skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't have much first-hand experience with Blu-rays, but I wonder if this kind of bad compression is a common thing?

Fortunately it's not too common, but it's more common than one would like. This isn't unique to Blu-rays either; it happened a lot with DVDs. Various problems that I've seen are:

1. Improperly done telecine (e.g. telecining two different parts of the frame at different rates, more common in animation).

2. Badly done framerate-changing (Robot Chicken DVDs).

3. Completely borked interlacing (Family Guy first season DVDs).

4. Bad encoders that can't deal with massive bitrate peaks well (Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu R1 DVDs, see http://i43.tinypic.com/105b8rk.png).

The primary problem with Blu-rays is a lack of source quality, not these kinds of mistakes: a lot of Blu-rays simply don't have any detail beyond SD because their source material is horrible (examples: Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind).
I suppose the big studios do a decent job at encoding (though I might be wrong)

They do a poor job in a significant proportion of cases. (Warner are known to be the worst)
Bill Gates and Chad Holliday: Energy industry needs more R&D
Substitute music with drink and imagine that your job is a doctor.

I'm just trying to point out that there is a possibility (a bit far fetch I agree) that listening to the music while you work is kind of mind numbing mild drug that maybe helps you to suffer through the drudgery of workday but it might be harmful to your ability to concentrate and the value of your work.
You can target facebook ads amazingly well. I can reach only under-30 single programmers in San Francisco.

I have friends who've built businesses targeting exactly who they wanted to reach, in a way that would have been prohibitively expensive (and less effective) via AdWords. I'd love to share their specific stories, but I don't have permission (yet?).

Edit: I guess I can elaborate a little. What these businesses had in common:

1. You could nail down the interested demographic in facebook to reach ~0.01% of the population who would be immensely interested in your service.

2. The service itself made sense in a social context. I don't know if advertising a plumbing business would work, despite being able to drill down into local married people of homeowning age.
Really Understanding Abstract Classes in PHP
Some data instead of "I have a friend who..." anecdotal evidence would be nice. The author doesn't make a very strong claim as to why facebook ads don't work which is the whole premise of the article.
No, but manipulation of people is largely applied psychology.
Paul, I think you make a compelling counter-argument. Thank you for moving the debate forward. I have written my own follow on posting here: http://bothsid.es/62o that referenced your blog posting
If his leadership is not admirable and he's a case of the problem in question, who better to say "Don't hire someone like me!"?
The author's thesis is that Facebook ads are bad because they can't harvest demand the same way Google ads can (no purchasing intent), so once Facebook has exhausted its share of 'gullible' or 'naive' businesses who give ads a try, their profitability will fall like a house of cards.

This is flawed in two important ways:

1. Just because people don't click on banner ads doesn't mean there isn't a place for advertising.

2. Facebook isn't only monetizing with ads. For example, they've proven themselves to be a killer platform for social games and Facebook Credits seems to have a promising future.
I look like a job hopper on my CV, so I have to explain that startups go bust.
http://cdixon.org/2010/03/25/stickiness-is-bad-for-business/

Chris Dixon posted on this recently:

Facebook is like a Starbucks where everyone hangs out for hours but almost never buys anything.

...

The vast majority of money spent on intent-generating advertising — brand advertising — still happens offline. Eventually this money will have to go where people spend time, which is increasingly online, at sites like Facebook. Somehow Coke, Tide, Nike, Budweiser etc. will have to convince the next generation to buy their mostly commodity products. Expect the online Starbucks of the future to have a lot more – and more effective – ads.

The problem, of course, is that nobody knows how, but we expect someone to figure it out eventually.

So here's a fun question to overcome your status quo bias. What if brand advertising is an artifact of one-to-many communications tech, and can't work in a many-to-many environment?
A Mystery of Missing Methane
No no no. I don't care about their motives. And I realize that with regards to internet content (aka Flash) there isn't anything explicitly hypocritical about supporting open standards instead of Flash. But I think it's a bit off to think that the potential for hypocrisy is confined to the specific context of any particular comment.

If a gay person says, 'I support marriage rights for gay people but not for lesbians' -- is that not hypocritical?

My explanation earlier was meant to spell out the important facts related to which areas Apple and Adobe support open standards and which areas they don't. It's simply about what they control and what they don't control, and it's based on the same principles as when someone would want free markets.

For example, before the Industrial Revolution, England imported most of it's cotton from India, which was the supplier of most of the world's cotton. At that point, the English government made all sorts of hindrances to how much could be imported and so on, in order to protect local cotton producers.

After the Industrial Revolution, Britain became one of the leading producers of cotton fabric, and suddenly they were huge supporters of 'free markets' ...in places where they didn't explicitly control the pricing of cotton (aka India).

So free markets/open standards is the same thing. It's entirely about what someone controls and what someone doesn't control. And it's hypocritical for Apple to talk about supporting open standards for flash-like functionality, because they don't care about open standards, as evidenced by the way they close off nearly everything they touch (which are actions, not just motives). It's simply about market control.
Economic Policy in the Information Age [pdf]
The article links to those screenshots to show how bad some results from so-called "professional" Blu-ray encoding software. Although it wasn't the case early on, most Hollywood Blu-rays looks great now.

Check out this review of the Avatar Blu-ray http://www.highdefdiscnews.com/?p=42265 . About a third of the way down the page there are tons of lossless screenshots. That site has reviews for tons of titles; it's a good place to check sound/video quality before buying a Blu-ray title.
I don't think the people behind this look at this as provocation, but as retaliation.

For those that haven't see this: Philip Pullman (who wrote a book titled 'The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ' had a comment on free speech and the right not to be shocked that I think was quite beautiful:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ3VcbAfd4w&feature=playe...!

"It was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if you open it and read it, you don't have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don't have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or bought, or sold or read. That's all I have to say on that subject"
For information rich applications (ie. B2B-ish), definitely ExtJS. Pretty steep learning curve since, unlike jQuery UI, you sorta have to take all of nothing. We use ExtJS everywhere where using data/information is more important than look-n-feel. Put together CoffeeScript (http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/) with ExtJS and you'll be in RIA dev heaven. Fast and very productive.

For applications where look-n-feel, customization, etc is more important (ie. B2C-ish or consumer internet), HTML/CSS/jQuery is the way to go.
First off tasty beer, and coffee both improve my coding skills, and my quality of life. As for music, you may not like it, but for those of us who do... does it ever make life great.

As a total aside, I can't imagine exercising without music, it'd be like some form of torture.

I had a similar argument with my business partner the other day. When it comes down to it, you can only really comment on the work flow you enjoy.

He requires total radio silence to be productive, doesn't like IM, music, anything. Where as I love having conversations going while I am coding, gives me something to think about in the front of my mind, while particularly tricky problems get my idle thread. And often when I am not focusing on why I can't solve something, it will come to me.

Just my 0.02.
How to make Firefox lightning fast on linux
The reason Mark is an asshole is that he's trying to create / exploit cultural norms to prevent employees acting in their own self interest. Of course it would be optimal (for the employer) to have employees that never leave, but the vast majority of employers treat their employees fairly poorly. Any social bonds such as employers keeping employees around through tight times have long since been shattered since employers have made it abundantly clear they look out only for themselves. Expecting employees to do differently makes you a dick.

Even the basics -- employers expect two weeks after you resign to help transition your responsibilities -- are asymmetric: how many employers would give you an extra two weeks of wages if they fired you to help tide you over until the next job?
Obviously this guy doesn't understand what a ponzi scheme is. Perhaps if facebook took some of the money from new ad buys to purchase goods from slightly older ads so that they thought they were more successful a case could be made for it being a ponzi scheme -- this is in no way one.

If in fact they are selling a defective or useless product then they are in the lemon business -- a card dealership that sells crappy cars will stay in business until everyone realizes they suck.

Anyway, I've never purchased ads on facebook so this in no way relates to that; however, when you link to the definition of a word in your first sentence -- by god, use it correctly.
I don't think that's exactly right. The religious doctrine that supports "Behead those that insult Islam/Muhammed" is based on sha'ria - Islamic law. The murder would just be an enforcement of the law, and not a ticket to paradise. (I believe you are thinking of jihad, as best I can remember the only ticket to paradise is not fighting in jihad, but dying in jihad.)

Bit of a quibble, but there's a bit of a difference between a ticket to paradise and simply enforcing religious law on people who do not live under sha'ria or follow that religion.
Particles and Environment Maps in GLGE
The geostationary orbit is 36,000 km in radius, an order of magnitude larger that the radius of the Earth. That, and the obliquity of the ecliptic, means that the satellite is only shaded by the earth for a tiny fraction of the time when the orbit crosses the ecliptic during the solstice, basically with about the same frequency as a lunar eclipse. Shading is not a problem.
A workaround would be to wait for another person that sees the same good as you did when commented.
...What these businesses had in common:

1. You could nail down the interested demographic in facebook to reach ~0.01% of the population who would be immensely interested in your service.

So perhaps Facebook isn't bound to take over the whole of the Internet. It's just bound to take over as advertisement infrastructure for the easily categorizable subset of the Long Tail.
Tous au numerique
You have more interesting friends than the rest of us.
If you read the complaint, it specifically says 55 of Paulson's original list made it into the final portfolio right off the bat, and the final 37 were negotiated between Paulson and ACA and subject to Paulson's final approval. Yes, ACA also had to sign off, but they were hardly 'independent' - Goldman was paying them to build this thing at Paulson's request.

So it's clear that ACA sucks. I've never argued that wasn't the case. But ACA's suckage in no way bears on the fact that Goldman plainly lied about the selection process to longside investors (who clearly suck, as well).

In summary: everyone involved sucks, except maybe Paulson. Goldman's the only party that criminally sucks, though, at least that we know of right now.
Hebrew Is a Difficult - Frightening - Edible Language
He's somewhat incorrect. Facebook ads work great for some things, and those things are where most of the money comes from. Right now it's games (which I have much experience with first hand, having spent somewhere in the 6 figures in ads) though I'm assuming also t-shirts and dating sites given the number of ads I see for those long-term.
Although I completely disagree with Mark's opinion regarding job hopping, I do not think it is right to call him a a-hole. The guy seems really decent.
actually, I'm looking at it from both sides. I'm working on my own startup right now and I hope that I'll be hiring people later this year. My point is that job hopping doesn't factor in as a signal on whether your resume ends up in the interview pile. I'll let you explain in the interview about your experience rather than just assuming that you're a disloyal sociopath that only looks out for themselves.
They gave an inch, people figured out how to turn an inch into a mile (Flash to iPhone compilation, etc), and Apple turned an inch into a millimeter (ban on non-approved languages for development -- stupid lack of Imperial measurement for small lengths).

Apple's original push for 'open' web apps is just an example of exactly what I was talking about -- they controlled iPhone and didn't want to share at all. They pushed for web apps because they can't control the web anyway. The fact that the App Store is raking in billions for them is a happy accident in their eyes.
Skepticism is always healthy, but being more skeptical of some than of others is the same as being biased.

The comments I saw about Facebook's big plan came in two flavors. Some said "Facebook is getting creepy. I want my privacy." The rest said "this will be awesome, you'll see."

This guy is saying, "yeah, but will they be able to execute?" You don't need data to ask that question, and we all need to know the answer.
I've never advertised on Facebook, but it has some impressive targeting options:
http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=863
In general, brokers are not required to disclose whether the other side of a trade is a hedger or a speculator. In fact, they are usually legally forbidden from doing this.
I'd like to be clear right now what this article is about. It's about Apple's choice to get frameworks such as Core Image and OpenGL to direct which graphics card the Mac should use, and how by doing this, there have been some unusual cases whereby some applications cause the dedicated graphics card to be enabled, and continue to be enabled. This leads to a detrimental effect on battery life which is the exact opposite for putting this in place. With this in mind... read on.
Don't promise free upgrades if you need GAAP revenue now
it's a good place to check sound/video quality before buying a Blu-ray title.

From a cursory glance it seems that site is rating known bad releases (e.g. U-571 and it's strong grain removal; Transformers 2's major blocking during action scenes) with 5 stars.
Oh man, I thought you had a valid argument - though one I disagreed with - till the last two comments.

Basically your argument has become along the lines of: you don't like music and therefore anyone that does has a "problem".

I personally can't comprehend people who work in silence! But I'm not judging people who do; just as music works for me, silence works for others. You've assumed silence can't be a distraction which, from my perspective, is wrong.

> Stop trying to pass your costly and possibly damaging addiction as something that improves your life and brings you value.

All in all you lost me at that... how rude.
The next logical question that this kind of articles brings to mind is how do you 'treat' this -- or rather, what are the most efficient tools, tricks and behaviors to progress beyond this addiction, and control our urge to connect the hive brain and focus on productive work?
"Absolutely wrong. These guys thrive on the fear they can stir up"

They may thrive on it, but I'd guess many of them are primarily motivated by trying to stop what they see as blasphemy. If they can stir up fear while doing so, they'll be happier, because that fear might stop future blasphemy.

However, I don't think its safe to assume that if they aren't causing fear, they'll let the blasphemy slide.
I take issue with your claim that these "prophets" served as great examples and deserve respect. They may do, they may not do, but I'm not going to self censor just because you claim they do.

This isn't about believing our freedom to draw Mohammed is restricted. It's about believing our freedom is restricted full stop.

Any time anyone says "We threaten to kill anyone who does X", where X is an activity that causes no more harm than hurt feelings, I think we should all take it upon ourselves to do X regardless of whether we would have wanted to or not beforehand.

That's the way to preserve our freedom. To make sure we take (very limited) action to assert that we are not going to be bullied into submission (pun intended).

Very few would ever have drawn a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed if it had not been for these death threats. If no radical muslims existed they wouldn't feel the urge to defend the free world from them, and would have no wish to insult the feelings of tolerant muslims.
Obviously it was subject to Paulson's final approval. If ACA did not construct a short position which met Paulson's needs, Paulson would not participate and there would be no CDO (unless another short side was found).
Microsoft Office on Windows Phone 7 Looks Fantastic
Well, not literally a Ponzi scheme, but I guess I get the point. He means to say, simply, that advertisers will eventually catch on and stop using facebook ads because they're ineffective.

The analysis suffers in trying to shoehorn facebook's biz model into google's. Facebook is relatively young and may very well find different ways to make money. If their push to be a major platform pans out, they're in a powerful position.
Last summer, I went through the whole series with my kids as bedtime stories (minus Tintin in the Congo and Tintin in America, which are a little beyond my PC threshold). We loved them! I have no idea why every kid in America doesn't slurp them up like candy.
Part of the motivation for putting 'like' buttons all over the web is to gather more granular behavioural data on users, which is eventually going to enable much better targeted ads. They aren't stupid. That said, I'm still mystified by the low quality/relevance of the current ads given what they already ought to know about me.
I thought this would have had more discussion going on, what with everyone here constantly picking up new topics. Anyone else?
When I get on Google and search, typically there are a few ads keyed to my search. These ads are selling real products, often the exact product I'm looking for, from legitimate and well-established companies.

When I get on Facebook, my sidebar is filled with ads. I would estimate 50% of them are scams. About 25% are for Facebook games, which I am not interested in. The remaining 25% are legitimate ads which are rarely targeted toward something I want, but even when they are, I won't click on them because of the 50% of ads that are scams.
At my previous employer, we hired an extremely talented engineer who found us via our facebook ad. Apparently he was looking for a job and had downvoted all the non-job related ads, so he was only shown job ads.
I think most people except those who are compromised by Wall St. influence consider Megan McArdle more of an apologist for Wall St. and laissez faire in general than as someone who did any sort of "takedown". Read closely, it's a pretty weak article, it's whole premise rests on criticisms of the delivery and attempts to bring reasonable doubt to a debate that has very little reasonable doubt about systemic abuse of public good faith by the big financial players.
grinich's HN app for the iPhone & iPod Touch has the arrows far apart from each other (it's shown in the image next to the App Store logo and the screencast):

http://michaelgrinich.com/hackernews/

I think the narrow width of the iPhone makes it work, though. Your solution (also thought of by others) is the best solution I can think of for the website.
since when does trading volume suggests special sauce? you can buy and sell 100 million shares a day and only trade 20 stocks.
Wrong t-shirt: extra pat-down search, and maybe denied boarding

Wrong cartoon: head chop

One of these two is more egregious than the other.
It's not a question of mass but velocity.

.01 * the speed of light = 2,997,924.58 m / s

1kg traveling at 2,997,924.58 m / s = 6,706,166.29 mph. At that speed it has the same kinetic energy as ~10,000,000,000 kg traveling 67mph.
Ok, so possibly (though not empirically proven) there is some misleading going on. Bad, I agree.

But a Ponzi scheme? I think that damages his argument because it doesn't really resemble a Ponzi scheme - indeed it sounds like an attempt to rationalise what is going as something illegal and thereby win support for the argument.

Bad rhetoric.
> "True" weaponization of space would be putting orbital to surface or orbital-orbitcal weapon systems in orbit.

Both have been going on for a long time. Russia has satellites in high orbit that carry nukes. Russia's very first step in WWIII, would be to detonate those nukes to create a huge EMP that would fry every unprotected electronic device in North America. It will also severely cripple the communication infrastructure. It will also be the first step because it can some without warning, as it only takes a couple of minutes to take effect. ICBMs will be launched simultaneously or right after the EMP attack. ICMBs can take up to half an hour to an hour to reach their targets.
Most professional employers give severance pay, usually well in excess of two weeks.
I lightly approve of anecdotal posts like these. Facebook controls all of the data needed to make informed decisions, and they're not going to share if the OP's claims are accurate. Lots of bad press about CPM and cost/click will force Facebook to publish data proving the worth of getting Facebook ads that transcend the 'case study' nonsense. If they continually ignore lots of bad press, that's a big tell that the only party that benefits is Facebook, even though it's not a smoking gun.

I've taken this approach with PayPal. I'd use them for person-to-person finances, but I've heard so many small-business horror stories that I'd invest the time to make a merchant account if I made a startup. It's not exactly scientific, but PayPal's not exactly flooding the market with data either