skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recently started doing some tech-related screencasts for our clients (photographers) at http://bigfolio.tv.

I wanted it to be all HTML5 and I'm still experimenting. I ended up doing 3 H.264 versions (a large .mov and a large/small .m4v) and an Ogg file. Just to be safe, I put a couple download links for people.

I haven't had any complaints but I did notice that older version of iOS can't play it. Haven't really tested Android.

Getting them all converted and put on S3 is quite a PITA. Another thing I discovered–if you're putting Ogg files on S3, you have to make sure to set the mime-type or FireFox won't play it.
I'm sorry but they really are not worth saving.
San Francisco: The Miniature City  video
http://www.stormpulse.com - made by 2 people. Tracks and maps the weather.
No Silver Bullet – Sharding and MongoDB
I'm an SEO & SEM consultant with http://piconsulting.com (excuse the page rust, we're launching something new in the near future). You can contact us via the website or you can email me directly (steve@)
Good comment, thanks for the reply. To clarify, you only "fuck them up" when they make violence on you. After they put their hands on you or someone innocent, they're in the wrong and they've forfeited their moral right.

Also, something to think about -

> Bullies are not "wild animals" bullying for "no reason", they're people with unique intellects and desires and motivations that you, or they, may not understand.

I don't know what part of society you run in, but some people are wild animals. Probably not on Hacker News. Probably not in the suburbs. But some people are born without a conscience, literally - I've looked into it, I've studied criminology and crime and things like that a little bit. I'm not expert, but when you look into it, something like 3% of people don't have consciences, and some percent of those get off on hurting people... it's not a big number, but those people are really wild animals to a large extent. I know this isn't polite to say, but consider it. You may never have come across one of those people, and God willing you never will. But they do exist. Hitler type people, y'know? They only respect strength. They can't be talked or loved or negotiated with.

Not many people. By all means, try a peaceful way if it works in the situation. But once they put their hands on you or someone innocent, all bets are off, and defend yourself fully.
Thanks. The ads rotate, I have three affiliate links atm. I am currently working on providing an API for this to see how much interest there will be in it. On top of the API I plan on building a monitoring solution which could be monetized. To an extent so could the API (say you get 100 free test an hour and have to pay to get 1000 or some such).

In the mean time I may add more ads but I would hate to detract from the experience for the small userbase.
Background:

In early August, John Gruber wrote that:
“The wheels are turning on N92, the CDMA variant of the iPhone 4... It’s right about where you’d think it would be if it were scheduled to go on sale in January. The CDMA iPhone is no longer a cold storage, keep-it-alive-just-in-case-we-need-it project.” [1]

He noted that the CDMA iPhone could be headed for China Telecom first - the competitor to China Unicom, who just launched a GSM iPhone 4 in that country.

He cites anonymous tipsters, as well as:

- Bloomberg says Verizon iPhone coming in January [2]

- CEA announces the Verizon CEO as the keynote speaker for CES in January [3]

- Steve Cheney claims that Apple has placed orders for “millions of units of Qualcomm CDMA chipsets” for December [4]

- Digitimes reports that Pegatron Technology will begin mass production in December of CDMA iPhones for Verizon and China Telecom [5]

[1] http://daringfireball.net/2010/08/n92

[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-06-29/verizon-wireless-sa...

[3] http://cesweb.org/news/080410.asp#4200

[4] http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/08/verizon-iphone-january/

[5] http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20100809VL202.html
Ask HN: What should Diaspora do now?
Looking at today's FB event, I get the feeling that Diaspora's whole 'own your social graph' and the contextual sharing vision is doomed. What Should Diaspora do now?

I thought this would be a good thought experiment...
Fear Made Farmers
It's true, there some similarities, mainly the color and wording, but in this e-commerce shopping cart business to describe the product we always need the words "shopping cart", "create online store", "sell online"... (at least in english)
This is pretty cool. In all my time going used book sales, I've never seen anyone doing this. Maybe I just go at the wrong times.

I wonder what the economics are here. Using his setup, you can get an Axim X51 on eBay for around $100 and the scanner he uses goes for around $250 on eBay ($384 new). That's at least $350 in initial costs.

Assuming a profit of $5 per book (just a wild guess) you'd need to sell 70 books to recoup that cost. Using his ratio of 1 "buy" to every 30 "reject" books, you'd have to go through 2,100 books to recoup your initial costs!

Taking it a step further, if you could scan three books per minute (another wild guess), it would take 700 minutes, nearly 12 hours, of "hunting" to earn back you startup costs.

Based on all those numbers and assumptions, your hourly earnings are roughly $30 per hour. ($350 / 12)

Based on a standard 2,000 hours of work per year (basically, 5 days a week for 50 weeks), this comes to $30*2000 = $60,000.... awfully close to his estimate of $1,000 per week for a person working alone.
Leaving graduate school is a decision, not a failing
Will the photos be in their original format, or reduced to the tiny file size Facebook compressed them to?
I'll add my two cents.

Have a good substantial but well balanced breakfast. There is a reason they say it is the most important meal of the day. Assume that on average that you have dinner around 5pm or 6pm. Skipping breakfast or having a meager breakfast and then a late lunch (1pm or 2pm?) means you haven't eaten for about 20 hrs. A big dinner won't carry you through that much time.

I'll also agree with the other suggestions I've seen. Consult your doctor, and make sure you're getting enough sunlight and physical activity.

Try to balance your life.
I'm on Verizon with a data plan (have a Pre). I honestly can't remember the last time I needed to use voice and data at the same time. I don't think this is as big of a deal as you're making it out to be.
I am reluctant to join because I'm in one group with around 40 people and it makes my whole Facebook experience a bacon+toast hell, especially with the group chat - can anyone figure out how to opt out of chat for a group without going offline of chat altogether?
As far as food in any given day, I'm likely to have a grilled chicken salad for lunch (not consistently, though). Dinner maybe 3-4 days of the week (which are often big). Usually no breakfast or something unfulfilling from McDonalds when I do eat. I've started adding in raisins and various fruit to start the day, but I'm wondering how many apples do I have to eat in order to feel some kind of way! Perhaps, I'm wrong for thinking I should always be full.
Facebook Adds Contextual Sharing via New groups feature
I think Facebook probably is trying to quell critics, rather than become more culturally open on a wider scale.

A disingenuous response is usually designed as a full stop, rather than way to carry on a conversation.

If they're truly into the idea of promoting user-ownership of data, there will be more done to allow it (i.e. this will be first step).
http://simplemailer.pearachute.com/ - latest incarnation of a mailing list engine that has had subscribers since 2006. Pays for it's server!

(I feel like we just got Mechanical Turked to an SEO farm, but hey- $GOOG juice!)
but not before dodgeball.
Sorry I missed a factor of 1000. Fast breeders on mined uranium have the same problem as plutonium breeders... Except you can breed plutonium faster (but less efficiently) in LWRs!
Same goal I posted on the blog post: To steal the high-ticket classifieds market from craigslist and ebay.
If You Want to Catch a Liar, Make Him Draw
I'm pretty underwhelmed by that argument, given that my iPhone 3G on AT&T's network in NYC can barely do voice OR data, let alone both at the same time.
== Initial benefits

- Instant collaboration. (No more HN Office Hours and the like.)

- Live group updates (wall posts, news, (even chat, ha!))

== Initial problems

- No way to connect HN handle/karma to FB

- No social moderation

- Bottleneck administration (No matter how much of a rockstar Jason is.)

- Group chat doesn't support large group conversations well. (approx 6 lines of chat displayed at a time)

Anyone else?
Technically he's a javascript "star guy". Thomas Fuchs, creator of the script.aculo.us library and core contributor to the Prototype library. Both libraries have been a big part of Rails development for years although many people are now moving to jQuery.
Is there any way to export your contacts including email and phone numbers? I know there was a greasemonkey script for it a while back, but facebook had apparently changed the html enough that it didn't work when I tried it.
This reminds me of the current Dubai commercial property crisis. During the boom, everyone bought property without asking if there was a legal framework for resolving disputes. Now that there's a bust, investors are finding Dubai's opaque property laws make it very difficult to resolve disputes and get your money out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/business/global/07dubaibui...

You bought virtual commercial real-estate in Libya and now you're finding you are subject to local law and bureaucracy.

Google's bet on the Greenland TDL with goo.gl is less risky but I'd be interested to see what their lawyers had the local government and ccTLD admins agree to.
was just talking about this on HN the other day: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1691492

it's clear that contextual sharing is the feature of social networking, but I underestimated facebook's ability to implement such a drastic feature so elegantly (and quickly)
Facebook you just kept me from leaving your service. Keep this up and I might actually become an advocate. :-)
Let's not kid ourselves, Diaspora was doomed from the get-go. Today's announcements were just another nail in the coffin. Seriously, did you really think that Facebook wasn't going to do something on contextual sharing?

Anyone wishing to compete with Facebook is going to have to have a pretty damn compelling unique value proposition, and "we're not Facebook" isn't going to be enough.
Dear god, there was a solar system simulation on the macs in my middle-school library (c. 1998) that I sunk absolutely inordinate, ridiculous amounts of time into. I think it had a 10-body limit and may have been much older (was definitely monochrome, and possibly used lines of varying density for shading). I can't remember what it was called and I haven't been able to find any information about it. It may be my favourite single piece of software ever and I am certain it had some nontrivial effect on the course of my life[0].

Can anybody help me out?

[0] Including nurturing several destructive habits and attitudes, such as on the acceptability of spending grade-school lunch hour on the computer every day.
اخبار اليوم
Agreed. I usually eat dinner around 7pm. Scrape by with barely a breakfast or apparently not enough of one, and then won't go out for lunch until 2-3pm. At that point my stomach isn't growling, but I feel spacey. Thanks for the suggestion for balance. ...lacking this, too.
Seems to stop after a minute or two...
What will happen in this group? How will it be useful? (Not meant in a snarky way, I am curious.)
A Quick First Look At The New Facebook Groups
Is this really what Diaspora wanted to be? Facebook with the ability to download a zip file? Wouldn't this help Diaspora or the next Facebook killa, since you could feasibly transport from one network to the next?
I'll have to agree with you. Bullies are not an monolithic organization with a single creed and method. And this changes a lot with age group as well. I suspect that most younger bullies are very much different from older bullies.

I don't want to repeat your post, but it really should all be repeated. You need to take away both their long term need to bully, as well as their immediate urge to bully. You can do so through a variety of methods. For example, that long term need to bully often (well, I think/hope it's often), just goes away as kids grow up. And that immediate urge to bully. Well, there's no deterrent quite like getting your ass handed to you by the guy who you just shoved.

And related to that, there are degrees of bullying. I dislike these school campaigns that stick all these different activities together as being equally wrong under the umbrella of bullying. I've seen material that tells children that all pushing/shoving and 'teasing' and being 'rude' is wrong and 'can be' bullying. I can't see this being effective in any way. All this can do is make kids think that adults and their rules are dumb. What do you mean I can't call Kevin, my best friend from before I can remember a fat dumby butt? What do you mean I can't shove him when I know he'll just shove back?

All that can do is make one subset of children dismissing the 'rules' and 'bullying' as a 'dumb adult' thing, and another subset (and I remember playing with this subset when I was knee high), that'll yell and scream abuse at anything 'against the rules'. Now granted, I was kinda in the 'these rules are dumb' group, so my view of things is a bit biased.
I really can't think of any occasion that I've needed to look something up while I was talking on my Verizon BlackBerry.
Quickly? As in "it only took 6 years to get around to it"?
I think Facebook has designed this feature very carefully so as to make sure it doesn't make it easier for another platform to use this as a data import feature. First, the process to get your data is not "click a button and download" but "click a button - wait for emailed link - download". This means that unless you are comfortable giving the new platform access to your inbox, they can't get your data.

Secondly, Mark seemed to be pretty clear in his reply to the last question: The information you download will not contain any information about your friends. It won't have their contact details. I am not sure if it will have a list of their names, but without an email address, such a list would be largely useless to any new platform.

So yeah, I think this is a pretty crafty P.R. move, a decent feature for users (hey, being able to download all my FB photos and videos would mean I have to stop worrying about backing them up), but this is not going to help new social networks recruit users.
It's beginning to feel like the Duke Nukem Forever of phones. It's been rumored too many times over the years for me to believe it until I actually hold it in my hands. Perhaps it will actually happen soon, but I remain skeptical.

(Yes, I know DNF is actually coming out, it appears. Gearbox just had to go and ruin a perfectly good metaphor by releasing a game that people have wanted for years.)
You didn't look very hard...

http://www.facebook.com/contact_importer/remove_uploads.php?...
I remember reading a while back about Twitter raising some money early in the company for a number of reasons: growth, hiring, finding revenue streams and "because we're going to get sued a lot." Looking for a citation...
Let's see how usable the exports are before we say that.
To add, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing - see the last two paragraphs in history for some problematic decisions.
Your assumption that we will stay exclusively on this planet for the next 1000 years is even more silly.
Read this book: http://www.amazon.com/Tao-Physics-Exploration-Parallels-Myst....
Ha. Well, even though this mimics real social groups much more closely than social networking v1.0, I don't think the issue had become readily apparent until recently (as evidenced by the number of products that have appeared in the past 3-6 months including Groupme (betaworks), CollegeOnly (funded by Peter Thiel), Google Me, Frid.ge (YC '10), Diaspora, etc.)
Whether the newspaper continues to be distributed on paper, the newspaper as a service is incredibly important.

At Seeing Interactive, one of the problems we find is that people have confused an old-fashioned method of distribution with the important journalism and community building contained within. Sometimes the newspapers themselves are troubled by this very point. It has merely been a coincidence that for the last 250 years the best way to distribute news was on paper and that for the last 150 years or so it has been immensely profitable.

So when people say they don't want to save the newspaper, they're merely stating a preference that they'd rather read news online than on paper.
The gigs board on craigslist is generally a huge waste of time. Maybe a little better in the bay area than any other city, but even if you do spot a decent project chances are if they are posting in the gigs board, the client isn't that committed. God knows how many useless meetings with flaky idiots I've taken through CL gig board ads.

My approach to CL is let them come to me, unless I'm desperate. That means post your resume, put an ad up in the services section, keep A/B refining it until you get hit with good emails.

One of the best approaches to finding local clients (that I rarely do and should attempt more) was actually cold-emailing local businesses that conduct a lot of web dev work. Back in 2004 I moved to the bay area with no clients whatsoever, and did 2 things - posted CL resume listings, and cold emailed every design agency I could find. At the end of a week, I had enough clients to last me the next 3 years.
Well, this is a hell of a new way to stress test "social design" for scale.
Don't you USUALLY read editorial type news on the site you know, instead of SEARCHING for it?

Yes, probably.

Do you seriously think that "research and shopping" doesn't constitute overwhelming majority of searches?

Yes, I do think so and that supports my point. Those type searches are not usually satisfied by viewing a small screenshot of a site's homepage.

The only thing I'm guarding is MY OWN CONTENT. I wrote it. I own it.

Calm down. I certainly agree content creators own the rights to their content. :)

If this is really a problem I'm sure Google would allow some way for sites to opt out of the preview. However, I'm thinking that Google's priority is to give users the best search experience possible, so sites that don't allow the preview might rank lower in search results. I'd certainly allow it for my sites.

Google was built on shoulders of people who produce the content.

I'd argue there is a symbiotic relationship between content creators and search engines/portals. Without each other neither would likely have many visitors.

I totally agree content creators have the right to say how their content is displayed beyond fair use. However, at the same time Google and other search engines are going to strive to give users the best possible experience, and that probably means helping them avoid spammy/low quality sites by previewing past them.
I do it all the time actually. For example, someone will be calling me telling me something/someone I need to follow up with. I can start immediately emailing the person and at least get started, if not finish the task. Different strokes for different folks.

Edit: I also use Google Maps while talking, or check for movie times while someone is on the phone.
MIT Grad Student Comes Up With Webcam System To See Heart Healthiness
Reading it definitely brought up a lot of repressed memories. Life seems so simple right now.
Most of my advisees finish their dissertations and get jobs. I'm proud of that. But some walk away—and of that I'm just as proud. Not everyone gets a Ph.D., but everyone who tries deserves our attention and respect. Teaching students how to leave graduate school is a task every bit as noble as shepherding them through it.
It's handy when you need it. Put someone on speaker, go to the net, look up the time of an event. That said, I don't do it enough that it really matters.
Performance gains from using foreign keys
> Fundamental reason: Apple doesn't release old, bottom of the barrel, price compromised junk.

I've always thought that this was a marketing thing. If you look around, you can find all sorts of crappy computers designed to run Windows, but every Apple computer you see is going to be powerful and shiny enough to never leave you with a bad experience.

Right now, I'd like a bottom-of-the-barrel laptop that does nothing but ssh somewhere else, so while I can deal without nice displays and ports, but I'm definitely in the minority.
may be this is 'the facebook' killer.
Psychopaths.

http://www.damninteresting.com/the-unburdened-mind
Gene Simmons on Building Successful Entertainment Brands
It seems to me they could have supported lists better. I created a bunch of lists and try to make sure everyone is in the correct list, but most of my FB browsing is now through the iPhone app, which doesn't prompt me about this stuff. It always felt like they did just enough to have a decent implementation of it, but it never really got as integrated as it needed to be.

If it's a feature that isn't used as often as they hoped, it's likely because (a) their support for this feature is lacking, and (b) they haven't educated users about this feature.

Both of these points weren't surprising to me because I always believed that FB wants people to share as much about themselves to as many people as possible.

I think without Google Me, and perhaps frid.ge, they would never have reconsidered these concerns.
With all the respect, I wish Poul-Henning Kamp the biggest of the fame, but it is hard to compare him with a world wide myth as Donald Knuth.
i thought this was a bullshit feature too until i was on hold for an hour (ironically, or not, with att). still, i think that's the only time i've used it.
The history of WordPress by jazz legends
I've had pretty much the same experience as you regarding Perl. I started with C in high school but never really got anywhere. Once I found Perl a few years later, I was finally able to do the things that I wanted to do in C. I stuck with it for several years and got quite good with it. Having this knowledge and experience made it MUCH easier to learn other languages and finally I was able grasp C/C++ (though, not as well as Perl though) and do some cool stuff. Like you, I feel that I owe...well, pretty much my whole programming career to Perl. Like you, I don't use it these days, but it's definitely the language I look upon most fondly.
Yup, I didnt mean to come off sounding like someone who just throws a label at a person. But no this guy deserves the title scumbag whore. I follow his blog and even tried to email him to ask if these allegations were true, and he never responded. If you google it on the web there are people that have come forward proving they were scam by him.
Congress Approves "National Postdoc Awareness Week"
Here's the story, for those of you who don't have access:

National Postdoc Appreciation Week was officially recognized by the US Congress on 23 September. The move confers no funding and creates no laws. But it is vital for building awareness of postdocs' research contributions as well as of their compensation issues and other woes, says Cathee Johnson Phillips, executive director of the National Postdoc Association (NPA) in Washington DC. The NPA, along with institutions nationwide, began the week in 2009. This year, it was 20–24 September and more than 70 institutions took part. In the past, most legislators knew little about postdocs, says Phillips. “Now, when our members talk to them about compensation and benefits, they'll say, 'Let's talk,' not 'What's a postdoc?'” she says.
The case of vb.ly: NIC.ly was right to shut them down