skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought this was going to be about a minimalist version of ASCII quake.
Apple stands to gain more than just licensing fees by threatening any non-H.264 codec. As Steve Jobs points out in his "Thoughts on Flash", Apple has millions of devices in the wild whose hardware is optimized exclusively for H.264. If any other video format gains dominance, the devices will not work nearly as well (cutting the battery life by half just to play an older codec, in his example).
"Luh was also formerly employed by Apple on the Final Cut Pro team. He said that because Adobe’s Flash Packager didn’t use Apple’s toolchain to create apps, the resulting code would not work well on an iPhone or iPad. A simple "Hello World" app created in Flash and compiled to work on the iPhone would take up 8 MB, he said, when it should be no longer than a few KB. (Wired.com verified this figure with two other developers who have tested the iPhone Packager tool in CS5.)"

8 MB for a simple binary? Really? That alone is almost enough justification for me. I frequently end up downloading apps directly via my iPhone - a massive increase in download time for no actual gain in value would hurt the experience.
Visual Multiplication with Lines
Agreed. They're competing at a whole new level now, having surpassed Windows in usability, functionality, and aesthetics a long time ago, they have their sites set on competing with Apple. If they're going to copy anything, it's going to be from the higher benchmark OS X has set than from Windows.
A Freebase implementation of the Facebook Graph API
That didn't take long...
They could solve this by setting a preference where it hides many of the rationalizations and gives a standard look. Why they don't do something simple like that is just their mistake. Not really sure if they care.
Agreed. I do the exact same thing. First define a palette and with variable names that describe the color (eg, !mauve= #E0B0FF), then assign those to descriptive variable names (eg, !accent_color= !mauve). That way it's immediately clear which colors are being used while also avoiding the need to replace variable names throughout the partials.
HockeyBias.com is looking for 1 developer with a broad range of experience; .NET/C#/SQL, android, appengine/Python, and SQL. See http://hockeybias.com
Email me at guy@hockeybias.com
Meteor Solutions (http://www.meteorsolutions.com) is hiring! We're looking for a couple of sharp devs to join a small team building cool stuff in Seattle. Come hack on Python, Javascript and CouchDB! Send an email to banderson@meteorsolutions.com if you're interested.
Hi Brian!
I've been to the last two meetups and they've been a lot of fun! Great people and great conversation. Good mix of tech / biz / misc. If I remember correctly, the HN group (10-15 people) ended up staying there 3-4 hours both times (until the coffee shop owner wanted to close for the night!).
This game is actually fun! Great work and an interesting take of platforming.
Where's page 2?
Sips - image manipulation via command line, bundled with OS X
SD is no SF, but I think you'll find the SD HN meetup to your liking if you're already hanging out here on HN. Come on by!
I second this. I like the visual design a lot though.
Pot, meet kettle: a response to Steve Jobs' letter on Flash
Is Time Travel Possible?
Agreed, this whole flash things is a distraction from the real effect, which is vendor lockin.
Austin, TX (will take relocations)

http://www.spiceworks.com

Spiceworks, Inc is looking for Rails developers. I was recently hired and they are still looking for more. With the $16m capital infusion back in January executive management is looking to double its size.

Brought to you by the same people as Tivoli, All.com, and Motive Communication (currently the 2nd largest IPO in Austin history).

Let 'em know Scott sent you :)
Snowball Factory is hiring a Backend Engineer in SF
http://awe.sm/55e8g
HN Breakfast?  GAFTA?
Is anyone interested in getting breakfast in san francisco tomorrow? I would love to brainstorm with a few people in the morning and then hack later in the day.

In the eve, i am planing on going to GAFTA if anyone else is interested.

Justin
Thanks for the invite - I'm still up here in SF, just curious about what's going on in my hometown. Cruising through the member list, I only found one startup:

http://phonehalo.com

Everyone else looks like CS students or researchers, is that right?
To be clear here, you're advocating illegal activity and negatively impacting the artist who created the music you like, because you dislike a business model. FYI, in case you missed it, music purchased from ITMS is DRM free.
TechCrunch, in Palo Alto

http://jobs.37signals.com/jobs/6659
I don't think thats the site you meant (lotusapp.com is non english)
Why did you write this reply?
Nice use of boolean logic.
Cub Scouts Awarding Video Game Loops, Pins ("...for video game media literacy.")
Lessons from the Brain: Toward an Intelligent Molecular Computer
Whoops. It seems you missed the point.
I believe the correct response here would have been "whoosh".
Weekend Project: Setting Up VPN on Linux Router
Pretty sure my son would get this badge, if he were in Scouts. And so would his father. ;-)
The “IE plateau” – a history lesson
But we as humans work at at least two clock speeds, normal as above and "wartime" literally and figuratively. The Yorktown was repaired in record time after Coral Sea and was available for Midway. I've heard a story about a Bell System machine room fire that zapped a bunch of PDP-11s that did ... 411 service? Something important. Anyway, DECs initial estimate was vastly exceeded in a Maximum Effort that got the system replaced in a short period of time.

Now, we'd need some software examples to really support this, it scales very differently than the hardware repairs that I cited above. I can't think of any off hand ... was the Patriot clock drift problem "solved" by frequent enough rebooting?

Anyway, my point is that the months problem you refer to is happening in situations that are not existential, right? I don't think you can be confident we'll be as slow when the stakes get really high.
Kindle: Most Highlighted Passages of All Time
Ah, that's why they're so short!
Not what I was looking for. That just snarfs packages from FTP rather than providing them on the CD.

I don't use Arch because I want the absolute bare minimum of functionality. I am just tired of seeing comments of the type:

# don't edit this file; use debian-specific-tool(8) instead to change it

in my /etc. I want to tweak e.g., resolv.conf my own damn self, without fearing that I'm interfering with the distro's way of doing things.

That's what I want from my Linux. Arch gets me most of the way there, has a kick-ass package system and rolling releases like Gentoo, but without the hassle of recompiling the freaking world when some critical library changes.
Lolapps is hiring actionscript, python, and web developers. If you want to work on social games or help us scale, drop me a line!
Distributed coordination with Apache Zookeeper
Maybe it's my scifi/fiction writing past but I've always thought that time travel is a possibility someday.

Perhaps it's that the universe/laws of physics prevents physical, solid matter from moving through time. In the far future we may discover a way to send pure energy - aka our pure consciousness - through time, allowing one to witness history as a sort of ghost (sort of time travel telepresence). This would prevent someone from affecting the timeline because no direct interaction would be possible as well.
Here's a summary of the license terms:

http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Documents/AVC_TermsS...

Let's say you make videos and sell access to them on your web site on a title-by-title basis :) Videos <= 12 min, no charge. Videos > 12 min, USD $0.02 per title or 2% of access price, whichever is less.
Yes, 2D jump-and-runs tend to work better than 3D ones. At least gameplay wise--you can have a 3D look, but still confine your gameplay to 2D (or 2+1/2D, if you have layers or so). However I feel that first person shooters really benefit from 3D.

(And I admit that controlling a first person shooter in 3D with a mouse and a keyboard is more complex than most people are comfortable with. It's a skill that I needed to learn, too.

On the other, a certain level of experience and skill is also necessary to enjoy games like soccer or chess.)
Ceph: The Distributed File System Creature from the Object Lagoon
Thanks, that clears the question up a bit.

It would be interesting to find out if those apps and services existed before MS came out with .NET. Obviously pre-existing ones are a lot safer in this regard.

I just thought that Microsoft has essentially hijacked the dot-net syllable, even though it belongs to everyone in principle, and even if it's safe to use in trademarks. Their .NET products are now so ubiquitous and well promoted that a computer/network product with .net in the name would very likely be associated with Microsoft in users' minds when they first see or hear about it.
This reads like Adobe left flash to wither on the vine. In retrospect perhaps Adobe is better at tools and they should have open sourced the flash plugin 5 years ago. Allowing them to concentrate on world class tools.

I can't help thinking that acrobat reader is perhaps going the same way. Will anyone use the plugin in a few years?
The Fireworks Project is recruiting members. This is not a typical job and certainly not a typical start up. We're looking for guy or gal #3. If you don't want to have anything to do with us, I'd still like to get your thoughts on our member managed corporate structure.

No resume or CV please. I want to see blogs, GitHub accounts, StackOverflow accounts, and the like.

http://www.fireworksproject.com/pages/extraordinary_people.h...
Be Healthy Guide
It's somewhere around a 30/45/25% split of students/professionals/business owners.

And a good number of the first two groups are in the process of moving to the 3rd.
Yahoo! (Sunnyvale, CA) is looking for a javascripter to work on their application platform: http://developer.yahoo.com/yap/

Email me directly at rburke@yahoo-inc.
Unity3d.com we are hiring for a number of positions, from engineering to marketing. we even sometimes hire people just because they can bring a good idea to the team. Why could you bring to unity technologies?
> Building things that people want is overrated. A person can derive great pleasure and satisfaction from ripping things apart instead.

Great spiel!
> If Adobe crashes on Macs, that actually has something “to do with the Apple operating system ,” Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen told The Wall Street Journal.

Yeah, that’s it. Program crashes. Must be the OS. Right.... Heck, why not blame the hardware, too!
http://www.revolutiontrades.com

We want to add one more hacker to our pre-launch team.

We're expecting to release our early access and close funding (from a top tier NYC VC) both within a two month time frame.

Familiarity with the django framework and mobile platforms help. Off-site work is fine to start, but you need to be from the NYC area for team meetings (or willing to relocate).

email: joe@revolutiontrades.com
Surprise Your Facebook visibility isn’t what you thought it was
I know for a fact that "normal" users were well aware that some web sites didn't work with some browsers, usually had two browsers installed, and tried the other browser when a web site looked broken in their favorite browser. It isn't a difficult concept, no different in users' minds than having two different kinds of stain remover in their laundry room. They didn't like it, but they had no problem understanding it. My mother, who at 67 is old enough to be a grandmother, still tries IE when something doesn't work in Firefox.

The question is whether a browser innovation war would provide benefits that would compensate for the inconvenience of installing and using several browsers. I think it would. Actually, I think it would be much better than the first time around, because we've finally reached the point where most web sites can work across all browsers. (Perhaps it would be best if the impulse toward complete compatibility and uniformity across browsers came and went like the tide.) A web site that only worked with one browser engine would be at a severe disadvantage compared to a similar web site that worked in all browsers. Browser innovations would have to enable really radical improvements before they were adopted. That's assuming that web developers are smarter this time around, which I think they are. If there's a surge in incompatible innovation, you won't see banks or insurance companies jumping on the bandwagon. Nor will you see any plain-jane sites that mysteriously require one browser or another. If a site requires you to launch a certain browser, it will be immediately obvious why, or you'll never go back to that site again.
Citrix is hiring in Cambridge, UK. We are doing opensource hardwarde virtualization in interesting languages (including functional ones).

Please write me an email (address in my profile) for more information.
Really Useful Web Development Tutorials You Should Have Read in April 2010
Not a startup, but my company is hiring. It's a design agency in San Francisco called AKQA.

Right now my team needs web developers more than software engineers.

(Send an email to the address in my HN profile if you're interested.)
Steel Bank Common Lisp Version 1.0.38 released
I think we've hit the point where, to conclusively disprove any of the (no offense) handwaving you're doing, I'd have to break confidences.

If you ask around your social circle for someone who's done SCADA work, you may find someone who can enlighten you with specifics.
It does apply to new houses, but you can't consider the sales tax in isolation. It's offset by the fact that you get to keep your entire income. Not just the portion on the pay stub, either; your employer would no longer owe payroll taxes. In general, you would get some or all of those, too.

Financing a 30% more expensive house and paying for it out of a 30% bigger paycheck would be somewhere between neutral and a win for most people.
Could someone please explain to me how Flash isn't open? To my knowledge, everything about flash is open other than Adobe's IDE. The spec has been released, the sdk is OSS and anyone is free to compile to SWF... Am I mistaken here?
I am saying that 80-90% of apps sold market share is on iPhone. No one really cares how many devices are in the wild if people who have those handsets refuse to buy software.
Sure. But you send faxes how often? A few times a year? If you're sending faxes all the time and you know how to do it, they're mostly pretty reliable. This is especially true within narrow communities of companies who use it all the time (like the legal and financial sectors).
Burlingame, just south of SF - isocket is hiring two engineers. We've had real paying customers since before funding and Techcrunch was our first.

http://www.isocket.com/jobs/

And we're pretty serious about being a flat and equal team - we stirred up some good reactions on HN with a blog post about why we don't believe in job titles:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1286982
Yes, the internet, but now with new improved barriers to entry!
Located in San Francisco near Caltrain and BART. Recently funded by NEA, full compensation, great co-workers.

One Block Off the Grid (1BOG) is looking for front-end and back-end engineers (web developers) to help us bring the consumer solar industry into the 21st century. If you're interested applying your software skills to the renewables space, this is a great way to do it.

You can reach me at kalvin / 1bog / org (Yes, we're a for-profit with a .org... it's an ongoing discussion.)
Last time I used a minimal install it was pretty small (it does grab packages from a cd but only a minimal installation of ubuntu).

It was more if you just like having the minimal system and choosing which software you wanted. Debian administration really isn't as bad as you seem to think but you're welcome to your opinions.

Personally I like BSD's (mostly freebsd) and am using ubuntu for matlab and an unsupported wireless card in bsd, but that just makes arch seem lacking when I use it
San Diego isn't too bad as far as general hacker stuff. We have a Ruby user group that meets at UCSD, an agile/extreme programming group, and a Django user group. Not too bad.
Cramerdev is hiring for UI/UX, general web dev, and project manager (http://cramerdev.com/employment). A more passionate and crazed web team you'll be hard-pressed to find. Our current tech stack is Rails, with some PHP and server-side Javascript thrown in, but we're open to whatever you've got burning inside you that'll blow our minds.

Literally the best team and company I've had the honor of working with. Onsite (Iowa City, IA), or remote, either is great.
Original link:

http://news.scotsman.com/world/Jurors-more-likely-to-convict...
Insightful comment, I'd be very interested in hearing more elaboration on the subject (specifically about your or other algorithms and some of the correlations that they found). There is a major dearth of information about algorithms that can be so readily used to generate profits. Very proprietary and hush hush as I am sure you are well aware of.
This sounds pretty cool. I didn't realize San Diego had this many HN'ers. Count me in.
Sounds interesting from a technical perspective. What about Lean Startups and other entrepreneurial stuff?
Not surprising - attractive people get rated more highly in competency, likability, trustworthiness, and all sorts of things by virtue of being attractive. This happens in almost all fields, and the reverse happens too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect
On a related note:

"Lunar Cycle Effects in Stock Returns"
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=281665

Abstract:
"We find strong lunar cycle effects in stock returns. Specifically, returns in the 15 days around new moon dates are about double the returns in the 15 days around full moon dates. This pattern of returns is pervasive; we find it for all major U.S. stock indexes over the last 100 years and for nearly all major stock indexes of 24 other countries over the last 30 years."
If you love Django, live in Austin, and want to be a hacker/journalist, there will probably be a job open for you soon at The Texas Tribune. You'll get a chance to fix everything you hate about how news is done on the web, and do all sorts of nifty things with government data, like these:

http://www.texastribune.org/library/data/texas-prisons/

http://www.texastribune.org/library/data/red-light-cameras/

nbabalola@texastribune.org
Palantir Technologies is hiring in Palo Alto, DC, and New York, LA, and in Europe.

http://www.palantirtech.com/careers/positions
Bi-pedal robots might not be that interesting in the first place. Insects might be a better role-model than humans.
I thought it was obvious. Perhaps I should rephrase it: All for-profit companies contribute to open-source because it benefits them.
until Israel ends the blockade of Gaza and lets them trade freely from their own coastline, they're still under occupation

such a moronic statement on Hacker News, I'm shocked. Do you think trade is stifled just so people like you can shout demands at Israel, a country at war, from the sidelines?
Cape Town, South Africa

We are looking for C++ Engineers to work on open-source code in the compilers/object persistence/DB/multi-threading/networking areas. If things like the new plugin architecture in GCC 4.5 make you excited, then you are our kind of guy (or gal). Here is more info:

http://www.codesynthesis.com/jobs
I've had 3 "bounty packs". I found them pretty useful. You get a load of free stuff to start you off with your newborn, and get to try out stuff.

I remember getting a few free samples of nappies. For us, Huggies were terrible, and Pampers worked great. It would have been a pain to figure that out by buying 2 big packs of nappies.

So for me, it was a really useful thing. And Pampers got what they wanted - to put their product in the hands of people who might want to buy it.

I don't think anyone anywhere would not be aware that freebies/samples are given out for a reason. And the reason certainly isn't generosity.

Also, personally, I don't much care who has my 'information'. For these sort of companies they basically have your name and address. Worst they can do is send round a salesperson.
> Maybe one of those people can explain why it's harder for Apple to develop for a single ecosystem on a closed platform then it is for someone like Canonical to develop on multiple ecosystems on an open platform?

I don't choose which products to buy based on how hard they were to make. All I care about is how well designed they are (aesthetically and functionally). I suspect that most customers are the same way.

> Or maybe they can explain why Apple shouldn't get credit for a final, polished experience?

Apple gets "credit" by profit: customers choose to buy their products, and they do so knowing that Apple is selling them for more than the raw cost of material inputs. This is good, because to make an honest profit (wherein all parties agree to a transaction voluntarily) is what everyone should try to do.

Companies should try to make the best products they can, which means making products that present the least hassle to users. Apple does this best because they honestly care the most about the user experience. And it's not just that it's harder to interoperate and make products work well - when the standard is badly misconcieved, no amount of effort to interoperate will make your product work well. So Apple is right in thumbing its nose at things that are either obsolete (floppies, flash, etc.), or just brain-dead (X-Windows). Apple is the one computer company brave enough to think in principle about what people will want in the future.

If this were so easy, why isn't everyone else doing it?
It is unsuitable for grown-up films of any seriousness. It limits the freedom of directors to make films as they choose.

I fully agree with him at this point in time. I think once 3D gets more mainstream young directors will find ways to make use of this new medium.

A lot of the points that Ebert raises are similar to ones raised when sound was beginning to be added to the films in the 1920s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_film). For example "Sufficient playback volume was also hard to achieve"Current problem is that Hollywood uses 3D just to project inherently 2D designed movies on screen, except for some shock scenes where a snake comes at you, etc. This limits its use to juvenilia or "blockbusters" like Avatar. That doesn't mean it's always going to be that way.

It's interesting that a sort of Innovator's Dilemma biases people who are in the movie making business. For example, Chaplin saw little value in talkies: "Chaplin firmly believed that “silent film's message reaches the entire spectrum of ‘intellectual and the rank and file’" (http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/Charlie-Chaplin-and-...) and his sentiment was shared by many actors and producers.
The player certainly very much isn't open, aside from the Tamarin runtime.
Are unattractive people more likely to commit crimes?
It's 16GB.

Flash is incredibly cheap now, you can get 4GB for $12 at the supermarket (that's AUD; pr $10 USD)
People are making this jump because Job's is committing the fallacy of special pleading when he applies his rule of openness to Flash but not to H.264.
This has a pretty comprehensive overview of the sort of events people are organizing here: http://www.sdtechscene.org/

For people in our field, the entrepreneurial stuff pales in comparison to the SF Bay Area.
You're not comparing like with like.

NO COLOR vs COLOR isn't the same as "n 3D cues" vs "n+1 3D cues".

A better analogy would be

"All colors apart from a particular shade of purple" vs "all colors".

Of course the current systems are rubbish, so you're getting an extra 3D visual cue at the expense of clarity sharpness brightness. And headaches thrown in to boot.