skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nokia's the one that's going to ship it, and shipping speaks louder than FUD. For some reason I thought Nokia was funding it too, but maybe their contributions to Mozilla are just patches to the browser.

Thanks for pointing out the ffmpeg VP3 decoder, which appears to have SSE2 optimizations and everything — yet another reason why Mozilla should be linking with libavcodec or GStreamer :)

I remember that the original libtheora alpha release was just the On2 BSD-licensed code dump rearranged with the copyright strings changed and working makefiles, but I can't find the original On2 tarball anywhere to confirm that. I just did some spelunking into their old SVN repo, the first few commits seem to be him checkpointing as he's working his way through munging the original files. The alphas just add library glue and their parochial container format fuckedness. The library infrastructure changes a lot more towards 1.0 but it doesn't look like any of the real codec implementation changes at all. http://svn.xiph.org/trunk/theora-old/

There being nothing absolutely forcing independent rewrites just means everyone sticks with one really shitty implementation they don't understand very well, instead of there being a whole spectrum of implementations competing with one another and calling them on their shit — that's how you get implementations like x264. DarkShikari has sassed the crappy commercial h.264 implementors, but he's got vitriol for the single-implementation proprietary codecs.

I'd love to see if someone can find anyone that really used VP3 pre-Theora, because I can't. There's announcements about them making the decoder available through various channels, and then they open-source it a year after 3.2 was shipped. The only thing I can find is this press release touting On2's use of it on a dot-bomb contract: http://www.on2.com/index.php?id=486&news_id=399

VP4 and VP5 fared only a little better, getting distributed in Winamp and Realplayer and getting shelved after a year. VP6 made them huge piles of money after it was bundled in Flash. VP7 got used for Skype's video chat. VP8 appears to complete the circle, with nobody using it that I can find.

Windows 7 was released a year ago. MS is shipping IE9 for Vista, so all those users will probably get the DirectShow codec. I think if you get it if you install the Zune software (it's always been supported on the hardware), or the Media Center stuff from the last several years. The Xbox 360 has shipped it since 2007.

I knew Microsoft were MPEGLA members (they have a huge stake in the VC-1 pool, after all), but I hadn't noticed that they have a big stake in the AVC/h.264 pool as well (Apple has one patent in it).
I believe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytocin pill cures psychopaths.
I used vim for lisp for some time. That worked fine actually.

Of course I didn't do things like emacs-slime, so, I always have a repl open in a separate window. ':set lisp' along with 'set lispwords=...' worked fine.
I don't think it matters if you live in a multi-generational household as much as it matters how much you interact with your extended family.

I live with my wife and child only, but I still have to constantly have to fend off "suggestions" from aunts, uncles, and my in-laws (especially my in-laws). "Buy a house", "drive this car", "look for a job at...", "go on holiday to...". In many ways I think I have the worst of both worlds - limited support from family because they live in a different city, but plenty of interference.
It should be noted that there's a serious effort to institute an income tax in Washington state.

It's probably hard to predict the likelihood of success, but today we can safely say it'll happen a lot sooner there than in Texas.

The gross receipts business tax is obviously necessary to capture money from Boeing in years it's not profitable, and didn't hurt eternally profitable Microsoft when it moved there (from Arizona, the home of the personal computer), but it can be a real pain for a not yet profitable startup and obviously raises the level for ramen profitability.
You're saying it's anti-competitive for companies to act in accordance with their own interests rather than go out of their way to support their competitors?
I don't normally mention this stuff, but since you asked...

* I started at university when I was 13.

* I won the Putnam Competition.

* I hold a world record for computing Pi.

* My bsdiff binary patching tool is used on tens of millions of computers and has saved several hundred human-years of waiting for software updates to download.

* I found a security bug in an Intel CPU. (Osvik/Shamir/Tromer also found it, but I was first, by a few weeks.)

* I'm the Concertmaster of an amateur symphony orchestra which is performing the Verdi Requiem tomorrow.
I care deeply about it because we have to live in a world where companies can say they own your product because it looks like theirs. They will make broad claims and see what sticks. If the company attacking you is big enough, that usually means doom for you.
I'm European and I agree somewhat with the author. It appears that Americans are indeed more focused on the one big platform or opportunity, whereas Europeans are more focused on the smaller untapped opportunities. It's a broad and sweeping generalization of course, and should be taken with a grain of salt.
It's really going to be an interesting twelve months for the EU. Considering the recent special report on Germany in The Economist, there are several possible viewpoints on the merit of Germany as a model-citizen for the EU.
It's quite extraordinary that this hasn't been done before.

I guess most people have thought about it but probably thought, there probably is a reason for this.

Just goes to show, never assume things can't change.
IE9 is bundling the codecs (otherwise it wouldn't work on Vista). Mozilla is bundling codecs. Google Chrome is bundling codecs. Opera bundles codecs on all platforms but Linux.

Apple gets you to install Quicktime on Windows if you want video in Safari.

Any thoughts on why you'd want to support every codec under the sun (and pay licence fees for most of them) if the market externalities and network-effects lead to only one codec being used? Why argue for "choice" if you know that will lead to people being forced to support one particular codec?
Grate ferro Roma
Those interested in the topic may also want to read this:

"Why we’re using HBase (at Adobe)": http://hstack.org/why-were-using-hbase-part-1/

It is a fine "war-story" of picking new technology and making it work without losing data.

(It was submitted yesterday by the author here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1196382, but got killed with 5 points, which baffles me. I found it when puzzling out why my submission today was instantly killed, with a different item id ...)

[P.S. minor bug report: my 'dead' item has a working link to the article, which it perhaps shouldn't. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1200833]
Pantaloni alta visibilità Roma
50% news users and 50% returning is supposedly good. It means you are getting new users (converted from traffic) while at the same time your previous users are returning to use the app.
I'm not sure I agree they really make things slow as such.

I'm more interested in the 3rd party monitoring aspect of them, how much of my information do they store on the way though exactly.

I agree, a universal markdown syntax would be good... or perhaps just drop "http://
Thanks, that's a lot clearer than it used to be.

I had found the 1099s a while back, but they stopped showing the whole picture after the Mozilla Corporation was created to take the revenue.
Two former Madoff computer programmers indicted
Two-part epoxy.
Grand Visions and the VC Model
How do you define and capture relevance across the web?
Why India Loves Facebook
There's plenty more information out there about Mr. Pincus. He's not the monster he was made out to be.
i'm curious about this - anyone use it? it looks like it's a "privacy spin" on a service that will be sold to advertisers as improving accuracy / response (because people are indicating what they do want to receive advertising for). so i guess if you're in the win-win camp it might be quite cool.

if you're in the cantankerous bastard camp, I just installed the RequestPolicy plugin and it's pretty neat - http://www.requestpolicy.com/
#3. Save a file you edited in vim without the needed permissions

:w !sudo tee %

I've used vim for a long time, but didn't know about this one.
Yes. Why would acting in their own interests be assumed to be pro-competitive?

The "invisible hand" that turns corporate self-interest into something socially beneficial only works when there is free competition and erecting barriers to entry (by excluding those who can't or won't pay patent fees) is by definition anti-competitive.

This is why countries like China are pushing for royalty-free standards. Even communist countries understand that open standards and competition are a benefit.
NBP: Broadband for everyone by 2020, but who foots the bill?
If it's a good shoe, I take it to a cobbler. But shoe repair requires more tools and expertise than reattaching a button.
The Oldest Trees on the Planet
March Madness: Sports Facts, Stats, & Betting
March Madness is upon us; all around the United States college basketball teams have geared up for upcoming tournaments. The tournament structure is pretty complicated so we have created simple to understand infographic going over the basics and some interesting facts about the tournament.
20 New York City Startups You Need To Watch
I ended up installing this, which is pretty neat - http://www.requestpolicy.com/
Ask HN: List tasks you outsource and to whom? 
Lets help each other be more efficient and list any task that you outsource and how. Thanks everyone!
How lobbyists are keeping the public in the dark about broadband
Nokia is almost certainly not going to ship any Theora or Vorbis support in any of their devices. This would be a substantial turnaround in their previous stance which their developer and open source relations folk have made clear is set as policy at a much higher level than they can do anything about. Maybe Meego will change this but I doubt it.

In the meantime though they have one of the few mobile systems where you can add your own system level code to support video and audio codecs of your choice so it's not all bad.
Not working in Chrome for me...
Couple of little nits - 5. and 8. are not bash specific and neither are event designators, these work fine in tcsh and zsh. I think caret substitution might have actually come from the *csh world. Not that big of a deal since bash is so prevalent these days but hey, a pedantipoint is a pedantipoint.
The DSP code was written for Mozilla Fennec to use, and the only platform using Fennec is the Nokia N900. Has Nokia shipped the decoder yet?

I just found that libavcodec implementation today — It looks leagues better than the Xiph implementation, but none of the FOSStard projects I've seen use it — most link directly with liboggplay, or if they're transcoders use ffmpeg to decode the input to feed to libtheora.

That's just the thing: I can't find a source to the contrary. On2 never bragged about licensing VP3 to a customer, just distribution of the decoder through Apple and Real's auto-download mechanisms, and one in-house hosting/consulting deal with TheStreet.com in 2000.
I have a little shop at my mall which charges $1 for button repair. The button is $1 extra.

They also repair pants cuffs, which is nice because my bicycle seems to have a taste for them.
IronPython vs cPython benchmarks
* I built a distributed search engine for my final year college project, when my teachers and friends told me I was taking on too much. It survived two project mates walking out, and some rather dumb ones pushed in. I got a 97 for it, and consider it THE accomplishment of my college years.

* Wrote an indexing program in C that crashed a Netware network. :P

* I've read the Bhagwad Gita, the Koran, the Bible and the Tao Teh Ching. I am still an atheist.

* I've written a complete IM module at work when drunk. Oddly, this has been considered one of my better contributions to the project in that company.

* I've completed reading five Asimov novels in the course of a single day.

* I am an Indian, yet can't speak any Hindi. I have lived in the Gulf, yet can't speak any Arabic. My folks speak Konkani at home, yet I cannot speak that either. Dad knows Portuguese, yet I somehow never picked it up from him. Strangely though, I can speak French, Japanese, Quenyan and am on my way to studying Sanskrit.
I'm a European and I know there are narrow-minded people over here as well.
Seize the day, they say; why is it the day seized me?
Depends on your audience. For a lot of in-house applications, that wouldn't be much of a problem. But if you are trying to build a new social media web site, it might well be.
Yes that would be nice, something like the search riddles http://www.searchlores.org/cgi-bin/search?query=riddle&s...
Not specific to your issue, but rather to the use of closures where OO folks would use objects.

The thing is, a lot of the time you need sideband data. A simple closure isn't always enough. Perhaps you need configuration options, or you need names for diagnostics, or you need to monitor throughput statistics, etc. A closure is a clumsy interface when it's overloaded to do multiple things. You end up with some kind of variadic argument list and having to switch on the first or more arguments - you basically end up writing a method dispatch routine.

So in this specific example, I would suggest that using a closure may turn out to be the wrong choice longer-term. I'd probably prefer a base class with a virtual method, and a concrete descendant which delegated the action to a closure. That way you get the succinctness of a closure when that's sufficient, but you also get the future proofness that a base class provides - you can add more functionality in the future, but without breaking previously defined implementations.
After using Haskell for a while, that seems to be partially true. It also seems to me that Haskell is especially well-suited to certain kinds of problems. For example, writing parsers with Parsec is very easy. That may be primarily due to the built-in syntax for monads, which would make that advantage fairly easy to duplicate in Lisp.
Good points, I like being corrected where appropriate.
It's just an opinion piece, stop getting your knickers in a twist. Of course it's full of hyperbole.
This is also an interesting read in this respect: http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100315_germany_mitteleuropa...
> Every major operating system on the market today (including Linux) has a media framework with support available for H.264.

thats what i meant by support via the OS. sorry i thought that that was clear?

linux generally doesn't ship with h264 and html5 offers video features beyond just embedding a video smack on a page. really think its more complicated then a "pure ideological decision".

but thanks, point taken and i will try to make my point more clear in the future.
I once saved a five year old from drowning in six feet of water. Boiling water. While naked.

(OK, technically speaking ~45C, not boiling.)
IE9 could always install it as a DirectShow filter on Vista like the Media Center stuff does. Google Chrome loosely bundles ffmpeg, which you can just swap out with one that isn't denuded. I don't think you can install Safari on Windows without Quicktime.

You'd ideally support every codec under the sun by falling back to the platform's API. That "choice" would probably lead to people being forced to support one particular codec (h.264 for now), but it means that they don't have to pay for it. It also takes it out of the total control of the browser vendors — so it provides a path for Dirac/etc. to take off in the future.

There's also the ability for minority codecs to persist without gross transcoding (you can always fall back to a download link + VLC, which is what you had before). One of the worst things about the Theora debacle is that nearly all of the video out there is extra-lossily transcoded from more efficient files.
Would the actions of the Digital Economy Bill be tolerated “offline”?
Afaik, adoption studies support that psychopathy is inherited (to a large part) genetically.
Am I the only one that finds it ironic that both this article and an article titled (though I haven't read it), "Why theatre was the most important class I ever took", are on the front page at the same time?

I figured the theatre paper was on a subject related to a different article the other day (the title of which I've forgotten, but it was about a particular subculture fitting in to regular society by faking the role), but this was something I found rather interesting and ... ironic?

[as an immediate side-note upon starting to read the theatre article: it doesn't seem to be on what I expected it to be, at all; furthermore, I'm finding the other subject quite interesting]
Back-porting features is great for providing a consistent user interface to users but it doesn't really reduce the testing overhead that fragmentation causes. Maybe Google is big enough or smart enough to handle it, but I think it's a drag on the platform no matter what.
I don't understand this.

Smaller untapped opportunities are only small until they gain traction. There is no end to browser based games right now.

Facebook started small, Twitter started small in fact most companies start small.

The difference is just as likely that European companies haven't understood the power of using large ecosystems to leverage their own business. Instead they are puritans who want to create their own companies.

When ecosystems like ebay, FaceBook and Twitter appear why shouldn't people take advantage of that?

Business opportunity is business opportunity. It is very few peoples luxury to create something truly unique and in that game Europeans aren't really making any dent's in the universe.
Side note: I got curious about this bit

Have you seen Ibis Reader [http://ibisreader.com/] ? This thing installs from the web, sure, but it installs. You don’t need to be online to use it read your books.

I thought it might be similar to the FireFox EPub reader plug-in ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/45281 ), but for KHTML/Webkit based browsers, and dug a bit on the website.

It may well be, but I found no way to download the plug-in (with Firefox). Apparently the makers want to channel the book finding (in Feedbooks, etc.) through a login in their own site. I suppose that then the plugin gets loaded, but didn't test that.
Of course, that means you have to bring your clothes to the little shop, leave them there, then come back and pick them up again. These transaction costs dwarf the monetary cost. But sewing on a button takes no more than a minute - and shirts almost always have a matching spare button attached, either to the inside label or inside the hem.
What to Do When Gmail Overflows
This part: Hitler would never have been satisfied with a partial victory, so the whole assumption is wrong. The victory also would not look like the Germans won over France in the second world war or the allied forces won over Germany.

Hitler wasted no time. When he came into power he soon killed his opposition, put them into labor camps or, later, send them to the front of the war. As soon as he got into power he started to go after the jews. As soon as he conquered Poland, they started the killing and when the front of war moved on, behind that they installed the concentration camp to get rid of disabled people, prostitutes, communists, priests, homosexuals, jews, ... Either they were killed immediately or, the stronger, were put to work - they were killed through working under extreme situations. They were enslaved.

Hitler and Nazi Germany installed a system to get these people and to bring them to the concentration camps.

Hitler also was not more unpopular after Germany lost the war. It took two generations to get rid of that. Children or grand children who questioned the doings and motives of their fathers and grand fathers. It took a lot of discussions, research, documentation to understand what happened and why. This understanding did not happen over night and not because Hitler won the war. But because people found out that there were millions of dead people, there were jews that were missing, where were they? The children asked their parents and they were not satisfied with the answers. What did the German army do in Russia? Research was needed to go to the truth and it was ugly.

Again: Hitler did not want to win some war and some partial victory.

He was talking about the 'Endsieg': the final victory.

You are making an assumption that is not in line with Hitler's goals. He would not have been satisfied with anything less then the Endsieg. Hitler was no rational politician - he was a racist and mass murderer.

There is also nothing positive to say about Stalin and all the other criminals from the past. That there were more like Hitler does not make him 'relatively bad'. He was bad. Period.

'What if Hitler did this or that?' is plain wrong if you don't understand his motives, his deep hate of other 'unworthy' races, etc. A compromise - that would be either tactics (like history shows his compromises were) or not Hitler.
Even if they keep up the FUD, they are shipping an open platform with an official Mozilla Fennec build, so Mozilla could implement the same kind of codec-downloader that they did for Flash.
It's comments like this that make me wonder about the wisdom of "Release early, release often". It's seems relatively clear that Amazon will address the glaring deficiencies of the app as it currently stands, but meanwhile, they're copping an absolute beating over it...
Conspiracy theory placed in the middle of a Qt tutorial
If you sell a million bottle of cola a day with your logo on it, how much extra per logo impression are you paying between a 50$ and 50K$ logo?

I agree with your later points, but saying overspends here "Coca Cola overspends and has custom everything." is wrong and inconsitent with what you sya later.
A very American perspecive :-)

There are millions of opportunities that will never make you fuck-you money, but will afford you a decent living. They are often less risky because there's less competition. Patio11's Bingocardcreator is an example. No matter how much traction it gets it'll never be the new facebook. Europeans seem to be happier with these kind of opportunities, while Americans go for the homeruns.
it's useful for the genius!
Is 45C hot enough to cause injury? (Assuming you don't drown, that is.)
Michael Lewis’s ‘The Big Short’? Read the Harvard Thesis Instead
Google issues statement on Nexus One sales
Here's a link to the actual thesis:

“The Story of the CDO Market Meltdown: An Empirical Analysis.” - http://www.hks.harvard.edu/m-rcbg/students/dunlop/2009-CDOme...
Recently (partial) alternative of slime for vim as brought up here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1193638
Not when, in the case of two formats, the formats aren't competing and one, in fact, includes the other.
In order to get a job in this industry, you don't need knowledge, but mainly a degree. That said, people work for their degrees. There are only x billionaires out of 100million x person and y millionaires out of 10million y person.

Being a millionaire or a billionaire doesn't require an MBA, degree, high school... or any kind of education. It requires skills, luck, determination...

Nevertheless, people will still work toward getting one: 1 out of 5000 get rich, but 4500 out of 5000 get a job. MBA won't make you rich, but with little skills it will probably get you a decent job.
I've gotten away using a tube of silicone sealant and a hammer (don't ask)
I created an appointment system and all its related subsystems from scratch in 7 days. The online part is on passport.com.ph