skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I haven't said that it's entirely Apples fault. I wanted to give the understanding that there may be different technical reasons to that.

From my point of view it is obvious that video playback could be faster if Adobe had access to hardware acceleration. We can agree on that point, right? This is obviously Apples decision to make an API public or not. Of course, i am not saying that video playback couldn't be smooth in software mode. The point that mplayer plays almost everything and smooth on different hardware is a good point. But to pass the buck to Adobe all the time is just wrong. I mean, the API is now public and Adobe already has built in the hardware acceleration, that is quite fast and shows that they are doing something to address the problem.

Obviously my opinion seems to upset others, so i should have just shut up and let people brag about how bad Adobe is. I'm not using a Mac, i am not developing with Adobe tools and i have no problems with my flash plugin, so in the end why should i care. I just hate one-sided views.
It's true that getting your sphere of influence to adopt a new social network is a pain. But that said, years ago I started off on Friendster, then moved to MySpace, and now I'm at Facebook. I would expect that Facebook's fame will cool just like the others did. Surely Facebook isn't as untouchable as Google is in the search market. Is it?
I wouldn't say it's taken this time to hit the mainstream. It's just experiencing a second wave of popularity. VoiceXML and it's predecessors were all the rage in the late 90s among the web developer crowd. Most of the automate phone systems you call at larger companies are VoiceXML backed.

One thing that has changed in recent past is that the cost has come down significantly, making voice apps accessible to smaller developers and hobbyists.

For those that want to use Asterisk and still take advantage of a web-centric programming model. Take a look at Adhearsion. It's an open source Ruby framework for writing Asterisk apps. Voxeo is a current sponsor of the project. http://adhearsion.com/

We do plan on implementing the Adhearsion API on Tropo, allowing someone to build a portable app that runs either on their own Asterisk server or on the Tropo cloud.
It could take 20 years to get numbers for YC specifically,
because in startups the returns are dominated by the big hits,
which (a) take longest and (b) are rare.

However, you could do a crude back of the envelope calculation now, based on average exits for series A funded companies. I believe the average (again, dominated by the big wins) is on the order of $100m. If you assume founders have 10% at exit, that's $10m. Currently 20-25% of YC funded cos raise series A. So if you ignore startups that don't raise series A (which could be an increasingly large mistake), you get a lower bound of $2m to $2.5m per founder.

Interesting. I'd never done that calculation.

The bogusness of it, of course, is evident from the fact that your expected value is so dependent on the performance of the other startups we accept. If 100% of the startups we funded went on to raise series A, the expected value would jump to $10m. And of course we have no idea how well YC funded startups will do compared to series A funded startups in general.
Author tries to connect NYC car bomb (if it went off, troops in the streets - laws thrown out), oil spill (might kill all life on planet), and the panic buying (pushing and shoving at the supermarket) after the Boston water main break into a "we humans are doomed - the end is nigh" scenario.
Oops, thanks for the heads up, posted in a hurry this morning.

Nice recap of details I had read a bit of a few years ago... also, highscalability is a great blog that is likely of interest to many HNers.
Some time ago I was unable to send a link via private messages to a friend, because the link was flagged as abusive/offensive. I didn't see anything wrong with the link, neither did my friend (once I got the link to him via email).
Jef Raskin stood out as someone who wanted to take far more credit than he deserved. Much worse than Wolfram in that regard.
What war?
Well surely not extinction, but maybe mass reduction. Of course some stuff always survives, but 5 billion or so humans dying due to lack of food and clean water, isn't really that cool either, is it?
Regardless of the common pattern for what is classified as what, people should be as free as possible to enter into any agreement they want.

Surely in the vast majority of cases it's what people agreed was the arrangement that matters. I know tax considerations complicate this.
Startup marketing tip - why it's important to market to customers one-to-one
Ask HN: Best Keyboard layout
I am interested in switching to a keyboard layout better than QWERTY.

The usual choices are Dvorak and Colemak.

I found an old article about finding the optimal layout with a genetic algorithm

http://boingboing.net/2002/07/06/hyperevolved-keyboar.html

Other layouts
http://mtgap.bilfo.com/official_keyboard.html

http://klausler.com/evolved.html

Regarding letter frequency, which layout is optimal?
How to bootstrap your company to profitability
See how easily identifiable you are when surf the web
I just added a few lines of code to migrate the database to encrypt passwords with a per user salt (not the best salt, but adds some flavor :-)

Thanks again for pointing that out.
Where to focus when "dating" investors
I think the argument was Apple stands for anti-authoritarianism. Which, trading heavily on its past, it still does. Much more-so than Microsoft.

That certainly might change and arguably is changing. But at the moment, that perception of Apple remains.
Blumenversand
Blumen online bestellen und mit Arena Blumen deutschlandweit und international versenden.
Put to the test: Visa's credit card concierge service
UIUC and Cornell are both historically strong. UW (Washington) and UCSD (San Diego) both seem like exceptional up and comers that are probably much better schools than historically ranked.

With that said, there's a pretty big dip from #4 to #5.
Well, focus on writing code that maps to the english or pseudocode definition, and attempt to make the pseudocode definition as high level as possible, if your goal is to minimize maintenance costs.

This idiom obfuscates, as you state yourself, because people who aren't comfortable with the language will find it jarring at first. I understand where you are coming from: If everyone knew it, it wouldn't be obfuscating. But I argue that people forget idioms or never learn idioms that don't map to our human explanations rather quickly, so it increases maintenance costs.

I argue that in this case, it obfuscates simply because bitwise or'ing data is too low level and doesn't have a lot to do with rounding down without understanding the internal representation of the number.
Facebook: Pivotting a Planet
Instead of assuming this, why don't you check and tell us? It should be pretty easy; historical Forbes 400 data is available online.
Beautiful Pictures of Mexico for Cinco de Mayo
maybe what you need is a federated friendspace, or something that such a phrase would imply.
New "How to Start a Self-funded Startup" Book for Developers
Right, that's why i said, that we still have no complex Web UIs. The ipad wouldn't die for sure, but it's slowing down progress to better web applications if webbrowsers are slow (and i don't mean ipad in particular every browser that is sub par in performance).

If browsers continue to perform that different and also continue to implement different features with different syntax, where will this lead? To web apps that are built for the slowest browser and the most minimal features available.
The only way out of this dead end, that i see are web applications that are just browser specific (aka "The website was developed and tested with browser XXX. Please download XXX _here_ or continue on your own risk").

And both ways sound horrible to me. Look at some HTML5 "tech demos" and see what web apps could be capable of and then look at the web. We are still years behind and it will take several more years to have web sites that implement new features.
Original Ideas Don't Exist
True, but in this case they'd have to be totally brain dead not to realize something major was up after Peter got caught in a serious lie, one he'd made a really big deal about (the whole point of the meeting, after all).

Unless he had amazing protection from someone senior and powerful enough, he would be dead meat.
Do you realize they both use WebKit (the rendering engine)?

... even so, what does your comment have to do with the comment above it?
My impression: no, not so much.

This case seems like basically every other contractor/employee status dispute, except turned on its head.

Normally, the company has tried to reclassify people who are morally employees as "contractors" to avoid the benefits and terms obligations that come with full-time employees. And no, despite what the "agreement" between the parties may have been, you can't simply call someone whose work obligations are structured identically to employees a "contractor"; companies routinely get dinged for trying to do this.
This is a good point, actually. The quality of person required by a startup is much higher than what an investment bank needs, and most of the people going into IB/MC wouldn't be qualified.

Also: analyst programs are designed to filter for the people with an unconditional work ethic-- people who will cut corners and work 100-hour weeks but simply will not miss a deadline, no matter how arbitrary, and people who will take the most awful work with a smile on their empty faces. This is a bad employee from a startup's perspective, because startups need people who write quality code (hard to do if you're working till 3:00 am) reliably and are willing to question others' decisions.
>but i was lucky enough to have a high school computer and robotics teacher that let me explore things i found interesting for credit.

You were lucky - the only thing that saved me from giving up entirely in high school were a few good books I found by browsing MIT's OpenCourseWare pages and other places. My high school was full of corrupt assholes who spent all the school's funding on elaborate sports complexes for our shitty sports sports teams, so that all the funding to our science, math and tech clubs dissolved and the library only had a few outdated dictionaries and some terrible fiction books.

But I'm not bitter. (;
Actually i meant all of the rss reading eyxtension there.
I thought some of them are Google Reader integration and some of them are the standard rss-fetching kind.. never tried one of them, though ;)
Smartphone Patent Battles: Dumb Move or Smart Strategy?
Agreed, it was a waste of time to try to understand a theory that predicts nothing and can't be tested.
Some useful links:

Updated test drive site: http://www.ietestdrive.com/

Updated tests on the IE Test Center: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?LinkID=110283

IE PP Developer's Guide: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/ff468705.aspx

Channel 9 Video Interviews: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/

If you've got any feedback/bugs to report, I'd be happy to hear them. My contact information in on my profile if you prefer to ping me privately. thanks! :)
This is a much harder problem to solve than terrorism itself.
He would have to run a hacked version of Mail.app as the last screen shot shows the "X-Mailer: iPad Mail (7B367)" header.

I doubt he would spend time on that sort of tricks. I think is much more likely that SJ eats his own dogfood, and that he would never have released the iPad if he considered it unusable.
Judging from the crankish/alarmist tone of the quoted "engineer", I wouldn't really trust his evaluation. However, let's say that 1 gallon of oil actually does poison a million gallons of water. A quick google search yields that there are approximately 346 quintillion gallons of water in the ocean. This means it would take about 346 trillion gallons of oil to poison the ocean. At a rate of 1 million gallons per week, this process would take about 6.6 million years. That is assuming that there are 346 trillion gallons of oil under the earth (good news for BP) and that the oil is never cleared or broken down once it enters the water.
This is an excellent article. I agree that memristors will change everything.

I'm a bit perplexed about the timeframe, though. I'd like to think 5 years, but my gut says it's more like 12-15 years before it's all different. And it will be very different.
I collected a few and used them to make a standing desk.
> That means wealth-creation is possible in an economy based largely on services.

How so? The service economy is basically masturbatory. I can trade my services for your services, around and around, but at the end of the day we both still need to eat. We need to put gas in our cars. We need medical supplies and all sorts of other consumables.

If we have a 'service economy' where all we do is sell services to each other, and buy all the real physical stuff from abroad, we're going to be in big trouble.

This seems to be exactly the situation that the U.S. is in. Yes, we still have something of a manufacturing industry but it's not producing enough to offset our imports. We've gotten away with it for a few decades because other countries are willing to send us useful stuff in exchange for Treasury notes, but that doesn't seem exactly sustainable.

Unless we can make the 'service economy' into something that essentially replaces exports (selling services abroad), I don't see how we can avoid going broke. And selling services abroad is a lot more tricky and much less stable than grinding out widgets and packing them into a shipping container.

It doesn't seem like we have much of a plan, moving forward. About the only good thing that I can see is that we still produce much of our own food, so that we probably won't starve if the rest of the world decides to stop sending us manufactured goods in exchange for worthless slips of paper. It'll be a lot of white bread, corn chips, orange juice, and peanut butter, though.
They are both using the same codebase for the implementation (WebKit), so it is mostly a matter of release schedule: we haven't seen a major Safari release for some time, whereas Chrome is released more often.
It could just be that the public friend feed only shows a small subset of all of your updates. Might have nothing to do with a blacklist.
I love the idea, but I'd be surprised if nice space like that can be built in Austin, for $300-$400/month, with room for profit.

<Brainstorming>

Do you have a garage? (Or, could you build another?)

Amortizing your monthly allowance, you could put some cash into the garage, and you're improving something you own.
The hell it is. If you want people to work for you, you get an employment contract together. If they're employees, you pay them, and you do W2 withholding.

The engineer in question was married to the founder's sister, and she died. Obviously there was a lot of personal relationship intertwined into the business relationship. In addition, there's a traumatic event in the lives of both the founder and the engineer. This probably meant there was no real contract, thus judges could swing in favor of either one of them. Your comment makes it seem like this is a typical business vs. the contractor case, which it isn't.
While I understand this convention, I personally hate it. Mixing roman numerals and SI units is just dangerous.

(Didn't Mary Meeker vastly over/under-estimate CPMs on YouTube or something like that a few years ago because of this very reason?)
Well, you wouldn't mail the Safari team, you'd just follow WebKit development (which has a lot of contributors from a lot of different companies): http://webkit.org/
Giant dome for Gulf oil leak is next best solution
I'm very happy to see this! Sorry for my ignorance, but does anyone know if there are any other projects along the same vein?
Just because someone thinks they're paying for something useful doesn't mean they are paying for something useful.
"[...] there's a pretty big dip from #4 to #5."

And that is exactly my sub-point. The fact that no one can list a clear #5 probably proves it.

Going further, it you agree with the above there's no sense in making a top 5 list, so replying to joeyo, it's not axiomatic in terms of cardinality. It only makes sense to list the top 4, and then something like the top dozen or so.

My greater point is that someone who doesn't know this isn't likely to make good judgments on the topic of this essay.
>Note that this is very different than terrorism by an occupied population: the IRA in Northern Ireland, Iraqis in Iraq, Palestinians in Israel. Setting aside the actual politics, all of these terrorists believe they are repelling foreign invaders. That's not the situation here in the U.S.

Not so sure about that point, Osama's stated reason was US military bases in Saudi Arabia (viewing it as a foreign invasion) and support for Israel (viewing it as a foreign invasion).
GUIMark 2 has been released: Compare HTML5 and Flash performance
Kind of misleading, it is open to individuals who want to pay a premium to register and exorbitant fees. It is not open for general registry at the advertised 29 euros.
Bidding has ended. I would have paid that much just to gut it and cram a little HTPC Hackintosh in there for shits and giggles.
The Connection between Tasing Tweaked Sheep and Baseball Freaks
Thanks for clarifying. But I hope they only appear if your posts are public. Otherwise, that's even worse.
Well, a lot of this is the flip side of FaceBook's "changes are pushed to the live site as soon as they're checked in" policy. That lets them innovate quickly, but also means that whenever anyone screws up, it's immediately visible in a very public way. Other companies have release processes and QA procedures to stop this.
Chat is back up now.
Sure, the average expected value of starting a startup could be lower. Or it could be higher. But I feel pretty sure in a startup you have more control over the outcome. You don't have to pay any dues or work your way up any ladder. So if the average expected value of starting a startup was equal to that of going to Wall St, but you were convinced you were a superstar, you'd be better off starting a startup, because there is less force pushing you toward the mean.
I just looked through the startup guides for RimuHosting, EC2, and appengine. Looks good, and it is probably a good idea to have a good exit strategy for any cloud provider.
True, but that's a different post/article that he didn't write.

In fact, your final sentence there would make for a much more interesting article than, "Business language suuuucks."
That's just for legal purposes, not something you'd depend on for a terrorist attack.
Here is what I dont get. In the US we complain about higher education Academia yet millions of foreigners go to our schools. I saw a stat where the majority of Engineer graduates are foreigners in the US.

They are using the very system that we complain about to benefit them and their country.
Absolutely.
I wouldn't have taken issue with Calcanis' comment if he'd simply framed it as choosing salary over personal development.

My criticism has everything to do with his use of "career" where he should have said "skills" or "personal development" and his use of "years", when time spent has absolutely no objective relevance, as reinforced by your own comment: 1 year at firm A is not equivalent to 1 year at firm B.

So the implication that there's an objective salary advancement/year or career advancement/year rate is nonsense. It's detritus from the failed management schemes of an older era.
The #1 Programmer Excuse For Slacking Off
I wanted to suggest that the restless progress of Chrome might lead some people to believe that Apple neglects Safari.
The Future of PostgreSQL
Project idea: Stack Overflow for teachers
Unusable micro-benchmark. The JIT can compile everything away. From the code in http://ernestdelgado.com/js/main.js

function doubletilda() {
~~0.12341234;
~~0.2;
~~-3.1234;
~~100000.23;
~~2.12341234123412341324;
~~100.0000000000000000001;
}

function pipe() {
0.12341234|0.12341234;
0.2|0.2;
-3.1234|-3.1234;
100000.23|100000.23;
2.12341234123412341324|2.12341234123412341324;
100.0000000000000000001|100.0000000000000000001;
}

The JIT should be able to optimize the function bodies away.

And the loop is:

// var fn = doubletilda;
for (var n = 0, t = 0; t < 1000; n++) {
fn();
t = new Date() - start;
}

So he's basically just testing creating objects and GC.
I disagree. Just because it's unfamiliar and hence "jarring" does not, of itself, means it's obfuscating.

I agree that code should be written at the highest level possible to express the intent, but sometimes that's not possible. In this case it's likely that performance wasn't an issue, and this particular idiom is actually of no value, but I contend that the principle remains: an idiom need not immediately be clear, and yet can still sometimes be the right thing to do/use.

Your last point is simply acknowledging that this is an idiom - what you say is characterising what an idiom, as opposed to an expression, is. It's not what you might expect, it's short, it accomplishes its purpose.

Finally, and again, I say that this particular example may not be a good one, but I say again that sometimes idioms are appropriate. You may disagree, but you haven't persuaded me. Our experiences no doubt differ, and may be the root cause.
> You're going to be kept busy doing things that improve the bottom line

Err, or more likely jumping rope to satisfy some grotesque political end.

edit: Oops, I read your last paragraph and saw that you covered that. Sorry.
Microsoft Cross-browser Test Results Summary
Also, much like Reader's Digest, the user-submitted anecdotes are typically re-written by the same person to give them all the same, easy-to-digest flow.
Try e.g. http://www.thehighroad.org/archive/index.php/t-301570.html, go down to the first comment with this time stamp: September 9, 2007, 02:52 PM

Follow up WRT to the MAC-10, as that's the most prominent case where the ATF shut down production of open bolt versions for the "civilian" market (civilians can buy machine guns if made before 1986, there are about 100,000 of them in legal circulation).
That's a great thought and probably the correct long view, but what a lot of people mean when they talk about defeating terrorism is addressing the existence of actual terrorists alive today.

I suspect that the general promotion of rationality wouldn't have been as effective at stopping Zarqawi as were the missiles that hit his safe-house.
The truly great innovations are done by people who are interested in a problem and want to solve it. Rarely is it done for money. It is in the best interest of society that the people who are creative and smart have an avenue to explore that creativity without too much risk. This means lowering the cost to higher education and constricting the amount of people who go to college. The best math grad students want to go to MIT, Stanford, Berkley, etc. because that's where the other smart people are and the environment fosters development. If we lose this then it will be a long term disaster for the nation.

The goal needs to be to get universities back to allowing problem solvers solve problems and not become factories that churn out workers.
If academic writing is obese, business writing is anorexic.

Both unhealthy, but in different ways. My metaphor breaks down here for a second, but what I think they share in common is laziness of language.

In my experience, the scholar is too lazy to avoid convoluted sentences with thousand-pound meanings that take more work to read than they did to assemble. The business-writer is too lazy to anchor words that are lighter than air to sentences with substance to keep them grounded.
Very this. I'd upvote you twice if I could.
Groupon Buys Mob.ly, Opens Silicon Valley Office