skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, PiCloud looks really interesting and extremely useful. It's solving a different problem than Zencoder - we operate on different levels. (We've actually talked to the PiCloud folks in the past about working together.)

Just to give a little detail on the video front: if you only run ffmpeg, you're guaranteed not to support a few dozen edge cases. You'll run into a non-trivial number of codec incompatibilities (>1% at a typical UGC site), audio/video sync issues, aspect ratio distortion, edge case bugs, etc. You also won't get the best output quality or compression, and you won't be able to do certain "advanced" features (like auto-rotate rotated videos).

That's not to say that ffmpeg is a bad tool. It's a great tool, and an incredible open-source project. But using it (well) isn't easy. At Zencoder, we use ffmpeg alongside a dozen other tools, both open-source and commercial. More importantly, we "drive" those tools with a lot of custom logic - to date, we have about 50 fixes and improvements over vanilla transcoding tools.
Actually advertising science has definitively proven that that is not true.

Watch "Mind Control Marketing" by Derren Brown for proof.
"I spent two years and a summer as a junior banker. I knew from the get-go that I never wanted to be a career Wall Streeter. I viewed my time in banking as a continuation of my education. And you know what, from that perspective it was incredible. The nearly undeniable reality is that the skills and knowledge acquired in banking are remarkably valuable and broadly applicable throughout ones career. Contrary to uninformed opinion, it is not all about spreadsheets and powerpoints - it’s about understanding flows of cash through companies, analyzing markets, thinking critically about strategy and competition, and importantly, identifying and valuing opportunities."

This is so far from the truth. Most junior bankers come away learning little relevant or valuable towards actual business and the startup world.
Next time link to the original article, which is here: http://www.chcchoices.org/Article/28083/Consumer_Power_Repor...

In this case the report was produced by the Hearland Institute which Wikipedia describes as "an American conservative public policy think tank based in Chicago, Illinois that advocates free market policies."

Based on some of the bullshit they have published when it comes to global warming, they seem to be more interested in pursuing a political agenda than sticking to the facts.

"Most scientists do not believe human activities threaten to disrupt the Earth's climate."

"The most reliable temperature data show no global warming trend."

"A modest amount of global warming, should it occur, would be beneficial to the natural world and to human civilization."

"The best strategy to pursue is one of 'no regrets'."
It is amenable to reason but only up to a limit. Certainly someone who had the experienced would be more qualified to reason about it.

I would say that is even true for racism and honor killings. Someone who grew up in a muslem country or in the deep south in US will definetly understand better the underlying causes for rampant racism or why honor killings happen.

As for quantum physics, I would take someone's word if I believed they could experience it. I don't think any one can, so that's why anyone that can do the maths is just as good.
1,000 images per page on new Google search
http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=1538163

Why does this link point to .org? Is .org owned by ycombinator.com?
Russians invited people of every nationality to the Russian vodka drinking parties.

Yes, but Russians have been using the ploy of "getting the foreigners drunk" for centuries! This has been a key element of their government's diplomatic strategy forever, and I hear that it's often used in business.
I am a little concerned about this. While I do some consulting work for large companies and we do 1099s anyway, I also do a lot of very small projects (mostly helping other developers get started or get up to speed on something I know more about than they do). For these little jobs that are paid for via PayPal, now small customers need to do a 1099 with me - a hassle for them probably means not as many little 1 week jobs.

Also, as a consumer of goods and services, now I need to do a 1099 for Amazon, people I hire for small bits of work, the local electronics store, etc.?
"WITH THIS ROBOT, HE PLANS TO ENSLAVE THE WORLD!" dramatic choir

Sarcasm aside, I'm sure stressed-out mothers and financiers alike rejoice...
Apple - iPhone 4 Case Program
but if it has some level of transaction log trail (however asynchronous)

"All transactions are settled between the card and reader alone. Readers transmit the transactions to the back office in batches but there is no need for this to be done in real time." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyster_card

People here are saying "I think/guess/assume that oyster cards work like... ". Without even checking with Wikipedia.
I'd like to hear about the Oyster card system's strengths and weaknesses from someone who really knows the system.
Ask HN: What's been your best investment?
I'm curious what everyone here considers their best investment. Not necessarily from a financial standpoint (thought it certainly could be, and that'd be interesting to hear too) ... but maybe your best investment has been the time you spent to learn something new, or the time you've spent with your family. What's your best?
Selectivity vs. Critical Thinking
This is really awesome, but I have no idea what this is a reproduction of. (I haven't seen a Daft Punk video in at least 5 years). Anyone who's more versed in Daft Punkology have a link to whatever this came from?
No, I'm just stating a reality of the banking and financial systems. If you want to receive wire transfers, you need to be a federally licensed financial institution, and therefore subject to regulation. Those regulations say you must report all activity that meets certain patterns (ie, certain dollar amounts, suspicious transactions, etc). So, by default all money transfers are monitored by the government. If you want to turn bits into currency (ie wire transfer) you need to pass through a federally regulated entity to do so.
A popular tactic of totalitarian governments is to pass laws which everyone will have to break. So that if they don’t like someone, there is always a lawful reason to take them down.
My son is a year and a half old. Five months ago, I began working full-time for a startup.

Before joining the startup, I sat down with my wife and we decided on milestones, a budget, and a schedule for spending time with my son. I know how long I can afford to wait for ramen profitability, and how much money I need to earn in the first two years. And if it doesn't work out, my cofounders know when I would have to walk.

I won't pretend it's always easy. But I see my son more than most lawyers, doctors or consultants see their children. Since I'm not currently commuting, I spend more time with him than typical parents who attend night school after working full time.

Don't forget: A monthly paycheck can evaporate with little warning, and unemployment rates for 50-year-old programmers have often been brutal. If you're a programmer, and you choose the safe course every month, you don't guarantee safety for your family in 10 or 20 years time.

So live below your means, save aggressively, and take the occasional risk. Start a business. Go to night school. Take a 3 month sabbatical and study something intensely.
another quote: "Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Calif., introduced legislation last week that would repeal the new 1099 requirements."

Bottom line, a misguided attempt to improve income reporting and tax collection is going to be either watered down by the IRS or killed in congress. Maybe I'm a sad optimist, but to me it looks like democracy's still working well :-)
I was informed in a Microsoft Training Class just a few months ago that the problem with banking is that most still run in Windows NT. Microsoft has a special team of developers that provide support for NT and the banks pay an inordinately large amount of money to have that support.

Anyone developing for NT?

Disclaimer: I have not researched this information, but assumed the instructor was not full of it.
Sorry if i wasn't being clear. I mean problems that remain undecidable even when you have an oracle for the Halting Problem.
How is that relevant to anything?
I tend to hold with Anne Foerst, who was the theologian working on the ethical side of the MIT robotics project back in the 90's. http://www.cs.sbu.edu/afoerst/

If it is relatable and seems to have human-like consciousness, we have to treat it like any other human, because consciousness is an empirically meaningless term.
I couldn't disagree more. Some of the happiest people I know have parents who took risks when they had kids. It's not as if career risks in the modern world kill you!

My own father was never a happy man, and he did an awful job of hiding it. He felt his family to be a burden that prevented him from doing the things he really wanted to. I'll never inflict that on my own children - they'll see their father continue to follow his dreams, and I hope I'll act as a good example for them in the process.
Google misses deadline for high-profile L.A. contract due to security concerns
I agree, but understanding probability distributions is actually key to this simulation that they've performed. The results would differ, greatly, by running it with a uniform vs normal vs binomial distribution, or by tuning their parameters.
Can you make it so I can auto-hide articles from certain sites? For example, I can't access *.tumblr.com urls from work, so I'd prefer not to even see them.

Edit: actually, just disabling the link might work better.
If you post your website for review, you can fully expect it's going to be attacked with malware or backdoor exploits, and your question will be down-voted.

I've never heard of anything like this happening. Anything to back that up?
Ditto everything you said

I went a half-step further and setup my hosts file to point certain domains to a page that says JFDI (unabbreviated).

It gives me a nice reminder to go work on things that matter.
Managing Indexes in Cassandra using Async Triggers
I hate to break it to you, but a whole lot of people in the US don't have accountants and yet still spend more than $600 at various stores over the course of a year.
I can't speak for bankers, but I can confirm a similar situation from my hedge fund days.

I interviewed lots of interns and junior full-time folks who worked in IT or infrastructure groups supporting trading desks. They all claimed it was a great experience learning how markets work, how their asset classes behaved, etc, and wanted to move to front-office. Sadly, the vast majority were completely clueless of how the asset class worked or even what instruments their code was pushing through databases, booking systems, and PNL calculators. Keep in mind I'm not faulting them for being ignorant of the actual trading strategy (which by design the front-office keeps a secret).

Fresh college candidates fortunate enough to play around with an options-enabled eTrade account during undergrad have far more market knowledge and passion for finance than say, a 2nd year infrastructure or trading platform coder at a bulge-bracket bank.

It stinks that the IT guys get pigeon-holed into the least glamorous part of finance, but after trying to keep an open mind for years, I can understand now why firms are so reluctant to let their back-office shift their way to front-office. For anyone trying to make the move, my advice is take the extra time to learn about the liquid you are plumbing through the system, get truly passionate about the underlying finance and math, and then change firms, because your current one likely won't let you make the leap.

EDIT: Responding to comment below. Hard work and a high threshold for pain will get someone pretty far in finance, but I suspect not far enough if there is no underlying passion. Anyone who really wants big bucks and prestige must eventually earn the pilot seat, or at least be in the cockpit (as a co-pilot). Maybe the saddest part of finance is that far too many people want to be pilots and not enough are happy being flight attendants and mechanics.
It's almost like the government is trying to get its populace to silently replace it.
Okay. Meanwhile, 17 bailed-out banks overpaid executives with tax payer money. If my startup failed, man it sure would be nice to get a $MM exit. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1287195...

Wall Street needs to return to partner-driven approach like law firms instead of taking risks with other people's money.
The difference between infinite and "essentially infinite" is that one
is infinite and one finite. That is a large number, but it's not
infinitely large.
25 for 25
Enso started shipments for zenPads
How old is the book he mentions? Is the argument still viewed seriously apart from a mental exercise?

If the answer is yes, I'd be puzzled. It's naive to think that computers in XXIII century will be anything like current ones. We are after all machines and I find no reason any complexity (quantum, midichlorians or whatever) that we have can't be introduced in the construction of future computers.

That's like a XIX scientist saying that a microscope will never be able to see atoms. Surely he could have demonstrated it with good math.

Rephrased. the argument should be "computers as are built now can't think" that is so obvious simply because lack of power.

A reasonable simulation of conscience that tries to resemble that of a living organism would need at the very least senses, pain/pleasure, feedback (if I want to move, I can,) all throwed in an integration layer that "feels" everything at once.

First we should see if we're able to simulate an ant, then a mathematician brain :-)

Current simulations of living beings or colonies have value for statistical studies, but they're nothing in which that impossibility assertions can base.
Sure, but that's not to discount the main point, which is that singularitarians arbitrarily privilege the importance of computational advancement over the real world. This is probably because computers are the easiest to draw the exponential advancement graph for (and because singularitarians hardly ever leave the basement).

Vernor Vinge predicted the singularity not before 2005 and not after 2030. Will we have crazysauce computers by then? Definitely. Will anything else in the world have caught up with the pace at which we apply transistors to wafers? Probably not.

One of Sterling's points is that the singularity is like dot-com startups in the 1990s: it doesn't have a business model. I think it would be right to say that it doesn't scale, either; there are too many other bottlenecks in the system where we wave our hands and say something about just throwing more metal at it.

Seriously, though, check out the talk, it's quite good.
Softlayer, and yeah, they're great (at least on their dedicated hardware, not sure about their cloud services).
This is at least a full time job, probably two, and maybe three depending on how many of our clients get the reporting wrong. That's a cost of $100k - $300k each year just for the accountants. Let's not forget that some clients will misreport, so we will need to chase them down and deal with their accountants and lawyers.

And remember, if the numbers don't match you'll also need a tax lawyer, because you'll be getting audited. Off by more than 25%, have fun in prison. This is a major, onerous reporting process. If you have a $50/month service with 1000 clients, you're doing $600k. This will eat at leSt half of your gross.
IBM's zEnterprise architecture makes mainframes cool again, also efficient
"Business? It's quite simple. It's other people's money." --Alexandre Dumas
As for getting paid for small jobs and paying people for small jobs, if you paid the person more than $600 in a tax year, you should have already been giving/receiving 1099s.

The only difference with the new rule is that you'd have to give 1099s to vendors.
There are also lawyers from all sides of the political spectrum who say this won't survive a challenge in court because of the burden it creates and other reasons (can't find the original quotes right now sorry).
LinkedIn? Social network and you can post jobs there. Works pretty much how you've described it.
The Case for Talking Shit on Wall Street
Nope. I agree with the article... I would've not argued either. Actually, I don't even try to persuade my closest friends that I've known for 15 years. Up until a couple of years ago, I loved preaching and talking about life goals, etc.. but I've realized that people won't listen to reasonable arguments when it comes to that.

Quitting your job and taking a risk is one of those things that you have to come to yourself, or not at all.
How do you know they are telling the truth? Maybe this is just scaremongering from a group with a certain political agenda. Before getting excited it would be nice to see the same information from a less biased source. How is that not relevant?
Wall street adds value to Govt. Start up adds value to the society.
Penrose's argument has always been full of it.

Humans aren't Turing-complete; they can certainly emulate a small, finite, Turing machine, but they can't emulate an arbitrary large one.

An individual human is not complete in any way; look at how many people have failed to proof Fermat's last theorem.

Finally, people aren't consistent; Robert Penrose can say "Penrose will never utter this statement" and the roof doesn't fall in.
Extending Cassandra with Asynchronous Triggers
As far as I can tell, one large benefit for Oyster cards is that people can use the gates at tube stations faster than with paper tickets. This is quite impressive, given that an experienced commuter barely has to break stride to use a paper ticket. (And on buses, you don't have the delay of interacting with the bus driver - you beep on as you go past). I'm sure the cost savings for London Underground from increased speed beats that that they'll lose to forged Oyster cards.
Exactly. I'd assume most businesses do nearly all their purchasing through credit/debit card. I know we certainly do. So I don't see how this is such a big deal.
Something about this article rubs me the wrong way, despite the fact that I agree with a number of things the author says. I think he's right on about the importance of diverse social-networks, and the value of weak ties. And I think this stuff is pretty well established now, so no surprise there.

But what this has to do with meritocracy and the identification of the "best and brightest" is a little questionable. These factors should correlate - to some extent - with being successful, regardless of whether or not an individual is one of his so-called "best and brightest" who went to Harvard or whatever.

If he had just said "If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, then make it a point to build a diverse network of connections with people of different backgrounds and interests" then I'd be saying "right on." But the harping about GPAs and SAT scores and Harvard just seemed to muddle the article up and distract from the point.
You are speaking about math, I am speaking about complexity theory.
The Frink programming language
I personally do not assume that consciousness only exists where it is observable. I am merely interested in the fact that it is unobservable-- and in how that makes it weird and different. Do you agree with me on this point?
I think it happens when you manually update it on browser, after adding few bookmarks. Let the sync take care of it. It happened to me couple of time, now it works fine. Syncing among Windows,Linux and OSX dev channel.
What the hell is up with this thread? This has to be the worst thread I've ever seen at HN. You'd think this were a comment thread on Fox News or something.

People: Chill the fuck out. The IRS is accepting comments on the issue. The rule doesn't go into effect until, realistically, April of 2013. By then, it is almost guaranteed that the rule will be significantly weakened to the point where it is not much different than what we have in place now.

This isn't a world-ending or economy-destroying fuckup organized by big-governement Democrats. It was a short-sighted clause put in by a politician trying to close a loophole. This is why we have checks and balances- the executive branch, which is actually in charge of implementing these rules, will implement them in a sane way.

So put your conspiracy theories to bed and get on with life. File a comment with the IRS and wait a couple of years. Then maybe you'll see that this was just one big stink over nothing.
blah at lack of newline preservation

keefe@hydrogen:~$ ping news.ycombinator.org

PING news.ycombinator.org (174.132.225.106) 56(84) bytes of data.

64 bytes from 6a.e1.84ae.static.theplanet.com

(174.132.225.106): icmp_seq=1 ttl=51 time=71.2 ms

--- news.ycombinator.org ping statistics ---

1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 71.268/71.268/71.268/0.000 ms

keefe@hydrogen:~$ ping news.ycombinator.com

PING news.ycombinator.com (174.132.225.106) 56(84) bytes of data.

64 bytes from 6a.e1.84ae.static.theplanet.com

(174.132.225.106): icmp_seq=1 ttl=51 time=71.2 ms
Well, I thought everyone has an example of things that they don't want but that they have to pay for. The tone of the post is humorous. Is a response (humorous one) to another post entitle "Make things that people want". People money is not about logic reasoning, they pay only when they have to.
> In reality people who say "I don't have time" are just not willing to sacrifice anything for their dreams.

Agreed, I posted my story above (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1541331), but I will tack on I also found time to work on a couple of fairly substantial side projects (http://fleurdevieclinic.org/ and http://tmedweb.tulane.edu)
I always wonder how many hours per day people who say they don't have time watch TV.
Thanks that link was the most helpful thing I read on the matter.
Probably learning a new language. Wanted to develop a JP site so after 2 years and lots of studying starting to get a handle on the lang, and having lots of fun doing it. Very rewarding so far.

Financially, probably China. Only problem is can't convert RMB -> USD so it's like monopoly money. Maybe one day can buy gold and send it over on a container vessel :)
I could see this being useful, but it's not quite there yet. There are a few things I think it needs to support first:

- comparing two fonts side-by-side
- seeing multiple fonts/sizes/styles in the same panel so you can try
to put together a whole title/body font hierarchy
- alternate justifications--centered is not how I want to view body text

Until then, this isn't really a substitute for opening up a rich-text editor and doing it all in there, unfortunately.

(The text-editing component of this is fantastic though. I'll be very happy if this kind of thing starts making its way to more places.)
FWIW I don't think this originated on reddit, I've seen it on fark and metafilter also (although it's pretty derided on metafilter if not followed by some sort of substantive response).
Man, I wish I could cancel laws just by getting a "conservative public policy think tank" to talk about them; have you actually got a link to anyone contradicting this? Because so far I haven't seen one.

Here's a guy who actually quotes the law in question, and since the health care bill manifests as a patch to the original law, also expands out the 1099 law to what it now says: http://thefinancebuff.com/2010/05/1099-filing-requirement-in...

I have no idea what his political affiliation is, I just linked for the law quote.

Or do I not have to worry about this law, because the Heartland Institute are global warming heretics?
You can get certificates for free at startssl.com
Unless you're only suggesting skepticism, which is a good idea in general, this is just ad hominem.