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/10/02/0225_angel_investors...

> As an angel investor, he’s famous for cutting a $100,000 check to Google’s founders even before they had chosen their now-famous name. In an e-mail, Bechtolsheim confirmed that the check has netted him more than $1 billion.

> Bechtolsheim also expressed a sober perspective on the emergence of former Google employees as angels and entrepreneurs. "When people are part of a new company that gets very successful very quickly, such as Google (but this effect is by no means limited to Google), they sometimes confuse the root of this success and incorrectly assume that the success was due to their own actions. They then want to translate this experience to other opportunities, either in the same or in related spaces, which in some cases may turn out, but in most cases will fail, just like the majority of all VC investments fail. … The only thing different about the Google mafia compared to other similar periods in history is that more money was made at Google by more people (and more money will be lost here)."
I call your bluff. Worrying about cost of a state change of 32 flip flops on a die with millions of transistors is patently ridiculous. No way could you measure that. No way.

That said, your core point is valid: not choosing the right sleep mode can hurt badly, avoiding polling is important, above all avoid busy loops. On many architectures avoiding FPU or vector instructions can put the units into a power save mode, etc...

But "use as many zeros as possible in arithmetic" can't possible be right.
An interesting approach but it sounds like it really boiled down to the backlinks you got as a result of the TC article ... and having an existing (if not extensive) relationship with Arrington. While that's definitely valid it's a combination that's out of reach for most startups.

I would have to say for me personally word of mouth outranks SEO enormously at this (early) point in my startup. To me SEO is about getting every joe typing whatever into Google, word of mouth is securing a lot fewer but a lot more notable users.

Only one significant blog (and only significant to casual game devs) has written anything about me in the month since I posted here asking how guys launch startups. And in terms of link creation ... just scraper blogs stealing that guys content really. But word of mouth has led to some of the biggest names in the industry using my service now.
It's official. Quote from a Citi representative: "I apologize for any confusion about the status of your account and the Fabulis website. Whatever statements that were made by any Citi representative related to the content of your website were inappropriate and made in error, and I will review in detail what happened. You have my firm commitment on this point."
When I first read this, I interpreted the parenthetical as editorial, since I didn't really see anything in the OP that called out OSX specifically in this regard. The original thread is mostly lumping all non-Plan9 stuff together as being more supported than Plan9, agreed.
Yeah, in particular, Citi made it very unclear if "the challenges" Fabulis faced were in fact related to its blog postings, and what Citi's policy on that is. Was that merely a misunderstanding and the account was suspended for reasons unrelated to a blog? Was it suspended due to the blog but by an employee not acting in line with Citi policy? Or was there a Citi policy on that, and if so, has it been changed?

It seems to have worked out for Fabulis (due in no small part, I expect, to the publicity), but they haven't given enough information for me to be confident that the root problem was solved.
Interesting point!

It would be useful to see this type of analysis done for different countries to see the social diversity.
I don't understand the 'or'. Isn't that what the article is suggesting?
Steve Yegge's appearance in this episode cracked me up to no end.
This is such a bullshit, CYA response. He doesn't in any way address the issue that Citibank, or any one of its employees, can and will freeze any of its customers' cash, for an undetermined length of time, for "noncompliance with standard policies", with absolutely no explanation when it happens.

Until Citibank disclaims any ability to freeze funds unless under court order, they will never have my business. What happens the next time it happens to someone who doesn't have quite so easy access to the media or a story so easily seen as blatantly discriminatory?
Why is this a union issue and not a legal one? In other words, why do teachers need a union to enforce legally binding contracts?
"But if you give an extra $10 million to the folks who fought shoulder to shoulder with you, everyone will feel better about what you accomplished together."

Sorry, I'm not in this to make everyone 'feel better'. And let's say I was, why would I keep anything for myself? Wouldn't giving 100% away give me maximum feel goodness?
I agree, this reminds me of just how good WordPress' apology was recently when they had downtime:

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/wp-com-downtime-summ...

Now there's some non-weasely, honest-to-goodness apologisin'.
That argument works against any sort of unionization. Employees should be allowed to associate in unions, period.
The situations he describes are entirely typical, and he's right to call the founder-takes-all scenario the elephant in the room. Early employees often work incredibly hard and receive a payout that is a thousand times smaller than the founder's. I know because I've been one of those employees.

After being on the wrong end of that deal once, I've decided to never make that mistake again. I'd rather work at a larger company (where I enjoy normal hours, lots of benefits, and 3-4x more $$ of stock every year than I got in 4 years from a startup) or be one of the founders actually winning in the startup game. Right now I'm actually doing both. ;-)
Similar statements could be made about the PayPal Mafia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia
Verizon and Motorola are definitely not helping diversify the customer base with the "bare-knuckled bucket of does" billboard and TV ads with jets and robots. I also find it interesting that Android users seem to be the stingiest (only 21% pay for apps).
Backlinks were huge, but I had absolutely NO relationship whatsoever with Arrington, Jason or anyone else in Silcon Valley. I link to post that explains how we got on TC. It's all perseverance and creativity.

But I agree, that word of mouth and passionate users are absolutely essential. You can still get backlinks from these 'notable users' - they have blogs right?

If you have a product with a viral coefficient approaching 1, you'll be all set. But for the rest of us, backlinks and organic traffic give us a steady base of users to test, iterate and get feedback from.
I wish these sites would take the time to populate the title attribute for images so you can mouseover and see the name before clicking.
OpenOffice, perhaps?
Well, light is a quantum effect, so...

A more accurate way to put it is that long-lived, coherent quantum states appear to play a role in photosynthesis.

This is surprising because in the laboratory this kind of coherence requires super low temperatures.
Thank you for the comments, we are updating the site right now and the next roll out will not be flash on the front page and will be iPhone and mobile device friendly!

Please give us more feedback!
Dan Pink's TED talk on the Science of Motivation shreds the notion of bonuses and performance pay.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

Joe Bob says "check it out."
Data.Seattle.Gov: City serves up feeds to hungry app developers
I think it boils down to one question: When given the chance, would you go for the no-Flash JS tool? I guess they decided people don't actually despise Flash that much.
The gameification of everything
I think a reason the second form may work better is that explains implicitly how the information you provide will be used.
Should We Fear China?
Because the law doesn't automatically enforce itself. It takes times and resources to go to court -- and usually more of each than a single individual has available.
Unionization is not necessarily the problem. The problem is that the public's representatives have no incentive to bargain hard in the public's interest.

I'm not arguing against public schools, but observing that the incentive structure is broken. Administrators of a public school district are hardly held accountable at all, so there's little downside to taking the easy way out and buckling to whatever demands the teachers' union makes. Charter schools seem to manage to strike a compromise, with the administrators and teachers held accountable by the school's stakeholders (usually parents).
Are those names sorted alphabetically? Or by descending number of occurrences? i.e. is JERNIGAN the 2182nd most popular surname? Or the 2182nd alphabetically among the 150436 most common? I ask because it makes a difference of whether or not you actually found the minimum.
No it doesn't.

The public has a choice whether or not it pays private sector union workers. If I don't like the UAW, I don't have to buy GM. I don't have the same choice with public school teachers. I'm forced to pay their salaries no matter what.
This shows the difference in failure management style between Airbus and Boeing. From the article, it seems that Airbus made assumption that the computers will not fail, and if it does fail, it won't be a survivable event. It does deal with sensor errors but no real way of completely ignoring the bad input.

Hopefully Airbus issues an update that allows the computer to fail gracefully. And make it free so there will be high adoption.
On Writing Code
MyHDL - Python based hardware description language
It sucks to visualize public data
Evented programming patterns: Asynchronous methods
Anyone for Perl 6 metaprogramming?
"Feel better" translates to "hire on at all". I don't know how many times I've heard the empty promise of "nothing now, but a share in the company later!" meaning give up a steady paycheck for 2 years to get Surprise! less than 1 years paycheck payoff.
Technically, its a galvanometer.

http://www.clambake.org/archive/books/tsos/sos-18.html
Have you tried lately? You can get any number of chumps willing to gamble. How about the really good ones?
Palm Gets Pounded
Official website is www.ynba.org
Yeah it's sort of a, "You see that blonde, yeah she likes you too . . . okay now you're interested come see me in the morning, cause you're sure as shit going to hell cause she's easy!"
Question for HN - Client/Designer Workflow Webapp
As an owner of a small business design firm I'm always looking for web apps that can help streamline my workflow. At the moment my workflow is done through gmail, with a pretty intense set of labels and filters. I send estimates via email, and wait for replies. I send design 'updates' or ' new versions' via email, and wait for replies. I send invoices via email etc etc etc.

I know there are a few solutions, but I'm having trouble finding one that is SIMPLE enough or deciding if I should take a week to learn the PHP to write my own.

I want simplicity for my clients. I upload an estimate, a new design iteration, an invoice. The client gets an email to log in and view new activity. Client then 'signs-off' to start work, continue work, finish work. Webapp keeps track of history for multiple clients. Webapp has interface for me to easily add new clients and projects.

My question is in 3-parts:
1. Does anything come to mind that has this sort of simplicity and utility?
2. What am I really getting myself into if I build my own? I am an avid entrepreneur, but I've never really got into the bulk of the programmer-centric HN content.
3. Suppose I wanted to try and sell what I create somewhere down the line. What should I know BEFORE I start coding, with this in mind?

I appreciate any time you can take to help me move in the right direction. Perhaps a little project like this may give me skill sets needed for future YComb involvement.

Darren Mills
Digital Shift Design

(with such a small text box, I hope there are no HUGE editing errors, cause I'm clicking submit now!)
I just looked and it actually seems like he picked up posting a bit more than he used to. For most of 2009 and maybe earlier, it was just product announcements and links to his column (which always seemed dumbed down.)
I think this article is partly arguing that employees should do exactly that, although it's nominally pitched at founders and CEOs.

I read it as saying that early employees will not get rich under current compensation packages if the firm is acquired for $50m (the most likely exit), and if they think they will, they're deluding themselves.

I think if it were widely known that early employees at startups that get bought do not make particularly significant amounts of money from the exit, it would decrease the number of people willing to work for startups, or at least, they would demand more up-front salary. A lot of people currently think the opposite is true--- based on the example of the rich early Google employees and such, they have a misunderstanding that early employees of a successful startup typically get significant payouts, while that's actually only true for massive IPOs, not for most exits.
This is really important to me. Every second "lifehack" post is about getting up all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and being productive in the mornings.
But what if you've got 8 hours of boredom/frustration/pointless cubicle existence, a family meal and some kids time to get through before you need to kickstart your brain? How do others manage that (legally, without drugs)? Personally, it takes about 2 hours before I start getting being productive and getting stuck into my side-business (i.e., 10pm)
[Ask HN] When to pay for an OS?
All,

I am slowing growing my startup. I have about 6 CentOS 5.4 servers.

Recently I have been wondering about when should I pay for an OS?

CentOS has worked great for me and it does everything I ask of it. But what about those companies selling distros?

What do I really gain? just paid support?

Suse Enterprise 11 is $899. CentOS is free. (although I donate every year)

I thought about running Novells Groupwise Server which they prefer that you run SLES for that.

I sort of feel lost in a sea of where do I put my hard earned revenue?
This is a big part of the reason I'm doing a startup. I worked for a company pre-IPO (back on the good 'ol days) and saw very little actual cash.

I'm paying for the sins of others now: I have heard nothing but snickers or outright laughter when I offer equity.

Net-net: single founder, no chance of getting any real talent on board (I'm way past the college buddy thing), all taxes and fees, like incorporation, due up front, my wife is about to divorce me because of the stress.

But, I would still rather do the startup than anything else. At least I have a chance to make some big money, whereas that chance is near zero at a job.
and you will reap the benefits.

But the majority of startups expect "start up hours", from their employees, yet there is no stability, no glory (nobody knows your products),
and what's the best scenario? The founders get rich, while the employees get one or two 100k after at least 4 years of work, which will probably never make up for the lost years/health and salary.

Next startup is something I am either founding, or I have double digit equity in it.
Never ever going to settle for 0.1% standard series b equity, or the measly 0.5% series A.

Fuck that.
Actually I think a big dentist-center would be a cool thing. Less money wasted on competition, easier ways for patients to get a specialists opinion if needed, cheaper access to supply, more efficient use of dental technicians / staff in general.

I guess the scale of centralization is the real question.
Forgive my ignorance - can anyone elaborate on what sorts of innovations came from Plan 9, and why it didn't overtake Unix? I'm intrigued, but I don't know anything about it.