skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"...it doesn't hold a candle to relativity (general or specific) or newtonian physics or a whole slew of chemistry theories."

I don't know if that's necessarily true. It's certainly not possible to measure how "accurate" the theory of evolution is, because it's not that kind of theory. It doesn't really make many (any?) specific predictions that can be tested in the same manner that those of relativity or chemistry can. On the other hand, I think our odds of discovering something tomorrow (or even in the next hundred years) that cannot be reconciled against evolution are significantly lower than the odds of us discovering something in the same timeframe that's inconsistent with relativity.
I was thinking a couple of days ago that maybe we need a plug-in or something that will ignore anything with Apple, iPhone, or iPad in the title or url.
Alex Lindsay said it right when he said Google and Apple try to "control or commoditize" - commoditized video is good

which license and patent terms I wonder...
Mahmud... what? The article was essentially saying that Apple can do whatever they want because they built it. The main point of the article was pretty disparaging to people who are upset by this decision. If I didn't convey that I was upset by this as well, that is my mistake. I thought that by pointing out that the author was, again in my opinion, mistaken in his argument I was in fact on the side of people who 'demand the right to hack, and contribute back'

Never said I was tired of people here discussing things. I am tired of what the author was saying which I didn't believe to be well thought out and, frankly, pseudo-intellectual snobbery despite its strong historical basis. Having just read the article a second time I thought I was abundantly clear, but I figured I should clarify.
WinPE 3.0 & Forensics
I'm not seing any confirmation from Google for now or any other sources. This is probably going to happen anyway, but for now I won't take it as a sure thing.
As the article points out, the big wildcard is Microsoft. I don't see what logical reason Microsoft has for skipping VP8 other than the anti-Google animosity, but that has led to illogical decisions on their part before.
Wow, I never would have guessed Flash was once called "FutureSplash". What a terrible name.
Indeed, there are plenty of examples in the text. I didn't think it necessary to paste the entire article in the comment box.

We'll have to agree to disagree.
Unless it turns off developers to such an extent that it affects the quality of apps on the platform. For that everyone will just have to wait and see - the big disagreement here is mostly on what the effects will be.
Horizontability: Readability + fixed height CSS3 multicols
This is basically a done deal, fwiw. Other folks who I've talked to in a nda-ish sort of manner have been expecting to not support OGG long term, and instead support VP8 as the "open standard." It's an open secret in industry circles, and this I think confirms it. Can't wait till next week.
Good point. Clearly there's a pretty serious problem with however they're creating those hashes.
Looking to hire a logo designer? You might want to read this.
In my experience, it is the users who go gaga over the "shiny things." If the media pays attention to these things at all, it's simply because they know that's what a lot of users will be interested in. If I tell my mom that the new OS X has a totally rewritten Finder that follows OS X standards much better and deals with failure much more elegantly, she'll just blink and say, "Oh, cool." If I show my mom the graphical interface for Time Machine with all the versions of my files apparently falling into a black hole, she'll point and scream and call people over to see how cool it is.

The moral: Never forget that people really do like using shiny things a lot better in many cases.
Image enhancement according to Hollywood
In the previous version of the Agreement, 3.3.2 stated "... No interpreted code may be downloaded AND used in an Application..."

Using an embedded interpreter that only ran the signed code inside your app bundle was previously quasi-legit -- it was more narrowly restricting the use of an interpreter to bypass the App Store review process.
Considering the amount of bandwidth Google spends on streaming YouTube content, this move is far from altruistic.

Who cares? Companies are allowed to make the world a better place without having to self-flagellate themselves. Google could easily have just paid the H.264 licensing fees and told Mozilla to toss off, or even built VP8 support into Chrome and used YouTube to force-feed it to the world. They chose to cooperate, and should be praised for that.

I don't see how it's an "uphill battle" to convince anyone they should use a free standard instead of paying million of dollars in licensing fees

Several companies, most notably Apple, have already spent what must be millions of dollars on licensing fees and hardware. Regardless of which is a better long-term choice, it can be very difficult to reverse that much momentum. Not to mention the hundreds of millions of non-consumer multimedia equipment which is designed to use H.264.

Additionally, VP8 does not have much application support yet. It'll take a while for codecs to be written, debugged, and distributed to users. There may be significant lag time before VP8 displaces Theora among F/OSS users, or H.264 on OS X.
Yeah, the article was completely pointless. Question some friends and I were discussing today: if this issue were to go to court, what grounds would Adobe have?
Interesting. I wonder why Google throttles it like that.
Some banks display a customer preselected image after the user name & before entering a password. This seems to be a good solution to phishing if one keeps the username private. Otherwise a site could give you the option of using two part passwords.
re: the MoA of aspirin, I stand corrected; thank you.

Yeah, man, totally. Well, that and safe dosage, drug interactions...

I only have direct experience with ayahuasca shamanism, but for that case, they do have most of those things, as well as demonstrable, and reproducible, curative effects, and have reportedly had them for thousands of years. (Obviously, that last isn't a claim I can very well verify.)

...anyone anywhere can invent a just-so story.

Just so, and I didn't mean to imply that I personally believe the shamans' version of how their medicine works. Regardless of their beliefs, mine, or anyone else's, however, it does; there's no way people would continue to come back, over millennia, to what can be one of the most harrowing experiences I can conceive, if it didn't.

Moreover, there are documented studies, done by genuine lab-coat-wearing scientist types, with measured doses and control groups and everything, that detail its effects, and its unambiguous efficacy. It's only the prevailing sentiment towards psychedelic compounds, and the restrictions on their study that engenders, that have prevented the kind of exploration I think we'd both like to see -- which is the point TFA was making in the first place.
Looking at the video, the simultaneous editing appears to be identical to Wave.
I don't see how it's very productive to work more than that, particularly in a creative discipline. Actually, I think I'm at my most effective when I "work" less than that - but I also spend idle time thinking things over in the background. That thinking builds up a head of steam for the next period of work, but after six or so hours of that at most, I'd have to be doing some kind of mindless grunt work to continue being effective.
shameless promotion much? wish I could mod this story down.
I can't find any official word that Firefox is supporting it. This article simply says it expects Firefox's will because of Firefox's reason for not supporting h.264 was that it wasn't open license.
Now if only they can get Apple and Microsoft to support it....
> Everything is managed managed managed! We have left internal (Office) and external (lots and lots of folks) customers in the dust by only building decent managed tools. That's my opinion.

Good! Well, good for internal I mean. If managed/WPF/etc are the future of Windows, then MS needs to start eating their own dog food and using those techs for their apps. It drives me utterly nuts to think of all the neat tools that show up in Windows that other MS divisions flat out ignore.
How it works 'elsewhere' depends greatly on where elsewhere is. In some countries you can write off your investments when they tank, but in those places you can expect to pay a healthy tax if they appreciate. In others both the losses and the gains are not part of your taxes.

It also depends on what you qualify as an investment, for instance, investing in real estate or antiques can be tax free but a business investment might be taxed.

You can't really answer this question in a general way without at least specifying locality and the specific kind of investment.

So the 'how it works elsewhere' portion of your question is not easy to answer without a long list of examples and localities.
I think you can't use native menus right now:
http://developer.appcelerator.com/question/9731/android-bott...

Not sure about back button too. I'm sure it's all in flux.
It knows how quickly you change/scroll through pages while you read, so it can make a reasonable assumption of the number of words you read per minute and create an estimation that way.
If this was true, I would think Google would be using YouTube as a negotiating chip to get, say, Voice or Navigation on the iPhone.
FWIW, native Python already runs on my Nexus One, from the ASE - http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/

It uses RPC to do Android-native calls though.
BigDoor Media offers exactly this type of solution. www.bigdoor.com.
Oops, voted up by mistake.

I don't see how this is relevant to the article. It's a bit like reading an article about shady business practices by auto dealers and replying "I've had good results taking public transit."
By now I tend to just assume that Internet Explorer is going to always do the bare minimum needed to maintain its dominant position, while holding back support for whatever people want. I hate it when I develop a cool web app and it works perfectly on everything except IE, where it's broken in new and excitingly different ways on each of the major versions.
A key word on True/Slant's site is 'contributor'. Journalists on NewsTilt are not contributors, they are our clients, and we work for them. A massively different perspective.
I haven't found anyone who believes On2's claims, so I wouldn't be quick to believe the bandwidth saving argument.

Apple and MS have already paid for the H.264 licenses; they can't remove H.264 from OS X or Windows since it would cause major backlash.
The obvious thing would be for Apple to just include Lua with the operating system. They could even fund a port of LuaJIT to ARM (it's the fastest general-purpose script interpreter on x86)
Download Rumba Callejera mp3
Money changes everything; People, relationships, principles, slogans, etc. to name a few.
I once wrote a computer game called flight deck. It was a pretty boring game (Atari ST vintage), so together with a guy called Mat we decided to spice it up a bit.

The game revolved around (you've guessed it) an aircraft carrier that had two elevators seen from above.

Every once in a long long time one of the elevators would spontaneously descend, a guy would hop on to it, the elevator would ride to 'deck' level and the guy would strip and jump off the side of the ship and disappear with a splash.

The conditions for the event to happen were chosen to be so rare that it would only happen a hand full of times.

Every now and then we'd get a really weirded out support person asking us if this was possible, we always denied it, suggesting the player may have been drunk or on drugs ;)
I know that this might sound like an attack, but it's not. I'm just asking out of curiosity: If you want to code in Java, there are highly sophisticated IDEs you can download and code in for free (eg - eclipse). The same for Mac (Xcode).

When MS bought out .NET - was there any particular IDE or language development environment that was distributed for free to encourage (especially young) developers to code in it? Or did you always have to pay for Visual Studio?

I'm not slagging off MS. I'm actually genuinely interested in getting my hands dirty with some Visual C# now that Windows 7 is shaping up to be quite a nice OS to use. It just seems odd that I have to pay someone so that I can write stuff for their OS.
Given how much caterwauling there's been about Firefox not supporting H.264 and the problems with Theora, I'd be very surprised if Firefox doesn't support VP8 soon after it's open-sourced. Too many people want it too badly for it not to happen.
Sexprs on their own are not enough - I think you're confusing surface syntax for the whole semantic lot. XML's namespaces, for example, let different applications mark up the XML without risk of clobbering one another. JSON isn't really comparable to XML at all - it's much weaker.
I agree with you from a network administrator's point of view. But, from a simple, home user's point of view, that person is going to get a lot more security benefit out of making sure his or her software (in particular, web browsers) are updated; running as an unprivileged user; and never directly clicking on links in emails that claim to be from a financial institution, than changing his or her passwords every X months.

The way a typical home system is compromised is through some sort of malware infection. Take me as an example. Say you were able to get my Hacker News password. What would that get you? You could login to HN and post as me. Big deal. That password gets you nothing in terms of being able to get to any of my data that I'd consider valuable (which is all on my home systems, protected by completely different passwords).

I think what we're supposed to take away from this article is that the only security advice that's worth a damn is advice people actually follow. In other words, you have to make it simple for them. Stuff like keeping software updated is generally pretty easy because it can be done automatically; ditto running as an unprivileged user and not clicking directly on links.
Potentially. Theora activists keep repeating that "there's no such thing as a hardware decoder; they're all programmable DSPs", but in addition to programmable hardware you also need the desire and resources to actually implement VP8 decoding firmware for all these different chips.
331 is an anti-competitive policy. They are using their position in one market to affect another.

Then again, they aren't a monopoly so...
I tried it but it wasn't easy mostly because those clients are like every other client: they will try their best to get just-another-small-thing from you. So be prepared to deal with feature creep. For me it was also annoying that I couldn't get my idea out of my head so I had no motivation except for the money to work on anything else.

My advice: get a full time job on a small web company for a year. You'll learn a lot about everything business related and you might save enough to work on your own thing for some time after you quit.
No, because then he would not have said he was without someone capable of building it.
"all APIs are running on top of Dalvik"

No, the NDK (Native Development Kit) allows you to bypass Dalvik for some APIs - OpenGL ES, math, compression etc. The complete list is on http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html
HackNY startup-student internship program now accepting applications 
Subject: hackNY startup-student internship program now accepting applications (through 11:59 pm NYC time Apr 30)

hackNY.org is excited to announce applications are now open --- for students and for startups --- for the 2010 student-startup internship program.

Our Objective

Establish a sustainable, repeatable summer program matching computationally and quantitatively expert NYC students with NYC startups, to:

• Assist in funding student summer internships,
• Provide pedagogical lectures to develop needed skills which are not obtained in traditional curricula,
• Establish a community of NYC tech/entrepreneurship-oriented students
• Strengthen the community of NYC tech-oriented startups
• Strengthen the entrepreneurial community in NYC more generally
• Facilitate quantitative and computational students securing entrepreneurial opportunities post-graduation

STARTUPS: please apply via http://hackny.org/a/startups/

STUDENTS: please apply via http://hackny.org/a/students/

for more info please see

http://hackny.org/ or email info@hackNY.org
What you want is Visual Studio Express. Or more precisely Visual C# 2010 Express. http://www.microsoft.com/express/downloads/
I'm going to echo the "use LaTeX" advice, but add to it the following: use memoir (http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/memoir/). Not only is the manual for that package a great (but basic) tutorial on layout and page design for the total beginner, there are lots of example layouts included that you can more or less copy and paste into your .tex source and it will look good with minimal effort.

As for hosting, I'd consider self-hosting in combination with one of the PDF -> POD sites. I don't have any specific experience with any of them, so I can't really recommend a particular one, but if I were publishing a book, I'd like the idea that people could get a physical copy of my book that actually looks and feels like a book.
Apple and Nokia refused to support Theora, and the same argument applies to VP8 since it's also from the VP family. Google would probably need to provide indemnification to change Apple's mind.

Safari and Chrome both use WebKit but they use completely different code to implement <video>; Safari uses QuickTime and Chrome uses ffmpeg.
$1 Million Doesn't Cut it for Retirement
A good idea. Perhaps we should also invent some form of Structured Query Language so that we can express these data operations.
Yes, it's http://news.ycombinator.com/killed but it is only visible to editors.
By that logic, Google is just another search engine.

Even if the only difference was that we vetted the journalists first, think of what that gives you. Seeing the newstilt logo on a journalist's page means you know they're good. It opens up the possibility of syndication to newspapers and other big content sites. It commands higher ad rates. It makes the frontpage a worthwhile place to go (would you go to the frontpage of blogger? probably not.)

Each little thing which seems like its practically the same as other sites, is in fact massively different. We use Facebook Connect, sounds minor right? Or it could be the difference between good and bad community (I'm betting on better comments due to using real names). Consider even the fact that I'm on HN. That means we know good community when we see it, and we recognize its value. See if you find that in any other online journalism endeavor.

And we're not gussi-ing anything up in wordpress. You don't take the core of your product off the shelf like that, at least, not as a technology company.

Our designer is working on the new site. It'll be pretty tomorrow.
As dfranke says, "private APIs" are CocoaTouch/NS_* objects and methods Apple uses that you aren't allowed to (yet).

This article is factually false and should be downmodded.
Two comments:

(1) technically it isn't bootstrapping if you aren't growing off revenues. That's funding off savings. It's useful to make the distinction as it makes it clearer whether the business is break-even.

(2) if you're looking for design work, you should make it clear whether you've done the coding or the layout or the graphic design for the sites listed. Did you draw the images yourself or design using photoshop and supplied graphics, etc.. Good luck!
Hehe, posting here is a pretty good way to get some heads to visit your site. I'm thinking about getting a quote from you ;-).
How would it benefit Google to re-encode every video on YouTube into VP8?
Venmo mobile payments drives exchange for charities, retail
How many of these are good apps? I haven't played most of the games so have no personal experience - a lot of the titles look solid though.

Personally I think we should wait and see what Apple does to impose these new rules. It's very easy to get excited about how the world is ending for unity et al but the proof is really in the pudding.

I have a suspicion unity in general will be ok. But Apple will use this to remove "duff" apps at their discretion.

Not that that is a great situation.
Ask HN: How do you find a side job?
I want to know what is your current most successful strategy for getting good side jobs? i.e. Do you have an Elance or Guru account? Do you comb craigslist for postings that are legit?

And what are some of the hurdles you are faced with that you have overcome? i.e. How to detect a client on craigslist won't pay...etc.

The reason I ask is I want to make a site similar to Elance but for local developers to compete against the craigslist people. With support by it's own developer community (i.e. developers are the moderators not moron staff). Also I have experience working for local recruiters and I want to use them to get jobs as well. Thoughts???

Also if anyone has any good ideas on how to do escrow without sucking at it please let me know.
> ...devs are forced to develop for it.

No, you're not.

This is what I don't understand from all of the developer "outcry" over this: you're not forced to develop for this platform. If you don't trust it anymore, then stop developing for it.

There were ways to make money as a developer before the iPhone came along. There are still plenty of ways to make money as a developer that don't involve dealing with the iPad or the iPhone.

These counter-arguments sound so much like the web developer hatred for IE 6 years ago, where everyone was bemoaning having to develop code specifically for IE 6, and everyone was saying that they had to keep developing code for IE 6, because that's what the users are using. But, years later, it has finally become OK to abandon IE 6 altogether; it could have happened a long time ago if developers had just quit supporting garbage.

Android/Google are looking for good applications developers. Go work with that instead.

Otherwise, it's just noise.
Yes, and co-opting other communities or activities to find people you like and have something in common with work probably best anyway. (Of course if you want to find a significant other, you will have to make sure that your preferred gender is represented.)

Works especially well offline.
The problem here is that these sites are able to continue to operate because:

1. The people that register don't search the web for reviews, but instead are simply persuaded by trustworthy-looking TV/newspaper-ads.
2. Negative word-of-mouth in this business is not strong enough: people seldom like to tell their friends they're on a datingsite. Let alone telling the about one that has succeeded in ripping them off financially.
3. Affiliate marketing ensures that sites with the highest commissions (the ones that are able to charge/ripoff their users the most) will be recommended the most on various review/overview-sites.

So, the question is: what can be done about this?