skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Same here, but makes it easy to pick a sound file for broken builds!
From a JAMA book review:

"19th-century homeopaths pioneered systematic drug-testing research, challenged the dangerously depleting procedures of mainstream physicians at that time, established rigorous professional standards, and valued advanced education at least as highly as their mainstream counterparts did. It was not without reason that homeopaths considered the bases of their approach to medical problems to be more logical and more promising than the inherited tradition of the ancients, upon which mainstream physicians still based their practices."

(For what it's worth, JAMA highly recommends the book.)

http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/295/13/1590.extract
Thanks for looking out for me! : ) +1
> No one complains ???? Have you not watched TV in the last 10 years? There are entire genres of comedy mostly devoted to jews complaining about their parents.

Was about to say that (as a Russian Jewish male), that if it weren't Jews complaining about their mothers, the literary and entertainment worlds would be far far poorer :-)
Many interesting things have been said in the comments, so only one short thing to add: don't do this right before you attempt to fall asleep. Putting your mind into the state where you consider the deep strategic implications of your day is not conducive to quickly falling asleep. The advice to carve out time at the end of your WORK is appropriate; follow this with play/relaxation.
I agree, to a point. That kind of thinking definitely has a place, and it works wonders for productivity I'm sure.
You're talking about making it clear what you need to do tomorrow, making a plan so you always know what to do next.

This article, though, is talking about evaluating your goals and methods, something far beyond "next actions". Are you even headed in the right direction? Is your strategy as effective as you thought?

No matter how excellent your work is, you need to be working on excellent things.
On the Java version you forgot equals() and hashcode(). Scala's case classes give you that for free.
Ruby on Ales 2011 Call for Proposals
How about the Paul Graham argument that income inequality is not a problem if it means that everyone's standard of living is raised?

http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html
Maybe that is somehow what Google wants? It has cozied up to Adobe to the point of including flash in Chrome itself. And YouTube apparently can't be bothered to make html5 video work reliably.

I can't think of why anyone would want to promote flash, though.
Well, it's better than Apple's strategy of using closed-ness to damage their competitors. All companies make strategic decisions. But if you're going to use ideology strategically, it might as well be a good ideology.

Note: I'm a huge Apple fan and I use lots of their products with alacrity.
There's a massive volume of h.264 out there that isn't going to get converted just to satisfy some dogmatic commitment to 'openness'.
From where I sit, it's very clearly sarcasm.
China conducts first test-flight of stealth plane
Angry Birds Available for PC
You'll have to add these caveats in as well:

Once Apple supports WebM.

Once chipset manufacturers produce WebM optimized hardware decoders.

Once handset, set-top, etc. manufacturers purchase and integrate those WebM hardware decoders.

Once handset, set-top, etc. manufacturers develop or license software players that support WebM encoded video and file format.

Could happen the other way around. But it ain't likely.
"X sucks" sucks
Well i don't know. What i see :

Adobe is gonna support webm. So having only one format is gonna be possible.

Browsers who supported or were gonna support H264 :

- Safari (5% market share)
- IE9 (0% market share right now, probably around 15% in 3 years)
- Chrome (around 13 %)

Browsers who supports Webm :

- Firefox (30% market share)
- Chrome
- IE9 will probably support it via codecs which is better than nothing

The big deal breaker i see is the mobile devices who natively support H264. But as a long term move i can only approve what google is doing.

Also :

> People will add WebM encoding to their already complicated video workflows

Most people video workflow is youtube/vimeo/dailymotion video workflow. All of which seems ready to support webm.
Record Labels To Pay $45 Million for Pirating Artists’ Music
I use org-mode extensively. It integrates so well into the Emacs experience. There's just nothing like it.

When I start working on a project, I use todo lists with notes, links, and tags to manage my tasks. I use org outlines to structure my work flow and organize my thoughts. I use the remember front-end to quickly capture notes on the fly. When I finish a task I just flick out the key stroke to clock out. Afterwards I can check a nicely formatted table to view my hours, paste it into an email within emacs and use org mode to reformat it into an HTML/multipart email with a properly formatted HTML table that I can send to my co-workers or clients to review.

For intense bits of code I use the literate programming features of org-babel.

Also, it has great export features. It can tangle, organize, and mine your org files for the information you want and export to a number of different formats. It's quite amazing.

I'd go as far to say that org-mode is practically a killer feature of emacs and one really good reason for switching to emacs if you don't use it already.

But I might be biased... :)
Your statement makes a nice, pandering story, but it's really a very complex issue.

There's some truth in the idea that the rich get richer, faster than the rest of us. But today, in a practical sense, what does it mean for someone to have much more money than I do?

And what causes it? It's certainly not that some plutocracy is holding our heads below water, as much some people like to paint that picture.

I'd encourage you to read this article, which has a pretty insightful analysis of where this inequality originates, and why: http://www.the-american-interest.com/article-bd.cfm?piece=90...
There is a difference between writing on a computer vs. a pen and paper is. Professional counselors who recommend journaling have long noted that many of their patients explain a disconnect when journaling digitally vs. analog.
Times have not changed. This level of commitment of managers to their employees is rare now, and always has been.
See the other thread about wealth where people's standard of living is measured mainly by how much richer they are then their friends.

It is pretty easy to make the argument that someone 5,000 years ago who was at the top of his tribe is happier than someone today at the bottom, even though the guy at the bottom today has far more comforts than the 5,000 year old.
Of course, Flash isn't patented at all. And H264 codecs always costs money.

I didn't know Google fanboyism existed.
You call this being "fully behind HTML5"? http://grab.by/grabs/0b694089e83975c385627b134ee8ece7.png

Even Microsoft's better than this.

edit: could whoever downvoted me explain why he did so?
What I think is pretty interesting, is that this is precisely what religious people do when they pray. Even if god is imaginary, praying forces you to spend 5 minutes reflecting.
That was my initial thought, but I'm gonna have to cite Poe's Law on this one.
Okay Okay, Austin area. The plan is to move downtown once we've figured out how big of a place we need--right now we're growing at 200% every three months so we need that to level out first as everyone wants a five year lease.

Feel free to hit me up (lloyd@seeinginteractive.com) or stop by our office in Pflugerville.
Journaling is very good for the mind. I have a lot of random thoughts and theories about business, life, politics, science,etc that I love to document. Writing it down forces you to think out my ideas into something coherent.It's fun to look back in your jounal and see what you were right or wrong about.
And for some reason it is an emotional release.

I use a livescribe pen to jounal. Stores everything I write down digitally.
I like PG but that doesn't mean he's infallible. Income inequality to a degree isn't a problem when and if the tide does float all boats, so to speak, but the problem is the tide doesn't seem to be raising all boats and that the middle class has all but vanished in America and what's left are the upwardly mobile upper-middle class and the working poor. Kudos to them they can now DVR a show and have broadband internet available at an affordable rate, but when you're essentially a wage slave, it means very little. When the top 20% have 85% of the wealth in America, the other 80% are left to fight over the crumbs. That is a terrible foundation for a supposedly democratic nation.
So H.264 isn't "open web" ... but Flash is?

Google has such an arbitrary definition of open.
>I can't wait to read old entries a year from now.

Knock yourself out...
AdSense on Unoriginal Content
edit [removed no citation available]
According to this article, Pixar doesn't treat its employees as nicely these days: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lee-stranahan/lucasfilm-and-pi...
I'm just pointing out differences from the point of view of google maintenance of their software.

> I didn't know Google fanboyism existed.

Ad hominem is still as bad as it ever was
Flash isn't just about video, it's a platform, it's not analogous to a video codec.
> The big deal breaker i see is the mobile devices who natively support H264

You kind of buried this but this is the true deal breaker. There aren't (and probably won't be) hardware WebM decoders.

And Firefox doesn't support WebM yet. You'll have to wait on version 4 (0% market share right now as you said for IE9).
Remarkably similar to the story of how the jews of Zakynthos were saved during WWII.

http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/greece/nonflash/e...
I've wanted to keep a journal for several years.
But I just didn't stick to the habit.

But now http://ohlife.com
has changed that.

The fact that they send you an email daily
And in the same email they also put a random memory from your past has really helped me stick with the habit.

I'm into 4 months... I think it works.

Maybe you would enjoy it too...
Clearly everyone's standard of living is not going up when approximately 10% of the nation are unemployed.
Seems like the timing of this is uncoincidental given all the recent talk about scrapers.
What has changed is the size of the industry. There are so many animation studios these days that the chances of landing in a studio with leaders like Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith are far, far smaller than they were back then.
Something I've long been curious about, as an academic who is removed from the startup culture and never really gave a damn about getting rich.

Suppose that the (US) marginal tax rate on income or capital gains over $500K was raised to 75%.

How much would this affect entrepreneurs' willingness to work their asses off on their startups?
Right now I live off of about $12k/year, and I'm paying about $4800/year in loans (which will be paid off soon enough). That works out to about $7k/year.
tldr version; right-wing skeptic triumphs over strawman climate change advocate.

CCA: Hi, I think global warming is going to destroy the planet.

RWS: Oh no! Why?

CCA: All the scientists say so.

RWS: What about all the scientists who disagree?

CCA: Oh, those don't count.

RWS: Why not?

CCA: Because they disagree with me.

etc
EFF calls on Google, Yahoo and Facebook to protect Tunisian activists
News and the social media revolution
> You kind of buried this but this is the true deal breaker.

Well i mentionned it. I'm at least partially intellectually honest :)

> Firefox doesn't support WebM yet. You'll have to wait on version 4 (0% market share right now as you said for IE9)

That's totally true, but from experience and statistical evidence, i think firefox users are more inclined to upgrade their browser than IE user are.

> There aren't (and probably won't be) hardware WebM decoders.

I don't think that's true
Show HN: Clip War
Just wanted to show off my weekend project. Carry on.
Next move, suddenly youtube stops encoding in h.264 and youtube won't be able to be played on the iPad.

And Android tablets look a LOT better.
That's about what I make now, and I'm living pretty damn comfortably without racking up debt (Internet-enabled phone, car, eat organic food, have plenty of free time for recreation).
Apple Wins Again: Gets iPhone On Verizon – Not Verizon iPhone
Fair enough. If we take the "popular acclamation" theory of standardization, here's how it breaks down:

h.264: IE, Safari

WebM: Chrome, Firefox 4

Streaming video with Flash: all of the above

In which case the most standardy standard is "h.264 over Flash", with native h.264 and native WebM tied for second place.
I'm worried about future of Pixar, they always valued original and insightful stories. All of their early and recent productions were delightful to watch. Understandably, this approach left not so many space for sequels.

They recently committed to making of Monsters 2 and Cars 2. Story outline for Cars 2 is just terrible. It seems that financial concerns under Disney leadership are prevailing and bits of integrity are slipping away.
And all the embedded chips in cellphones,m set top boxes and mp3 players are going to support WebM?

Thats going to take a while - the lead time on new DSP families isn't quick.

And how long before their are optimized open source libraries like ffmpeg and x264?
This is just another in a series intellectually feeble articles on the wealth divide. Compare this recent study from Canada: http://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/reports/rise-c...

Both of these pieces offer no in-depth analysis of the data and almost no international perspective. Without offering any justification, they quickly point the blame at the typical scapegoats of "the bankers who caused the crash", high CEO pay, and tax rates. They rely on broad and readily available statistics, and haven't done any genuinely new groundwork.

I'd like to see a better study which considers these factors:

* Choosing a meaningful dividing line (Why choose to compare the top 1%, and not some other fraction?)

* Breaking down sources of income (Investment income, regular pay, stock option grants)

* Breaking down income by industry (Medical, law, engineering professionals; public servants; finance professionals; entrepreneurs; corporate managers; entertainment figures)

* Detailed comparison of wealth divides in other countries

If anyone can point us to this sort of study, please speak up!
Here’s a thought. If Google is dropping support for H.264 because their “goal is to enable open innovation”, why don’t they also drop support for closed plugins like Flash Player?

because there are open alternatives to h.264 that google is trying to push. if there were an open flash alternative, google would probably push for that as well.
Actually, Pixar is probably one of the best places on the planet to work.

The no-cold-call policy did not mean that employees were off limits completely. We hired lots of people from ILM, Lucasfilm, Dreamworks, etc, but they came to us.

The "evil" of this particular case is pretty overstated. I was there at the time, and basically understood it was happening, and it didn't bother me in the slightest. All those other VFX houses treated their employees like cattle.
> There aren't (and probably won't be) hardware WebM decoders.

The very article states that there are hardware WebM decoders, not only that but Google is licensing the technology for free as in zero dollars:

http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8...
I tried the app, it is pretty well done. I tried a few calls and it is very useful.

The app needs some more features like favorities and default timezone. Also i think the app is currently targetted towards personal use which is great. But I believe that the app or the service also has a good potential in commercial space.
Overall i definately see a lot of potential, so congrats on the good work and good luck!
Have they said or done something that conflicts with this statement?
Well, I guess a lot of people do it for the money as well as the fulfillment of building a great company.

Relocation to a different country is always an option.
This is a reasonable suggestion, but I disagree for three reasons:

1. It's a common misconception that professors work very hard for tenure and then, once they get it, are free to do whatever they want. (In other words, that there is some "threshold".) Instead, the system is set up to keep professors on a treadmill until they are very old through grant "carrots". Yes, it's possible once you secure tenure to just hang out and think deep thoughts, but this leads to salary stagnation or even regression. Instead, most professor continually chase money by cranking out research. Taking time off to write books means significantly less salary, (which is not nearly made up for by book royalties).

(This is my impression as a physics grad student. Other department might be a bit different.)

2. I claim that the hardest part about writing books is distinguishing what's obvious from what's not for the student. Once you've been using the material for years, it's very difficult to remember all the tiny mental leaps that are required to get from point A to point B. Yes, you need a mastery of the material to write a book, but sufficient mastery for textbook writing comes with only a few years of research experience (as opposed to, say, review papers which require extra experience because they are more-cutting-edge/less-canonical).

3. Even if tenured professors didn't have a penalty for writing textbooks and they were the most qualified (in contradiction to my first two claims) there needs to be some serious incentive for them to get off their ass and write a whole book. Those incentives doesn't exist right now. A lack of penalty isn't enough.
>> Looking at the end product it’s impossible to know the journey that the designer took, to appreciate what went into it. You don’t know about the constraints, the compromises, or external forces that shaped the design before you. Certainly the end user is not going to be privy to those details either, but as a designer critquing the work of another designer you should know there is more to it.

I would really like it if designers would be more open with their constraints. If the customers understand the constraints, then we can give better feedback about how to make a better product.
This is a great move...

Mpeg-LA has been bullying everyone for too long...
There are already hardware WebM decoders, in fact they've just announced hardware encoders too.

They link to a relevant announcement in the linked blog post:

http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8...

And the update rates of Firefox and Chrome and totally different from IE, especially since version 9 doesn't support XP.
Eh? They have had 2 iOS refreshes in the past year.
A pissing match in the Microsoft boardroom – pass the popcorn
Getting tired of the inequality articles.
I don't know if I trust any authority on the Internet when it comes to judging interface design. Even some esteemed bloggers/authors in the web-design field, I've found their personal home pages to be a bit dull. See also: the apparent outcry over the Mac App Store interface. When I finally used the thing myself, I was highly impressed and I suspect the non-geek portion of the population have no problem with it whatsoever.
Oh wow... I'm flattered.
"but the problem is that the middle class has all but vanished in America and what's left are the upwardly mobile upper-middle class and the working poor. When the top 20% have 85% of the wealth in America, the other 80% are left to fight over the crumbs."

Can you link to some evidence showing a slowdown in mobility? Also, I would assume a key metric to showing whether income inequality increase is a problem is to see whether the speed of improvement of standard of living is slowing or not. I'd like to see figures on this as well.
Now it's called blogging. Xanga -> LiveJournal -> Tumblr.
I once had an hour long conversation with a stranger at a bar about this. Coincidentally, we were in the same field, hacker. And he told me that coming out of college it's a little bit too easy to just work for the man. Being young and fresh out of college, you really can afford to take risks and be in that small percentile of people that are so much richer. Of course, it's a risk, and you have to take it and put your heart into it.
I guess I just assumed it was implied. I generally don't like typing out my dissertation on how religion has held back social progress since the birth of America and the fact that that includes everything from cutting funding for scientific research, education, grants, etc to telling gay people they can't get married. It's all fundamentally anti-intellectual. Expressing it usually just gets me in a fit of rage.

I guess " religious folk think they have a seat at the intellectual table as well" is mocking, but I still stand by it. It's a succinct indictment of people who by definition don't adhere to reason having way too much power over those of us with the intelligence and ideas to do REAL GOOD in politics and science and society.

Now my moaning reply was just silly, but I was annoyed. Probably because I spent a lot of yesterday arguing with a Baptist.
Income inequality can be ignored (by politicians) until a large segment of the population cannot find jobs and can't afford food/gas/healthcare. Oh wait, we're there.

Census estimates suggest 1 in 6 Americans live in poverty

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-u...

1 in 7 Americans rely on food stamps

http://money.cnn.com/2010/12/21/news/economy/food_stamps/ind...

Labor Force Participation Rate Drops To Fresh 25 Year Low, Adjusted Unemployment Rate At 11.7%

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/labor-force-participation-r...
Speaking as someone who works for a browser vendor: There's a big difference between dropping support for entrenched technologies, and choosing which emerging technologies to support.

Certain formats and practices are already part of the web, for better or worse, and it's not fully within the browser vendors' power to change that. If any browser dropped Flash support, it would break thousands of popular web sites, and users would simply switch browsers.

What is within our power is to decide which emerging standards to support. Dropping H.264 in <video> at this point won't cause users to flee the browser. And it does give us some chance of avoiding another patent-encumbered format becoming a de-facto standard on the web.

We don't control existing sites, but we do control our own actions which influence new sites. We can't alter the past, but we can change the future.
> That's totally true, but from experience and statistical evidence, i think firefox users are more inclined to upgrade their browser than IE user are

Very true. Our site has had for a while only a couple percent of non 3.5+ Firefox traffic.
The startup world demonstrates there's nothing systemically restricting people from being upwardly mobile. The formula for wealth in America is simple; create a product that people want.

The fact that creating something people want is difficult is a universal truth, not an indictment of our democracy.
Passive-aggressiveness is lame.
Which sucks for HTML5 video. Without Chrome, only about 5% of web users actually support HTML5 playback using h.264. Chart: http://videojs.com/2011/01/google-is-dropping-h-264-from-chr...

Two things could end the format war.
1. Apple adopts WebM (which requires WebM hardware for iOS devices)
2. MPEG LA removes all royalties from h.264
That is way too high a price to pay for the freedom of mentally unstable people to have access to guns.
It looks like Groovy satisfies many of these checklist items too. Any reason beyond personal preference to go with Scala vs Groovy or JRuby?
Just because work is hard and it was done doesn't mean it's above criticism.
Also Flash isn't just about video playback it's a a platform, it's not analogous to a video codec.