skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But the reason why your digital TV shows the correct screen is because the cable transmitted the "digital" bits between your DVD player and the TV correctly. If you have a poorly made cable you will get bit errors. Electromagnetic interference from other A/V equipment could also cause bit errors. A well made cable with twisted pairs, proper shielding (few people do this correctly), and well formed connector crimps will prevent those bit errors. With bit errors, what your awesome Blu-Ray player decodes off of the Blue-Ray disc will not be what is shown on the screen (assuming there isn't bit error correction in the TV, etc.).

And your speakers are playing an analog signal. Cable quality matters even more there.
Memeo Is Bringing A Google Docs Reader To The iPad
Because there's a body of misinformed devs who think jQuery's not JavaScript, or that it's some route around having to learn JavaScript.
The web was made for making information more accesible. Discriminating against users of older browsers by crashing their software doesn't seem very productive to me. And what if 10% of your visitors still use IE6? You're basically giving them the finger and send them to your competitors.

PS. I'm all for newer, better browsers; I myself use FireFox. But content should at least be usable on every browser, that's more important than that the site looks pixel-perfect in those older browsers.
I think that "it either work or doesn't" only if the receiver has some kind of cyclic redundancy check before processing the signal.

My guess is that very few digital A/V systems implement this. Proof of this is the weird sound you may hear on a damaged compact disc, it half works.
I am a dump person!
It's an entirely legitimate concern. But the fault that causes this worry is fundamentally a lack of openess. The solution is to promote openness. To be exact, if the document format was open then there wouldn't be a problem, or at least many orders of magnitude less of a problem.

End users shouldn't have to worry about this because the techies should have figured it out for them. Not only have we failed, there's a bunch of comments here that show that we (techies, as a class) don't even understand the problem.
Shoes and software
Il  sorriso   della iena  serve  a comunicare
I've seen people spend somewhere between weeks and months purely on IE6 support.
The obvious answer is that there’s nothing stopping you from running two browsers. Install Chrome or Firefox and you can access the modern web as well as your legacy systems.
He makes a point of mentioning that he doesn't always recommend that start ups get venture capital funding. Sometimes the pressure to grow from having so much money causes the company to collapse.

I tend to agree with him here. A little funding is good, because it can allow you and your team to work full time. I know that my projects would get done faster and with better detail if I didn't have to work a day job to accomplish it.

Having tread carefully usually leads to better decisions in my experience.
There probably are CRCs run during the decoding process, but CRCs only tell you "yes this is correct" or "no, something went wrong."

There are additional protection schemes that can detect and correct bit errors. Those are probably also run during the decoding process. The problem is that you can only detect so many wrong bits in a given word, and beyond that no correction can be made. That is probably why the damaged disc half works.
Would it be enough to allow the browser to arbitrarily style visited links that occur within the same domain of the current page and force these restricted rules on links outside the domain? Although I don't typically do much with visited links, it seems pretty extreme to limit them so much.

Edit: Nevermind, I forgot that the URL destination can be changed. I guess the browser could force style changes to the links if href is changed, but that might be too complicated. It just seems like there should be a more elegant way to fix the problem than restricting what styles can be set for visited links.
Ask HN: Anyone know how bluecoat mess up with https?
I came across a guy who was boasting about the awesome ability of bypassing https that a web proxy named blueCoat has. The guy was quite confident about what he was saying. This left me shocked even though I knew it can not be breaking SSL but maybe some workaround.

After a bit of research I found I was right but I'm still curious to know if bluecoat can bypass https by _some way_.

Update: BlueCoat web site : http://www.bluecoat.com (I think this is the BlueCoat that guy was talking about)
Dan's Data on this and that and write-protected USB keys
Even better: An electromagnetically shielded, gold plated optical audio cable. Sold at Sears [1].

I stopped buying cables retail a long time ago. My favorite supplier: RiteAV. They're (IMHO) the Amazon of cables. Huge selection, modest prices [2], and great customer service [3].

1. http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_12605_05750807000P?vName=...

2. HDMI cables start at $3.50 - http://www.riteav.com/hdmi-cables-c-141_147.html?osCsid=cjmg...

3. I've never seen another retailer with as high a satisfaction rating: http://www.resellerratings.com/store/RiteAV
Great to see a push for students in the NYC schools to go into the startup world, and trying to lure them away from finance!
the same idea about retail markups applies to these cables as well
Thanks for pointing that out; and the idea does sound similar to BuiltWith.com although this wouldnt really be focusing on the frameworks, web servers, ad-networks, etc. The focus would be more towards marketing/usability/analytics type folks.
HDTV was new enough to me the last time I made a purchase that I assumed an HDMI cable would be in the box. It wasn't and next time I will plan ahead. Not everyone will do that so, so maybe a little business for same day delivery of cables to people would earn an enterprising college student a few extra bucks for beer. It could work where the population is sufficiently dense.
2 hours during primetime is still less than 24 hours, all the time. Hell, Fox News employs a convicted traitor (Ollie North) just becasue liberals don't like him.
I was expecting some comparaison of the renewal interval from users buying cheap cables vs users buying expensive cables.
I think following your heart is the only meaning going somewhere can have.
Its not just about being pixel perfect. IE6 will struggle with a heavily javascript'd up web app.

Newer web apps rely heavily on javascript and css, and it might take you 20% longer to make your site work for 5% of users. Its just not worth supporting in my opinion as the time you spend on IE6, could be spent making much cooler things for the newer browsers.
Early April Fools?

EDIT: or right on time since he is in Australia :)
Are the colors 0026FF and 8026FF the same?

No, they are not. And the difference between blue (0026FF) and purple (8026FF) is a 1 bit error.

You will see an image, but not the image your DVD told your TV to display.

edit: This comment makes a lot less sense with the deleted comment removed.
It's pretty common for IT departments to restrict what can be installed on a computer, so the obvious answer is that there's a lot stopping you.
Yes and no.

I can only speak for myself, but I could see elements of his Six Lessons in my own public schooling. Yes, some of my classmates' souls were basically crushed by public schooling, but I also know some people who were set free, climbed socially, were brilliant/inventive, etc...

The so-called "bad habits" he fears we learn from those six lessons aren't strictly bad at all, but they definitely become habits. We're talking about habits like "school bell" based time segmentation, taking x amount of time to [do work/go to next class/appointment], balancing homework with home life...

These habits could become tools for an employer/government/etc to control you for life (then they would be called "bad habits"), but methodologies like GTD co-opt the habits to return control to your own self-directed free will (and suddenly it's a "good habit".)

Think of public school as being like an API.
I'm kinda old fashioned for my age, but I thought the end of the video where humanity was coerced into cleaning up its act was the scariest part. I disagree with his definition of 'cleaning up its act.' It sounds like he equates 'cleaning up humanity's act' with the small changes, like brushing your teeth, cleaning your room, and eating your vegetables. Is it really to our benefit to have this god watching over us, and we'd better act good otherwise we'll go to hell. I mean, let's be reasonable, no game system in the world is going to end rape, theft, or murder. but what would it change?

Apart from my crotchety rantings, it was nice seeing how many of his ideas of the future seemed to come from Futurama. :)
For places like yours, what we need is a web-browser (probably Webkit/Gecko) that works off a single executable, does not require installation, does not need admin privileges, has no library files, no large caches, does not save to registry, does not have addons, does not write anywhere except for a single file in temp folder. It should check for an admin config file in a specific read-only location and save user config/bookmarks to user's "Document & Settings."

If such a browser existed and explicitly mentioned the above restrictions/features, it would be trivial for most IT departments to put the browsers's .Exe in a read-only network share and put an icon for it on every user's desktop. The problem is that other than IE, every other browser is a pain to setup on a Windows network. I have Chrome installed on a couple of Terminal Servers and it took almost two full days to make it put the cache files in the right places. And I had to write my own script to empty the cache because there is no easy way to automate it. On the other hand, it is very easy to deploy IE7/8 but since many intranet sites have been custom written for IE6, it is not possible to upgrade to other versions of IE. Things break and it's very costly to fix them. I've seen a $400k software system that only works in IE6. The pages don't even load in IE7+ or other browsers. The upgrade to a version that is IE7-compatible is $300k. So for the IT department, it's either IE6 or $300k. Management does not care and should not care about IE6 working for all sites. They need IE6 to work on this expensive piece of software that runs their business.

Despite what people here on HN say, IT departments don't mind users using alternate browsers. Their problem is that Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari aren't easy or even possible to setup in a server environment like IE is. Depending on which user belongs to which department and logs in from which location, I can configure their IE to automatically set homepage, proxy settings, privacy/cookie settings, and lots more. Forget features like these, with other browsers, I don't even get to set the location of the config files and cache folders. When you have 100 people logging on to a terminal server, you need to be able to configure these things or the entire server goes down because some user downloaded a partial 2GB file which is still in their cached folder and now the server is trying to save it back to their user-profile folder.

TL;DR version: Give me a browser that I can setup easily in corporate environment and I will set it up.
I think the point of the "either works or it doesn't" is a comparison versus analog. With an analog signal you could get slightly better results by getting better cables (or worse with worse cables). If you have a poor digital cable it flat out doesn't work. If the cable you're using works, buying a more expensive cable isn't going to make it work any better. Either the 1s and 0s made it from the source to the destination or they didn't.

No one is claiming that there isn't engineering that needs to happen to make a digital signal reliably travel from the source to the receiver.
Ok when it comes to HDMI the goal was to always have good quality. The difference between an analog and digital is that digital ENCODES the information, it either gets there or not. The only thing the cable gives you is bandwidth.

Analog is different. The signal is itself the image, so a poor signal = poor image.

MAYBE if you have a projector projecting onto a movie theater screen will a better HDMI cable matter... maybe? because of bandwidth limitations if the sender is smart enough it might send info at a lower resolution. Other than that I can't see theoretically why a good HDMI cable will help.

Also on my 42'' tv, I've yet to be shown a performance improvement when connecting my XBOX 360 via component or hdmi. It looks identical. And if HDMI is better than component, then I don't see a reason why you would ever need a good HDMI cable unless you are a movie theater and the theoretical problem does exist.

Edit regarding bit errors... Lets assume that the cable you bought is a good quality cable. By good quality I mean most seem to be shielded and not cut and no shorts. This is a reasonable expectation. I've yet to see an argument for buying more expensive super gold plated uber network cables. Hey why is your network cable that handles SO MUCH DATA not gold plated shielded etc.?
Restricting choice can be a good thing
Any site that uses this should be classified as malware. Is this really the sort of relationship web developers want to have with users?

I hate IE6 as much as the next guy, but most people running it don't have the choice. If you choose to be hostile to helpless users subject to poor management, they're going to blame you and your site, not their browser.
This is my favorite page of infrequently asked questions. It's for an outdoor concert hall. Scroll down to see some of the odd questions:

"My father is hard of hearing and although I tell him your system amplifies sound sufficiently for him to hear, he's still afraid he won't hear what's going on. Do you have anything else that can help him out?"

and

"My mother used to perform at Cain Park in the 1930s-50s and hasn't been back since. She'd love to see a show there now, but she's in a wheelchair and doesn't think it would work out, getting her in and out. Is she correct?"

http://www.cainpark.com/facts_faq.asp
Is this a web app or a static site?

If a static site, yes, it isn't too hard. But a web app is another matter all together -- not only working around the issues but stopping you use features that better browsers offer.
I'm not interested in personal finance. I'm interested in business finance.
While I agree with most of what you are saying.

>> but most people running it don't have the choice

how do you know this ?
Actually you've got those two mixed up.

Flippa is the old SitePoint site marketplace (they still keep a marketplace on SP, but not with any site): http://flippa.com/about

And DigitalPoint just uses their own forums: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=52
resume padding.
List of Websites Censored by the Great Firewall of China
Reminder: the censors can be very capricious. What was blocked last month might be working fine now (Wordpress). Yet similar sites may still remain forbidden (Blogspot). This list may not be entirely up-to-date, but it does showcase the kind of content the Chinese Communist Party doesn't want its people to see.

Article 35 of the Constitution of the People's Republic of China states:
"Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration."

Yet... The Internet giveth, the PRC taketh away.

Note to readers in China:
You will be able to view this list, as Dropbox thoughtfully provides access to files via encrypted HTTPS. Attempting to transmit or view this list without encryption will result in your connection being reset.

Apologies if Dropbox or HN becomes blacklisted as a result of this post; the current discussion of Google, China, and censorship should benefit from a more comprehensive look at what exactly is being withheld from Chinese netizens.

For those wanting to help, you can do so in many ways:

Raise awareness of censorship efforts world-wide by copying and redistributing this and similar lists, share them on other social news sites, discuss the issue on your blogs, with your friends, respected companies, and political groups.

Contribute your skills or spare change to projects such as Tor, Freenet, Freegate, Haystack, etc. that provide privacy and security to netizens. Offer encrypted versions of your services; use encryption anytime you can so it becomes the norm, and not "just for criminals."

Volunteer proxies, VPN services, or anything else that can help to open up the Internet to those in need. Create new projects and design new technologies to combat attempts at suppressing access to information.
I'll repost my comment here:

I think there’s also a huge disconnect between the people who are making the software and those who are using the software. We (as programmers) tend to evaluate things in an incredibly methodological way, and care about advanced features, and are willing to take the time to learn bad interfaces in return for “power features.”

But most people are not us.
Thinking about it more, a problem that personally cost me a couple of days was investigating a problem where AJAX calls intermittently fail on IE6. It took a while to find, and was something obscure with keepalives I forget.
Tech's two greatest albatrosses: Microsoft Bob & Apple Cube
> But the reason why your digital TV shows the correct screen is because the cable transmitted the "digital" bits between your DVD player and the TV correctly. If you have a poorly made cable you will get bit errors.

Yes. Which is why the poorly made cable can be said to not work.

> And your speakers are playing an analog signal.

Huh? I've never heard of HDMI cables capable of carrying analog sound.
Reminder: the censors can be very capricious. What was blocked last month might be working fine now (Wordpress). Yet similar sites may still remain forbidden (Blogspot). This list may not be entirely up-to-date, but it does showcase the kind of content the Chinese Communist Party doesn't want its people to see.

Article 35 of the Constitution of the People's Republic of China states:
"Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration."

Yet... The Internet giveth, the PRC taketh away.

Note to readers in China:
You will be able to view this list, as Dropbox thoughtfully provides access to files via encrypted HTTPS. Attempting to transmit or view this list without encryption will result in your connection being reset.

Apologies if Dropbox or HN becomes blacklisted as a result of this post; the current discussion of Google, China, and censorship should benefit from a more comprehensive look at what exactly is being withheld from Chinese netizens.

For those wanting to help, you can do so in many ways:

Raise awareness of censorship efforts world-wide by copying and redistributing this and similar lists, share them on other social news sites, discuss the issue on your blogs, with your friends, respected companies, and political groups.

Contribute your skills or spare change to projects such as Tor, Freenet, Freegate, Haystack, etc. that provide privacy and security to netizens. Offer encrypted versions of your services; use encryption anytime you can so it becomes the norm, and not "just for criminals."

Volunteer proxies, VPN services, or anything else that can help to open up the Internet to those in need. Create new projects and design new technologies to combat attempts at suppressing access to information.
Yes it depends on the way you handle the response of the CRC, you could say "give me the data I don't care" or "please try to read it again it's wrong".

In my opinion that is just the proof that it's not as simple as "it just works or not" but rather : depending on muptiple factors such as error correction and the way your algorithm works on the receiver it may "half work" no matter what kind of cable you plug in.
Because it is basically a glorified frontend (as far as pdf to other formats conversion is concerned) for pdftohtml. It treats every line as a paragraph, can't intelligently decide on what is a chapter heading etc. The problem I'm describing is AI hard, it can't be done be some rule based matching. I know that Calibre has some regex based rules for finding chapters etc. but that is way too hard and only solves part of the problem, besides many book don't use the 'Chapter 1: xxx' format anyway.
Yes to Graham.

Emphatic no to Rich Dad Poor Dad. Here's why: http://www.johntreed.com/Kiyosaki.html
Well that's true up until a point. But an OS is more than an API, it's also a collection of files and libraries within a directory structure. In my experience Linux distributions rarely agree on these minor points, and that is where the hassle lies in porting anything non-trivial.
That is precisely my point in the post: A lot of times the problem itself changes. Not to mention the requirements that management sees as "details" but that, in reality, are complete game changers as far as the system architecture goes.
Are you using too many technologies in your projects?
The article describes fruit juice as being better for you, which, of course, is true when you are comparing it to Pepsi. I just wanted to warn people not be careful about taking that at face value. Fruit juice has a lot of fructose and other sugars, and most importantly has little or no fiber, which is required for glycemic control. If you drink juice, make sure you have it in the context of a healthy meal with plenty of fibrous vegetables and the like (or drink it right after a hard workout!).

If I were Pepsi, I would create a separate brand for healthy products based on somewhat unprocessed foods, for example maybe high protein bars that use raw grains, or supplemented milk beverages with interesting flavors and various vitamins, fish oil, etc.
Hell, I would settle for a FAQ entry with the appropriate pointer.
Canadian Citations - Breaking News on YPG
Yup, the correct signal might not get through if you don't have perfect shielding. And a speck of dust on a CD could theoretically ruin a whole song.

That's why CDs (and cellphones, modems, and countless other digital devices) use channel encoding.[1] That way you don't have to have a perfectly noise-free signal to reconstruct the original information.

I don't know that many specifics of the DVD or Blu-Ray standards, but I'd put money on them using Reed-Solomon or something similar.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed-Solomon_error_correction#D...

(Edit: forgot footnote)
I know from personal experience and previous threads here that most people running IE6 are doing so in a corporate environment they have no control or influence over. My wife is a great example. Large company with 10s of thousands employees, all running IE6 with no other options. Sure there are some home users out there still running it that don't know any better, but I'm betting they pale in comparison to the number of corporate IE6 instances.
Diapers.com will leave larger shoes to fill than Zappos
Spend some time here: http://www.bogleheads.org/

read the wiki; post questions in the advice forum; read some of the suggested books. I think William Bernstein is probably the best of them.
Getting ready for Outlook 2010
>> perhaps because they have their own pre-conceived notions of what success is

There is no absolute definition of success.
Dereferencing a NULL pointer always segfaults, right? Not if you're clever...
I suspect Monster has it in their catalog for government contract fulfillment where they can just drop it in without any review of cost when A/V components are ordered (seriously).

It's not aimed at people who actually look at price tags.
Not to mention that this could get you in some legal hot water depending on where you live.