skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah, but necessary is the key word there. Very little that Flash is used for is necessary, it's almost always about entertainment. HTML 5 is well suited to overtake some of the reasons developers have to use Flash - inline video players and many Flex apps.

The HTML 5 technology stack is not well positioned to do everything Flash can do though - and I pointed out three key places where that's absolutely the case.

The biggest point though is that HTML creeps slowly forward through a standards process that is laborious at best. Flash, being a de-facto standard controlled by one company doesn't have to wait - it can push and prod forward and let developers explore new ideas and create new experiences. Even if you don't care for Flash, you should appreciate what it does for pushing the web forward. Sure there are missteps - I think Flash ads are awful too, but the work and because of that HTML5 and canvas will be used to build just as annoying ads in the future.
Information wants to be free. If you don't want someone to know about something, don't take it out to a bar. And especially don't leave it sitting around in the bar where anyone can take it. If you show something to a bunch of people, it's not a secret anymore.

Apple fucked this up, and they have only themselves to blame.

Gizmodo did what their readers wanted. They worked hard (to the tune of $10,000) and got an exclusive story that no other media outlet got. If nuclear launch codes were left in a bar, the media would be congratulated for breaking the story. But if it's a telephone, then everyone should be quiet and say nothing about it? Why? Why does the government deserve more scrutiny than a publicly-traded megacorp? Because Steve Jobs likes saying "one more thing"?

I'm not convinced.

(Uh oh, dowmodded because I hate Apple. What a shock.)
I have been told by an accountant that failure to file while abroad, even if nothing is owed, carries a $100,000 penalty.

Criminal penalties are also possible, and more likely than in the past.
Come on, it's a hardware update on a phone that changes the shape a little. Yes you can say you don't agree with Gizmodo and think it reflects badly on them. But that's only worth a passing comment in a pub with friends or a comment here on HN in what should have been the one and only thread about it. But instead we get a deluge of threads about it and people writing "why I'm angry" blog posts. This kind of stuff isn't really different to celebrity news and doesn't belong on HN at all.
YouTube got Video Store
Regardless of rule of law. What Gizmodo/Gawker did looks very unethical, at least to me. To hand-wave and say "people break laws all the time" and "the story was interesting, so it's worth it" are both ex-post-facto rationalizations for something that is, at best, pretty sleazy.
"To a certain extent," meaning that popular stuff gets funded at a much higher rate than unpopular research. I'm not suggesting your motives, or the motives of other hard-working scientists, are suspect. I'm just pointing out that most science is funded by outside organizations that have their own agendas, and can exercise those agendas by choosing what to fund. As an aside, this is true in scientific publications, as well. Just because your research is great, and your conclusions sound, doesn't mean Cell (or whatever journal) is going to print it.
Brevity Is Beautiful
The investment world is pretty small, especially in Canada.

Getting an investment from a company that is second rate immediately qualifies a startup as second rate, as though you've tried the more serious outfits and finally had to resort to 'plan b'.

Just like having kpcb (I know they're not Canadian, and not exactly angel investors, just to illustrate the point) on board is an automatic stamp of approval, the reverse also holds true. If I were on board of one of their other investments I'd definitely be concerned about the effect for follow up rounds. It's not just your company that matters, but also the company you keep.
I don't think it's unusual that companies are bought and shutdown to get rid of competition.

When Palm will be bought, i think the resulting company won't build smartphones anymore (the revenue stream) but will only be bought because of Palms patents.

I don't really think this will actually happen, but if Apple buys ARM, it would basically have power over the whole mobile phone market (plus settop boxes, receivers, TVs and almost every other embedded system). It would put the competition to a serious disadvantage for years (until competition is able to switch to a new platform).

Even just owning a core technology like ARM has, in the hands of one company, cannot be good for competition, the market and the customer in any way.

But as i said, i actually don't believe that Apple will buy ARM. That day, i will lose all the last hope i have in the regulation of the market.
From what I can gather "Beauty Particle" is the newer name for popular culture's "God Particle"?
I want flash to die; I just don't want closed platform policies to kill it.
I would trust neither, as both parties have other interests in mind.

The government will suffer political fallout if a plane crashes, so they err on the side of caution.

On the other side of the coin, BA loses money every second that a plane is not in the air, but their insurance company covers them if the plane crashes and kills everyone on board. So they err on the side of keeping the planes in the air.

With neither group being interested in objective safety, it's hard to believe either of them.
Kakai: It’s a Kindle for Students and Much More
Rubbish ... this is not a revolutionary product like the original iPod or iPhone launch ... it's just an update after all.
I'm not claiming that he's necessarily right, but Slavoj Zizek claims that so-called "consumer capitalism" actually does more harm than good. He says the fiction makes people feel good and complacent, and actually serves to prevent the frustration that leads to real change. I can't find a link, atm, but if I do I'll update the post.
"I really wish media and politics had stayed out of the science. I mourn the loss of objectivity, testing, and discovery."

I'm sure Galileo felt the same way... Science that might fundamentally shift worldviews has always been subject to meddling by the powers that be.
Can't disagree more. You're saying Steve is going to go on stage and pretend like he's "unveiling" something everyone knows everyone in the room has seen?

Nope, he's going to go on stage and deliver a presentation which will whip the fanboys into a froth world-wide. And he's going to do it in front of a hall full of carefully chosen audience members. Standard Operating Procedure.

The fact that Gizmodo scooped his reveal might be a game-changer for a lesser CEO, but Jobs is the best presenter in the business.
The awesome bar. Any non-deterministic address bar is infuriating to me. Chrome's is pretty bad. IE is the best out of the modern browsers. Best bet is to stay with an old version of firefox: 2.0 or earlier; you can spoof any naggy sites like youtube by updating the version in about:config's general.useragent.extra.firefox. The day you find any diminished functionality should be very novel.
Apple's not just selling a phone, it's the entire lifecycle experience: that includes the buildup, the unveiling, the opening of the presents. It's precisely like Christmas, and Steve Jobs is Santa. For those of us who buy into this ritual, what Gizmodo did is like tell us exactly what our Christmas present will be in August

So what? It's about time that Apple was welcomed to the real world product leaks that happen every day with companies with size of Apple. I think the key here is how Apple deals with it now that everyone is watching.
I disabled all the power saving features, at least, all the ones that I could find (don't really care about power saving since I only have it on when I'm either downloading something game related or playing a game).

I did do a search for the error codes and it was just a bunch of people saying, "Hi, I'm getting this error code, help."

It's comforting to know that, no matter what happens, Windows will always suck.
No they have a better one (connect).
Xobni takes to the streets & skies above Microsoft
Yep, this is it. I can't help but feel like this is a direct response to Adobe's criticisms.
I am not at all angry about the iPhone leak. I could not care less.

Am I the only one that suspects this leak to be just a PR stunt?
What about the possibility that this was done intentionally by Apple? They're famous for these kinds of intentional leaks.

I don't know anything more than anyone else here I'm just speculating.
I think he means necessary to deliver the appropriate entertainment, not necessary in the True-Grit sense.
Razor thin margins are a sign that the retail business is operating as efficiently as possible.
It is highly arguable that Gizmodo came upon the iPhone prototype legally. And in the case that you can run a story on an iPhone prototype for $5000, gaining 20M+ page views without stomping all over any laws, I would say that any smart tech publication would do the same.
What ever happened with that company with the proprietary video codecs that Google bought? There were rumors that Google was going to adapt it and release it as a better open standard than HTML5
I "know" this as a "fact" of human behavior. Yes, it's an appeal to authority (myself :-), but I've been watching politicized science for about three and a half decades so I'm pretty confident about my judgment.
Founder Bloggers Wanted
Getting angry that a company is going to have a little less marketing buzz at launch seems a like a bit of an overreaction.

Apple make some awesome phones. This one will do just fine on its merits.
My physics is rusty, but I think not. A Beauty particle is a bottom anti-quark paired with a up quark. The bottom quark was called beauty for a while, so that's probably why this particular combination is called a beauty particle.

The God particle is the Higgs boson. Note a boson is quite different to a lepton (e.g. electron or neutrino) or a fermion (e.g. quark or proton).
html creeps forward exactly because of people using sub standard workarounds like flash, and those times are changing, anyone following what is happening on the web can see that real web development is starting to move at an extraordinary pace.

the standards committee dont "design" the internet, by definition to become a specification someone needs to have implemented it, browser vendors are free to implement cool new features as fast as they want, w3c is just a forum for agreement on those new features.

if we were waiting on rubber stamping from the w3c, we wouldnt even be using ajax right now.
No. Did you read the description on the page?

The Beauty Particle (called B+) is composed of an anti-quark b (that has a very short lifetime of 1.5 thousandth of a nanosecond!) and a quark u."

The God Particle (the Higgs Boson) is a fundamental particle, it is not composed of smaller particles.
I don't come from an Ivy league background, but I did join a start-up directly after school instead of joining a more traditional company. I did it because it was interesting and seemed like way more fun, and also I could wear jeans and combat boots to work. Money was not a motivator, and the stock options were, of course, not worth the paper they were never actually printed on.

There are those people who feel the money draw, and that's fine, and then there are those who prefer a different set of challenges. They go to work for non-profits, they join start ups or become entrepreneurs, they take their Columbia degree to the wilderness to count mayfly populations. I'm not convinced a start up would necessarily want to attract the kind of person who prefers money and security.
The ones I recall were not baseless. The problem wasn't publishing trade secrets, it was offering a bounty for trade secrets.

So... If an employee wants to spill the beans, that's fine. But bribing an employee to spill the beans is not fine. I think that's relevant to the flap about the iPhone given that Gizmodo paid $5,000 for the phone, giving the so-called finder of the phone a tremendous incentive to turn it over to them instead of returning it as seems to be their obligation under California law.
BDB and Tokyo Cabinet have transactions, and so does everything built on top of these (KiokuDB, Memcachedb, etc.)

Mongo, Couch, and Cassandra don't have transactions over the entire database, but documents must be self-contained and must not refer to other documents. Following those rules, operations are atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable. "Useful" is not one of the ACID qualifiers, however :)
Modded you back up my friend. This is just about the the most laughable link I have ever seen on HN. It highlights the total and utter meaninglessness of the Apple "fanboi", writing whining blog posts about the revelation that a phone is going from smooth corners to sharper ones before the god-Jobs can present it to the salivating masses.
This line resumes everything:

"They posted a video on YouTube with a smug smile on their face as they unveiled the iPhone a couple of months before Steve Jobs could."

I do not think he is angry because of Gizmondo (low) standards of decency, because they apparently released an entire report about the guy (I just do not read Gizmondo, so I did not read the post), he's just mad because Jobs will not present an orgasmic keynote for Apple fans.
Can't disagree more. You're saying Steve is going to go on stage and pretend like he's "unveiling" something everyone knows everyone in the room has seen? I'd expect that from any other CEO, but Steve is smart enough to not reek of bullshit in front of his most loyal customers.

They don't call it the reality distortion field for nothing.
Filing states student broke rules and had no expectation of privacy
Smart maybe, but not ethical. They may have gotten 20M page views, but their not in my feed anymore.
Who downmodded smutticus here? That's just ridiculous. Modded back up.
Presumably one of the most important initiatives at Google outside of search has got to be Google Docs. Having a platform for people to create and edit documents on the web has to have been seen as a critical feature.

Why? It's not at all clear to me why Docs should be "one of the most important initiatives at Google." Since advertising brings in the lion's share of Google's revenues, their priorities are probably:

1. Search - where most of the advertising money currently comes from

2. Android - where most of the advertising money will eventually come from

Also, considering that google's enemy-du-jour is now Apple, not MS, I wouldn't be surprised if Docs has slipped even further down the priority list.
Is Steve the only person in his life who truly understands him, the only one who can surprise him with a wonderful present he's sure to like?

All the shiny toys in Cupertino won't help you, Mr. Blogger. You need a girlfriend.
So, will Facebook destroy the Internet or simply change it's identity? Change it's identity, haha, get it ... ahem... (:P

Personally, I don't like where this is heading. I deactivated my account (can't delete it outright for some reason!) so I should no longer have a presence on facebook. However, this is not the case since I can log back in and my account is instantly re-activated. Whatever I shared on that site previously will always be there.

The privacy concerns are a serious problem and I think people need to critically look at this and decide if this is what they want their Internet experience to be going forward.
It's a load of shit is what it is.
I enjoy a good spy photo of a mysterious new product. It doesn't ruin the surprise for me; it enhances it by keeping me guessing.

Gizmodo ruined both for me this week. It just felt unfair, even predatory—acquiring the device itself through shady means, photographing it up and down in high resolution, dissecting it and macroing each component; it turned what was a game into something unnecessarily serious. It turned a coy tease into pornography.

I had to imagine the Apple designers and engineers who had made this thing their focus for the better part of a year, cringing as their unfinished work went through the wringer of Gizmodo's pageview circus.
Main reason: Too frequent updates with little noticeable improvement is a hassle.
I think I spent 90 minutes on that movie. That's probably more than I have spent on Facebook.
What does this mean? I mean, I guess this tells us the LHCb is working correctly, but other than that I'm not sure what this tells us.
Ask HN: What makes a presentation great ?
Recently, I've been watching presentations on youtube in the hope of becoming better at it. The problem is that I don't really know, for instance, what makes Steve Jobs a great presenter.

Could someone more experienced show me the details which make a great presentation ?
Still sounds like crazy talk to me. I think it's much more likely that Apple would just want to make sure that the CPU roadmap was going in the direction of their designs.

They have a history of participation in the AIM alliance. The Altivec instruction set is practically their baby. The reason they had to switch to x86 is because neither supplier (Motorola nor IBM) was willing to target the performance-per-watt that Apple needed to execute their laptop designs. If there is any truth to this rumor, I would guess it has to do with securing the roadmap so they don't get blindsided by suppliers in the future. That makes much more sense to me than blowing 8 billion dollars to scuttle competitors.
What is Operations Research?
I think what the biggest problem is with HTML5 nowadays, is that even with HTML5/CSS3/JS every browser supports other parts of the standards and even if there are common elements they can behave differently. Everyone ever written a complex webpage for IE/FF/Safari on Windows and Mac will know what i mean: It's a nightmare. Flash offers a common API for all browsers and operating Systems and even more features then HTML5/CSS3 deliver with a feature rich platform for development.

Don't understand me wrong, i actually wish Flash to die. But i'd rather like it dead when programming for different browsers becomes less of a pain. Internet standards need to evolve faster (how long did it take for HTML5?) and browsers need to be more standard compliant/support a common feature set.
Also, as a sidenote, i wouldn't write websites in Flash, but i can see some actual benefits for the developer.
The Trust Gap: Why People Are So Cynical
Rumors are that Google is going to release VP8 as fully free codec to resolve <video>-tag codec wars. It supposedly should be comparable to h264 in image quality. But Flash is much more than just video.
Right - but when did XmlHTTPRequest first rear it's head? 1999. When did AJAX actually take off? 2005.

Six years.

During the same time Flash went from a no scripting (well it was essentially programming via madlibs with Flash 4) to ActionScript 3 (Flex 2, the first place AS3 was used, was in early beta at the time I believe).

New versions of the Flash Player only take a few months to hit 90%+ penetration rates.
Ugh. What a load of shit.

In the grand scheme of things, this whole ordeal is utterly insignificant. Watching these bloggers furiously wipe the foam off their mouths for Apple's sake is pathetic. Nevertheless, Apple brought this upon themselves.

Apple treats their products like they're little Holy Grails. Insane levels of security, meticulously choreographed press releases, dramatic introductions by the electronic Jesus himself. What do you expect to happen when they screw up and leave one at a bar?

In the end, none of it really matters and the world will go on spinning. Apple will sell them like the little hotcakes they are. Gray will go on to have a completely successful career (might not get to have any more pre-release units). And Gawker will go on "creatively" scooping stories.

Perhaps the only injury from the entire affair is to the bloggers and tech news junkies that aren't going to get to play out their familiar 41 minute "new Apple product" masturbation routine...
Sleep Is Death (video game art by Jason Roher) released
I just want an Android PDA(no phone) Is there any of those in the works?
In the bad old days of 1998, HTML was flashing forward along several haphazardly chosen paths, as Netscape and Microsoft were busy creating their own incompatible extensions like document.layers vs. document.all.

I prefer the present situation, where the experimental envelope-pushing happens in the controlled sandbox of Flash, and only the most vital innovations will eventually trickle down into the HTML standard.
Turn Your Facebook into a Mini Blog with Facebook.Me
Do you have a source? Because 40 billion is the number I've seen quoted most often, for example here: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/ByteOfTheApple/blog/a...
For most people, joining a startup as an employee straight out of college is a pretty bad career move these days. Your first job has an enormous effect on what options will be available to you down the road. A brand-name company like Google on the resume will open doors that a (likely failed) startup no one has ever heard of simply won't. You can always join a startup or found your own company later.

Prior to the dotcom crash, you could at least justify a startup on the potential upside, but with today's meager buyouts and non-existent IPO market even founders don't always end up with a life-changing payout. Employees should expect nothing.
"a better open standard than HTML5"

You mean a better open source video codec than Theora? They did and they have.
Some honest questions:

Does the caller of this API need a patent license to do so? Does the patent license of H.264 cover decoding of the format through OS APIs, or does each caller need its own license?
I would argue it's about the market prodding Adobe to change their flagship Creative Suite tools to fully support HTML5 output. A major reason designers use Flash is because of the development environment.

There is a slight possibility that a startup could take on Adobe, but the fact is there are hundreds of books on Adobe CS4/CS3 because they own the industry mindshare.
This whole Flash murder/death/kill attitude is boring me to tears - I don't think any Flash developer would disagree that HTML 5 will (eventually) replace the more basic things that Flash does. Advanced multimedia will still use Flash. Ads will use whatever is most intrusive until the end of time so use whatever tools you have at your disposal to block them.
I don't think Steve Jobs is that great a presenter, Ballmer is (much) worse though.

A good presentation and a good presenter are two different things. A good presenter can give a presentation about essentially boring material and make it live, be memorable. A bad presenter can turn a great presentation in to an ordeal.

I've linked here once to a youtube video of Joe Ades, have a look at it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCUct4NlxE0&feature=relat...

The subject is 'potato peelers', from a street vendor no less.

That man has more feeling for presentation in his little finger than any amount of high flying consultants that lecture on the subject.

Watch the crowd he draws and how well he interacts with the people.

Of course he's had years to hone his 'patter', but still, I can't imagine watching someone trying to sell a car, much less a potato peeler, and presenting is essentially a sales job.

He manages to turn the mundane in to something interesting and engaging.
http://www.presentationzen.com/ might just be your new best friend.
This might be a case of the dunning kruger effect in action. The blogger doesn't know enough about the web that he'd suggest a fancy new technology called 3d HTML without even knowing that it already exists.

How many people rely on inexperienced individuals like this for advice about the web when the advice giver him/herself doesn't even know their words are two decades late...
Can your Network handle Telepresence?