skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He's posted an update saying Google only uses Theora because they already have an H.264 licence, so they're safe.

2 counterpoints: 1) so does Apple yet they're not using Theora because of alledged patent risk, 2) Google only provided Theora with the open source Chromium. Under this theory, why can they ship Theora but not H.264?

I think we can conclude that he's just making this up as he goes along.
It's also a bit of a survival tactic. Saying you don't support the government can be bad for you.
One open source graph visualisation program I really like is Cytoscape which is also Open Source and written in Java.
Are you seriously suggesting that a bribe would cause a developer of Miguel's caliber to devote nearly a decade of his life to building something like Mono?
I can easily read code that's written with 2, 4, or 8 space indentation. I can't read code that's written with 2, 4, or 8 space indentation at the same time.

The most important part about code conventions is that you have them. It really doesn't matter what they are. In fact, I wish fewer styleguides would pretend to be right and more would just acknowledge that they're simply whatever the originator prefers. But it's still very important that everyone agrees to follow them, even if they disagree with some of the individual aspects.
I am surprised no one has brought up NGmoco? They are a gaming company and got heavy backing from Angels / VC's from their start (it seemed like it at least).
Taiwan is your counter-example.
I've locally fixed issues that I discovered, and then submitted the patches back. In every case, those patches have been rejected because they weren't formatted correctly, or the project lead disagreed with my choice of design, or the team didn't like my haircut, or whatever.

After a certain point, one just stops bothering.
an entirely different audience appeared that we never expected: Designers. [...] who use Beanstalk for binary files

That. (And this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1201559 )

Not begrudging the coders kudos for a solution to their problem. But studiously ignoring wider application seems a bit short-sighted.
Reddit.com: help
Facebook asking someone not to infringe on their trademarks is like genocide? This is what you are standing by?
Is Facebook going to create THE web currency?
Here is another view:

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h...

and here is a Chinese view http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h...

that Google's departure will be bad for Baidu advocating that with Google's departure Baidu will have less competition and hence will not evolve properly.

I picked up the links above randomly from my wife's computer (she is Chinese).

I do not support any repressive regime, but I also have reservations for Google. There is a huge propaganda machine in China and a more subtle one in the USA, either we like it or not.
gitx, gitg, giggle.. I use gitg on my Ubuntu and gitx on my Mac. Love both, though I use them less. Command line ftw!
K1d5upr3m3
Singapore is my counter example to your Taiwan.
That site won't show me the article. Instead, it shows me a page complaining about ISPs that use something called "Webwise", and tells me to change ISPs if I want to see the site.

PS: my ISP is not using Webwise.
White House seeking advice on spurring student-led innovation around broadband
> Unless I'm mistaken a majority of Chinese actually support their government and matters such as this are viewed through the prism of nationalism.

How do you know that? Without free elections and trustable surveys, it's hard to know.
Should also consider the cases with zero head pointers.

For singly linked lists, a pointer to any node gives you the downstream part of the list, but not the upstream. (Can't think of any non-contrived, simple examples.)

For doubly linked lists, each node is effectively a head/tail. The list might be circular or might not. (Lots of kernel data structures where list membership is not the primary index.)

This makes the categorization a little messier.
Looks to me like the problem with this discussion is the dismissiveness and defensiveness of people on Hacker News, not the article.

Maybe MySQL really isn't a decent database product, or not for high performance needs. How many of his statements are troll-ish in that light?
On music, Pandora, Apple, and discovery
Well, looks like I have egg on my face. Your comment prompted me to download the latest version of IntelliJ and try it out, and the rendering has improved tremendously. It is now indistinguishable from ClearType (it probably is ClearType). :)
Yeah, it's pretty messy. 被 is usually but not always adverse. And while 被 is the most common, there are at least half a dozen possible passive markers such as 讓,弄,給,叫,據說, etc... The topic comment construction of Chinese further complicates things, since it's very common for passive constructions to lack any passive marker at all.

For example:

The article has been finished.
文章寫好了.

The meeting has been postponed until Monday.
會議延到星期一舉行.
Why do I need to buy a new Commodore 64 when my old one still works?

Honestly, the only upgrade I would want in a new Commodore 64 is the ability to play games immediately without having to wait for floppy disk load times. And I'm not talking about using emulators. I want the same software, same hardware, same peripherals, just no floppy disk waits.
True, most organizations (and people) react badly if you disrupt their illusion of total control over things. On the other hand, the newspaper industry has been the most visible recent example of a complete failure to control, or even monetize, online assets. I generally get the feeling that it's more of a "let's see what we can do with this and get away with" kind of thing or a case of ruffled feathers than a direct attempt to squash individual freedoms. This is particularly so in Facebook's case, which you are certainly under no obligation to use for enjoyment of the broader internet.
As Peter Schiff has noted, if US dollar tumbles, holders of the dollar will be hurt, but the US itself will be wiped out. The situation is analogous to a stock market bubble. Holders of stocks with inflated values are hurt when the stocks lose their value, but the over-valued companies themselves go bankrupt.

Furthermore, China would be better off if it consumed more of what it produces rather than sell it to Americans for American dollars and government bonds.
Eh, it's not subpar either. I purposely didn't get Resharper because I hate how intrusive it is. TestDriven.NET and ViEmu make VS2008 a passable IDE IMO.
Seed Funding Options For Entrepreneurs (2008)
Harris Polls: "Wingnuts" and President Obama
It's actually not about jumping through hoops, it's simple math. Doing a command in a terminal is O(1). Everything is at your fingertips immediately and can be combined efficiently with everything else. Doing something in a GUI is O(n), you have to dig through menus and tabs to get at what you want, and the result is in a form that can't be recombined or filtered or modified at will.

The trade-off is that the command line takes a lot of getting used to in terms of memorizing commands etc. If you don't know any Unix commands, the terminal is almost completely useless unlike a GUI. For beginners, a GUI is a good way to explore and get a feeling for how to do things because GUIs explain themselves.
Yeah, that's a different one, but you're right, it is way more interesting. What they've found is that the interactions of groups of proteins is very highly conserved, so proteins that work together towards a function in plants are still working together in humans, for example, even after millions of years of evolution. They use this to find a plant model for a neurological development disorder.
Subversion doesn't require a server either. You can create a repository anywhere.
Will Google help breach the great firewall of China?
Pulling it out would be M.A.D., it effectively won't happen. And given that the rest of the world would pretty much tumble with it, there'd be a mad scramble to protect the USA from bankrupting, and a mad attack on China for doing so. As evidence, just look how USA's economic downturns are reflected by others shortly after.

They are likely to try to use the debt to pressure the USA though, which is still a fairly real threat. If they're not already, that is, I wouldn't be surprised (and it wouldn't be illogical for them to do so, it is in their best interest to have as much control as they can get).
Sponsor Flip Wall With jQuery & CSS
I see. Thanks for answering.
You're assuming that she wasn't aware of how her words would be interpreted. I think she knew exactly what she was doing.

If you can make your interviewer laugh, your chances of getting the job just went way up.
Air America selling mailing list – so much for their privacy policy
App Engine (Py) tool to process a datastore using only the Key() property
"The party in china does not kill people. You say it does, but there are no reports saying that."

You are saying there are no reports of the Chinese Government killing people, so therefore, obviously, they do not kill people. If they did, they would surely report on it. But regardless... it's all justified, right, because otherwise it would be chaos. Big brother knows best.

What an absurd thought.

The end you seek (peace) does not justify the means you condone (oppression). I'm sure North Korea is a peaceful place. And Taiwan? Have you been there? Total friggin free-speech chaos! Also, I'm confident the Tibetans who live in Indian and Nepalese refugee camps are perfectly happy that their religion was outlawed and their home overrun by outsiders. But, I guess, if you're reading Chinese media, you wouldn't know... Ignorance is bliss, as the Chinese say.
10 years ago, Subversion set itself a goal: to replace CVS.

That is exactly what it has done, and it now finds itself in pretty much exactly the situation CVS was in 10 years ago.

That's quite an achievement, but it doesn't exactly suggest an exciting future ahead for Subversion.
Empirically, very much so. Stories of investors maltreating founders are not uncommon in the startup world generally, but they are extremely rare among the YC alumni.
There actually was an analysis lately that showed the highest level of economic freedom in autocratic regimes (Singapur), not in democracies.

Edit: Heritage Economic Freedom Index: Autocracy Wins Again
http://athousandnations.com/2010/01/20/heritage-economic-fre...
Those instructions read eerily like a passage of 1984, namely the parts where workers are getting instructions on how to rewrite history to portray the State in an infallible, beneficial light.
"But with Canvas I have to manually redraw the Graph any time the state changes. In addition, to keep things snappy, I have to calculate which commits and connections are currently viewable and ONLY draw those. This results in a substantial amount of code that is completely unnecessary in Flash."

Seems to me you could still do this in Canvas—just make a big wide one, and throw it in an overflow:scroll div.

You wouldn't even have to draw it all upfront. Just flag the elements you've drawn so far, and lazily draw the rest as they come into view (there's a scroll event you could capture to make this happen even more seamlessly).
Because I, at least, pretty frequently hear from person X about their friend Y in China who supports their government and what's being done.

Yes, it's effectively impossible to actually measure it, but I get that feeling too from my browsing history.
Thanks for the article. I'll read it in a moment.

It's obvious to me a lot of the disparity can be attributed to culture. What is unclear is how much.

What I am trying to ask is what happens if we remove all barriers that prevent, say, men from becoming psychologists (important disclaimer: the guy sitting to my right is a psychologist and a very good programmer) and girls from becoming physicists, and they still are not much interested, what will we do and how will we recognize we have done enough? How much disparity is right?
Ask HN: what's going on with Disqus?
Many internal pages are giving the "500 internal server error" message.

This message claims the issues are resolved, but not so.

Posting Comments and Moderation are back, sorry about that.
UPDATE: We’ve made changes to resolve this and it’s now fixed.
During server maintenance tonight there was a misconfiguration, for a brief period of time publishers were not able to post or moderate comments.
Sorry for the inconvenience,

-Giannii

[edit] - updated formating
One interesting part is that they used fewer calories of HFCS than sugar in the trial, yet it still prompted more weight gain.
I don't see the part in this post where he supports the title/thesis of the post. He clearly states

DVCS provides a much smarter workflow for merging and sharing code.

Just because it doesn't have a gui as sexy or user friendly as versions doesn't mean the technology isn't better which is the point of Joels quote

If you are using Subversion, stop it. Just stop. Subversion = Leeches. Mercurial and Git = Antibiotics. We have better technology now.

The technology is better, just as antibiotics are better. However sometimes the need still arises for leeches.

Aside: Both these posts are self serving posts about competing products. Beanstalk vs. Kiln.
Because the rest of the world doesn't like free speech? Americans may throw the term around more often, but I wouldn't equate holding it important to nationalism. If anything, American nationalism has forced free speech on America, not the other way around (and yes, I'm aware of the many failures. Not saying it's perfect).
The story of nyblogs.org
Unfortunately, I don't see the amount of HFCS that's used in the American food system changing much; at least until the government can find a way to continue to prop up the corn farmers.
Not in the slightest. Just because we're married does not mean we're together forever. Every day I wake up and see her is another day I want to show her how much she means to me. I don't believe in soul mates, but I do believe in true love.
This would make more sense if I had a better understanding of biochemistry. It's only a matter of time before an awesome explanation is posted. (Yes....!)
You should definitely contact Techstars boston and apply to be a hackstar, I did it last year, and I'm doing it this year. Its a lot of fun, and great networking.
Worrying about this was one of the primary reasons for creating the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, so these topics are being adressed at the highest levels of both governments.
It may be as simple as corn syrup causing the body to think it needs to store more fat for some reason or another.
The Onion cut 66% of their bandwidth by upstream caching 404s
A Call for Browser Supported 3d Image Formats
I am incredibly excited about the inclusion of geospatial indexing and searching (http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Geospatial+Indexing), especially with the impending release of full-text search next quarter (http://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-380).
And I guess the fact you didn't mention your obvious conflict of interest in this specific case is perfectly cromulent, eh?
Prey Tracks Your Stolen Laptop So You Can Get it Back
Yeah, I think China would avoid doing anything that looked like an outright hostile act, like dumping all its reserves simultaneously. If they did so, and the U.S. considers it a hostile act rather than merely commercial maneuvering, there are a pretty wide range of options to retaliate, which makes it something of a M.A.D. scenario. Among other things, the U.S. could void the $1t of outstanding Treasury bonds held by China, seize the assets of Chinese companies in the US, and/or ban imports from China. I think both countries would fare pretty poorly from an all-out economic/trade war, even if it didn't spill over into actual hostilities (there are edge scenarios where you can imagine e.g. an angry U.S. recognizing Taiwan's independence in retaliation).
Meet The Man Behind Apple's Beautiful Retail Stores
"we see the highest levels of economic freedom from countries ruled by a single strong, competent, benevolent individual":
Heritage Economic Freedom Index: Autocracy Wins Again
http://athousandnations.com/2010/01/20/heritage-economic-fre...
How Mint.com Acquired 1.5M+ Users
No... That one is their VIC-20 ;-)
Maybe biofuel would be a good use of corn instead of HFCS. And the gov't could still subsidize that.

Edit: That probably should have included an irony tag...
When stocks tumble the companies usually keep operating along, the shareholders take the big haircut.
What am I missing? I don't share anything in my Google Reader. So where's the problem?
Unfortunately very large canvases suffer from poor performance in certain browsers. At least as of ~1 year ago.
Don't forget the x-list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XOR_linked_list
Tempers Flare in North Face vs South Butt
I'm still yet to see a convincing reason why those people could not have been brought out of poverty while there was freedom of speech at the same time.
> Every economic development has been accompanied by huge misery and death.

From Peru here. The country used to be extremely poor, we're now doing ok, not great but ok with 9.2% of GDP growth (2008 est.) and freedom of speech is pretty great (totally uncensored internet and press) and we're still alive!
Bookmarks. How are you managing them?
Nothing fancy, just sharing if anyone finds it helpful.
Far greater people have devoted more than a single decade to M$(and other companies) in exchange for cash. It's not unusual. It's called capitalism.
I recently needed to do this for sorting search results. My approach was to calculate a Bayesian average (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_average ), which was also pretty simple (once I found a formula to copy from here: http://www.thebroth.com/blog/118/bayesian-rating )

It seems to me that the Bayesian average is superior, because it considers the value relative to other items.
From 2003; it might be worth putting that in the title.
Why are there no attempts on a current release of FireFox? Its not like Fx 3.6 is brand new. Plus, where's Opera?
In America there is not any particular issue that is so contentious that free speech is actually curtailed. But there is tremendous social pressure for people to voluntarily curtail certain forms of speech.

If the US had a less stable society, chances are certain kinds of speech would be considered more dangerous, and we'd progress from certain forms being considered socially inappropriate to being banned outright.

This has happened in our past... and the usual framing of it is that we've progressed past such mistakes. In reality the pressures that force such things have abated.

China still faces these pressures...
Apple's Board Doesn't Matter
Apparently if you build it, they will come.
What you assert is hard to square with things like this:

>China’s remarkable economic development has gone hand in hand with the rise in nepotism which has powerfully distorted the distribution of its benefits. As a result, China’s wealth is concentrated in only a very small share of the population. In fact, despite enormous GDP growth, a large share of the population is not much better off from a decade ago. The book “Capitalism with Chinese characteristics” by Huang Yasheng demonstrates using detailed quantitative analysis that China’s state-directed economic policies since the 1990s are essentially anti-poor. Huang’s book attributes Shanghai’s strong GDP performance not to indigenous private enterprise but rather to state-controlled (and subsidized) corporations and their foreign partners, with the gains flowing to the state – and their favored business people – and overseas rather than to the general population. In fact, Huang documents how Shanghai actively discriminates against private enterprise to protect well-connected state-owned enterprises. When the state plays a bigger role in the process of development, politicians are inclined to rent-seeking. As a result, corruption in China is pervasive. With unethical business practices so common at home, it is unsurprising that such behavior would carry over to its companies’ operations overseas.

http://www.cipe.org/blog/?p=2844

China's growth has been extraordinary put don't imagine that it is some sort of massive poverty reduction program. The party controls massive amounts of the economy and is profoundly corrupt.
Oh god, wall of math!

/me hangs head in shame.
They found turnkey surveillance products, marketed and sold to law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the US and foreign countries, designed to collect encrypted SSL traffic based on forged "look-alike" certificates obtained from cooperative certificate authorities. The products (apparently available only to government agencies) appear sophisticated, mature, and mass-produced, suggesting that "certified man-in-the-middle" web surveillance is at least commonplace and widespread enough to support an active vendor community.

I wonder if China, Sudan, or Iran are included on the list of governments that they're allowed or willing to sell to. If so, the problems that arise from trusting too many Certificate Authorities would also apply to trusting too many governments.
I don't understand why you would need this script. The functionality is built right into the Facebook "feed" - just "mouse over" the Mafia Wars notification and there's a big button "Block Mafia Wars".

Of course, you have to click for every app, but it's a small price to pay.
Travel Hacking: Smart Ways to See the World
GitHub continues to make me happy.

This morning, I logged in to view my +6 timezone partner's commits from last night. I had a very visible smile when I noticed the graphs. (I rarely bother installing flash on my *nix boxes. The support really is terrible.)
What you should argue for is that the government stop subsidizing farmers (and everyone else) altogether. That way, you don't have to worry about unintended consequences inherent in any subsidy program. (Nothing bad happens when you don't rob Peter or Paul.)

The important thing is not the political reality of the moment, but the philosophy people go by in the future.
In Singapore you get caned for smoking weed and gum chewing is illegal. Sounds like a friggin blast!

Besides, it's not a counter-example. In order for it to be a counter example, you would have to prove that Singapore would be "chaos" if it wasn't for it's big-brother government.
An exception-like mechanism for Go
Awesome. This is the first time I've seen a real world app ported feature-for-feature from Flash to Canvas. It's a good data point.

It feels more responsive than the Flash version in Chrome on OS X.
When you owe someone $1 million, you have a problem. When you owe someone $1 trillion, they have a problem.
Because it was 8:30am when I read this, and I usually wake up at 10.

It still doesn't change my original point, however. Just because he acknowledges that the benchmark is unrelated to what he's talking about doesn't excuse him from the fact that it's unrelated to what he's talking about.

It also doesn't change the fact that the article is still a troll, regardless of the correctness of his benchmark.
Are you saying that the Chinese government could reduce poverty quicker BECAUSE they restricted freedom of speech?
How is it unwarranted when Lisp is THE greatest programming language ever known ?
Ask UK HN: Is FPS much better than ACH?
I'm often frustrated by how long it takes to transfer money from my bank account to my PayPal account via ACH. I stumbled upon this article that says the UK has a system much faster than ACH:

http://portalsandrails.frbatlanta.org/.m/2010/02/sameday-ach-provides-faster-payments-across-pond.html?locale=en_US

I was hoping someone could explain whether the UK's version of ACH really does take hours instead of days.

Does anyone know if something like that will come to the U.S.?