skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a short term thinking. Let's go back and time, say before December 24, 1994. A time when GIF is used for majority of graphics on the web and PNG is just a blimp. You would have used exactly the same reasoning to say that GIF is just fine, PNG doesn't benefit you right now and PNG supporters just want to force unnecessary work to convert GIFs to PNGs.

And then on December 24, 1994 "Unisys stated that they expected all major commercial on-line information services companies employing the LZW patent to license the technology from Unisys at a reasonable rate, but that they would not require licensing, or fees to be paid, for non-commercial, non-profit GIF-based applications, including those for use on the on-line services".

And then "In August 1999, Unisys changed the details of their licensing practice, announcing the option for owners of Billboard and Intra net Web sites to obtain licenses on payment of a one-time license fee of $5000 or $7500.[18] Such licenses were not required for website owners or other GIF users who had used licensed software to generate GIFs."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format#Uni...

Before Unisys decided to start enforcing the patent, everything was fine with using GIF and there was no need to do the work. But after they did decide to start enforcing it, potentially every person using GIF to publish images on the web was liable for GIF licensing fees. Web luckily survived that one without major disruption and after the fact PNG is now the standard used.

WebM is a defensive weapon to make sure that the history won't repeat itself, this time with video format.

The tactic used by Google is risky but on the other hand if no one takes a stand, we will never get rid of h264 as de-facto dominant standard and we'll get a GIF-like money grab.

You have just told us that you're only interested in short-term convenience even if it'll cost you big time in the future. That's understandable and most people will act exactly the same.

Which is why the only way to replace proprietary h264 with an open, royalty-free technology is to make it inconvenient for people to use h264 and more convenient to use WebM. Google is doing exactly that.
I hope this means non-Java-based languages (Scala and Clojure would count as Java-based) with C FFI will be easier to use, too.
I just have a save hook to do all the work. I'm not even sure what all the work is, but emacs does it for me.
Clever and true, but no 19th century American writer would ever have written in that way. Even Mark Twain, surely the closest in spirit to such a style, was an order of magnitude more grandiloquent than that in his published writing. And don't forget that "damn" was a swear word then (http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=damn&year_sta...). No, this is very much a 20th century aphorism. A quick look at Wikiquote reveals that the earliest validated citation is... Maya Angelou! In an interview from 1989. But they trace it back to Sheridan (1819):

You write with ease, to show your breeding,
But easy writing's curst hard reading.

Now here's how Americans really wrote in the 19th century (chosen at random from Hawthorne, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Hawthorne):

There is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghostlike, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.

Rather different! I can't resist another:

The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive also, of the long lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within.
haha, point taken. there have been at least 2 products released in the past 2 weeks that are similar to what i'm doing, hence my fear of someone beating me to the punch. hence, my hope that what i'm working on is going to succeed.

on the other hand, maybe you're right and maybe they have tried what i'm trying and it failed and they gave up...
Ouch.

But now I wonder, do individual blog posts in SvN reflect the overall opinion of 37signals or just the person who wrote the post? Keep in mind that the author of this post and the submitted one we're discussing now are different.
>" I’m hoping someone can explain this because to me it makes no sense."

It might be because 2008 was a letdown to the press compared with 2006 (Intel) and 2007 (iPhone). The press was looking for a major new products and significant improvements to existing product lines - see: http://gizmodo.com/343246/what-to-expect-at-macworld-2008-an...

Sure the Air generated some buzz, but importantly the Gizmodos of the world were predicting it would be "Bigger than Usual" The big news came later in the year with the Appstore and Apple was moving towards announcing new products in the summer rather than at the new year (this New Year's announcement wasn't even made by Apple but by Verizon).
I don't think the JVM is in any particular danger of disappearing, otherwise I wouldn't be still programming in it :)

However, a technology controlled by a single vendor, even one as large as Oracle, is at greater risk than one that is an open standard with several competing implementations. I'd be happier if Oracle were encouraging alternative JVMs, rather than suing them or withholding testkit licenses.
I use ical to pull my exchange and google calendars down, then a bit of applescript to update org-mode: https://github.com/dustin/snippets/blob/master/applescript/i...

It's gross, but it means I can see everything I care about in one place. :)
The only reason I didn't rip out PrototypeJS was for the CSS selectors and the add/remove classnames. That's what remain that will take time and hopefully not for much longer.
This is a great attitude, I'm going to read your post a few times to let it sink it.
It is worth building. I know I'd LOVE to have the product I'm thinking of. And I know it doesn't exist (yet). And yes, there is lots and lots of learning in this project.
Thanks, stsmytherie.
The roots of plant intelligence (Interesting TEDTalk)
I see. Yes, he did trade on more advanced information. And reading up on his case again, it was far more complex than a tweet from 50 Cent...
Google isn't keeping anyone from writing an H.264 plugin for Chrome, they're choosing not to support it. Apple has the luxury of those being the same thing (not supporting = not allowing) on iOS.

Are you implying that Gruber isn't biased? It's really neither here nor there, but I've been on HN enough to simply see the headlines with (daringfireball) next to it to roll my eyes at that notion.

(Note, I think John brings up some great questions. I think almost all the complaints about WebM, voiced here on HN, are ignorant of browser compatibility and Flash's support for WebM (though I still think the hardware decoding points that have been brought up are very valid), but the questions of timing and consistency across Google's product intrigue me)
I got a few emails about this... I'm not sure if anyone is following this thread any more, but I reckon I should clarify my views for posterity. Here's a reply I wrote -

--

Your positions there were good... I need to reflect and pick my words a lot more carefully when I write on something that touches people so closely like parenting. I am actually an admirer of the Chinese way except not the abusive jerk part of it. But I studied Chinese culture some - they're incredible. They move somewhere, dirt poor, and within 2-3 generations they're established, prosperous, educated, own businesses and real estate, have established families... I remember one time I was staying in a small inn in Amsterdam owned by a Chinese family, recent immigrants to the Netherlands. They'd rent all the rooms, and if every room got rented, the couple and their young son would go sleep in the lobby at midnight instead of their own room.

In the end, the place would only sell out maybe 10 nights per month, for a total of perhaps 800 euros per month for the inconvenience... but then that's about $12,000 USD per year they're banking by sacrificing their own comfort. Later, they'd for sure invest that into education, expanding in business, things like that. It's why Chinese are so successful anywhere.

But I should've stressed that I think the abusive and mean aspects of it are crap. I do think it's crap. But more self-sacrifice, achievement, duty, service... I don't know, I think America is way too far in the other direction. It's funny cuz I'm guessing our ideal parenting styles aren't very far apart. Lots of encouragement but also emphasizing it's not just do whatever makes you happy - delay gratification, serve worth causes, strive for more, better yourself, give your kids a much better life than you had, etc, etc.
For many years, I wished for a boss who would hand me a book and say, "here's a book, read up on it." Little did I know that I had to marry him first.

</twee>
I see the rage directed at the app developers. I don't see any of the blog's rage directed at Apple. Please show me what I'm missing.
But it's ok to point to a reference for the joke. It helps to educate people.
"If other people aren't working on something at least similar to what you are doing it is very likely a dumb idea."

I am sorry, but that is the worst piece of advice ever. Why bother with science if we can just appeal to the idea that what other people think is most likely correct? Why don't we just give up the game now?
Geographical area:

Finland: 330k km^2

USA: 9,692 km^2

Despite the our higher population density, the US is almost 30 times larger than Finland. Because cell phone coverage is also a factor of area, you could safely assume that it would be (approximately) 30 times more expensive to blanket the US than Finland, yet our population density is only double.
I love this advice. Bookmarked.

There are competitors in the field. The problem that I'm trying to solve has been marginally solved (using sloppy shortcuts) but I want to solve it the real way. I think there's a market. It's a niche market, with 2 very established companies (100+ years old) but they don't have (i'm really really really hoping they don't) what I want to make.
Sony suing fail0verflow & geohot over PS3 jailbreak [pdf]
Hardware decoders already exist for VP8.
Apple will not allow Verizon to preload software on iPhone
Aww, that's so cute I just barfed in my mouth a little.
No, but Apple is the biggest factor. I'm willing to bet more corporate decision makers have iPhone's than Androids (which also don't support WebM by the way) and when you're selling a video hosting and asset management service that matters.

These are the other extremely popular devices that support H.264 and most will not be supporting WebM anytime soon so why would I encode in WebM until they do.

Android devices.

Sony PSP.

Sony Playstation 3.

Xbox 360.

Blackberrys.

Some Symbian Phones.

Windows Phone 7.

I'll jump on the WebM bandwagon as soon as more then 50% of the popular consumer devices support it. Taking away support for an established and popular codec just makes you an asshole and will be nothing more then an inconvenience as long as Flash player supports it and is included with Chrome.
U.S. spam now top of global list - UPI.com
The WP entry has something to offer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengdu_J-20
I'm a content creator. The question I had before is, "why should I pay money for a fucking video format". Now the answer is, "you shouldn't".

Hating Google is pretty low on my todo list.
He and his executive team had just somehow driven hundreds of people to work hard for months, giving 20 hour days, even 48 hour sleepless stints...

If put in more work than what your cash salary is worth, then you are investing. And sometimes investors get no return. Invest with caution.
If it's implied it's not intentional. I'll state forthright that Gruber's bias is worn on his sleeve. You'd have to be a fool to argue otherwise. But even someone with bias can ask straight forward questions. While Google and Apple may be engaged in some perceived "battle to the death", it doesn't mean that someone with an Apple bias can't ask valid questions about Google's decisions.

The OP accused Gruber of having an inappropriate agenda and not acting in good faith. I didn't read that between the lines in Gruber's post, so I'm curious why he/she did.
I have this terrifying feeling that 3 months into the project that a company will have the exact same product and that's 3 months of work down the drain.

Apple didn't have the first MP3 player. IBM didn't make the first personal computer. Being first to market might not mean quite what you think.
From the comments there... DHH shitting on the app store http://bigthink.com/ideas/21603
Everyone sounds more nebbish when translated through a reporter.
Nice library. It looks like a great candidate for one of our upcoming projects.
I'm suspicious of anyone who obviously doesn't think innovation is innovation without making sure your innovation actually works (with tests).
> How do you rate your own writing?

You can do it objectively or subjectively. Objectively you'd use some metrics or measurements. I do a little of that, but mostly it's a subjective "feel" thing.

> What percentage of your posts make the extremely high quality content mark that you attribute to PG and Sivers?

I thought about this for a while, and I'm not sure how to answer it... I don't really benchmark myself against Graham or Sivers.

Yeah, I'm not really sure how to answer this. In a good month, I'll write between 1 and 6 pieces where everything comes together at the height of my current ability... but I'm still developing my skill, so even a couple months later I'll see a number of improvements I could make to a pretty good post.

> If your aim is to improve as a writer, then over time shouldn't your output reduce to only keep the good stuff and filter out the not-so-good stuff?

Easier said than done! I'm not good at predicting what'll be popular yet. For instance, I wrote an analysis of why Walmart failed in Korea that I thought was particularly interesting, but it didn't take off. Then there's been some offhand casual posts I've made that do take off. Go figure, eh?
Is Naming Your Startup “Hipster” Genius Or Terrible?
Why? Do lamas have radar dishes installed in their foreheads?
But why do you care so much? Google did what they think is right for them and the web long-term. They're not in the business of making your job easy and certainly aren't in the business of extending ubiquity of what they feel is a harmful codec.

You don't have to agree. If you don't want to re-encode to WebM then don't. The users using browsers that don't support H.264 natively will get the Flash wrapper. If they don't like it they can use a different browser that does H.264 natively or go to a different content provider who will encode in WebM. Free market.

If WebM proves popular and wins the format war, we get a (FUD aside) license free codec. If it doesn't, at worst we get status quo of part-Flash, part-H.264 video experience, and at best we get your dream of H.264 ubiquity. Where's the loss?
It'll be one of those things where time will tell.

I have sympathy for those involved in encoding but one has to remember that disruptive technologies are called disruptive for a reason. If WebM takes off its going to cause someone pain during the process... :)

Since you edited I'll edit too:

Which of those devices will still be around and usable in 5 years? Which ones won't be replaced by shiny new hardware? Your timeframe is a bit different than Google's.
The PDFs original link is http://geohot.com/Motion%20For%20TRO.pdf .. I mirrored it because his server is not responding.

Wow. Just wow. I guess this was expected. Hope they lawyer up properly. They are going to need it.
I'll repeat my question, which browsers stopped rendering GIFs when it became an issue?

I'm all for WebM. Let me know when consumers can use it and until then it's in your user's best interest to support H.264 because that's what the content I want to watch today is encoded in.
There is SIM Card equivalent for CDMA technology called R-UIM (Removable User Identity Module). It's commonly used by any CDMA phone outside the US.

I wonder if this CDMA iPhone come with R-UIM card or it have build in ID which register with the network?
The S&P 500 was up 11% last year, the Dow was up 9.5%, and the Nasdaq was up 17.5%
My reading of the SEC/CFTC report is pretty much the opposite of "absolved", though they consider HFTs only one factor magnifying the spike, rather than the initial cause (i.e., consider HFTs a volatility-increasing factor).

From the report's punchline:

The combined selling pressure from the Sell Algorithm, HFTs and other traders drove the price of the E-Mini down approximately 3% in just four minutes from the beginning of 2:41 p.m. through the end of 2:44 p.m. ... HFTs began to quickly buy and then resell contracts to each other – generating a “hot-potato” volume effect as the same positions were rapidly passed back and forth. Between 2:45:13 and 2:45:27, HFTs traded over 27,000 contracts, which accounted for about 49 percent of the total trading volume, while buying only about 200 additional contracts net.
These are some of the tamest allegations of corporate wrong doing ever made. The worst of them is that Mike Jones waited to fire people as long as possible instead of firing them in time for Christmas.
You clearly don't understand the importance of TDD like many others (count the downvotes).

If you cannot stay with the curve because of your lack of knowledge, maybe you should spend less time flaming on Hackernews and more time studying up, sir.
Question about hardware: http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8..., http://mashable.com/2010/05/19/vp8-webm-support/

Your patent FUD: any software can be potentially sued for patent infringement. You can't prove the opposite. See Oracle vs. Google on Java patents and a number of other examples.

Pointing that out about WebM software specifically is not insightful. You can make the exact "but can you prove it doesn't infringe patents" statements about any software product.

There are, however, reasons to believe that WebM does indeed avoids patents.

1. It's a technology that has been created and commercially licensed by On2 for years. In all those years no one sued On2.

2. On2 licensees (including Adobe) were confident enough about the technology being patent-free to pay good money for the license.

3. Google, presumably, is not stupid and didn't pay hundreds of millions of dollars without doing a technology evaluation, including potential patent issues.

4. Even if someone sues WebM, Google has a better chance than most to defend it.

So while no one can ever satisfy people demanding impossible proof of WebM being safe from patent threats, there are very good reasons to believe it is indeed safe.
And isn't one of the most important aspects of the F22 its avionics system? Do we have any information about the J-20's avionics?
interesting.
On a slightly tangential note, I wonder if the Chinese are going to attain sophisticated manned aerial capabilities just in time to have it completely superseded by American UAV capabilities which aren't constrained by having to contain human meat bags....
http://wiredforwar.pwsinger.com/
Oh, no, type systems need to be debated. It's just that some care about definitions needs to be taken lest you end up with a megabyte or two of text between many participants going on for several days with no two participants actually sharing a definition, and thus with none of the participants actually understanding each other.

My personal preference is to identify the language is question, which is usually the important and relevant point anyhow. Strong vs weak typing? Too vague. Haskell vs Python or Java vs C++, now we've got something we can sink our teeth into and we're not just spinning in space.
> If it looks terrible, it's a bad design.

Looks terrible by whose standards? If you go by my standards, all Mac stuff has 'bad design' by this rule if only because of the font rendering.
Asahi.com（朝日新聞社）：Businesses see widgets as effective promotion tools - English
It amazes me that Yahoo doesn't want to keep/use delicious. What an amazing database of user voted content.
California state bonds are in this vicinity. Rates of return vary. Tax-exempt.
Well put.

If h.264 compatibility is left usable in Chrome then there is no reason to switch.
I really don't think macros are much different than any other API. The only difference is that it's an API that affects the language itself, and thus the stakes are higher. If you design the API well, then it makes code so much easier to read than if you didn't use a macro. If you design the API poorly, then it makes it much more difficult to read than if you didn't use a macro.

Thus, I think a lot of it boils down to risk aversion.
Newton had Leibniz (and others) pushing calculus. Einstein made use of ideas from Lorenz pushing Relativity. Elisha Gray applied for a patent on the telephone the same day as Alexander Bell. Perhaps I should have been more clear. The fact that most people aren't doing what you are is no excuse to give up. If nobody is doing what you are maybe you are a super genius - or maybe you have a dumb idea.
For those who are locked in on contract, sure, but I wonder how AT&T's tethering terms versus Verizon's are going to affect AT&T's ability to attract new customers.
I personally don't think this is a good move from Sony. Apple seem to have the right stance with their hardware being compromised - pretty much just ignore it.

Bringing a legal action like this just raises the public awareness to the hack (not good for Sony). It pisses more hackers off (not good for Sony) and it doesn't fix what seems to be an unfixable problem for Sony.

I'm sure the courts will be made aware that Sony removed a "key" feature/selling point of a console and left consumers with little choice about how to re-enable that feature.

Anyway, Geohot shouldn't have been such an egomaniac, the keys/tools could have been leaked online anonymously and he wouldn't be in legal trouble. Still, I can see an out of court settlement of some kind on the horizon...
> A new material might make very robust dental implants.

I stopped reading after that. When these "Wonder Materials" are actually for sale is when its time to tell everyone.
I saw this analysis when it came out. He certainly may know what he's talking about but I think it's more likely that Google's due diligence would have caught these legal issues than an x264 developer. Not guaranteed, but likely.
You mean Facemash?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook#Facemash
Aigner Replica Watches
Nyc startup tries to make sports teams more data driven
The people taking videos of their kids won't be doing H.264. Their videocams and/or their Youtubes will be doing the encoding, and their browsers will be doing the decoding. In both cases, larger organizations which are easier to bill.
I'm not seeing how my statement has anything to do with TDD. OP was very harsh in his critique, whether it be valid or not (which I never said anything about), and that's all I was making a point about.

Going from there to my supposed 'lack of knowledge' is a poor representation of yourself, too.
Where Bean Counting Fails
Well the Android browser still can't render animated GIFs. There's a joke in here somewhere.
> 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.

Agree. J2EE is an even worse example of "Java the culture". For a much better alternative, see Guice. I personally prefer "it's okay to call new sometimes" Design Pattern to IoC containers (but occasionally I find myself using Guice).
Piemuggacollarbombaphobia