skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, then can you enlighten us a bite more? Personally i have read pretty much every kind of "myth" about mpeg licensing.
One blog post i remember was "according to their terms you (theoretically) would have to pay when a friend sends a video with copyrighted material to you" which more or less sounds like "wherever there is mpeg video they have the right to demand fees" (because even your holiday movie may contain a copyrighted soundtrack).

According to http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/h264-royalti... there are "royalties for pay-per-view or subscription video". And this is just what is happening in the internet all over the place.
Firefox can't even know if you look a "free" broadcast or just paid for an online stream, so they just have to pay to support this codec?

And in the end, it's not at last the uncertainty about the codec. MPEG-LA could just have said "Alright guys, browsers are free of charge, go ahead with HTML5, we'd like to see our codec in HTML5". Afaik, they didn't. Because there probably is quite a good amount of money to be earned from fees.

Screw that H.264 stuff, support theora or dirac and problems are solved.
Wow. That's a fascinating read. Thank you for sharing.
It's not 'just an excuse' — the fosstards+Nokia only started working on a DSP decoder in the last year, and haven't shipped anything yet.

Before that there were ZERO independent efforts at implementing Theora decoders — there was the original On2 code dump, and a transliteration of that to Java called Cortado (used in an applet player by Wikimedia). There are no independent encoders, just the original code dump and a deshittifying refactoring (v1.1, Thusnelda) that was just released a few months ago.

Before it was tied as an anchor around the necks of the FOSS partisans, Theora was a really awful totally proprietary (in the original sense) codec. It was open sourced because it was never once licensed to a customer, and On2 only pushed one codec at a time (they never improved them, just forked off a new one).

As for the patents, MS has been shipping h.264 decoders with their OSes for a while now (they always left MPEG2 decoding the OEMs to bundle until recently too). Apple actually has patents in the h.264 licensing pool!
The press release - http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmV... - notes that full text search and annotation will be added in the 'near future.'
I'm not sure what you mean by "ethical", but I'll go for "d) All of the above" as being unfortunate from my perspective.
HTC plans to 'fully defend itself' against Apple's patent suit
FTA:

"HTC disagrees with Apple’s actions and will fully defend itself. HTC strongly advocates intellectual property protection and will continue to respect other innovators and their technologies as we have always done, but we will continue to embrace competition through our own innovation as a healthy way for consumers to get the best mobile experience possible."
> Sociopathy is a disorder, a mental illness, a way in which someone can differ from the norm

You don't know that sociopathy is a mental illness or disorder. That was also explained in the article. For all you know someone who achieves universal enlightenment might become a sociopath because he/she realizes that we all eventually die and nothing that happens in this world matters, or something like that.

In fact I'd say it's simply an effect of a different world view, and the ones getting caught are the dumber/impulsive ones while the smarter ones are the ones we label as "assholes."
Kanye is far more successful than you, and has contributed far more to society.
“Don’t mention the war”?
That's what Jesse Schell talks about in his great talk at Dice.

http://fury.com/2010/02/jesse-shells-mindblowing-talk-on-the...
Learn business. Don't get an MBA. Don't plan your life by trying to extrapolate from the Forbes 400.
Yes, someone could fork Gecko + XULrunner + Firefox; but it is a huge pain-in-the-ass to even track it as upstream, much less diverge from it.

It's purposefully architected to make a plugin very unsavory — you could do it with a plugin/extension that inspected every DOM for failed <video> embeds, dynamically replacing them with an <embed> of its own NSAPI plugin. You'd be guaranteed to get FOUC, poor detectablity, and regular breakage. At that point the author is better off just seamlessly falling back to Flash.
Not that coal is the source of all of our ills, but I have read that to elevated levels of mercury pervading the environment are primarily from coal plant stack emissions. Given this, I wonder why it isn't a diplomatic issue between, say, Japan and the US or Japan and China?
DRM-free ebooks work with this app as they do with the PC version. I just downloaded and opened a DRM-free mobipocket file from here: http://www.feedbooks.com/book/88, so the problem seems to be specific to your O'Reilly ebook/Mac app install.
I see, h.264 support is a really bad idea.
With "Apple actually has patents in the h.264 licensing pool!" you scared atleast me away. So one competitor has patents and the competition should use that too? nooo, sir.

So, dirac it shall be then?

edit: Also you mention technical reason. My reasoning still is: This is not about technical reasons it is a pure political decision to get rid of competition in a shameless way.
You don't want to tell me that two of the biggest software companies in the world which did their own codecs (quicktime, wmv) arent capable of shipping a decent theora decoder in their browsers? It's just a stupid manager decision in the likes of "haha, mozilla can't/won't pay mpeg fees, we'll use that".
Programming FAQ
Are you referencing the episode of Faulty Towers in which Germans are visiting? John Clease repeats "don't mention the war" several times to his fellow English hospitality workers, but he himself fails in this endevour, with hilarious consequences.
Noone really wants On2's proprietary codec implementations — that got us the Theora shitpile.

What we could use is their independent patent portfolio.
This is utterly stupid. Mozilla can't support H264 and distribute freely its browser and conform to the (moronic) US law. This guy can whine as long as he want, there is no way around. Mozilla is a real US company with real money, not a couple of hackers in a garage; unfortunately they must comply to the unfortunate state of patent laws.
I don't see the word "lean" used once in that article by PG, so for now, I'm going to continue to assume that Eric Ries largely coined "lean start-up" and so has some ownership of the definition of it.
Netflix Prize: This Forum is now read-only.
yeah, status is very interesting. understanding how it works is real power. we actually tell each other where we think we rank and lower-status-thinking people usually submit first
I think your analysis is correct despite of all the self-congratulations that goes on here on Hacker News.

A couple caveats though; I think your definition of technology is too narrow, Web 2.0 is only one segment. The smartest people have moved on from IT which has already matured, and are working on green tech and genetic therapy where supposedly the next break through will come.

Also, even in software since money seems to be the biggest concern to you, consumer-centric software isn't where the money is made - it's just what appeals to be the most sexy to the young & naive. High frequency trading, e-discovery, medical informatics, Sarbones-Oxley compliance modules - there are tons of enterprise software companies in those fields make revenue more than most of the Web 2.0 startup's you listed.

Finally, I don't think what motivates programmers aren't necessarily the same that motivates a business-person. The best way I can describe this is by the musician and A&R example; there are some musician's who want to make it big and appeal to as many people as they can (i.e., Linkin Park), there are those complementary record labels who can help popular musicians by handling the business side and tailor their records to the focus groups. But there are also those musician's who care more about pushing than envelope than selling records, and if they are successful, like the early black blues & jazz musician's in the 40's and 30's, their influence will get heard in the 60's and 70's (ripped off by white musicians). Most people in IT operates on this sliding scale between craftsmen and A&R as well.
So you're thinking that you'd use a finger-gun for that? Maybe mount some kind of wii-mote or lightpen on your index finger?
Ooooh I love my starcraft 2 beta :D

Sorry, I've been playing on my younger brother's account, I have no idea how he got one. I think you just sign up and they send invites out in waves. Have you tried that yet?
Looks like it shares some pieces from the PC version ]=

strings /Applications/Kindle\ for\ Mac.app/Contents/MacOS/Kindle\ for\ Mac | grep PC

and what is this about?

strings /Applications/Kindle\ for\ Mac.app/Contents/MacOS/Kindle\ for\ Mac | grep -i easter

FeedbackDialogWrapper::doEasterEgg
LinkedIn phishing vulnerability
They just sent out the 4th wave, but I didn't get one :(

They also sent out an extra key for people who have the beta key for a friend invite.
Well, you'll notice I was talking about the point of view of a browser vendor, because H.264 licensing is irrelevant to that use case: the right thing to do is delegate to the operating system's media framework, and let codec support and licensing be the OS vendor's problem.

But since you mention it:

MPEG-LA could just have said "Alright guys, browsers are free of charge, go ahead with HTML5, we'd like to see our codec in HTML5". Afaik, they didn't.

Personally I'm against having HTML5 specify any codec of any sort. HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0 are each over ten years old now, and HTML5 won't be broadly usable as a replacement for at least another year or two; given the rate of development in video codecs, mandating one in a spec with that sort of expected lifespan would simply be stupid.

But it's worth pointing out that MPEG-LA is currently exempting H.264-encoded online video from royalties (so long as it's provided free of charge to users -- hence YouTube and other video sites don't have to pay every time a video is played), and will continue to do so until at least 2015 (by which point the whole question of software patents may be moot), so rushing to draw lines in the sand now is -- as I already said -- rather premature.
Some of these differences in numbers come from how git works in general.

A push is basically just uploading your repository to the remote server. As such a push might contain many commits by the person who pushes and others by different people - many of which are also part of other pushes.

Also due to the decentralized model of git and the model of pulling code from other people, it's highly likely that some (most?) of these pushes/commits never end up in the official repositories of the different projects.

Pushes may contain commits to throwaway branches, to branches for private use.

Also, the blog post doesn't say anything about rebases. If I push a rebased private branch, it will contain all the commits of the branch but with changed IDs.

There are so many more occasions for a commit to be moved around over the network in git than there is in the more centralized solutions as they are provided by Google Code and Sourceforge.

Yes. Google Code does provide Mercurial, but it's still project centric. So what gets committed to google code is official code that is part of that projects code base.

What gets commited to github is mostly throwaway stuff or patches about to be processed before being merged into some mainline.

This is where the difference comes from. It's just natural.
I picked several suspicious words and ran them through searchyc. The four rarest words in the post are: pure-ad, CTRs, disinformation, and dissimilar.

Walked through the results for each word, pulling in all the usernames:

intersection of: pure-ad dissimilar
['noodle']
intersection of: CTRs disinformation
['jacquesm']
intersection of: CTRs dissimilar
['ivankirigin', 'patio11', 'strlen']

Of those, strlen's writing style seems to be the closest match. So I'm changing my guess from randomwalker to strlen :)
From my perspective "have very mixed feelings" is overly generous. The idea of being stuck somewhere with not just your parents but a variety of other relatives sounds oppressive and claustrophobic. I think I'd end up spending most of my time away from the place (and I have good relatives).
Keep up the awesome work. This is by far the most real-world applicable intro to rails that exists. I recommend it to anyone I know that is looking to learn rails.
The patent licensing is dirt cheap, the people paying in are almost exclusively hardware makers, shipping hundreds of millions of embedded devices a year. Apple having a few patents in the pool just makes a janitorial-sized line-item in their budget even cheaper since they get payments back too. Apple has paid to license a suite of codecs for every install since the dawn of Quicktime (though they charged $20 for an MPEG2 encoder for a long time), supporting h.264 <video> costs them nothing — they already paid a nickel for your iTunes install.

Dirac is terrific, but it'll be another few years before it's ready; and it'll be much longer before the available bandwidth and demand for quality exists — it'll pick up among people pirating 1080p video, but it doesn't scale down enough for the youtubes of the world.

QuickTime is not a codec and never has been, it's a container, which happens to have been standardized as the MPEG4 container, because it doesn't suck ass like everything else (save Matroska). WMV is mostly a container too — they had a good 'proprietary' WMV codec called VC-1, but they got pwned with submarine patents after they lobbied it into the HD standards war.
What are people so shocked and distraught about? Most of us contribute to the destruction of life by eating meat and to the reduction of biodiversity by occupying many environmental niches that would have otherwise harbored other species. Frankly, c is not an ethical issue for me, as death is an essential part of life, and it always contributes to some food chain.

I'm not able to make the connection between some dead birds that happen to have eaten a human contaminant and all the outrage/shock etc in this discussion. So I'm hoping that someone will connect it for me.
Unfortunately, it wasn't me. I did post on that thread but then I was gone from HN for quite a while because of work.
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Your first link is blocked by my employer. Strange.
Last time i checked there a lot of video services out there with subscription/premium service. Vimeo has premium subscription.

Ok, so you don't want to specify the codec. Technically a good reason. But think about it, what will happen then?
MS will support wmv by default, Apple will support Quicktime by default, Mozilla theora. This is a freaking nightmare for every enduser!
Now on a desktop you can probably tell the user to install the correct decoder (my family/mother/older people certainly would never be able to do that!). But on a phone? So Windows Mobile 7 will ship with "hardcoded" wmv support? iPhone with quicktime?

As i told you, this is not technical, it's political. Now i don't know you, but when you have ever worked in a bigger revenue driven software company every f*cking decision is first made by money. It doesnt matter if something is technically the best solution as long as another solution provides a "benefit" in terms of money, marketshare, whatever the manager thinks will drive the competition away.
MS in particular has proven to be driven by such decisions in the past, why would they change now?
Also bragging rights are important.
The Step Of Eye Exam
Exam by yourself

Before eye exam, we need to pay attention to our eye problem. The most common cases are when people who have found that there are some discomfort in their eyes. Then, eye test is essential to take. Especially for those who wear glasses, their eyes are prone to be infected, so they need to take more frequent eye tests. First of all, we should check by ourselves, if the following conditions are usually happen that prove your eye problems:
Fantastic design, fantastic intro. Well done.

One minor comment: make 'Install now' a bit more prominent. Couldn't find it easily on the page.

EDIT: On more point, your punchline "cloud based, streaming media for RSS" can probably be made more human-friendly.
Now I bet that's something those astronomers haven't thought of. They're so cool with their, predicting events that will happen a million years from now via the information gleaned from a few tiny pricks of light in the sky (damn they are amazing!), I bet they can't figure out what will be in fashion on the alien planets that pass by. :P

I am constantly amazed by what astronomers seem to be able to do.
I like the site, nice and simple.

My only question is where do the quotes come from?
I hit f5 too fast before noticing one of the quotes was by "Heywood Jablowme"
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> that's one of many drawbacks to releasing a crippled javascript-only application instead of semantic resources that have URLs and actually become part of the web.

yeah, crippled applications, just like gmail?
This is the kind of thing that Adobe should be working on. Tools and libraries for a post Flash world.
Branding and Marketing Essentials for Your Web App by Alex Hunter (Video)
Great list! I will be adding several of those to minimotivation.com. Thanks.
Don't overgeneralize: my guess is that multigenerational households simply amplify the cultural values of the family relative to the cultural values of the nation and city and neighborhood you're in. This could be a good thing or bad thing...
The Nazis are waging a new kind of war. The war of public opinion, in which they weasel their way into completely unexpected places...

Edit: what, is it so impossible that some neo-nazis are trying to drum up support in foreign countries?
The Movie Studios' Big 3D Scam
Stories about Steve Jobs's domineering personality date back to the Macintosh project in the late 1970s. I don't think he had cancer or a hormonal problem then.
I'm far more interested in whether Apple is going to approve the Kindle app for the iPad, or whether I'm going to have to buy all my eBooks again.
That is insanely ugly. I will pass, thanks.
Also, the comments about 'but I'm Aryan'... couldn't you stymie them with the simple explanation: 'Do you look like me?' (says german). 'No, but I'm Aryan'. 'Doesn't matter, you don't look like me so they probably would have shot you on sight'.

Not 100% accurate but I think it gets the point across.
In many places the vocal minority controls the media. I guess this popularity issue is not a Asian thing only. A significant large number of silent people in Germany I assume is supportive of Hitler's work --- that's what my impression is after personally talking with a limited few.
Is this a joke or are you saying something deep that I'm missing?
Cassandra Internals – Reading
I think the point to be made here is that your comment isn't particularly constructive. Hence the down-votes.
The academic in me wants to ask you if you spoke with a statistically relevant sample size? :)
The Original Google Computer Storage
One point: I clicked install now and then hit cancel. It didn't cancel properly. I had to close the tab.

The idea seems very cool though.
Because you need to pay licensing fees measured in "millions of USD per year" if you're going to distribute software which decodes H.264.
Anyone know why an albatross would feed this stuff to its chicks? I don't mean that in terms of comparing an albatross to a human (as in, I can tell that a bottle cap is probably not a good thing to eat) but comparing it to other animals - a cat or an eagle say - that come into contact with a lot of the same objects on land. Is it a question of intelligence (that albatrosses are just not very bright) or maybe desperation (if it looks like it might be food and you can't find anything else it's worth a try)?
Two things

(1) "Mein Kampf" is just another book for Indians. Sure it is available in bookstores, it isn't particularly popular. Most people have read it, and most think it is a turgid bit of prose.

(2) Why should Indians (or Pakistanis for that matter) have the same level of Hitler Phobia and/or Holocaust guilt Germans have? I thought the German "guilt" was all about how Hitler and co misled their ancestors into The Holocaust and other dirty deeds. Indians and Pakistanis were colonized by the British at the time of WW2 and many of our ancestors fought against the Nazis and the Japanese. (Some of them fought for the Nazis/Japanese trying to attain independence for India from the British).

Nutshell: People who had nothing to do with the Nazis or the Holocaust and for whom the Nazis and Hitler were "people far away" fighting and winning aginst an oppressive colonial power don't have as much of a bad reaction as people who were invaded/ruled/slaughtered by them.

Big Deal.

Genghis Khan built mountains of skulls during his invasions but would Germans blanch if they saw a Muslim with the name "Genghis" or "Timur" or think his name is inappropriate?

As something to chew on, many babies born in the Middle East / Pakistan etc are being named "Osama". An American child with such a name would find social situations difficult I imagine. No such stigma in Pakistan. At some point will we see a headline "Saudis cringe at Osama's popularity in Pakistan"?

To be even more controversial it could be argued that Bush and co "killed a million Iraqis" for no real purpose. Should all Americans hate and abhor W? Stalin and Mao were responsible for more deaths than Hitler Should Chinese be surprised that some few Americans think Mao was "cool"?

fwiw I personally thing Hitler was a charismatic and thoroughly evil person. Most Indians who are aware of actual history feel the same way.

But I am also aware concentration camps were "invented" by the British during the Boer War and the large scale deaths of non combatant Boer women and children in these camps could be called genocide if it happened today. Should we hate Lord Salisbury (and Winston Churchill for that matter) too? I don't see many Britishers being ashamed of them.
So here is a much more interesting problem. Can you code a program that runs a function on its own source code?

Hint: It is a generalization of a quine.
I for one am donning these in anticipation http://www.vibramfivefingers.it/images/moc/img1-large.jpg
Totally unrelated, but by eye was drawn to this on the page http://www.csmonitor.com/CSM-Photo-Galleries/Photos-of-the-D...
No, unrelated.
They don't have to cough up $5 million to support Flash. That's a priniciple I can understand.
To go with your analogy, I think the point would be that it's silly to argue one of (Python/Ruby) is objectively superior to the other. Yet with version-control that's precisely the argument we hear so often; yes, the workflows are different, and the particular techniques for specific use cases are different, but there aren't -- so far as I know -- many, if any, use cases where one or the other just falls over and says "that's impossible".
Not the idea, though. I can't remember anyone before PG arguing that startups today cost less to run, and so therefore should be funded lightly, and built for low cash-burn. In the essay above PG argues against "getting big fast". Which is a rough way of saying "stay lean".

That being said - Horowitz seems to be limiting his advice to 'high-tech' startups. Note the penultimate paragraph.

Not sure if the advice applies to startups in general.