skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have no plans to ever program video encoders or decoders, but this blog is always fascinating reading, and satisfies a lot of the curiosity I and, I assume, others have regarding just how video compression really works. (It’s not as straightforward as GIF or JPEG, that’s for sure!)
Poll HN: How often do you read technical books?
When learning new languages or frameworks, I like to have a good book to learn from. The idea, for me, is that a book will tend to be more reviewed and refined than online tutorials tend to be (though some languages do have really excellent documentation). I also find they're better for reading on a bus or a plane than a laptop might be.

I'd like to know if there's truth to the rumour that tech books are a dying breed, so let's conduct a little survey.

I'd like to define "reading" a book to mean something a bit closer to sitting down with a book, or some sort of study, rather than looking for a quick reference.

So, how often would you say you start reading a new technical book?
Never. I learn via online resources and trial and error.
Rarely. Perhaps one or two books per year.
Frequently. I like to pick up a book and learn something new at least once per quarter.
Often. I'm constantly refining my skills, and adding new tools to my belt, so I go through books nearly as fast as I can read them.
Other. See my comment below.
Express 1.0.0beta2 released for nodejs
If your new to Express check out http://expressjs.com, if not 1.x is a near rewrite of the popular node web framework, optimizations have made the framework MUCH faster, 1.x provides additional robust features as well as utilizing the Connect middleware framework.
Licensing. Every time I install a version of windows, it's a hassle I wouldn't otherwise have to deal with. (Also not a problem I expect you to be able to do anything about, but you asked...)

Installing programs - Ninite.com is a startup dealing w/ that.
How to Hack Politics.Video.YouTube Link
Interview with Christopher Kullenberg of Telecomix.org at Hacknight.
Return the largest number possible in 512 characters of C
Show HN: Deepwater Horizon oil spill infographics in HTML5
If I'm missing any important options, let me know and I'll add them. Also, if my choices above are really skewed or inaccurate, I can make a new post with better choices.
The end, or the beginning? These were designed in 1998.
It's not a 1984 scenario, no one has video surveillance in their house, and you can have sex without being executed. You win.

On the other hand, this is a pretty big deal, and your reply doesn't justify it. Yes, not everyone "is" a business, but everyone relies on the economy every day. Adding a not insignificant overhead to the companies that bring you food, water, electricity, etc. makes those items more expensive. Also, increasing overhead in businesses makes it harder to start businesses, which is sort of relevant given that we're on YC news.
2574.07 miles away from me...bummer. I can't even find a laundry place near where I live in East LA...glad someone is doing it.

(Might want to put a range threshold on that search.)
Couldn't find any better place... Bug report: when voting someone's entry down, the score stops at -4, but the poster's karma actually continues down beyond that point. This seems err to me.
The operating system ships with absolutely nothing that I consider useful for modern development, and it doesn't ship with several things I consider crucial. SSH. A decent terminal. A decent text editor. Perl. Python. Name-your-core-Unix-tool. A decent web browser. Windows is actually quite pathetic out of the box.

Now, yes, Windows can be brought up to par (and I've done it). I am not saying it is impossible to use Windows to be productive. But, I am past the point where I see this as worth the trouble; why the hell should I spend hours downloading and installing all the things Microsoft doesn't provide (oh, and re-install them, every 6 months, when invariably the OS falls apart and one has to start over)?
Hmm, it depends on what exactly you mean. I was going to answer "often", but from the description it sounds like you have in mind the kinds of books that come from technical publishers like O'Reilly, which I read closer to "rarely/never".

For languages, frameworks, tools, etc., I almost never read books. But I do read technical books on concepts, ideas, research areas, techniques, etc. So e.g. in computational statistics / ML, I've never bought/read a book like "R in Action", but I do own "The Elements of Statistical Learning".
My point is that if two mathematicians play this game, there is still lots of room to be clever. Even though both will know the idea of looking at numbers nameable in a some formal logic, the more clever of the two will beat the one with fastest handwriting (I'm assuming hours or days - not seconds - to compete).
You think telling a start-up with no revenue, no plans for generating revenue, and no obvious link from their offering to a revenue generation model that they aren't worth a multi-million investment is merely resentment of others' success?

Twitter was given as an example by the GP poster. Are we still talking about them? If so, it might not be resentment but it'd be a flat out lie. If Twitter were not worth investing in, they would not have been invested in. Several of the world's biggest VCs have not gone collectively crazy.
If this is true it makes me happy because this is surely less of a hack.
The Inverse Power Of Praise
Feel free to check out FastSpring
Some Google crawls already execute Javascript; they could easily do so more extensively if that were the only way to reach valuable content.

Also, Google is already promoting a convention for making the various parts of an AJAX application reachable via different URL-#fragments more easily crawlable. See:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...

A number of sites including Facebook have adopted this convention; app developers usually want to be found by search engines.
Admitted by Americans visiting Europe, or claimed by Europeans?
Prototypes and Inheritance in JavaScript
It's true that they're not working full-time, but I think it's somewhat indicative of how the knowledge and supply chains are spread out. If you were to try to recreate a modern computing infrastructure on a desert island, you'd have to assemble a lot of those people, from the people who know how to smelt ore, to the people who can figure out how to build capacitors, etc.

A wild card that I'm not sure has been tested is how much you could get away with recreating solely from published materials. Given some smart people with a university-library-quality set of books (and let's say a good index), how many of them and how long do you need to go from stone-age to iPhone?
Pdf generator using pure javascript
Yes, I like writing recursive descent parsers but I don't know of any in "industrial" use, beside the lisp parser you just mentioned.

I'd like to know if there are more.
So what is your answer, then?
Titles are generally considered secondary to the article, and are often used to grab attention (in the style of newspaper headlines). And expecting a title (a single sentence, at most!) to explain why there are so many people behind bars is a bit illogical.
This has been one of my background questions for some time, but the best answer I have been able to come up with is that we replace it with a system where nobody is in charge of making new laws or regulation, but is in charge of enforcing them. Since bad laws are created at a faster rate than good laws, the result should be a net positive.
Yeah, I had something in my head when I went to create this, but in the process of defining it I discovered the question was rather flawed.

I had an idea for a project that rather relied (at least as far as early monetization) on developers preferring to read books, if only as a supplement to online learning.

This would include books like SICP, CLRS, etc., but I thought O'Reilly-type books would be where the most dollars are spent.

There is definitely a market for those books, but it may largely be a "newbie" sort of market, with more advanced developers preferring other methods to acquire knowledge. As a very junior developer, I can't personally see that gap, so I had to ask.
People from Mozilla, including Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript, are working on a new language called Rust.
The compiler is written in OCaml.

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4009
Maybe I did. Good point.

Can you use gmail with other mail hosts? That is, without google apps?
I know it is old, but no-one has hit on exactly what is happening. It is decision trees, and it does make use of the winnowing effect of true-false questions. The last ingredient is user feedback. If it cannot correctly guess your character, it asks you to enter them. It then saves your person and the decision tree that got you to them for future use: croudsourcing.
Austrialia censors 90% of web censorship plan to avoid "unnecessary debate"
Thoroughly Unusual Itches
FluidDB is very exciting technology once one gets past the initial "WTF". I'm looking forward to more user-facing applications.

Not really a Tickery question, but I'm curious about how one could extract subsets of data for off-line use and then replicate this when back online. Understanding that the plan is to open-source FluidDB, what kind of resources would be required to run a "mini-FluidDB"?
In my case I learnt on digital and the freedom of digital meant I have been able to continually experiment unafraid of wasting film (and money). The learning process for me has been a mixture of reading the basics and a large amount trial and error. I started snapping away but as I have learnt what works I spend more time deciding the what, where and how (so now I am the annoying relative that takes ages to take the family photo).
I'm not complaining about the spending, my point was just that it's an unfair comparison to include extraordinary expenses when presenting the costs of housing prisoners but not when presenting the costs of housing students.
Agreed - My first thought when reading that article is "hm I don't think I've ever experienced the thought of 'I'm having a bad day'"

I also don't believe in luck and spent a long time as a serious poker player which shaped my mind into seeing non-dependent events as they truly are.
Industries using a recursive descent parser: http://www.edg.com/index.php?location=customers_oc
But the State governments are just as corrupt or more corrupt than the Federal government. Remember Rod Blagojevich?
This is exactly why I think it's crazy for browsers to be forcing users to use the codecs that they embed in their program, rather than letting the user use their own codecs. It's fine to bundle codecs so you know the user can watch things, but when I have a better codec installed on my system - I should be able to use it.
What's more risky than a startup?
Finger painting on the iPad
All of them. It isn't just that it takes twenty years to train a software engineer, 30 years for a doctor or a lawyer.

It is also the tools we need (I don't even dare think about the complex physics that has to be mastered to make the microprocessors that enable me to encode bits that can be sent halfway around the world so you can see this comment), the tool required to built those tools, the food we eat (easy to make perhaps, but it needs to be brought and sold, transported, stored and finally sold to us consumers), etc.

The interconnections in this world are truly mind wrecking.
If it really is independent, please keep it an extension and don't bake it into vanilla Firefox.

It doesn't just impact bewildered users that never asked for it and devs/users of existing extensions that are now sidelined -- it completely fucks your upstream development cycle, since changes to the chrome are lumped in with and gated by rendering engine changes.

It's a fundamental mistake that y'all and many others in the industry have been making for years. Microsoft stopped bundling some of their apps with Win7 for this reason, and Google has finally stopped bundling core user apps with their most recent Android release so that users have any hope of getting current versions.
Uh, you can?
Huh? FFmpeg is an open-source project that has been around for a very long time. The license is LGPL.
I've gradually got to thinking that gaming is a field that is extremely poorly understood(even by enthusiastic practitioners like myself), and that it is why it can so easily turn into an destructive tarpit.

The problems start at some extremely base assumptions of concept and focus - stakeholders will often treat a game as a branding exercise akin to a toy, just on a larger scale. Or they might conceive of it like a movie, with a Hollywood-style marketing push. Or it might be treated as "entertainment software," with a focus on having the best technology and the most features. All of these are not really correct, but we can fool ourselves into thinking they're correct because entities outside of the industry(namely, IP owners and other hardware/software manufacturers) will bring their money and their world-view/assumptions to the table, and through sheer trial and error game devs have found a few ways to satisfy these stakeholders and make something that can potentially turn a profit, even though the historical record indicates that the "value" the stakeholders brought to the table usually wasn't a contributing factor in the biggest hits.

But once you start down that path, the top-down directive forces the development team to start doing unnatural things that work against product viability and realistic ship dates. Soon, everyone's dissatisfied and it just becomes a hellhole where the team works as individuals, takes their paychecks, and "looks out for number one." But a lot of people want to work in the industry, and they'll take bad money over no money.

It's the same problem as in startups as a whole - find an original, scalable game concept. Work on making it marketable. Then you can start spending big to make a refined, feature-heavy implementation.
Microsoft in Data Center ARM Race?
Random realities of programming
Why whitespace? Just pick the simplest to interpret Turing complete language with a two symbol alphabet.

Also: you're disqualified :)
Navigenics, 23andMe slammed in government report
This is a seriously awesome deck!
Same for me: http://img2.pict.com/70/30/58/3833301/0/1279933262.jpg

I found out, though, if I resized the window to a smaller size, the banner disappears.
The shipping version of Firefox when Chrome was first released absolutely did not have this feature. It was a regular pain in my ass. The ability to poof a tab out into a new window without reloading the contents was added to Firefox in the interim.
Firefox Addon with Tab Candy like functionality
I know. I just wanted to add more information to the discussion.
Springpad is pretty good, has mobile clients and all
Yes, there was just an upgrade to the Mini, and it's pretty and all, but it lost a USB port, is still using the same (old) Core 2 processors, and they raised the base price by $100. Not very competitive if you ask me.

Their laptops do sell better, that's true. Why are both the Macbook and Macbook Air still using those same Core 2 processors then? Also, the Macbook Air has 2GB of RAM in a machine costing $1499. That's absurd.

If they still care about their computer business, then in my opinion they're doing a pretty poor job of managing it.
I don't run windows, but all there is on the next page is the commented listing of source code for the virus.
Build Online Polls Instantly with Flisti
You are confusing bad software with technical debt. Debts can be paid off. Wordpress can only be burned to the ground and never mentioned again.
Bundled codec has one advantage: it's guaranteed to be compatible with the browser.

User may not have up-to-date codecs, or could have installed some dubious codec pack with codecs that are buggy or unstable.

For average user bundled codec "just works" and it's one less piece of software to update, and one less thing that could break.
Select parts:

[on an assertion by the expert witness of SAS] That evidence was capable of seriously misleading a non-technical judge.

[judge doing fact checking from Wikipedia] In my judgment the SAS Language is a programming language. I am comforted by the fact that this assessment coincides not only with SAS Institute's own assessment in paragraph 6 of its Particulars of Claim and in its literature, but also with that of the anonymous author of the entry for "SAS language" in Wikipedia...
I've found this not to be the case. If you write custom applications and they are solid, when it comes time to add a new feature, you can do it quickly and keep the customer happy. If you are riddled with technical debt, the cost of adding a small feature approaches the cost of having a competitor rewrite the whole application.
Anyone know what the correct result is for the Interval Arithmetic example? I coded it in five environments and got 1.172604, -.8273960599468214, 1.17260394005318, 2.62722e39, and 1.17260394.

So the consensus is 1.172 etc., but I'm guessing based on the article that despite consensus it's wrong.
Most users don't have a usable window manager, though, so they decide to write one inside their pet application instead.
Reading this article helped rejuvenate my efforts on a fitness product I've been working on. When I first started discussing the idea with my girlfriend, we immediately saw how it could become the biggest thing in fitness and take the world by storm. I couldn't imagine such an awesome product not being a household name and a source of tens of millions a year. I sold myself so completely on the life changing power of the product that I assumed everyone who heard about it would instantly be on board.

After a couple weeks of working, the glow began to wear off. I still believe in the project, but the more people I pitched the idea to, the more clearly I understood the challenges of marketing. My thought process had been "fitness is a billion dollar industry, my product has one or two successful competitors that I can out maneuver, so, a billion * a decent chunk of the market = $."

Now I realize that I don't have the experience or resources to reach a huge market. I read this article some weeks ago and I felt comforted by the idea that that is not a horrible thing. If I can really connect with a large percentage of a smaller audience, than I can find users who are really happy and excited by my work and want to share their excitement with others. I would feel good about being able to deliver incredible value to a select group, and if the momentum carries the project into new markets I'll be happy about that too.

My minimum viable market is small groups of friends in offices who want to help each other stay on track losing weight, and a slightly expanded market would include friends attending aerobics classes together. Now that I am okay with targeting a smaller group of potential users, marketing doesn't seem nearly as overwhelming and frightening and I've been able to make some great progress.
When the history of Kodak is written, Kodachrome should get an entire chapter as an example of managerial malpractice.

Imagine: you have loyal fans, hundreds if not thousands of pro and amateur photographers who ONLY use your product, each pro shooting thousands of rolls of film per year (yes, pros go through a lot of film). Fuji tried to duplicate it but couldn't.

The entirety of the market for Kodachrome is 100% owned by Kodak, from manufacturing the film, the unique developer process, the chemicals, etc.

The film also has unique archival characteristics and other characteristics that mean almost all competitors are locked out - if you want the Kodachrome "look and feel", you have to use Kodachrome.

Fans as rabid as Mac fanbois, unique lockin, capture of nearly 100% of the value in the entire chain ... and Kodak cancels the product.
Mostly LGPL. Parts of FFmpeg are GPL, as are some key libraries (like x264).
Regardless of which metaphor is a more accurate translation, "technical debt" is much more accessible. If you have to explain your turn of phrase, it's not going to catch on.
Personally, I think random selection would produce a better result than the system we currently have. Select the legislature by lottery. Pick N (where N is some fixed integer designated by law for a each political office) candidates for each office by a random lottery, selected from a pool of everyone who has ever served jury duty. Re-roll for anyone who declines to serve or is currently incarcerated, in a coma, etc. (Obviously, the particulars of the exclusion rules have to be made very explicit so that nobody can exert undue influence by arbitrarily disqualifying people they don't like.) Give each candidate a fixed amount of government funding for their campaign. Nobody is allowed to solicit campaign contributions of any kind or permitted to spend their own money, so everyone is on an even playing field. The quantity of funding depends solely on the particular office that the person is running for. You don't get to choose what office to run for; there is a lottery for each individual office. If you are selected as a candidate for an office by the lottery, you are ineligible for other lotteries for that election year. The candidates run their campaigns. The voters pick the winner for each office by condorcet voting.
Whoa, thanks for the heads up!
Are you really sure Lehman's bonds went to zero? No one was willing to take a chance they'd be worth something when everything was sorted out? I doubt that and would like to see some evidence of it.

The problem for the Reserve Primary Fund was that their value dropped precipitously; I suspect it wouldn't have mattered if they ended up at 0, 1, 5 or 10 cents on the dollar.

As for the derivatives, when it came time to settle them, as widely predicted they mostly canceled out with only (from memory) 6 billion US$ changing hands.
Looks like a pretty well conducted spear phishing attack. If the exploit code hadn't crashed Acrobat Reader, chances are the originating attacker would have a nice flow of 0-day exploits from this security researcher.
Comparing the growth rates is pretty sobering:

1980 2010
US Population 226MM 307MM = ~36% growth
US Prison Inmates 0.5MM 2.3MM = ~360% growth
Name me one browser that let's you load codecs from the OS apis for HTML5 video, rather than as a plugin.
It's a long article, almost 4 pages in print. I'm ok with discussing both ends of the social spectrum to establish a universal context. Penology is a frequent topic in the Economist.
Chipophone - 8-bit synthesizer
I didn't say browsers shouldn't bundle codecs - just that they shouldn't be exclusive about them.
This is simply not true. One specific example is SSDs -- they offer a huge increase in performance, yet Apple only offers mediocre, overpriced ones as options on its higher-end machines.
Pretty good. I was thinking Faramir, and it guessed Boromir.
http://www.linusakesson.net/chipophone/index.php
Even if it does go through exactly this way, very few people will comply with it, so the probability of getting singled out for serious retribution should be fairly low. So there's yet another reason to chill out.
I found that I hated working with lots of windows as have many others. However, I came to realize that this is because of the window manager. I switched to a window manager capable of actually managing windows, and will never go back. The particular window manager I use is called Awesome, but there are many like it. A particularly useful feature is Awesome's use of tags. Multiple tags can be assigned to windows, and multiple windows can be assigned to tags, and at any one time, you can view whichever combination of tags you want. I have a tag for work, a tag for personal, a tag for news. I also have a tag for web, a tag for communications, and a tag for production. Viewing combinations of these tags is extremely useful and an effective way of managing windows.