skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> With Chrome(ium) you can just replace the copy of the libavcodec dll/so, and it magically supports whatever codecs the new one is built with.

Yes, that is exactly what every non-technical user is going to do to get HTML5 video working properly in Chrome. If there was a button that popped up saying "Get the h.264 codec for Chrome" whenever there was the possibility of using it, then we'd have a comparison, but I doubt replacing shared libraries underneath Chrome is ever going to be a supported mode of extension.
Well, when Mozilla drew their ideological line in the sand and said they'd refuse to allow Firefox to use OS codecs, Microsoft responded by releasing a Firefox extension that delegates H264 playback from HTML5 video elements to Windows Media Player.

Perhaps they'll end up doing the same for Chrome?
Presumably the next Android Dev phone will have a SoC that supports WebM... otherwise yes this move is toothless.
YARV is the VM, it's still MRI (Matz's Ruby Interpreter)
You are right, but I think public opinion is turning steadily against unions: you can see it everywhere, from the rage against teachers' unions in places like Washington D.C., to the disillusionment of private-sector union members with public-sector unions in NJ. People are realising that they have been had, what with our leaders giving away generous benefits to unionised employees during the good times.
Firefox 3.x doesn't play WebM content. So it's just Chrome's ~13% share at the moment.
I don't understand what's so awesome about this? Browsers have supported deep linking since forever. You can link to any specific id on a page and the browser will scroll to it when you open the page.

For example, I could have every paragraph an id say id="p5" and then link ad example.com/story#p5 and voila, deep linking.

Hoorah for reinventing the wheel :)
I kept a journal on a couple of backpacking trips. I ended up spending over an hour a night on it and would have kept going if it weren't for exhaustion. Eventually I couldn't bring myself to start an entry because I couldn't face the commitment.

Usually my days aren't as interested and filled with introspection as when I'm backpacking, though. I just signed up with http://ohlife.com/ as mentioned by dabent.
Someone else's SOC?
You sound like you have a lot of experience here but I can't understand what you've written. Can you explain in a little more detail?
That would fix Windows, but for my personal use I care more about Mac and Linux
I feel bad for the guy having to die with his hands handcuffed behind his back. I mean - at least let him try to disarm his own bomb, he has nothing to lose.

Tell him you'll shoot him if he moves from the area, but otherwise back away and let him try.
Google is starting to remind me more of Microsoft every day. But at least Microsoft doesn't make their anti-competitive strategic decisions under the guise of being "open" and "not evil".
Android is already marginalizing old iPhones (and to some extent Apple's business model is built around marginalizing old iPhones.)

Also, Google controls YouTube. So H.264 <video> YouTube could see a sunset at some point, which would be a BFD.
Enterprise JS is 400 lines of code... 0 lines of tests. Kudos, NYT.
Kohsuke's post: http://kohsuke.org/bye-bye-hudson-hello-jenkins/
Ah yes, moral equivalence. "Some say this, some say that. Thus, they are equally valid." :/
The problem with this approach is that as the paragraph is moved around, the linear id's become stale. Say the article is edited to move content, your deep link may break, still right page of content, but wrong deep link to content.

This addresses this (as stated in the article) without some elaborate server content management solution that tracks paragraphs and their html id links.
+1 for SketchUp. It has many limitations but it so easy to get started with compared to the popular giants of 3d. Follow some of the tutorial videos.

It has a hugely active community writing custom plugins for just about everything you could imagine. My tipping point was finding all these plugins are written in Ruby :-) As a programmer I loved being able to hack together new extensions based on examining the source to other peoples work.

If you plan to do anything regarding animation, physics engines, or spline-based surface modeling etc then you'll need to look elsewhere of course. Blender is free and has a massive amount of features but a steep learning curve (and I personally dislike the interface).
The point I was attempting to make is that Java (and all other languages that I know of) are both strongly and weakly typed.
Something I've been hacking on for the last few days. Android SkiFree Clone
Ogg is not a codec. (Seriously, I was unsure if the OP was talking about Ogg the container or Vorbis or Theora.)
It's what linux distributions have been doing by default — just replacing it with a symlink to the system's installation of ffmpeg. The sane ones take the added step of not crippling their default ffmpeg :)

Unlike Firefox, Chrome extensions are sandboxed, so they can't automatically replace the file for you. Someone can just make a simple native installer to do so though.

Still, the tide appears to have turned, so the usefulness of restoring h.264 <video> support may decline within a year. People outside the Mac world will probably just standardize on a Flash video player instead of trying to support multiple playback frontends.
I absolutely love dark comedy generally, but for some reason the idea of a comedy about this just rubs me the wrong way. I'm not sure why, but that's my reaction to it.
__hq, get___, ___now

All these are nice "sufix/prefix naming conventions." For my startup, I use HQ(ChalkboardHQ.com).

Here are some possible names for you:

- RunRateHQ.com
- GetRunrate.com(I really like the sound of this one)
- Runratenow.com(This one sounds like decisive and makes me sorta want to hop into it and try it)

Good luck with the naming, if you'd like, we can chat(hajrice@gmail - gtalk), I have a lot of ideas and could maybe help you more.
Can you support this statement? Because Google didn't even create VP8 - they bought it with ON2. I can't find anything that supports your statement.

H264 isn't "an algorithm" its a pretty massive collection of different algorithms. I actually find it a bit difficult its not infringing in some way and this analysis seems to confirm this.

http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377
That's why NYT is never getting on my NoScript whitelist. I have a nervous habit of highlighting random text while I read.
yeah I know - neither is WebM, I'm just sticking with the idioms currently being used.
RTFM? :)

The difference is no 'href' tags. The 'tag' is automatically created based on the words in the paragraph, via Javascript, and decoded appropriately.

It is also slightly neat in that you can highlight a specific sentence (multiple sentences actually, see the little tutorial at the bottom).

I actually kind of like it, it would be a neat way to really highlight what you think is interesting in an article when sending someone a link. But doing it as a per site thing is crazy.. seems like it could be a good browser extension though. People who have it installed would instantly get a more functional linking experience. Imagine linking off to some documentation in a blog post for a coding problem, say to a Django documentation page, and when someone clicks the link they are not only taken to the specific part of the page that you are talking about, but the relevant stuff is actually highlighted. That'd be Neat (tm).
For me, aside from some interesting landscape rendering, Cars isn't in the same league as the other Pixar films. It felt like a pure kids movie + merchandising extravaganza.

> and box office receipts prove my point too

This isn't saying much. The cost-structure of CGI and effects-heavy films is such that you have to essentially make something that will appeal to kids and/or teens, otherwise you're hosed financially.

I can think of many great stories that I'd love to see on screen that wouldn't really appeal to kids + teens, and therefore wouldn't be feasible with the current cost-structure.
Why would you not?
There is definitely some fear about that, there are times when I have actually cut out a page that had info I didn't want to be available any longer.
It's my impression that android installs typically have Busybox userlands. Busybox might not be a GNU project (although it's licensed under the GPL), but in that respect it's no different than shittons of other linux devices. Most consumer grade routers, most likely your dvr/[cable/satelite] settop box, other UI centric consumer devices like the kindle (http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...) all use Linux kernels with Busybox userlands and (often) proprietary frontends.

Android devices are no less "Linux" than any of these things. Lack of X11 and traditional X desktop environments are particularly beside the point.
50 Cent falls to $0.39 on rumors of Jail time :-)
Arbitraging mobile distribution channels
Long Jump Techniques and Mobile Applications
Downvote this if you hate writing unit tests for code you release publicly.
So, in less than a year we've gone from zero scalable django hosts to 3/4... The pricing on this looks neat too — they are explicitly saying that small community sites will likely fit within the free quota, presumably as a loss leader to get developers to use them for multiple projects?
It depends on why the book is hard. Sometimes it's just sloppy thinking and writing; sometimes it is an inherently hard subject. It isn't always clear when starting which it is so it is useful, if you start having trouble to compare the one you are reading with another on the same subject.

For reading that is inherently difficult, Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren give some very helpful information in How to Read a Book. Unfortunately it is not an easy read itself.

Another book I found helpful was A Time to Learn by Phillip Bandt, Naomi Meara, and Lyle Schmidt. It has some really good ideas on diagramming complex work to help you understand them, especially how their ideas fit together.
Interesting. Somewhat off-topic but what on earth is their business model? Journals are private. There are no advertisements. The service is free.

YCombinator hopes to make money from this how?

Don't get me wrong: it's a simple and clever idea. Just... it's not philanthropy, is it?
I understand what you're trying to say, that type coercion makes a system 'weak', but your example is terrible.

Python's type system uses interfaces, so strings are effectively also of type sequence, which is also of type boolean. Any object can just define __nonzero__() and be a boolean. That's all the bool() builtin does — it just tries to call __nonzero__() or __len__() — http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#truth-value-tes...
Phenomenal, simple idea. I, too, signed up.

I can still dig up random LiveJournal entries that I wrote on a whim ten years ago. What would people here rate the chances of me being able to do the same with OhLife entries in ten years?
I like the "small town bug tracker" marketing on the home page, ... not sure if the image depicts a small town tho.
A Lego model factory built using Lego
I agree that the Java culture is significantly poisoned by the 'enterprise architect' culture, but Spring if anything has been the saviour of Java.

Compare IoC (Spring setter injection), with J2EE+EJB2.x - it's night and day - and I know which I would prefer to code using. Spring introduced POJO programming and explicitly called out the crappy J2EE design patterns in favour of simplicity.

Now, Spring has accumulated so much cruft (and become much more commercial with the vmware buyout), that it is becoming the new J2EE.

I've been doing some android programming recently, and working with Java without IoC is simply unbearable.
And conversely, it would take us the amount of energy sufficient to power a toyota prius for an entire century to create a grain of anti-sand, and we'd have to dump enough power to run 100 homes for a year to create a piece the size of an aspirin tablet.

Antimatter isn't free.
I think before I could keep a handwritten journal again, I'd have to learn either shorthand or drawing. Besides resisting the temptation to self-pity, of course.

Might actually a good idea for some neat new skills this years. Sadly last time I looked there were too many shorthand systems (and the default German one looked rather complicated), and I've yet to find a drawing book that makes me seem less clumsy ("Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" was recommended here before, but didn't do anything for me).
Don't worry about Apple. AirPlay is their ace in the hole, seeing as it is compatible only with h.264/MPEG4 video streams.
They send you an e-mail daily... one that you presumably actually look forward to getting. Surely they could add an advertisement to this e-mail if they wanted?
I like Getrunrate. It actually has a nice ring. Hmm... My Gchat is sean@orangeslyce.com
Awesome, well-thought post by a clear veteran.

"With GeoShare I was consistently fighting against myself not to add more features that I knew would be useful. This was a difficult thing for me to resist since I myself used the product daily and had a sense what I wished it could do. But they say if you're not embarrased by your first product then you waited too long."

'nuf said.
Every startup I've been in paid a naming company. I've never liked the results, but the VCs always have liked the results...
Scott Belsky: How To Avoid The Idea Generation Trap
The problem was that they did something unethical: They mass-published pictures of people who didn't approve of it. Facebook.com didn't do that. (I won't get into how many unethical things they DID do, though.) They also published the entire student list as well.

Yes, both of those things were publicly available. But much like Google Street View, the fact that they're public doesn't necessarily mean they are easily obtainable, and so people object.
Google Chrome to drop H.264 support; roadblock to HTML5?
This is true for way more than rent, too. Gas is another obvious one, but it's still just scratching the surface — prices for a huge range of things rise subtly (or not so subtly) in more affluent areas.
There are many places, and one is right here:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1351-1-who-the-fuck-designs-t...
Skype Hits New Record of 27 Million Simultaneous Users
I really worried they'd lost the plot after Wall-e and Up! (The 2 worst releases imho). So Toy Story 3 was great to see.

Story outlines usually sound rubbish IMHO. So I'll give cars 2 the benefit of the doubt. Glad there's a new movie with characters my kids love in it.

Wall-e and Up! catered mainly to parents/intellectuals so it's nice to see some good fun movies in the pipeline.
Don't like it? Branch Chromium and retain H.264 support.

First customer here.
Poll: What do you use as your primary search engine?
Please let me know if you'd like me to add any other search engines to this list.
Google (www.google.com)
Yahoo (www.yahoo.com)
Bing (www.bing.com)
Ask (www.ask.com)
AltaVista (www.altavista.com)
AOL (www.search.aol.com)
DuckDuckGo (www.duckduckgo.com)
Dogpile (www.dogpile.com)
Blekko (www.blekko.com)
It's a cute metaphor, but what would you think of eating a lobster from looking at one?

If you're going to be the authority on the taste of cow shit (shit tastes like shit is, of course, a tautology), you better eat some cow shit.
I don't know, I find it (whatever it may be) to be refreshingly honest.
since its an auto reconciling app - how about ledgerbot.com -- it is available and seems to carry many of the aspects of what you are looking for.

Can make a cute logo from that idea etc...

Yeah, I like alliteration as well - you have to have a name that captures your product, is a .com, is easy to spell and rolls off the tongue. Then, it will never be forgotten.

One of my first thoughts was "account.ly" would work - its registered to a guy in carlsbad... but looks like he is trying to build something.
Securities laws are antiquated, rooted in the paper-and-ink world. This makes it difficult to do anything online, but not impossible. So why hasn't it happened? My guess is that it is the companies that are not eager to participate. They are shy about widely disseminating their business plans, their financials, their cap tables, their need for capital. So even though it seems madly inefficient to raise money the old fashioned way, knocking on one door at a time, and even though eventually "everyone" knows everything (so it's hardly secret), I suspect this company shyness explains the odd persistence of that old model.
The auto-playinf video advert is actually an auto-playing video report of the 50 cent stock issue. It just happened to have an advert before it, as web video is wont to do.
"Someone" is probably Apple, with their huge new data centers et al
Ask HN: Why my "Show HN" submission is not shown in "ask" tab?
I've submitted this Show HN thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2093542

Apparently it received very few votes, so it didn't rise well enough. But I thought I can atleast see it on "ask" tab. But I paginated for 4-5 pages, and that thread is not shown.

Any idea why this happened?
Clickable: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2093542
Thanks for correcting me. I get so much stuff wrong in life and people are usually to scared to correct others.
Ask Apple, I'd only be speculating at why they didn't redesign their existing product to support it :P

But, since what they did for the Verizon iPhone has no bearing on what will appear in the iPhone 5, I don't really understand the point of your question.
then they're hurting themselves as well as me.

Hurting themselves by putting up a barrier between eyeballs and their content. I mean it's such a silly short sighted pattern. "I know, we've a really popular village noticeboard which people have come to trust and tell their friends about. Let's put a layer over the noticeboard with adverts that you have to lift up before you can see the actual noticeboard underneath. Soon we'll be rich!". Which they will be, but after 3 months everyone in the village will get wise and stop looking at the noticeboard. And then the noticeboard will be covered in spiderwebs and hornets nests and everyone in the village will have to have their houses fumigated and eventually the noticeboard will be burned down, but the fire will spread and their fumigated houses will also burn down because of the chemicals and so on.

I've seen it happen a hundred times. When will people learn!
1) You aren't going to get H.264 decoder for free. There will be always at least license fees to MPEG-LA.
2) Current hardware video decoders are DSPs. You are not going to "waste valuable board space". It is a program in ROM, it is easy to change H.264 to VP8, you will probably even save some space.
A modern Perl programmer might write something much more elegant:

my $x = 'Apple Carrot Banana';
my @y = $x->split(' ')->sort;

if (@y > 2) {
say "we've got ${\@y->size} elements!";
} else {
say "insufficient elements. fail.";
}
Actually, the money wasn't a major factor. It's piling up, but I literally have no idea what to spend it on.

Here are my opinions from when I was an academic (I've only been working in HFT since March 2010, full time since May 2010):

My opinion from 347 days ago: universities have vastly more problems than that. They are huge bloated organizations structured around funneling money to employees (from both students and the government) rather than educating students. The main reason people still go is for status signaling purposes, otherwise they would have been replaced long ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1087281

From 406 days ago: a $10 million grant; my university will take about $5 million off the top in "overhead" (to be spent on overpaid administrators, student stress counselors, the latino student center, and maybe even education).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=969664

(This was roughly the period when I decided to leave academia.)

From 469 days ago: The job description of "professor" is certainly a strange beast: teacher/scientist. It makes about as much sense as actor/programmer...The perverse incentives this creates are massive. Universities hire scientists rather than teachers in order to get their hands on half the scientist's grants. Scientists waste their time masquerading as teachers... This is harmful both to science (I'm not doing research in class) and students...Actual teachers are squeezed out, since there is no room for them.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=851218

From 999 days ago: Another part of the problem is that there is no incentive for cost control in the university...I'm currently teaching a "Quantitative Reasoning" class right now. Basically, take Weeks 1-2 of Prob&Stat and expand it to fill a whole semester (half a semester, due to poor planning and miscommunication). Some of this is my fault, some of it not...Plus, my students are all art/history/literature majors, and just don't need it. Everyone in the room would be better off keeping their $4,000 and not sitting through my class.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=166307
I'm surprised Gruber didn't also pose a question about the murky patent landscape re: WebM. If Google decides to throw their full weight behind WebM, it wouldn't be at all surprising to see some legal action on the part of MPEG-LA.

That said, the "Who is happy about this?" question smacks as slightly unfair given Gruber's unabashed approval of Apple's decision to not support Flash (albeit, I too support this decision as a web developer).

Addendum: whereby I mean to say that there are undoubtedly numerous users who have been "harmed" (whether they know it or not) by the lack of Flash on iOS devices (e.g., because they could not view a given website on their device), even if the removal of Flash will be good for the web in the long term.
FACEBOOK WILL END ON MARCH 15th (Satire, folks)
Black Silk - Chinese J-20 Stealth Fighter Takes Off
I do the same thing but mine's a Field Notes. Smaller (about the size of 2.5 credit cards). I write my travel itinerary, phone numbers and dates, random ideas, todos, etc. It's also good for sketching, something which my smartphone cannot handle.

Would love to find a book that has a more durable, fabric cover though as opposed to a paper one. Sort of like the old US passports had, my passport has seen so much abuse it ought to be illegal. Anyone know of one?
Probably.

And don't call me "Shirley".

I'm so sorry. I just couldn't resist....

(If you don't get it, watch this movie soon: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080339/)
Pastor in Kansas, not Arizona.
Here's How to Ditch Your AT&T iPhone and Switch to a Verizon iPhone for Free
If you want to see how it's done in Ruby on Rails, here's an example app with authentication and user management and MongoDB for data. With a tutorial.
https://github.com/fortuity/rails3-mongoid-devise
There are equivalents for other environments; Non has quite as many packages.

Python: cheeseshop / easy_install / PyPI

Node: npm

debian: apt

TeX: CTAN

R: CRAN

(edit: cheeseship -> cheeseshop. Thanks!)
All that trouble for ~$10M in paper profit. Compare this to the $400M he seems to have netted from his investment in the drinks company Glaceau a few years ago.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/may/29/news.50cent
If you put it that way: the average salary for most Americans, when inflation adjusted, has been largely unchanged for the past 40 years. We know this.

Bubble or no, most people are not seeing a general trend of more personal wealth.