skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I like our system in Sweden, there has been a dramatic change in the last 10 years. Especially for students, youth, foreigners and others with a limited social network.

The housing market is ridiculous, both for renting and buying, especially compared to 10 years ago. For students it has become harder to both get accepted to university and to keep their student benefits. Foreign students have harder to get admitted, not competing fully with Swedish students and also soon have to pay tuition around 8000€/year. When you finish school you won't get unemployment benefits, but instead have to apply for welfare if you can't find a job instantly. I've heard it's a funny feeling having studied for five years and then being interrogated by welfare workers who can't understand why you're there in the first place. If you're young you basically won't get any help for the first three months of unemployment, which is when you want it.

Off the top of my head I know several people who has moved to Berlin explicitly for the cheaper housing and better quality of life. Swedish DJ Petter Nordkvist[1] has stated in interviews[2] that he moved to Berlin because "it is nearly impossible to find a flat [in Stockholm] if you don’t buy". An example even more relevant to this site is Soundcloud. The founders attended university and the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship in Sweden and then moved themselves and their company to Berlin, stating "since it was and still is affordable to live and work there"[3] as one of the reasons for moving.

[1] http://www.discogs.com/artist/Petter+Nordkvist
[2] http://www.hrfq3.sakura.ne.jp/home//e_interview/petter02/ind...
[3] http://blog.twingly.com/2010/05/18/from-stockholm-to-berlin-...
I don't follow the last part of your post. Rights granted by the government are not automatically all property rights. This is infringing on copyright, an artificial monopoly granted by the government to encourage social progress. I agree that's illegal, but it's not removing any items from your possession; it's circumventing the government's attempt to give you a monopoly in duplication, which harms your business prospects, but does not damage any items in your possession. For example, you can still use any software you have.

I mean, if reducing something's value by making it harder to sell is equivalent to destruction of property, then any competition is destruction of property. If I open a bakery next to yours, I'm damaging your bakery. But I think calling it theft or destruction of property would be absurd, even if I broke the law in opening my bakery. If my bakery failed to get the proper permits, or violated zoning laws, I'm competing with you illegally, and might be guilty of some sort of illegal business practices. But I'm not guilty of robbing your bakery in the same way I would be if I smashed in your front window and stole your oven. That's something rather different.
Can you point to a similar thing? I personally haven't seen it: binary proving of a limited subset of the x86 instruction set.
Interesting... so if, say, the diaspora guys want to apply to YC, will that create a conflict of interest?
Embrace Your Inner Misfit
Try Microsoft's ClearType Tuner powertoy.

Edit: MS ClearType info including links: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ClearTypeInfo.mspx
Interesting strategy.

Devils Advocate: basically encourage many of the best and brightest to lock them selves into using facebook like Zynga originally did?

Only question, does this welcome offer include the frid.ge :)
In the cases you mentioned, it was easy for the techie guy to recommend Google or Macs to friends or family because they were far better products at the time.

I take recommendations I give to people very seriously, and I simply wouldn't recommend to any non-technical person to move away from Facebook to a platform that has none/few of their friends on it.
I found this in the comments of the posted article’s website:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1637442
24 Things You Might Be Saying Wrong
Your copies of said software aren't destroyed. Your "property right" is more akin to owning all copies of software.

Instead, piracy protect your marketshare against people who offer their "property" for free.

GIMP can't effectively win against photoshop + pirated photoshop. They will have an easier time to win if people actually respect copyright.

To the extent that it is my interest to encourage other people to go after pirates, that is in my interest. However, it is not in my interest to develop methods to prevent people from copying my software, nor is it in my interest to use the court to go after these pirates. What I would do is annihilate the possibility of pirates existing by not making my goods artificially scarce and work on the problem space of making money in the assumption of infinitely copied software.

I also win by making it easier for me to compete with similar products because their marketing capacity is reduced through the reduction and destruction of illegal distribution channel for their products.

That is my theory of copyright competition.
> If they're smart, they'll wait until we annihilate ourselves or destroy our planet, and then walk right in. Less resources will be expended on their side.

That's assuming they have time on their side. By the time they are searching other galaxies for resources, I'd imagine they wouldn't be so patient if we neglect to be hasty... ;-)
Ah, she's one of the intuitive ones. Some of it is probably due to women being more perceptive to body language and non-verbal communication than men are, on average. I wonder what else there is.
Or Nevada.
Some investitors complained at Angelconf 2010, or maybe on a press coverage of it (don't really remember), about angels financing Facebook's expensive "selection program" (buying startups as a means of hiring people). Wonder how this will be seen those who made such claims...
He was talking as a developer wanting to hack on the code, not a user.
Personally, I love Postgres; I've been burned by MySQL in the past. Here's the thing, you will be infinitely more employable if you know SQL well, and you'll easily retrain from one RDBMS to another if a better SQL database comes along.
You should try a RBDMS too :P
I'm curious. Does that mean that the angels don't expect to get a decent return if FB buys their investment?
Hence privacy controls. The mom can require the kid to "friend" her, but not to actually make visible all of her statuses.
Memory will always be cheaper than bandwidth and far more pervasive. It makes no sense to download something, then 10 minutes download it again. We already have pervasive non-downloadable streams - it's called radio. It's still popular, but has never completely displaced having your own collection.

One of the killer uses of digital music is the ability to have a miles-long playlist for long road/plane trips. Downloadable streams cannot possibly service this market cheaper than a solid-state memory device. Wherever you have a market segment that needs two devices, the one that combines both always wins. So the future is an iPod that can stream if necessary - which we already have in the iPhone.
Some fonts (especially less-common ones now available through @font-face) just get hinted too strongly with subpixel AA. I wouldn't use this property in body text (if your body font doesn't hint well at that size, you need a new font), but I've used it before on title copy and it really does make an improvement.
A quick question: Is instant personalization just removing a click that is otherwise required by an application to access all this data? Is there any new data that I can't access via the api, that is coming here.

Maybe devs who work with FB connect more often can clarify.. Thanks in advance.
> It doesn't have to be an interpreter, the processor itself can be optimized for Java (or whatever bytecode you'd like), a point the article also missed.

This is slower than compiling it to a more easily implemented ISA.
It's see it like this:

Observe that historical trends show communication technology advancing much faster than transportation technology. In the 20th century we got cars, planes, helicopters, rockets... and now we still have cars, planes, helicopters and rockets (do they make hovercraft anymore?). No major advance for decades. Compare to communication, which seems to change beyond recognition every ten years.

What then is bound to happen is that we develop some sort of theoretically inter-stellar range communication technology. Of course by the time we do that, we'll be lucky if humanity has so much as a moon base. But the chances are we are not the first intelligent race, and a number of intelligent races will already exist, and will have already have implemented this technology.

In effect, we will switch on one day and find a galactic internet (the Intergalacticnet?) of forever isolated planetary nodes. Once we figure out how to decode and communicate etc., we will exchange/trade information and progress will increase exponentially. But no field trips (maybe some sort of VR/avatar tour of alien worlds though).

IMO sci-fi writers get it wrong when they show spaceships bumping into alien civilizations etc. Regardless of whether that sort of transportation is even feasible, communication will have been established much sooner.
This is the important bit. Just about every company or web app will have a bunch of relational data and therefore an SQL database of some kind. And storing key-value pairs in an SQL database is really not that hard or inconvenient or slow or whatever - it's gonna be 'good enough' for just about everyone. Why bother supporting an entire extra dedicated KV store when the SQL DB I already have will work just fine?

'Best tool for the job' is an oversimplification.
Does it implement Ostatus? Is it compatible with more than just other appleseed? Diaspora will be compatible with any app that implements Ostatus such as status.net and google buzz.
I love the cooking analogy in the middle I use them often when talking about programming!
I actually did start working on this about a year ago — and realized that I didn't actually have to write any code! A Mozilla developer had already written a gstreamer backend for use in Fennec, because the original implementation couldn't play Theora in real time on any of the Maemo devices. Of course, there was a Mozilla lead in the main bugzilla thread shooting down any suggestions that it be used in Firefox.

So it comes down purely to the maintenance burden — but the codebase was organized so that I'd need hostile forks of Gecko, XULRunner, and Firefox. No thanks. Shortly afterward Chrome was usable on Linux, and I no longer had an itch to scratch.
I hope this means more improvements to the FB platform. Has anyone else tried to build a product exclusively on top of the new Graph API yet?

Curious if anyone else has the same opinions that I do - not mature enough to trust just yet...
As a twenty-something, I've only recently figured this out (I would say within the last 5 years), and I can say that life is much more enjoyable when you learn to recognize things you can't change by getting upset, and let them go. Driving on the road with a-holes is indeed at the top of this list.

It is also much easier to be empathetic and see someone else's side when you're able to keep a level head. One rule I made for myself a couple years ago is that I try not to argue with anyone unless I can argue their side first. By that time, it's no longer a potential argument, but rather a discussion.
Their API will be OStatus, same as status.net and google buzz, to be more specific: pubsubhubbub, salmon, activity streams and webfinger.
My guess is that Facebook wants to sell personalization and credits as a service.

Once a few YC startups become successful, Facebook will showcase them to legitimize their "product". Big companies will want to join in, and then Facebook will start charging for it.
the content of this book is a little odd: it seems narrowly oriented towards getting enough number theory to understand RSA, Diffie-Hellman, and elliptic curve cryptography.

i very much enjoy a book with the same title but by burton:

http://www.mcgraw-hill.co.uk/html/0071244255.html

it contains a lot more of number theory and a little cryptography too.
Some year PG will be "This year's most influential person in tech"
Awesome, they must have cleaned up their act when they implemented WebM. Do you know what it uses now? (I'm on my iPhone now)
Are there many ruby app built by large teams?

In my experience, teams building Ruby apps tend to be much smaller than teams building Java apps ..

That said, this is a problem for any libraries that you might want to include, you have to trust that the authors followed conventions and didn't do any thing 'evil'. Ruby Rewrite (http://rewrite.rubyforge.org/) was conceived to specifically avoid this sort of problem.
Appleseed uses an MVC+Hooks framework, so it can support whatever anyone wants to build a set of hooks for.

I'm sure you'll see a lot of different protocol support in the future.
BS 499 welding position
One region hosts many client accounts.
One client account has many services.
Services are linked to charge rate tables.
One account can have multiple logins.
One service was many log entries.
...
Obligatory: http://www.xkcd.com/664/
Intel + McAfee = push for "Trusted Computing"?
I think I see what you're getting at. I don't know, I usually just pack everything into a single minimized javascript file and include that on every page. It may take longer for the user's browser to download the first time, but then it's cached on their machine for every page when they're browsing and when they return several days later.
Where I live, at least amongst the people I know, this is not the "general consensus". In fact, one of the most brilliant prime ministers of this country (United Kingdom) was a woman.

My point is though that you have to be careful when discussing such delicate matters. While an argument could be made that men tend to perform better at abstract reasoning and women tend to perform better at other mental tasks, small differences in wording can make a difference between offensive and objective.
Please file a bug (http://bugreporter.apple.com/).
I didn't see this referred to in the article. And that was my point, it's a very poorly written article.
Don’t undercharge. Once you are confident that your product is great, don’t be shy with your price. The smart people will pay for it. The whiners will leave. We had a product for a while that was much cheaper than our other products. Those customers required far more tech support than the professionals who use our other products. It was a relief when we discontinued it.

I cannot repeat this lesson enough, and this is the thirtieth time I have heard another company chime in with it. Charging a premium means your worst customers go afflict a competitor instead.
This is highly ironic, IMHO, given the anti-FB attitude that's been flagrantly displayed on HN for the past several months.
Zuckerberg himself donated to Diaspora, so I don't think he'd care.

You're not going to see a startup get accepted that is essentially a competitor to Facebook -- it's too late for that. Even if it were, this partnership would give them the chance to know about the startup and acquire it long before it becomes a threat.
Yeah but 30% is a big cut. Thats what they want for their credits correct? Basically they want to become the de-facto APP store for web apps?

For example:

A user has a Facebook account with his credit card attached to it and now every YC startup has a button that says buy Plan A for 8.95 a month.

In single click the FB user is now a user of the the YC funded App (He doesn't have to fill in any email or password, or his Credit Card number) and the App is able to bill the FB user 70% of $8.95 a month.

Its a win for the the YC startup because this new button takes all the friction out of buying the App ( having to make an account and open your wallet to type your credit card number in). FB wins because they control web 3.0 and get a 30% cut.

If I didn't think this was a really boring way to make money I was going to submit this idea about a year ago as a YC application.
It depends on what you mean by "predictable". Chaos does not necessarily mean you can't tell where something is going next. It means you can't reliably predict it over the long term.

If you were to watch the pendulum, you might be able to reliably make statements like "it's going to tip to the right in a few seconds" (particularly when it's near one of the bounds), but you won't be able to reliably predict which direction it will be tipped 3 minutes from now, or whether it will spend 8 seconds or 28 seconds tipped to the right, or whether its next 10 motions will be RLLRLRRRLL or RRRLLRLLRL. Any tiny error you make in measuring or predicting will be magnified over and over until the error is bigger than the signal/calculations.

We're all familiar with another chaotic phenomenon: weather. Tomorrow's temperature and prevailing atmospheric conditions can be predicted fairly well, but you can't make reliable weather projections more than a few days out. It's intrinsic to the system; a tiny effect like a butterfly flapping its wings half a world away is enough to make your predictions worthless a couple weeks out.
Use of liboggplay has been dropped in favour of implementing Ogg support directly using just libogg, libvorbis and libtheora.

The WebM support is implementing using libvpx (Google's VP8 reference decoder library), libnestegg (a WebM container library), and libvorbis.

They're all still builtin however so this doesn't do anything to change your NIH assertion.
There are pros and cons to each of your points. It just so happens Apple chose almost the exact opposite when compared to Android.

- portability between hardware architectures

Android went with the VM solution. Apple chose fat binaries when going from PPC to X86. They also use fat binaries for ARMv6 and ARMv7.

- portability between operating systems (mostly)

Apple handles this at the OS, framework, C language, and compiler (LLVM) level. The Unix bits of OS X and iOS are essentially the same. CoreFoundation is essentially the same across iOS and OS X. Cocoa and Cocoa Touch share the same design ethos as well as a number of classes.

If you assume Unix then a VM isn't that big of an OS portability win.

In general, Apple doesn't believe in cross-platform Apps. They believe in trans-platform Apps. Every single pixel in a Mac, iPhone, or iPad App should be pixel perfect. Java and a VM doesn't really give you any benefits with respect to this.

- memory management that doesn't suck

Objective-C 2.0 on Mac OS X has garbage collection. I imagine garbage collection will come to the iOS world when Apple believes that the performance tradeoffs make sense.

In general, memory management is hard. Memory leaks are trivial to find for an experienced programmer with Instruments. Leaks are tough for a novice programmer. But hey, life is tough for a novice programmer.

Memory management involves more than just garbage collection. Running out of memory is a big problem on handheld devices. A VM can compact memory but you can't do anything about VM memory overhead.

- and yes, decent speed in return for a high-level programming language

I'd argue that a message passing language like Objective-C is actually just as high-level (if not more) than a method calling language like Java.
How about just using the fonts that I told the system to use, the way I told it to use them? I installed and selected those fonts for a reason, thank you.
I always thought Java's slowness is due to the scads of layers of abstraction you have to go through to get anything done. You can't do anything without hitting a mile of stack trace.
Isn't PayPal in a pretty good position to undercut that sort of thing? While everyone complains about their fees, they're nowhere near 30%. And while their penetration isn't as great as Facebook's, Facebook's penetration-of-users-who've-entered-CCs is also likely to take some time to ramp up.
Ugh what a frightening future you picture there. =(

Let me put my MBA hat on - don't back out of a good money-making idea because you think it is boring way of making $$$. Spend a couple of years making an awesome product, then either sell it and do something interesting or live off the profits and do something interesting.
Wooden Mirror
He also mentioned he didn't want to 'risk' installing it on his server, as if PHP programs are inherently insecure.
There's a big difference between HN and YC. HN is people who like startups, YC is a mentor/investor. The HN community might not like what Facebook has been up to, but YC knows that being friends with FB is good business.
In real life, the way applications are programmed usually has far more to do with speed than the language they are programmed in.
On the last point, startups have a pretty high failure rate, so you also have to factor in the possibility that you'd spend a couple of years doing something boring that you hate, and still not end up any richer. I wouldn't go for something unless either you found it actually interesting to work on, or you somehow knew you had a 90%+ chance of succeeding.
I know! I know!

Step 1. They'll announce that Facebook is going to invest in any Y Combinator companies that want to make their products work well with Facebook.

Step 2. They'll announce that Facebook will pre-acquire any Y Combinator companies without going through the trouble of demo day, angel investment, etc.

Step 3. Getting accepted to Y Combinator will mean automatically being acquired by Facebook. All Y Combinator founders will have guaranteed jobs at Facebook with 4 year vesting lockup.

Step 4. Paul and Jessica realize that there's no glory in being Facebook's unpaid campus recruiters, but unfortunately, their own vesting deal will require them to hang around pretending to be friends with Mark Zuckerberg for another 13 months.
This is a fairly superficial difference, but Python's syntax grammar is very conventional, Ruby's isn't. Compare the grammars of Python, Ruby, and ANSI C.

Python: http://docs.python.org/release/2.5.2/ref/grammar.txt

Ruby: http://web.njit.edu/all_topics/Prog_Lang_Docs/html/ruby/yacc...

ANSI C: http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/ANSI-C-grammar-y.html

Python and ANSI C both have a similar organization of productions and names for statements and expressions. It's pretty easy to follow the grammar to obvious points where the language differs. What are valid unary expressions in Python and ANSI C? There's a production in each grammar that makes a convenient starting point and comparison is easy. What is a valid unary expression in Ruby? It's much less clear.

The Ruby grammar isn't large, so I'm sure some people prefer the way it's organized. Once you've absorbed the whole thing questions like "what's a valid unary expression?" don't matter anymore. But I think it's an interesting distinction to someone trying to decide which language to learn.
Rolling shutter effects
Haha, just coincidence :-)
I was the original author of the GStreamer patch. It wasn't developed for Fennec - it was originally developed as a backend for the Firefox desktop browser. I wrote about it here when I first developed it:

http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2008/04/firefox-html5-video-wit...

Once it was decided to not use GStreamer for the desktop we continued with the work on the Ogg backend and the patch bitrotted. It was subsequently picked up by another Mozilla developer for Fennec work. The patch is currently waiting on review (by me) and as I understand it it will be landed but disabled at compile time for third parties to enable if they want it. I'm not involved in that decision or whether it would be in desktop Firefox however.

An H.264 specific backend wouldn't be too hard to do. It should only be a few days work to get a ffmpeg backend going for H.264 support. I had a partial one implemented that I used for testing although it has bitrot quite a bit now.

Your point about having to maintain a fork still stands however as there's no pluggable API for backends.
Re 2): With great power comes great responsibility.