skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quicktime works just fine for all manner of esoteric codecs and containers — the problem is with the FOSS stuff where they decided that they'd do something inventive, and ended up with something pointlessly different

So it works with all manner of esoteric stuff as long as it's not inventive, or different? That's a very limited definition of esoteric. And I've heard enough complaining about Quicktime over the years to not automatically give it the benefit of the doubt.
Maybe they just want a comfortable life, a wife, and to vacation once or twice a year... Why is that something to be looked down on?
Talk about money burning a hole in your pocket. Here is a listing:

"I will plant a tree in my backyard for $5"

Thanks, but no thanks.
The single reason that I choose gmail over desktop clients are the conversations - the ability to see all email bodies of one email exchange in a single page is indispensable for me. Another smaller reason is a search. If some desktop client would implement conversations (but by displaying email bodies, not only headers like Outlook or Thunderbird do), I would probably switch.
Would you mind posting your offlineimap and Gnus configuration (sans passwords) somewhere. I've had a few false starts with Gnus and always get lost customizing something. Maybe there's a nice tutorial for this somewhere?
Sounds similar to pure science, which often ends up finding a use (you know that mathematician who deliberately choose an abstract area with no applications so that it would never end up being used for military purposes - and it was)

It's testable: has anything in the past week (say) turned out to be useful in a way that you didn't expect at the time? (hindsight may obscure how useless it seemed before) Of course it might take much longer for its use to appear. Sometimes indirect, eg you learn concepts/principles from taxes in another state, which later help you understand your own state's tax policies (or something else altogether).
That was an interesting read. I think Zed has very nicely anticipated many questions a novice programmer might ask while avoiding the trap of trying to spare them the grunt work required to understand the basic concepts a programmer requires.
For Mac users who might not know, the standard text widgets in OS X use a subset of Emacs keybindings, so you can use C-a, C-e, etc to quickly navigate, which is handy if you have your Caps Lock key remapped to Ctrl (in the Keyboard system preferences) and are used to Emacs.

Two caveats: 1) no meta key, which makes navigation less handy sometimes; 2) C-k will kill the line, but I haven't found a kill-ring and you can't use C-y to yank the line back! This has bitten me a couple of times.

It's definitely nothing close to having a full text editing Emacs widget, but I've found it handy.
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Learnings from Five Years as a Skype Architect
How old is this article? It says April 2010 at the top, but most the comments are from 2005-2006.
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Using Labs "Mark as Read Button" will reduce the steps required to mark messages as read to two steps (mentioned as the first in ugly)
WOW, so many commenters are complaining about the blog design, instead of the content of the post.

People should stop being so serious. People should take a look at things from a different perspective, and gain positive values from it.
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"If you're smart enough, not a sheep" - sounds like a sociopath from the sociopath/clueless/loser model of organizations:

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...
What's wrong with it being written in c++?
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When friends of mine get married or get in serious relationships, I am happy for them. But I am also (selfishly) disappointed, because that means less time hanging out with me and sharing life experiences.

I see this in a similar way -- I perceive many employed friends as being tied up time-wise by the combination of work and (for many) family. Often, they fall off my radar because they wouldn't be able to help out with interesting projects due to exhaustion from work or due to work-related restrictions.
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We should consider what profession we are in.
I'm a software developer, and the opportunity for me to gain more and more luxurious or easy opportunities are slim. No matter which path I will take (entrepreneur or employment).

If you're an MBA or PhD from an Ivy League school, you maybe able to do that. But, what if you're just some dirt in your employer's shoe?
They can be making inflated claims for their own fanciful reasons.

They don't need to be copycats to be dumbasses.
I've tried using this on a few sites and it seems to fix some problems. However, it inevitably ends up causing new bugs.

I still think the best solution is to keep your CSS and javascript as simple as possible, while resorting to browser dependent stylesheets/scripts only as a last resort.
I've seen Rasmus speak twice and talked to him once. He certainly is very interested in APIs. It seems a theme of his to hack a mashup together with an API that exposes information that wasn't previously available.

I would guess that this post is more about his passion for APIs than it is about PHP.
Well, most people have above-average number of fingers :)
Actually, i think the day is already here , i am seeing quite a few software companies, small-to-medium sized, competing successfully by simply saying "We will provide better customer service".
Love the post-it idea, hadn't heard of that before.
All About Online University College Clubs: A Growing Trend in Distance Learning
Socializing is part and parcel of an academic experience, and some online students and instructors have found ways to overcome that lack of on-campus interaction through online college clubs.
The mystery of the mega-selling floppy disk
I don't look down on anyone. Everyone makes their own choices in life to move closer to the goal of happiness. Sometimes that involves running your own business. Sometimes it involves working for someone else's business. Sometimes it may not involve working at all.
Linux machines linked to spam by dodgy study
Five years ago I registered with them a wrong domain name, misspelled by my client. I asked them what could I do apart from registering the correct domain name this time, and they refounded my 12.54€ sending me a postal mail with a bank check. That was a good surprise for me, I will never go with another registrar.
Well you know what they say: there are user counts, damned user counts, and Alexa rankings.
It's not written on punchcards, that's what!
How to convert FLV to iPad on Mac
How To To Convert Mkv To Itunes M4V on Mac
Venture Capitalists See Growth in Agriculture 2.0
I've read this book some time ago, it's definitely a must-read, however I'm not sure how valid the assembler-tuning tips are on current processors.

Somebody should write a new edition of this book which takes account of multithreading optimizations and best practices.
Right...everywhere is walking distance if you have enough time.
YouTube Quietly Begins Renting Movies
Try telling people you study mathematics ;)
Well that's just the bizarre missing feature to install apps to the SD card, combined with the manufacturers's braindead insistence in shipping the devices with the least amount of inbuilt flash that they could possibly get away with.

You can't even install the last several OS build on the 256mb in the G1 and other early devices! Instead of bumping that to a reasonable 4gb for a couple dollars, they just doubled it to 512. Even Google's high-end Nexus One comes with only 512mb!

WTFs all around. An SD card is nice, but I shouldn't need it.
The retail price I've seen quoted a couple of places in €370, which would make it significantly cheaper than the iPhone or HTC android phones, and on par with the lower end Samsung Android phones. If they can make the UI work well enough I can see the combination of the Nokia name, cool selling points (HDMI out, 12MP camera etc.) and low price make this a phone that sells quite well.
Araba Oyunları
;; Gnus
;; . http://jfm3-repl.blogspot.com/2007_12_01_archive.html
(setq mail-user-agent 'gnus-user-agent)	; always use gnus for email
(setq message-send-mail-partially-limit nil) ; never split messages
(setq message-signature nil)	; no .signature
(add-hook 'message-send-hook 'ispell-message) ; spell check on sent

;; . encrypt .authinfo file
(require 'epa-file)
(epa-file-enable)
(setq epa-file-cache-passphrase-for-symmetric-encryption t)
;; . define mail/news sources
(setq gnus-select-method '(nnnil "")
gnus-secondary-select-methods
'(
(nnml "")
;; to add rss: type G R in *Group* buffer; when asked, paste url
(nnimap "gmail"
(nnimap-authinfo-file "/path/to/.authinfo.gpg")
(nnimap-address "imap.gmail.com")
(nnimap-server-port 993)
(nnimap-stream ssl))
))
;; Accessing the [Gmail] folders http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GnusGmail
(setq gnus-invalid-group-regexp "[:`'\"]\\|^$")
(setq gnus-ignored-newsgroups "")
;; After that, S s to the groups as specified above. Before doing
;; anything else, G c configure each Gmail line, and hit [done]. Gnus
;; will pick up “another” group, this time without the nnimap+gmail
;; designator. C-k the old group and it works! (I don’t know why; I
;; originally wanted gcc-self “nnimap+gmail:[Gmail]/Sent Mail” on
;; INBOX and this was the easiest way to arrange that. Magically, it
;; picked up the new INBOX and everything worked, even across
;; sessions.)

;; . save sent items
(setq gnus-message-archive-method '(nnimap "gmail"))
(setq gnus-message-archive-group "nnimap+gmail:[Gmail]/Sent Mail")
(setq gnus-gcc-mark-as-read t)
;; .
(setq gnus-thread-sort-functions
'(gnus-thread-sort-by-number
gnus-thread-sort-by-date
gnus-thread-sort-by-total-score))
(setq gnus-summary-line-format
"%U%R%z %d %I%(%[%-25,25n%]%) %s\n")
I believe like IMAP normally does -- newest takes priority.
You can use C-y to yank killed text back, unless the application is specifically interfering with it.
Most web servers by company
If you're just doing it to keep your head down and live a comfortable existence, then yes, a little bit.

But if you're doing something that you find satisfying, challenging, fascinating, or worthwhile, then I would never dare to look down on you.

For me, the real point of entrepreneurship is to take control of your own destiny. If you're doing what you really want to be doing, then you're already there! Just remember to live beneath your means and build a nice cash cushion, so you can keep control of your destiny as well.
Seems like a chapter out of http://www.amazon.com/Google-Story-Googles-10th-Birthday/dp/...
The problem is that from my experience trying to hire here, it's extremely difficult to find good engineers.... Cheap engineers are dime a dozen, but quite a few I've interviewed can't even do the fizzbuzz test.

And of those that could most were needed a lot of hand holding to do any basic tasks (and some of those were people with 3 years experience, I can't imagine how they could have provided any value to the company they were working for)
"If no email is selected, the Y key should archive the email under the cursor. This should be common sense."
Nope, bad idea. I inadvertently hit keys often enough that the message "No messages are selected" is engraved in my brain. Don't make these bad key hits do actions.
Would you mind moderating your language?
That was my bible when I was a kid, I spent so much time reading and pondering over it... It really is a great book although it's getting to be a bit outdated, a lot of the concepts and ideas can still be very useful.
Did you try Wanderlust(emacs)?
I previously used to have offlineimap(gmail) + Mutt.
Wanderlust has wonderful support for IMAP.
I think it's from 2005. The Gmail logo he uses still says 'beta', and he links to this blog entry from 2005: http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0405d.shtml
could you elaborate on the bugs?
Convert PDF to Word on Mac OS X
PDF to Word for Mac is a handy tool that converts PDF to Word on Mac. It brings Mac users the ability to edit or fix the content of PDF file. It is perfectly compatible with Mac OS X Snow Leopard.
Of course. Bach, Shakespeare, and Michelangelo can hold their own with the best that have ever existed.
By_star
How do you square that with him having designed a byzantine language, written an inefficient implementation, and built a standard library that's the most excessive of all time?

The things he disdains as novel in other languages are 40 years old — as old as he is!
I actually wrote about this the other day: http://whislr.com/2010/04/20/a-different-approach-to-buildin...
The Martin Luther King essay
he name of Martin Luther King is synonymous with the fight for racial justice in America. You could write a Martin Luther King essay that speaks volumes about this great man as a liberator or a person for whom civil rights was a creed.
Krugman fails to mention that this is the corrupt fallout from his cheerleading in 2002 for low interest rates in order to create a housing bubble to fill the void of the .com bubble !

"Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble." - Krugman 2002

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/02/opinion/dubya-s-double-dip...
Oil vs Grand Canyon
I just wanted to get a sense of what we're burning so I did some quick calculations. Needs peer review.
Ask HN: Is Facebook Graph API ready for production use?
Have been looking at the Facebook Graph API and having some major problems. A lot of the API documentation appears to be wrong (the first example on http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api doesn't generate the JSON it says it should) and some of the code generators generate code that just doesn't work (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like-box).

Have hacked around and managed to get things working but unsure if I should use in production - would appreciate any thoughts & experiences.
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It needs peer review.
Nike CEO Calls Tiger Woods Ad "Polarizing" But Authentic
It's rather slow.

I've used this on a few projects before, and always found it took several seconds to "do its thing" on a mildly complex site.

Remember that the typical computer that runs IE6 is not new hardware, and is probably already throttled by corporate bloatware in the systray.
Apple buys iPad A4 chip maker
True, but the burdon of proof is on the prosecution. If they have proof, the they could sue, but this looks more like a flimsy attempt to gain information.
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Launched in the UK, Canada, Ireland and the USA in 2008, Storm Cricket is a rapidly growing brand that is already being used by several International Cricketers.
Storm Cricket Bats are handmade from the finest English and Kashmir Willow by highly skilled craftsmen who have made cricket bats for some of the world's leading cricketers.
They're just trying to keep the best technology away from competitors. At their scale it's worth the money. Half a billion is nothing compared to iPod/iPhone/iPad profits -- if they can keep the technology out of competitors' hands for 6 months it's worth it.
You can also select messages that aren't on the screen. You click "Select: All" and then "Select all conversations that match this search".
The last releases of Pine appear to be in '05 too.
Since python wasn't there, I thought I'd fill it in with this reference to xkcd python wiki page:http://wiki.xkcd.com/irc/Python Or in my own words, for those who need to prototype and think fast at the speed of running away from velociraptors (or even deadlines and competitors). Agile like a raptor, libraries and frameworks like a T-rex. Simple yet powerful enough to fly with the pterodactyls.

Lisp would've been nice to see there (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859669 - the bipolar lisp programmer)
I tried it, but frequently found it causing Javascript failures in seemingly unrelated areas of the site as well as element flickering and disappearance.
I have a synth that has a built in floppy drive. I'm thinking of two options. Either sell it and get something newer, or find a drop in replacement for the floppy drive.

Does anyone know if such a thing exists? eg a device that looks exactly like a floppy drive to the host, but has maybe an SD card slot and some way to switch between virtual disks on that filesystem?
Ask HN: Widgets and SEO (iframe vs JavaScript)?
Just wondering what is the preferred way to provide a widget of a web service. That is, a small frame that people can display on their own web site.

For one of my sites I chose an iframe, hoping that it would somehow count as inlinks by Google. However, I suspect that has never happened.

If they are useless for SEO, maybe Javascript would be a better choice? For one thing, it would be easier to adapt the widget to the style of the web site (it could inherit some styles).

Also wondering what to do if something about the widget changes. I don't have email addresses of people who use the widget, so how can I try to prevent their web sites from breaking?
The way to pick a progamming language is to understand that you are joining a community in doing so. So the question is, what are the people in my field, or in my office, using? If you use the same as them, you will have access to experience, code libraries, support, etc. If not, there's nothing wrong with that, so long as you are willing to start from scratch. The language you pick has to be lot better for this trade to be worth it (with the exception of fields in which there isn't already an established technical community).
"I'm getting an unspoken but almost palpable sense of disappointment and disinterest"

The disappointment might be due to your entrepreneur friends believing you were great at being an entrepreneur, and that it's a waste to the community if you go back to being employed? I know I sometimes feel that way when I see a potentially great entrepreneur quit; but that doesn't change the fact that getting a job can still be the right thing for you.
And personally, I wouldn't worry about those people who display disinterest - they were probably only interested in the fellow entrepreneur, not the person.
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You didn't say it, but generally when it comes up that's the implication. So I took the next leap and went on the defense trying to turn it into something awesomer. =)
Right and I agree with you... except that this isn't a $300 phone. If it was, why did they pay $5,000 for it?
A payment must be made according to a contract, since otherwise there may be reasons for considering it as a tax evasion.
Well, it's more subtle than that. The big ratings agencies are Fitch, S&P and Moody's. They are competitors for the business of issuers. So each one is incentivized to rate higher than the others, without blatantly being seen to take the piss.

The problem with complete openness is that it encourages short-termism. You see this even with quarterly results, companies that have recently gone public (and thus have minimal reputation) manage from quarter to quarter to quarter and are hugely volatile. Imagine working for a manager who only cares about the share price tomorrow.

The risk of your XML file is not copycats, it's front-running.
Besides affiliates, did you have any other business model for your other websites? What themes were your other successes targeting besides entertainment (or what other forms of entertainment)? Were they also aggregation sites?
Also it's not visible without javascript which is silly and annoying. It wouldn't be hard at all to move the cutting to the server..
Actually the Bible got there first.
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Decent critique of Gmail, but the title seems a bit of a misnomer -- it really seems like an article about Gmail, with a few mentions of Pine thrown in. Given that it's presented as "X vs. Y", I would have at least expected the "Bad" and "Ugly" sections to have some comparison showing how Pine was better in those regards.
It's not doing that intentionally, it's just because they ported to a different phone platform first. One of the developers commented on the Techcrunch thread:

we will also be working hard on integrating with the Android platform and UI. (Current versions of Fennec are designed to fit in more with Nokia’s Maemo-based N900.)
"... That was my bible when I was a kid ..."

John Carmack learned from Abrash reading his graphics and assembler articles Dr.Dobbs ~ http://www.firingsquad.com/features/carmack/page7.asp
Congrats to both! I think it's important to realize while there are a lot of valid criticisms with PHP (likewise with other popular languages), there are still a great many intelligent developers and programmers in the PHP community. Once you wade through a lot of the cruft (and there's a lot of it), you'll hear from some really intelligent people who use PHP.
which would mean that they wouldn't be paying out absurd bonuses

No it wouldn't. Investment banks are huge and diverse businesses. If you're an FX trader, nothing whatsoever to do with mortgage-backed securities, and you've done your job well this year and made excellent profits (which for the bank as a whole offset their losses) then why shouldn't you get a bonus as usual?

Of course the loss-making traders shouldn't get bonuses (that is after all the point of the bonus system) but lumping everyone in with them is both inaccurate and counter-productive.
A mass disbursement solution for international payments is offered by Paypal, https://www.x.com/community/ppx/mass_pay ; another one is http://www.arvatodigitalservices.com/fileadmin/case_studies/...
Stationery Design – Biggest Reason of a Small Business Success
Stationery design generally includes business cards, envelopes, company letter heads, billing slips, newsletters etc. All of these stationery design types have equal importance in promoting your product and business to the masses.
Normal floppy drive has essentially an analog interface with almost all digital logic in FDC/on motherboard. So building something that translates it's interface to something more modern is not exactly trivial. I can imagine how to build device that stores low-level images of floppy disks, but that is probably not useful for any kind of data exchange (because there is no easy way to access these images without such device), also such images are bound to be significantly larger (i would expect 2x-3x) than usable capacity of floppy. Storing mountable images would involve relatively complex processing of floppy disk's modulation scheme and synchronization.

I haven't seen anything that does this, but it is well possible that such thing exists, but it is not going to be cheap.

EDIT: Few years ago I had built something like this (with large SRAM array for storage) as a demonstration of how floppy interface works. It kind of worked, but I abandoned this project before getting it to work reliably or documenting it.