skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"...Twitter to appear as a Grand Jury witness to “testify and give evidence regarding alleged violations of the laws of Pennsylvania”."

Is there someone here that knows what the PA law is that enables a subpoena for uncovering identity in this case? If the long standing interpretation of the U.S. Constitution protects liability from criticizing a public figure anonymous or not (does it?) then how can a PA law, require uncovering identity if there can be no basis for liability once the identity is known?

I've tried to read the embedded subpoena but scribd just shows a spinner telling me its saving trees.
Why do some large firms hire highly-paid, low-talent CEOs?
Firefox will support VP8 (aka WebM)
From PHP to Ruby, join me on my journey
REST web services with Geddy framework for Node.js
Ok, I had to look back and see if I could substantiate that claim. It's not quite like I remembered it - my apologies for being a bit misleading. Here's one link to details:

http://androidandme.com/2010/03/phones/hands-on-as-new-dell-...

So it's the Dell Mini 5, not Amazon's. But the content deal with Amazon is big news.
It is not possible to ship binary over XML. Regardless of encoding used, XML rigidly forbids the bytes corresponding to non-whitespace ASCII chars below 32: http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-xml-20081126/#charsets This makes arbitrary binary impossible. You have to base64 encode it or something.

Not entirely relevant to your point, but worth bringing up. (XML doesn't ever mangle binaries, because it simply forbids them.)
Someone has to talk to Google about their terrible naming practices. Between VP8 & V8, Go and Closure, I'm amazed any of us can remember what Google product is what.
Firefox and Opera on board as well. This seems like a big deal.
Over a million YouTube videos are available in VP8/HTML5 today, and that number will continue to increase.

http://www.webmproject.org/users/

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/05/firefox-youtube-and-webm/
We have a saying in Sweden, "the more chefs, the worse the soup". It kinda embodies what I feel about yet another attempt at squeezing something new in through the door in hope of setting the standard.
That was my first thought: they are so many security flaws in Woedpress, how can it be a good example? Check the latest advisories on SecurityFocus.
At the dayjob we have 2 geographically separate teams of about 4 people each working together. We tried to use Wave last year and it was a cluster.

Even if it's improved 10x, you're going to be hard pressed to get anyone from my company to try it again anytime soon.

If you're going to launch early and iterate you've got to try harder to keep the buzz respectable.

Harder for a company like Google, obviously, but with the state Wave was in last year they could have done without the advanced PR push and conference launch.
OpenBSD 4.7 Released
Corbett is best known in PA for prosecuting a number of high-profile cases where legislators used taxpayer-funded state resources for campaign purposes -- i.e., using government-employed staffers to knock on doors, send out campaign mailings, etc.

It's possible that there's a similar thing going on here, and he's trying to prove that the accounts are being used from state resources or something.
How long will it take for Safari to switch away from their beloved h264? It usually takes Apple years to admit they lost a format war.
Uhh...if I remember correctly then the Fourier transform is:

F(w) = <f(x), cos(2 pi w x)> + i <f(x), sin (2 pi w x) >

(where <_, _> is the inner product between functions, x is a time and w is a frequency).

So the imaginary component is not the phase but how much of your function is explained by a sine wave. To get the phase you should take the angle of each complex number (and to get the amplitude you take the magnitude).
Hi,
For the algorithms our inspirational reading was "Programming Collective Intelligence" http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321

As all the recommendation algorithms the basis is the text, and dictionaries with technologies, and of course a long time blacklisting words by hand.

We didn't think about ssl but, could be a nice feature. Is already wrote down in our roadmap. I like it.

About http://www.foaf-project.org/ give me some days and I'll put it. I can tell you when this is done through GitHub's message system.

We are really appreciating and considering every ideas all of you are giving here. Thanks a lot.
I am a member of a small startup. We use it for all of our brainstorming. So far, it has only improved. We don't even think about using something else.

Maybe we are the exception. But it has helped us an incredible amount.
For a long time, Sun has believed that their business interests (selling hardware) are served by making software free (or as cheap as possible).

Being aware of that "business interest" provides a lot of context to this post (which seems to criticize software vendors for the fact that their products aren't free or that their product-upgrades may not be free).

While Sun's business interest often masquerades as love for the consumer or for the open-source ideology, this post does deserve some credit for an acknowledgment that free services generally means a business model where you charge consumers for support, services, "other software", hardware etc.
They concluded that a long time ago - OracleVM. Looks like the strategy is OracleVM on the server and VirtualBox on the desktop.
Ask HN: Good programming communities?
Somewhere to post code, learn, read others code, try new things and just loud!

Most communities I've looked at like Daniweb, seem dead, so if you know of a cool place to hang out, post it.

wan
Great initiative. The air here is indeed healthier for startups.

I don't have tips on a place to sleep, but I can tell you where to work and hang out: the hacker dojo in Mountain View (http://hackerdojo.pbworks.com/).

How many are you? You can always find a cheap sublet and crowd a room, college style. What exactly is your budget? Would $500/month be too much? Or do you really want to make this free (possible, but expect to sleep on a couch and move often)?
On-stage, Adobe just confirmed that they will include VP8/WebM with Flash Player and "push it out to a billion users within a year of its release."
And yet with all their errors, the majority of his students still pass and presumably go on to be leaders or at least high earners. So even though it's a "crisis" no one will do anything meaningful to fix it.
Lapsed Users - Your Most Valuable Untapped Resource
The flash support is absolutely key to this thing being adopted. If I'm a video company, I'd bet the future on VP8 and HTML5 with Flash to support older browsers.
Sounds alot like what I like about App Engine. Hit the upload button and you've got a new version uploaded and live within minutes.
You'll find a lot of very helpful people on the ruby-forum.

I moved over from many years of java programming, and have loved what ruby has to offer. Meta-programming, open classes, closures, mixins and plenty more -- and I am not even hard-core.

Do read some source code of projects like Choice, Highline to get an idea of what ruby can do. If you like the command-line, I developed rbcurse while learning ruby.
Oddly enough, I'm initially leaning towards siding with Corbett, although like everything else internet, we only have a very small piece of the story. (disclaimer: I know nothing of PA politics, which party this guy is, what his views are, etc. This is just a thought experiment)

The question: are the tweeters using Twitter as a tool for political speech? If so, they rock. More power to them. Get out of their way.

Or are they using Twitter as a political hack-job tool, spewing out purposeful disinformation just to muddy the waters? More to the point, are they being paid by some political entity to do this? Is there damage to Corbett's life being caused by these purposeful lies?

You have maximum freedom of speech for political purposes. But if you have malice towards a person for political reasons, and are saying things you know to be inaccurate in order to hurt them, and you have hurt them in some way (perhaps instigating an investigation you know to be spurious) you've crossed the line and should be subject to civil action from the person you are purposely harming. That's not a criminal thing, but a civil thing.

EDIT: So yes, as a matter of free speech I have the right to make a bunch of things up and call you a pedophile and convicted felon on Twitter the day you apply for the job as CPA at a daycare, but if you lose the job because of it you have the right to make me pay for that damage that I purposely caused. This is no different than the freedom to have a gun doesn't give you the freedom to go around shooting people. (key concept: real measurable harm is done in a purposeful manner)
Citing usually has multiple functions:

1. You use the authority of the source you cite. (If a well-respected researcher has made the point, I may be more likely to assume it's sensible than if it just came to your mind). This is why citing Wikipedia or single newspaper articles or popular science books may be a less-than-good idea.

2. You point the reader to someone who has invented/first described a certain phenomenon (i.e., recognition of achievement). It's debatable whether that is relevant at an undergraduate level, but it's probably not a bad idea. (Encyclopedias and textbooks are clearly bad on this criterion).

3. You point the reader to a place where he finds more extensive material on the topic. Many encyclopedias do not cite their sources, which makes them less-than-useful on this account.

Note the conflict between 2. and 3.: If Someone Else published a cryptic paper in the 50s about something, yet no one understands that one until they've read the excellent overview paper by A. Random Researcher, 2. would say you should cite the Else paper from the 50s, whereas for 3. it may be better to cite Researcher's more recent paper.
I think it's worth pointing out that while I suspect you may have intended that as pure snark, there is a deeper point lying under it. Assuming this continuous deployment is something like "developer picks up bug, hacks out whatever solution works, deploys it five minutes later", then you are punting on any issue that may require a bit more introspection. This most notably includes security, but there's other things that this procedure will fry too, like longterm maintainability and such. Not to mention offloading QA onto your customers, which may work for a free webservice holding nothing of particular value but hardly works for everybody. (And I hope they have good backups.)

With this logic, it's perfectly fair to point out that WordPress's security record is absolute shit (tptacek: "There are unforced errors in Wordpress. Every web application will have a cross-site scripting mistake. It takes a special one to have "anonymous commenter" -> "admin" privilege escalation, or executable style templates." - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1328583) and it's fair to conclude that this "We systematically and deliberately fail to check our code before deploying it!" approach to development may be a contributing factor.

Now, nothing stops you from implementing "take bug, code solution, run it through code review and QA, deploy" on a patch-by-patch basis, but I have a hard time imagining making 20 releases a day with that procedure, so I'm assuming that's not what they are doing with some reason.

Basically, what I'm saying here is that hearing WordPress advocate this model is a strong argument against it. If they honestly think it's not costing them anything, or even just a net benefit, then I call their judgment into question. Or perhaps rather, further into question, since I think their security track record was already calling their judgment into question.
Five Exciting Ways to Die
LMDDGTFY:

http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=goog-411+phoneme&v=
Sure, but they said it was a developer preview. They never suggested you use it for general or work purposes yet.
Thanks, that's an excellent list of resources! (And also a good blog for me to check out in general.)

But in addition to learning the topic I'm also looking for advice on handling this kind of course correction.
This supposedly has a set of qualities nothing else out there has. Namely its royalty free (excludes H.264) and is high quality (excludes Theora).

If those two claims hold true, VP8 has significantly more value than the current options and should be the standard.
"The patent system's primary goal seems to have become protecting patent holders, which really ought to be only a secondary function. The original purpose of patents was to encourage innovations that would benefit society. It was a simple trade: if you invent something that will help society, society will give you protection against competition for some period of time."

Exactly. How do you have one without the other? Should Microsoft (or any other patent holder) go to court and argue on the basis that society is not being well served?

The patent owner needs to show harm, which is what patent law was supposed to protect them from. The stated reason for such laws is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", but if you are a patent or copyright holder your argument needs to be that you are not being provided the protection you had expected under the law.

"And in the case of software patents like the ones in this suit, society receives very little benefit for the protection it provides."

That may be. Some patents are for essentially trivial ideas, or ideas that have been in the ether for quite some time. Other patents are indeed clever, and more to the point are the results of an investment of time and money. Without some assurance of recouping that investment some number of valuable ideas would not see the light of day. (Or so I believe. I don't have any citations to back this up.)

Any article that simply refers to a patent abstract as proof of the triviality of a patent is itself trolling. Patent abstracts offer a very broad description; it is the detailed body of the patent that distinguishes it.
I don't have any of the comments bookmarked, but I'm sure you could find them with a tiny amount of Googling.
Personally, i think their "pairs" ( gin and guice, nacl and pepper) are both effective and cute. As for the ones you mentioned, v8 is a faster JavaScript engine , which makes sense (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V8_engine ). Go is a language that is easy to get started with. Vp8, they inherited when they bought on2. I haven't used closure, and don't know much about it, but I'm guessing to those familiar with it, it makes sense.

At very least, their names are much more intuitive than, for example, apache software names
How come? Our experience with OpenSolaris so far has been headache-y.
I do it the other way around. Ubuntu is my primary OS environment, and VirtualBox lets me run those other OSs for various work-related things. It allows me to stay logged into Linux all day.
Seeing this makes me sad.
Ask HN: Moving to US / Visa
I'm a French entrepreneur, currently living in Finland. My company is based in Finland, and was started in 2006. We've already raised money from investors in other European countries.

I'm looking to move to San Francisco, to do bizdev, possibly raise VC, but also because I love the culture / people there :)

Does anyone have experience with moving this way? What type of visa did you apply for? How long did it take? I was recommended an L-1 visa, plus setting up a daughter company in the US.

What is the status of the startup visa?

Side info:
- I have a US social security number, from when I was a kid.
- I passed SATs, in addition to the French Baccalaureat
My theory is that texting abbreviations are currently in vogue mostly because of the limitations of early texting technology. As technologies like smart auto-completion make it easier and easier to text complete words, we should see a reversion back to a more conventional style.

I'm clinging to this theory even though I have pretty much zero evidence backing it up, because the alternative, that "dat was hawt, amirite?" will eventually become acceptable writing, makes me depressed beyond words.
I can highly recommend stackoverflow.com from my personal experience.

I've never used it, but refactormycode.com looks pretty good too.

There will also be plenty more sites that are language/framework/library specific. Rubyflow.com is excellent for Ruby news. Subscribe to mailing lists and Google Groups. Scope out talented programmers by looking for good blogs and good code on Github. Never be scared to send out emails to total strangers for advice. It costs nothing to ask, but the benefits can be huge. Good luck!
At my college, the "gatekeeper" CS course was notorious, even among non-CS majors. Your code could compile, pass all the unit tests, have optimal algorithmic efficiency and highly optimized runtime... and you could still get a C- because you used inconsistent capitalization for your variable names, or had misspellings in your comments[1]. May the ghost of Dijkstra have mercy on you if you did anything "clever" at the high level.

The goal, of course, is not that later on you will spend half your coding time thinking about variable capitalization. The goal is that when you're writing your code, you pick good variable names automatically because you've built up the reflex, by having the idea pounded into your head with the wrath of an angry god. Anecdotally, the class was largely successful in its goal of setting up good habits before the bad ones settled in. After taking that class, people wrote code that was significantly more readable and maintainable than they had written before, and the habits tended to stick.

I suspect that at least part of the problems with effective communications is that we develop our early communications largely ad-hoc, and tend to build up a lot of bad habits in the process. Without concentrated effort to correct this habits, they remain and reinforce themselves through repetition. And of course, concentrated effort doesn't scale well.

[1] Granted, part of this was because the class was graded on a negative curve. If everyone got 145/150, then 145 is the average, which means a C.
VCs Who Code
I agree with the importance of good writing, but I'm curious about the headline. As I read it, the author gives two examples of how poor writing is costly: in terms of time spent correcting papers, and a reference to an estimate from the "National Commission on Writing" that "remedying deficiencies" costs as much as "$3.1 billion annually". There is no explanation of how this estimate was calculated, nor does the article explain how big the US economy is, for purposes of comparison.
I think both parties have a shaky record on free speech. For example, the McCain-Feingold Act regulates campaign speech. Senator McCain is a Republican. Senator Feingold is a Democrat. President Bush, a Republican, signed the law. The chief opponent of the law was Senator Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Republicans in the Senate, who challenged the law in court all the way to the Supreme Court. More recently, Democratic President Obama criticized the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United which rebuffed the government's attempt to ban political speech.
There's another benefit of using proper grammar (and punctuation): It helps people whose first language isn't English.

I grew up in a mixed-language household, and I struggled a bit with English (when I was very little). I relied on the rules of the language to understand complex sentences.

Deviation from these rules may seem like no big deal to people who have internalized the language on a deeper level; but for people who are not as comfortable with English, the rules are very important.
I always used Wikipedia as a reference for my college papers, but cited the pertinent references from the bottom of the Wikipedia page.
We have been thinking about StackOverflow info, but we have some doubts about it. How to measure, how to compare it with the code info, etc. We prefer first work with the code, trying to "do one thing a time and do it well". Nevertheless hopefully in a not very long time we will try to start giving tools to improve CVs with non FOSS.

Regards
I wonder how soon the O from FYO will take this post down? For those who haven't noticed, this post was written in 2004. While I was reading it I thought this must be the guy's last day at this job.
So, any bets on how long until litigation from the H.264 patent pool turns up?
hah, very nice. Particularly because I just tried to enter that into Adblock, and it's busy ignoring me.

Thanks!
I have some limited experience with OpenSolaris, but it has, so far, been good.

I particularly love ZFS and its Linux-ish the package management.

They could have the latest Gnome desktop for the adventurous ones.
Definitely. This is not "just another video codec" - it is significantly better than any other open source video codec. That's a big deal.

And codecs are really really hard to create, for technical and legal reasons. It's not like 5 new production-ready video codecs come up every year. We might not see another credible open source codec for five years.
I don't have a starup, I am not even a developer but I would say location very important.

Whether you are located in a small town in the third world or in SV , NYC, London or Tokyo makes a difference. Just think about all the different factors that are affected by location internet speed, cost of living, laws, local scene, etc. All this changes not only from country to country but from sate to state and from city to city.
Is anyone else baffled by how the article title talks about "failure to communicate" and then goes on to talk about basic things such as spelling and grammar?

In my opinion, communicating something is a far deeper skill than just writing correct grammar (and following your local style guide regarding other conventions). It's about structuring your thoughts into a logical arguments that others can follow, and that is specific enough that people can find out on which points they disagree with you if they do.

Most from the Graham/Spolsky/whoever crowd can do this awesomely well, but in all likelihood, not many enough people learn this in high school or college. And it's something that overworked school teachers or TAs cannot ever hope to address if they are to spend 15min. with a 10-page essay. (Why are they making anyone write a 10-page essay if there's no time to provide adequate feedback?)
Dopamine, Creativity and Schizophrenia
Installing & Configuring Postfix
In theory, I'll agree with you. However, as far as I know, there are no s-exp parsing libraries for any language I know but Lisp. Also s-exps as they exist in Lisp assume some Lispish concepts that don't map to all languages. Symbols, for example, don't exist in Java. JSON is a better solution for cross language portability.
Fair enough -- presumably both of those are simplified if you s/mutual fund/hedge fund/.
"The civil service was united in its desire to make sure that the common market didn't work. That's why we went into it."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIXH3-A8zMI
Thanks for the words of encouragement :)

I've heard a lot of great things about Ruby and I feel like I've finally "conquered" PHP in a sense (although you can never fully know anything), so I'm looking forward to seeing the differences with regards the language and also the frameworks. I've seen people rave about the syntax, so I'm looking forward to some really readable code.

Will look into the open source projects, thanks!
My karma goes down 4 then up 4, and is pretty much stagnant. I should make a clarification here, I do not support patents at all. The above rant is merely directed towards double standards.
I suppose I have a hard time believing that it was just coincidence that the two accounts were criticizing Corbett before he went after them. He really just has the public's interest at heart here, and it has nothing to do with going after his enemies?
I had no idea that was why -- I always thought it was an unnecessary pain in the bum to get a book on my iPod Touch from my iPod Touch. Thanks for the info!