skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting set of events. But the artificial dramatization really reeks of a cheap B grade pulp. I am sure the fictionalization could have been done more tastefully. It evokes Sam Spade or Tracer Bullet more than a working chemist.

...taking gold out of Germany was almost a capital offense,
carrying a punishment not to be sneezed at. George was
certainly not sneezing, but his palms were sweating as if
he had a fever and his heart was pounding like a drum....

Perhaps in the near future he would be holding a Nobel
Prize of his own.

But for now, these two Prizes were all he had, and they
were getting smaller.
The argument with the licensing fees for Mozilla to implement h.264 is probably a non-issue, and it doesn't do justice to frame it as such. The Mozilla Corporation does have a revenue stream (largely from Google) and MPEG-LA would probably be willing to allow Mozilla to license without paying the fees given their pivotal role in the fate of the de-facto standard. Operating systems often provide h.264 decoder APIs, like in QuickTime and Windows Media Player that they could use to circumvent the licensing fees.

Mozilla is doing it entirely out of ideology (and sticks to their ideology much more than Google usually does).
Djb redo: the Git of build systems?
Plans for Gimp 2.8 and beyond
(25% ± 1%) ± 1%
Not sure, but I once made something similar to help a friend pass her test. Something regarding history in literature.

http://filo.heroku.com/

I was planning on extracting this to a general flashcard app for people to collaboratively create quizzes with facts from their curriculum.

This was coded in a day with Rails, but I have a pretty good idea of how to abstract and scale it up. Get in touch with me if you're looking for somebody to team up with.
An accelerating rate of innovation will do that to you.
Because HN is filled with prospective entrepreneurs and innovative software engineers, and these people need to say "Yes" in order to do their job.

Startups would never get off the ground if their founders said "No" to everything. The next great idea would be killed long before it could be developed enough to prove its worth.

The critical piece is being able to say "Yes" to everything early on, and then critically look at everything you've said "Yes" to once they're on the table and say "No, no, and no" to the vast majority of them.
I concur with you.

What was the public's understand of the word App Store prior to Apple's entrance?

I do wonder though, is App Store a short for Apple Store or Application Store or both?
Yep. As we tried to make clear, there's an implicit contract and both sides must take their responsibilities seriously.
If this were extortion, in exchange for being paid, he'd not do something. What exactly is it that you suggest he will not do, in exchange for money, given that he's already released the crack to the world?
> Offer multiple skill levels.

You could also start with easy questions and have it slowly adapt to harder/easier questions as you get questions right or wrong (maybe accounting for speed as well).
I find it kind of funny that while staring at a post for a Justin Bieber URL shortener you get upset about the fact that HN has a "different culture" from Reddit. ITS A JUSTIN BIEBER LINK...

I can already sense another "What has happened to HN" post coming. This one should be interesting
To get clarity of thought on the debate, go back and read http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377

Everybody seems to be crying "but hardware support is coming soon!" without seeing it's difficult: "The unfortunate problem with this is that it’s a nightmare for hardware implementations, greatly increasing memory bandwidth requirements."

It comes down to WebM/VP8 being inferior (in specification and implementation) to an existing widely deployed (in bits and gates) codec.

Feel free to argue the fallacies of the osnews questions if your time is worth nothing.
What you're describing is basically NAT64.
Yes, most definitely, I mean who would want to cater to a giant install base of people who you know actually buy software and are willing to pay a premium for UX.

Google cant put hardware into most Android devices because they don't make them. Heck, you can barely upgrade your Android software on most carriers/devices. Google should first figure out how to prevent carries/manufactures from installing crapware on their handsets.
Show HN: mediaqueri.es - a gallery of responsive web designs
This is referred to as NAT64/DNS64 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_transition_mechanisms#NAT6...) and is the strategy many mobile phone networks (such as T-Mobile USA) are taking.

Effectively they give devices IPv6 addresses only and run a DNS server that makes up "fake" IPv6 addresses for all of the v4 only DNS records. It works well except when applications embed IPv4 literals (as they won't go through the DNS system and get translated)
Did they all jump then into the hot tub? And did John Cusack get transported back to the '80s?
I like how he says "at the end of this semester", why not immediately?
Apple releases iOS 4.3 Beta 1, Mobile HotSpot included
The Mobile HotSpot requires carrier activation. For iPads they are re-enabling the hardware orientation lock as a configurable option.

Apple link: https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/#releasenotes/General/RN-iOSSDK-4_3/index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40010565
The New Science of Choking Under Pressure
The student who knew grew up in a household full of 'em. Videophiles find advantages in LaserDiscs over DVD: http://www.starlaser.com/dvd-lasr.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laserdisc#Comparison_with_DVD. Jacket art and possible increased quality due to uncompressed video are cited. I didn't know LaserDisc was an analog format! LaserDisc has some of the grooviness of the 8-track, if not the deep catalog of the LP.
The original paper is linked at the bottom of the article: http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.0666
BC != BU.
By "people who have actually implemented h.264 and are familiar with patents", I assume you mean Jason Garrett-Glaser from his x264dev blog ( http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377 ). There aren't any patents explicitly mentioned, just that vp8 "feels" a lot like h.264. In that post, there was only one reference to a specific feature, the intra prediction, which was updated with "Update: spatial intra prediction apparently dates back to Nokia’s MVC H.26L proposal, from around ~2000. It’s possible that Google believes that this is sufficient prior art to invalidate existing patents — which is not at all unreasonable!".

The idea that VP3's prior release making AVC infringing is pretty stupid.
That's not the point of the article, I think. It's not that FB is unfair because it's a better investment opportunity. It's that by going outside the usual framework, such deals have an advantage - by virtue of less overhead due to regulation - over deals that play by the "rules".

I don't know enough about financial regulations to judge whether that's true, but that's the meaning I took from the article.
I've got both cores pegged under Mac as well.
Ubuntu developers talk reviews and ratings in the Software Centre [video]
What a bummer. Reading the acquisition announcement from 2007 (http://hivelogic.com/articles/corkd-has-been-acquired) shows that the founders Dan Benjamin and Dan Cederholm will be pretty disappointed.

"Cork’d couldn’t have found a better home." Maybe it could have?
Maybe I missed it, but I don't recall Gruber taking issue with the webM move, in and of itself. I read his posts as just being part of his continued critique of Google's pitching itself and its various business decisions as "open" and/or "good".

I mean that's been the recurring theme on that site re: corporate Google for years now. He's not throwing darts when Google does something in their own best interests. He's throwing darts when Google tries to spin those moves as being moves made in the interests of users, 'open development', free puppies and hugs for everyone, etc.
Now officially confirmed to be in iOS 4.3 Beta 1 which was released today.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/12/ios-4-3-beta-arrives-for-...
Microsoft's Novell patent cartel dodges German regulators
I remember when Nintendo said that. You'll note that the spinny disc camp slaughtered them. Spinny discs are little sheets of polycarbonate. They're ridiculously cheap to make.
Agreed. Two and a half years of law school and/or a degree are an assest. People are hiring lawyers, so become one of the ones that gets hired; or become one of those guys on TV.

I doubt he will be refunded, nor do I think he should.
So glad to see this getting tackled at last. SproutCore's lack of decent documentation has been my single biggest difficulty in adopting it.
Can the iPad Really Help My Autistic Son?
Bing Beats Google In 20-Search Shootout
Those people that you're thinking of are local bank branch managers. They can have a decent middle-class career, but they are hardly the people you think of when you think "high-paying banker". PayScale.com lists their salary as being in the $42K-64K range:

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Branch_Manager,_Bank...

A skilled engineer in Silicon Valley can easily make triple that. Hell, new CS grads can often make more than that straight out of school.
We had a PDP-11/34a running RSTS/E v7.0-07. About 50/50 split between VT100s and printing terminals, plus one Tektronix and later on a few GiGis; storage was two washing machine-size RK07 drives (swappable 28Mb dual-platter cartridges the size of a small trashcan lid) and two RX02 8" floppy drives. We found some undocumented escape codes for the VT100s that let you play "music" on the keyboard by turning on keyclick and cranking up the autorepeat on insane levels. Someone bought DUNGEO (the original version of Zork) from DECUS too. Man that was fun.

I still have all my 8" floppies -- loads of BASIC programs, and a lot of content from the message-board system we wrote for it. You could enter posts using VT100 escape sequences to create animations. I figure there's a 50/50 chance the disks are still readable, since the bits are the size of small cats -- someday I'll find someone who can dump them for me.
It's doubtful Gruber will address this, as it would be a bit like hammering a square (logic) into a circle (Apple).

My personal fav:

If Apple were to switch to WebM and drop H.264 tomorrow,
would you then herald it as a great move?

Most likely. PowerPC to Intel, anyone?
Private IPO sounds kind of funny to me. IPO literally means Initial Public Offering.
If 0x00 isn't a valid opcode, as soon as one is hit, the CPU will fire an invalid instruction interrupt (if it supports invalid instruction interrupts), allowing the operating system (if any) to do something about it.

However, since the original comment was about the Z80 which according to http://www.z80.info/decoding.htm treats invalid instructions as a NOP, the point is moot.

By the way, z80.info is the type of site that made me fall in love with the web -- it's full of information compiled by people doing it not for AdSense impressions, but just for the love of sharing knowledge. I miss the days when all of my Google searches would take me to these sites instead of the contentless content farms of today.
The Norwegian companies A-Pressen Digitale Medier (http://www.apdm.no/) and VG Multimedia (http://www.vg.no/), both news publishers with non-technical audiences, had similar experiences. The IT group that helped them set it up published the results of their experience and brokenness testing here: http://fud.no/ipv6/
"the articles require some degree of research"

Step 1: Read 4 paragraph press release or product description page

Step 2: Regurgitate with your rote spin ("The technology continues to get smaller and more powerful with the new xxx yyy from zzz. Featuring foobar processor and bazbot spiffo support, the yyy can meet the small form factor needs of today's HTPC and silent PC enthusiast.")

Step 3: Submit to kreci

Step 4: $1.00

Step 5: goto 1.
Two things commonly arise in these cases.

1. Most insurers don't drive home the point that they're only insuring for storm and surge, not for flood ... until after the floods are done.

2. Flood insurance is usually set at very high prices. In some parts of the country it's consequently been made illegal to settle in flood zones. But these floods are so large that they're affecting areas that have never flooded before, where a rational person wouldn't have bought flood insurance anyway.

I'm honestly not sure if you'd be encouraging them to skip insurance in future. I suspect not, because the government payouts in past natural disasters have only been a fraction of the damage caused, whereas a good insurance policy could pay 100% or more of the cost. It's still rational to take the insurance if you can afford it.
by people who have actually implemented H.264 and are familiar with the patents ... I'm gonna go with the analysis of the guy who said his B-frame implementation gave x264 the project's single greatest encoding quality improvement over the guy who thinks the release date of VP3 determines which patents encumber VP8, thanks.

I see this a lot. It purports that Jason Garrett-Glaser has done an expert analysis of all of MPEG-LAs patents and has proclaimed specific infringement by VP8.

Of course that's complete bullshit. His analysis was superficially that there are similarities, and thus there may be infringement. Not one actual patent claim was shown to be infringed upon, much less even referenced to show that there was any understanding of it.

His analysis was as a codec guy. Not as a patent guy.

The devil are in the details.

It turns out (ha ha!) that when people vying for standards lay their patent traps, they tend to be extremely specific, ensuring that they don't get caught by prior art (there is plenty), but that they trap anyone who implements the standard. See Microsoft ActiveSync patents as a perfect example of this.

Does WebM infringe patents? Almost without question, as is the nature of the ridiculously generous patent system. Just as h264 is almost certainly infringing on patents of other parties that just haven't come forward to make their claims yet (and for which a h264 license is zero protection).

But one gets the sense that the author sees it as some sort of devastating argument.

Just as Gruber's post was framed. Google supports Flash, therefore they can't possibly be open, therefore Google is closed, therefore Google is evil...or something like that. Preaching to the choir and all that so I don't think much critical thought is necessary.
No kidding. I went to BU and taught at BC, and I'll be goddammed if I know who to root for in hockey.
Venture Funds Raised 14 Percent Less In 2010
What is the most correct way to validate an e-mail address?
Technically true, but many (most?) law schools have indeed, marketed themselves to students using statistics about post-graduation employment. Of course, the reality is that they count any employment, and in some cases have inflated statistics by hiring recent graduates for positions within the school itself, which last only for 6 weeks but happen to include the period ending 3 months after graduation (which is what's measured in the US News & World Report rankings). It's a perfect storm of too many government subsidies (qua student loans), expanding market (bad economy? maybe stay in school), and regulatory capture.

That said, this guy doesn't seem cut out for the trade in the first place, although it's possible that that I'm wrong and this is actually a shrewd exercise in personal branding.
Our governments get a lot of practice. Fires, floods and cyclones are relatively common occurrences, though rarely on this scale.

I imagine that at this point emergency services in the south of the US are pretty good at responding to tornadoes, for example.
>The thing to remember is that when two systems each have patents, it's a false dichotomy to ask which set of patents trump the other.

Where is the false dichotomy?

The current talking point on the h264 versus WebM war is that WebM is a patent landmine, while your back is covered with h264. There is some sort of broad belief that h264 is a universal got-your-back patent defense, and that is simply ludicrous.
I had a friend who did history research in Hollywood for movie companies. That is one example of a non-academic historian.

Heck, you could even say that some news reporters and non-fiction book authors are modern day historians.
Just wonder who have hosted data that is larger than RAM with MongoDB, and what's the performance characteristics?
How about everything?

Seriously. The graph is one of the best data structures we have for modeling systems and taxonomies.

See, for example, Avatar. What enabled the effects in that film, at its very core?

A Directed Acyclic Graph.
I think Napster was more remarkable.

But who remembers Napster anymore ... it's like that "What are the A: and B: drives for" story yesterday.
Pretty accurate. IPv6 is flawed in ways that make it non-upwards-compatible with IPv4, so a smooth transition is impossible. Oh well, there is enough stuff on the internet already.
You're neglecting many reasons extra terrestrial life may pose a threat.

The most obvious is they may want our planet, they want to live here, and if they've managed to travel across the vast void of space, wiping out humanity probably won't be particularly challenging for them.

Also, your second point is invalid, territorial reasons are not void. We may pose no threat now, however a technologically superior civilization may conclude we pose a future threat, and so wipe us out now before we can become one.

Also, the old 'dangerous biology from somewhere else!' is almost entirely null and void, organisms are adapted to their environment, they usually pose negligible risk to any other environment already inhabited by biological organisms. This is why, for instance we don't treat organisms from thermal vents as 'oh noes, biohazard material'.
Renders wrong in Chrome for me. Seriously guys? Good thing it's not an HTML5 gallery showcasing the benefits of open standards.
> The air poses another problem: it absorbs light. In fact, a high enough powered laser can cause the air itself to break down into a ragged line of plasma. I’ve seen this in the lab and it is awesome.

Badass.

edit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeqIZyUMDP4
Oh - I'm not doubting the original point! I'm a professional translator myself. I know how weird it can get (most of my languages are Germanic and Romance and provide no great headaches, but Hungarian is hard to translate well).
proof that a catchy domain name, alone, can generate buzz. the site looks very nice, too, even though it doesn't have much on it.

so, what market is this in, anyways? :p
Does anyone else feel it's weird that there's only one blog that everyone happens to link to whenever something related to vp8 springs up? It's been half a year, you would think there are independently arrived analyses by now.

Most people could probably agree that taking everything that John Gruber says as the truth without any other sources is a bad idea, but that's exactly the landscape of evidence presented for/against vp8. Thankfully, Dark Shikari's writeup is great, but there really needs to be more evidence.
This needs some serious proofreading.
Cool. How about licensing fees for Opera? For any other browser maker?
I think this article makes a fantastically gross error, the conclusion is fine, however the authors gloss over the fact that any space-faring life has a high probability of being machine-intelligence, not squishy biological life which 'evolved in the same manner as on earth'. (note, this is already the trend with our space exploration)
Under her watch google made several design changes which were direct copies of bing, I would be embarrassed if i was her.
I should say that it only follows if the patents in the patent pool apply exclusively/specifically to H.264.

And they don't. For example, "Method for processing decoded picture blocks in a block-based method of picture coding" was filed in '96 and granted in '99, and is part of the H264 patent pool.

There's a long list that goes like this.

MPEG-LA actually goes through great effort to show how each specific claim in the patent maps to a specific section in the spec: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avcCrossRe...
It is weird, in that I'd have expected the MPEG LA to produce or cause to be produced more FUD against VP8 by now.
I'm going to give bing a try. I'm tired of google search results listings that have too many clone sites full of content copied from stackoverflow, wikipedia, and project mailing lists.
I have nothing meaningful to contribute, but I want to say this is a monumental step forward.

Some people here seem to predict this heralds the end of language education for most people. Maybe that's true. But I actually think this will contribute to earlier and more frequent exposure to foreign languages. And that may ultimately do more for language learning than compulsory education ever did.
Yes and he also takes issue when Apple slightly improves a technology that's been available for years and markets it as "revolutionary."

Come on. It's marketing. Too many black kettles and pots to count.

edit: second paragraph of parent post has been slightly edited since I posted this. Originally it only mentioned "open" without users, puppies, and hugs.
You make a valid point that I should have acknowledged. That said, what I'm doing is comparing this post, which seems deeply uninformed, to Garret-Glaser's post, which isn't.

I'm not expert on video patents either. The overarching issue is, this post seems to think the IP situation with WebM is virtually cut-and-dry, and we have every reason to believe it isn't.
The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten.
THE FIRST PLAN INVOLVES SHOUTING! And apparently the Gimp people aren't using any sort of actual blog engine, so it's impossible to permalink the post in question, which is rather confusingly hidden on their front page. Rather than complaining about it, I'll just copy and paste the full text here:

----

In the face of all sorts of rumours and interpretations about the future of the project there is a call for clarification regarding development of GIMP.

Currently GIMP team is working on finalizing the new stable v2.8 with many improvements such as layer groups, improved brush dynamics, a new unique transformation tool, optional single-window mode and more. There are two big obstacles in our way right now: missing specification on the last change in user interface and broken graphic tablets support in GTK+.

We have already invested a lot of time into UI changes and brush dynamics, we treasure your continuous support for the project and thus we are determined to release v2.8 only when it's working out of box as expected for everybody.

After releasing v2.8 the focus of development will shift to deep integration of GEGL — our new non-destructive image processing core. Results of this work will enable many features considered critical for use of GIMP in professional environment which is part of GIMP's product vision. It's a lot of work, and currently we don't have enough developers to make this change happen very fast. If you want to help us to get there faster, we encourage you to join gimp-developer mailing list and/or the IRC channel to discuss how you could contribute.
I can't see how he expected this would be accepted. I do sympathize with his situation but until someone invents a memory erasing machine to remove his accrued knowledge, a 'time refund' for all people who invested in his being there, and a method to magically transfer everything to the other person who would have paid to sit in that seat for the last few years, you just can't turn back time.

He would still walk away with knowledge, degree or not, and the school is out the time and effort to have imparted that knowledge. It's like asking for a refund if you don't achieve the degree. "I failed, I didn't get the degree, so can I be refunded?"