skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is incredibly misjudged. The Times, while an excellent news paper wouldn't be anybody's primary choice as a news source. I suspect that the vast majority of people who are willing to pay for read it would only pay to read it on paper.
Gruber's right about there being two distinct sets of patents Theora has to worry about (basically big companies that are part of MPEG and random other companies/trolls) but he's wrong about whether they are "likely" to infringe either set and wrong about basically everything else he says about patents in general e.g. misusing the term "submarine patents" even though he links to an accurate explanation on Wikipedia, and in their specific relation to Theora and H.264.

For example, why should Theora worry about H.264 patents? Theora is from the previous generation of codecs, which means it is both simpler and older, two very good things when it comes to patents. That's two very good reasons why Theora is less likely to be exposed to random non-MPEG patents than H.264.

If Theora infringes any MPEG patents then it's more likely patents from MPEG-1, 2 and 4 part 2 that they need to worry about. But these are well known and Theora has worked around them.

Thom (of OS News)'s arguments are, as you say, mostly rabble rousing, and probably wrong wherever he gets into specifics, but that doesn't magically make Gruber right.

But this does remind me of a million other tech battles where you have the choice of supporting the plucky underdog or rewarding the source of the actual problem (e.g. people building sites that work on IE6 only) and I think people getting angry, at least as a first step, is a potentially useful strategy.
In the mainframe days thats how it was. They were called computer operators. Some mathematician or scientists would give them the design spec and they would enter it into the mainframe. It wasn't production work, but it wasn't high-level programming either. Unlike today, a good percentage of them were women since it was treated as secretarial work.
NI chief executive Rebekah Brooks said it was "a crucial step towards making the business of news an economically exciting proposition".

And I suppose Windows 7 is "a crucial step towards making the business of desktop computers an economically exciting proposition". Marketing blurb never fails to impress me with its sheer lack of logic...
The problem then is that you now have to maintain your own fork of Python.

Again, the joys of open-source ;-)
The thing is, I don't want to have to stop my music just because someone wants me to watch their video. I like my music! What's the big problem with text these days?
Wouldn't exclusion via robots.txt be appropriate in this case?
What Paul Graham Will Not Tell You
BULL... SHIT! American business owners need another "challenge" about as much as Warren Beatty needs help getting dates. What we need are "set-ups," lay-down hands, deals that can't hardly miss even if everything goes wrong. (As it always does.)

I wanna sell heroin to junkies. Fudge bars that make you skinny to porkers. Porno videos to Pee Wee Herman. Travel luggage to President Bush. Memory pills to Ronald Reagan. Kitty Kelley dart boards to Nancy Reagan. Condoms to Geraldo Rivera. (Did you read his new book? Whew!) Booze to Ted Kennedy. I.Q. pills to Dan Quayle, etc... etc... etc.
Looks like public Waves work just as well?
You have to start with one platform. You then make it work on the others.

If I write something that initially only runs on IRIX and then make it work on other OSs, it would be unfair to attribute it an all-the-world-is-IRIX. It just happens the guy had a Linux box to refine his idea to the point of working, unfortunately using stuff other OSs don't offer in the same way.
Depending on the language, IDEs are often not worth the trouble. I was big Eclipse and then Netbeans user when I did Java dev. When I started working in C++, I used Eclipse for about two days before I went back to vim. The Eclipse functions I depended upon most in Java - navigation, autocomplete, and refactoring - just didn't work all that well in C++.

IntelliJ IDEA has exactly what the author implemented, but IntelliJ IDEA can also take about 5 minutes to start up, and takes up all your screen real estate. When you work in 5 languages on a regular basis and just want your editor to start up quickly, that can be quite a pain.
There's a finite supply of quality general news websites, especially UK local. The newspaper market in the UK is much healthier than in the US, and each of the papers has a defined market position. If I want to read about a politics story for example, I'll check out the Telegraph and the Guardian for their distinct perspectives. For a business story I'll go to the Financial Times, and for international news I read the Times. However, there is also a core readership that tends to be very loyal to their paper.

Charging for access to the Times website may cause a loss of page views, but it may also encourage more of the papers to charge (it isn't the first) - which I think on balance is a good thing.
Chadduell
Carly’s son and so Drew Garrett will now be replaced by Chad Duell on show. it only said that they were recasting role of Michael Corinthos Jr. with Chad Duell
"It is the cheapest intervention that has produced the most improvement in her life"

Amazing. What games is she using?
I think that if you're generally respectful of the target websites - scraping them is ok. For example, I scrape various government websites for my website. I use a random delay between requests and am generally very careful about not requesting the same page multiple times (this is hard 'cause a lot of the pagination happening on these pages is via JS calls).

I am ok if someone decides to scrape my websites in a similar fashion - although if I do see that starting to happen, I'd rather just go ahead and build an API.
The hundreds of billions of dollars made when mobile phone networks started operating across most of Africa could be repeated with internet services.

However, it is my understanding that internet at the moment across most of Africa is trending towards UMTS and another wireless technologies that leverage the existing towers built for mobile access.

A single such tower covers a far wider area and is much cheaper to install and maintain than broadband cables. Also, factoring in that Africa is not very densely populated, I would think that wireless makes sense over wired.
Especially since The Times already costs £1/day.
On the consumer side, I'm happy with the following rules.

I'm happy writing a program to let individual users scrape from their computers. After all, they have a right to visit the site and retrieve their data in whatever format suits them.

I'm not so keen on setting up a server to scrape data, or having a server scrape a huge pile of data for a list of users. After all, whoever is running the service is keeping stuff for all of the users. My taking it all is just stealing.

On the provider side, I think my feelings are about the same. I think you have to be careful that you leverage scraping -- let scrapers come in and get enough stuff that it makes people want to visit, but not so much that they have everything. If executed effectively, you can use scraping to great benefit.
The headline is misleading. You can get a week subscription for £2.
> Or you want an internal secure site for your society, company, hospital, police force

This is the real win in my opinion. On the open web, the SE sites are not just about the technology -- that is quite a small part of the problem.

Internally, especially in smaller companies, involvement is less of an issue and the technology becomes are more significant part of the problem. This is where I see a lot of opportunity for Shapado.
This might be true for some areas in Africa, but there are areas such as Gauteng which are quite densely populated, and already have extensive copper and in some places fibre networks. The only problem is that access to these networks are still quite expensive.
The bitter truth about fructose alarmism
Yeah ... I enjoyed "An 11 digit counter may overflow within an hour on a P2/466", too. GNU obviously overclock their hardware, the Wikipedia page for the Pentium II says it topped out at 450 MHz, in 1999.
How did you get this impression? One of the ffmpeg guys had been hinting about this for a while and finally posted in a LWN thread to point out 3 Nokia patents he thought Theora infringed.

http://lwn.net/Articles/372416/

Which were shot down pretty quickly:
http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/2010/02/some-additional-inf...

You could argue that the ffmpeg guys should be the ones to know best about MPEG patents that Theora infringes since they implement those codecs and as this example shows they are happy to jump to conclusions even when two of the patents clearly couldn't apply for the very basic reason of being filed after VP3 was made public. So the fact that they've not named names could be seen as a positive sign, but as with all things patents, proves nothing.
I would have agreed with you before I discovered the Readability bookmark. I use it for all HN articles now!
Am I the only one a little disturbed by the "name" of this product?

At least in german speaking countries "mongo" is usually only used as insulting calling for people with Down-Syndrom...
Economics 101 - people will simply substitute a cheaper equivalent good. For the vast majority of their readers, The Times isn't doing anything unique. I'm sure they will have a small number of readers who are just loyal to the paper, some who are fans of a particular columnist, but for most people it just isn't £104 a year better than the Telegraph or the Independent.

I think Murdoch is mistaken to believe that newspaper buyers are paying for content - I believe that they are paying for access. If I'm waiting for a train, I am happy to pay £1 to have something to read. The problem for the newspapers is that now I carry a smartphone with a huge backlog of RSS feeds - content far more specific and relevant to me than any daily paper.

Personally, I think the only chance they have is to establish a news cartel, which I believe is explanation enough for Murdoch's mission to kill off the BBC.
Also, Dropbox users can easily create several accounts (I have) for various purposes. Seems unreasonable for the Mint users.
It is interesting to see South Africa's two biggest rent seeking industries (telecommunications and banking) covered in one post :-)

Things are changing, but there are issues that more undersea cables and a tiny opening in the banking system won't be able to fix.

You still have to pay Telkom for a voice land-line, and that adds to the cost. It can still take months to get a land-line, and waiting for an ADSL connection is also a problem, so many people don't bother.

Telkom remains a de-facto monopoly for fixed lines (Neotel's current offerings still seem to be wireless, and of variable quality), and the South African government needs to be even more aggressive IMO in undoing the disaster of Telkom's mid-90's state-granted monopoly, and it also needs to take a tougher regulatory line with mobile providers. I'll really start celebrating when cheap uncapped wireless/3G becomes available at reasonable rates.

PayPal is also a good start, but the terms and conditions are strict. You can't leave the money in your PayPal/FNB account for longer than 30 days, and all transactions need to be reported to the Reserve Bank for exchange-control purposes through the FNB website. There is also a prohibition against "bulking", so I guess you may need to report and withdraw money for each transaction individually, meaning higher fees (see above point about rent seeking).

On a related note, exhange controls are a relic of the past, and should have gone years ago. Even though for the average person they are moot (the offshore allowances are now quite large) the amount of regulatory pain they put one through is deeply disruptive. I recall an former employer needing excon permission to purchase a developer suite from overseas - not the way to be part of the hi-tech global economy.
Science Tattoo Emporium
Readability bookmark ftw.
Escher Circuits: Hacking visual perception
Someone should just make an app that gives you deals and coupons to local stores and take all the potential ad revenue away from these guys. Maybe Yelp should solicit the small business owners to offer discounts to people who are browsing Yelp listings on their phone.
Youtube have never used any On2 VPx codec to my knowledge, but Adobe Flash and basically every video site on the web used them up until about 2 years ago when they started to transition to H.264 (though many still use it for certain bitrates) so your basic point remains that lots of companies, big and small, used or are using it right now without any patent problems.

(I assume Flash on mobile phones means they'll now all be exposed to the exact same patent risk too)
There are some areas in Gauteng where Telkom lines remain heavily rationed. Factor in the risk of copper theft and consequent reliability issues, and wireless is very attractive.
So the distance does matter, it seems. Can anyone figure out under which conditions a pen doesn't fall to a moon?

When there is a force holding the moon in place that doesn't act on the pen as well, or the pen is really far from the moon.

Orbit is a special case, so assume earth, moon and pen start at rest. They will all start accelerating towards their combined centre of mass. The pen essentially doesn't contribute at all to the location of the centre of mass; If moon and earth had quasi-zero radius, the pen would hit the object first on whose side of the centre of mass (CM) it started on. (the objects' acceleration will be such that their individual CMs would hit the CM at exactly the same time, so the objects nearest the CM will accelerate slowest)

earth - pen - CM - moon -> pen hits earth first.
earth - CM - pen - moon -> pen hits moon first.

Earth is bigger than the moon, which is much bigger than the pen, so this won't quite be true, but the pen will still have to be quite far from the moon to begin with for it to make a difference. (distance pen-moon vs. radius of moon vs. distance moon-earth)

The original question is clearly the latter case. In fact the pen and the moon are so close compared to any third objects, and the pen's mass so irrelevant, that you can treat them as being in the moon's frame of reference. So unless there's a force acting on either the moon or the pen which isn't acting on the other (this can never be true for gravity), the pen will always drop to the moon.

Because this is true in general, it is also true in orbit.

Aside: Note that there cannot be any tides on the moon because the moon itself rotates around its own axis at the same rate as it rotates around earth. Also, the water involved in tides doesn't start floating off - it is still very much attracted to the earth, and the deformation of such a gigantic body of water is extremely slight - metres of deformation of a shell with a radius of ~6300km. You won't notice the pen's reaction to that sort of force.
All very valid points that I didn't mention in my post.
Would you mind adding this comment to the original post to add some insight? :)
Xiph and Mozilla have both done patent searches. The lawyers that they spent the money on told them that publicizing the results would reduce their options if they were ever sued so the only evidence they haven't found problems is that they haven't altered Theora to work around problems and that they ship it in their product, respectively.

I would assume Google (and Opera and a bunch of other companies with slightly less impressive amounts of cash and lawyers) have done the same, though I don't think they've mentioned it if they have.
I'd hate to base my business on people who will buy iPads.
In both Singapore and Hong Kong, most of the economic freedoms are for colonialists and not for the local Chinese.

As a Singaporean Chinese, I must say, wtf? There are practically no colonialists here, and I've never experienced a lack of economic freedom. I probably agree more with you than maxklein in terms of ideology, but please, get your facts right.
Where would one use MongoDB? Without durability I'm not really sure I see much applications using it.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongo, there are a wide variety of uses of the word "Mongo".
I agree that, in general, you should educate yourself about what your doctor is telling you and push back a little bit. It's probably a good practice of any thinking person.

Routine conditions are a case where self-diagnosing will yield adequate results most of the time. But outside of the most common conditions, a smart but not medically trained person will end up treating symptoms rather than causes. A good example is blood pressure. You can walk into any pharmacy and find out within a minute if you have high blood pressure. For 80% of cases, you could probably just look up the most popular generic medication, start at a low dose and adjust a month at time until your blood pressure is normal. But what about the underlying cause? It could be an endocrine system problem, enlarged heart, arterial narrowing of the blood vessels from the kidneys, or ion channel exchange imbalances, to name a few. It is routine for a general practitioner to check for these and other causes and interpret the results of their tests, but is decidedly not routine for most smart people.
Basheera Bhangi Joke
Ask HN: Good usability service?
I'm a fan of usertesting.com but their already expensive prices are about to rise 35% in one weeks time. Too expensive for this startup.

Any other more cost effective alternatives.

ps - already use Feedback Army for quick first impression stuff, am looking for a service to capture first 15 minute user activity - screen-recording and audio comments
I think you overestimate the ability to self diagnose objectively. i heard that medical students , while learning about medical conditions , start to see symptoms in themselves , and believe they have all kind of illnesses.

So collaborating with your doctor seems like a better path(especially since he has access to various tests).
We agree. "Tyrant" and "Evil Dictator" are two different things. I'm using "tyrant" in the original sense -- a person who takes most of the power of the state on themselves.
Magic Virtualization-Fairy Dust and the New Network
I shouldn't have to spell this out but "The Singularity RDK is for academic non-commercial use" means it is not open source.
I won't subscribe; I might at, say, something less than 10 US cents per article because I just don't read the Times that much, only from links from other sites.

I'd pay good money to read the Torygraph (Telegraph), which I've enjoyed for something more than a decade (although in all fairness the news coming out of the U.K. as of late is so depressing that's iffy right now, even balanced by Matt).

I'm sure others would be happy to pay for the Guardian; heck, I'm sure some people's life would be incomplete without their daily dose of Page 3 girls in The Sun ^_^.

And if I was in a different phase in my life I'd be subscribing to the Financial Times and The Economist. (In the '80s I subscribed to the latter and The Wall Street Journal).

But I just don't see the Times as offering sufficiently distinct value to prompt me to shell out much money for what they're offering.
It's not just C. A lot of procedural code is written in perl, for example. It's true that languages that force you to write procedural code are relatively rare, but languages that force you to write OO are by no means the rule.

IME, OO sometimes works, sometimes not. It's not necessarily about getting close to the hardware, either.
Those "doc in a box" clinics, after doing simple treatment for a few years , start moving to treating chronic diseases.

Chronic diseases account for 75% of the healthcare costs.

A big fight is going to start between physicians and "doc in a box" clinics in the future.
Convert PSD To Wordpress With The Help Of A Software For Free
In web based software the software providers have economies of scale and can connect many systems, and then offer them to single doctors.

Does the integration problem steel exist for web based software?
This is not new.

The option only appears when there are foreign language tweets on the page. I've used in numerous times in the last few months (and probably before). My guess is that it has been there since before Twitter acquired summize.
Instead of going down this same road yet again, I've got a better question for you:

I can pull out my C++ compiler and write straight C (mostly)

What do you call that? C? C++? If I don't use classes in my C++, is it C? Or, conversely, if I develop a complicated module structure in C, does that make it C++?
The Return of History
The thing is ... the harmful emails are never really from paying customers. They are almost always from freetards who remind you that...

- you are expected to provide phone support to them (even though they are not a paying customer & have no intent of being one!)

- you are wrong to set up any type of conversion funnel for the 1% of people who will convert (but which costs the freetard type as much as 30 seconds of their time as well)

- accuses you of selling their email information (when you have not), curses at you, is shocked when you dish them back any of their own cooking, and then calls you non-professional

- they sign up for your free autoresponder series (which is more valuable than most paid courses on SEO) then takes the time to send you a nasty email rather than clicking the unsubscribe link in the emails

----

I didn't have to deal with tons of this stuff when I set up our paid membership site. I mean some...but a fairly small amount. Where the entitled freetard type became enraged was when I set up a conversion funnel and required registering a free account to get our firefox extensions.

And in our support software the contrast between paid customers and freetards is almost unbelievable. As an extreme comparison, the paid person could have an issue like being locked out of their account (which they are paying for) and label it as an issue of low or medium concern and write a polite "please help" type message ... whereas the freetard who is not a paying customer (and will never be one) typically labels their issues as urgent or critical.

-------

The other thing freetards try to do is try to bully you on social networks and stuff and threaten to destroy your brand if you don't self-implode your business model to support their rude behavior.

Some of our posts about freetard culture...

http://www.seobook.com/are-you-fighting-human-nature-measuri...

http://www.seobook.com/i-stopped-caring-about-links-well-alm...

http://www.seobook.com/professionalism

http://www.seobook.com/why-many-successful-people-become-jer...

and people far smarter than I have noticed the freetard culture phenomena being harmful to business
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/science/12tier.html

"The basic idea of this contract," he writes, "is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising."

and, as a sharp contrast to freetard behavior, this post mentions how private paid communities have mechanisms in place that prevent the above types of abuses amongst customers (namely people who pay are of higher quality, and people won't make absurd demands in front of others)

http://www.seobook.com/why-private-communities-work-so-well
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