skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it me or is RTFHIG actually generating discussion, adding value and generally making sense? What is it that 37signals are doing in this post again?

Oh, I'm sorry, trying to engage in a urinal measurement comparison.

There seems to be a thing amongst blogs and indeed writers. They reach a certian level in which they comment on things that affect them, then they comment on things that don't affect them, then they seem to adopt a particular stance that seems controversial to us, but not to them, because thus far we have celebrated them - they have become celebrities. I've seen this with Guber, I've seen this with 37 signals. Perhaps one day this will happen to me (hopefully I'll never become important enough). From that point on the shark is never far away from jumping.

I don't think 37 signals jumped the shark here, but I do think they went too far. They're right, there is no place for just shitting all over other people's work. Shame they forgot their perspective on who was doing the shitting.
Holy crap, is spamming Hacker News to get some cheap traffic this easy?
Web Developers: Charging Too Little Hurts the Entire Community
transparent aluminum?
Is 50 having tough times? A couple of weeks ago he was asking his Twitter followers for $100 to shovel the snow off their driveways: http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/12/50_cent_shoveli...
I believe lukeschlather provided a good response, but I would like to add something more about the hardware side. It is a mistake to believe that one needs an entirely newly designed hardware chip to handle the WebM standard. Those hardware accelerators are not pure hardware. They are like little computers, with their own processors, and their own instruction memories, and their own software (or firmware). The processors are designed to efficiently compute the most commonly used math operations of the standard (which are usually Fourier transforms, matrix operations, etc.). The firmware causes the processor to apply the mathematical operations properly to the data to decode the video.

The thing is that all of those video standards use more or less the same basic math operations, just in a different way. This means that a WebM hardware accelerator would look very similar hardware wise to a h.264 one but would have different firmware.

In practice, I am sure that the hardware companies will make one hardware accelerator that can handle both h.264 and webm through different firmware programs. So you wont need much additional silicon or power to handle WebM. It might cost more, if the hardware companies decide to charge extra for WebM support, but that surcharge will not be much, because (i) they do not need to pay license fees, and (ii) there is a lot of competition in that field.
OK - so I'm accessing this on my mobile device, and I read through all the smug, self-congratulatory crap that just oozes cleverness, and I get to the link to the puzzle, and it's a Word document?

At least I assume it is. My device asks if I want to download this file with a "doc" extension.

Really?
> there is no market advantage to supporting the WebM format as there's no WebM-exclusive content.

hristov's entire parent post was about why this sentence should end in "for now."
I liked Cars. I absolutely hated Up! and Wall-e with a passion.

Cars is obviously a reasonably simple storyline, but it's a good movie with good characters. Kids like cars shrug it's a movie about toy cars... what's not to like?

Better than an obese highly irritating boy scout kid hitching a lift on a house with an old guy :/
I use OhLife because it's so easy just to hammer off a few sentences at 8pm when it sends you that daily email.

And the random excerpt from the past is what keeps me opening the emails every time. Interesting to look back at the past.
for C code: Anything by djb. http://cr.yp.to Unconventional, but top quality.
for C or Python code: Anything by Avery Pennarun (http://apenwarr.ca - his stuff is on GitHub)
for C or Lua code: Anything by Mike Pall (http://luajit.org)

The Python interpreter is mostly a joy to read.

FLTK is a great example of C++ code from the days before template worms ate everyone's brains.
The article mentioned dental implants as a possible use, but they also mentioned it has a very high silver content. I would have thought, given silver's relatively high reactivity, that it wouldn't be suitable for dental use. I'd be interested in hearing from someone with a chemistry background on this.
Why isn't it sufficient to use the Google-hosted jQuery? It's likely to be cached.
Love Your Customers
Wait, Americans are getting dropped calls?

Whenever I hear of horror stories from the states about crappy phone or broadband service, I find it incredible that such an advanced country with such amazing people can have this issue.

If you don't mind, as an experiment could you possible post as a comment your location, your download bandwidth and the number of days in a month that it's up without interruption. I'd like to collate this and give the data back in some way to the HN community.

To start with:
location: Reading, England
Bandwidht: 18 Mbits download, 1.3 Mbits upload.
Number of days within a month wihthout interruption: Normally 30, although in December there were a couple of hours where there was no Internet access.
He seemed to be a pretty savvy investor.

That's also one of the worst points about what he did, with his portfolio and status as an accredited investor he's not going to get much leeway for not knowing this was illegal.
"The founders say that they would have kept trying much harder at the Facebook component if they knew how huge a similar site would become."

Everyone would be a millionaire with the benefit of hindsight.
Ask HN: Have you seen some beautiful Java Code?
Recently I've been working in Java, on a project started years ago. All the code I see, whether developed inside this project or in external libraries, is horrible.

It is almost devoid of content -- hundreds of classes, each doing a few assignments and logging some data, and then deferring to another class.

I've seen some beautiful C code, e.g. the LuaJit2 compiler written by Mike Pall. I've seen beautiful C++ code in the FLTK project. I've found beautiful Python code e.g. in apenwarr's "bup" and "redo" projects.

But I've never seen any beautiful java code that gets something done clearly. Did you?
Anatomy of a Re-Design, Part I
It's a case of inverted causality. The author thinks that because a lot of great people he knows about wrote journals that writing journals helps make a great man. It may in fact be that great men that write journals are the ones he knows about.

It does not address the (likely many many) people who keep journals but will not be considered great.

It is a valid point that keeping a journal does increase your legacy as it becomes easier to write memoirs for your grandchildren. Even if no one else will read it, they will have a vivid portrait.
Why does this feel like an open plea to price fix? If outbidding your competition guarantees you work, you should do it.
Those are some of the best Disney movies :/
If you want to do consumer products learn Solidworks. Once you understand and grasp it, it's amazing how quickly you can produce a product, I've gone from concept to prototype within a couple days. The important part is to learn what you can and can't do design wise (drafts, angles, thicknesses, etc), there are quite a lot of limitations but most can be worked around.
Why can't you do two formats?
For me it's not having things to "hide", it's editing and keeping drafts. And I sometimes like pen and paper to supress premature editing. If I have a keyboard, it's hard to keep my fingers off Alt and Ctrl. (I exclusively use web apps and I haven't found/made a good browser-Vi yet.)
The Pixar Story has some issues with it--largely cuts out Alvy Ray Smith and gives a lot more credit to Steve Jobs than deserved. I'd recommend reading The Pixar Touch for a balanced portrayal of the company.

For what it's worth, I got to know Alvy by running into him at various Seattle breakfast spots over the years (he's in Berkeley now). If you ever get to hear him speak, be sure to go up and talk with him. He's nothing but a welcoming, smart, and humble guy.
And one that doesn't like autobox would say:

use 5.12.2; # enables modern features
my $x = 'Apple Carrot Banana';
my @y = sort split ' ', $x;

say @y > 2 ? "we've got ${\scalar @y} elements!"
: 'insufficient elements. fail.';

Not everything needs to be an Object. Not every call needs to be a method call. Some people think better with procedures, some people think better with objects.

One of the reasons I personally like Perl is I can use which ever one is appropriate to the problem domain.

Edit: forgot the `sort` call.
> 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).

The "Who is happy" test for Flash passes, though. I, for one, have desperately yearned for the death of Flash for years before Apple partisans took up the mantle. Why? I was partly responsible for maintenance and analytics of a terrible flash website that, superficially, looked kind of neat. All you have to do is have this trash plugged into something mission critical to start wishing for its demise.

And I'm not alone. Flash is a crappy, frustratingly ubiquitous technology whose marginalization is a godsend for anyone who cares about a usable web. Anyone who has ever tried to use a restaurant website is happy about the end of flash.
Great links!! I have my own music app that I'm building for personal use. Here is a jQuery plugin you might want to check out for the player: http://www.jplayer.org/
IE 9 won't support XP users (60% of Web-connected PCs) so they will only be able to get a fraction of the IE 7 and IE 8 users to upgrade.
An Interview with C++ Creator Bjarne Stroustrup
You have to be very good at Greek to come up with a word for that particular phobia!
cheeseship?! Better edit that one quick before the Pythonistas get you.
Check out all the cities available.

http://usehipster.com/cities
You don't need to use an application to know that a close button that is sixty pixels large, with an appearance that's completely inconsistent with the rest of the application, along with the operating system at large, and is positioned in the wrong place... is poor design.

http://readthefuckinghig.tumblr.com/post/2651530636/when-you...

Half of using a visual interface is visual. You can tell a lot about the quality of a GUI-based application by the level of effort that went into making it look correct.
I've used this technique and works great (article is from 2006). There's a video of it somewhere too, which is helpful for seeing how "wet" the dough is.

If you want to make bread on a regular basis check out "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day": http://www.artisanbreadinfive.com/
I'll stay with ATT for now. I like having simultaneous voice and data. I use it all the time.
Archive.org has some stuff for steamtunnels.net, but it's pretty thin for 1999:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://steamtunnels.net

http://web.archive.org/web/20110112002443/http://www.steamtu...

Too bad - it would have been fun to explore the remnants of this site.
So you just want Google to keep raising and raising the threshold? You know that can't last forever, right?
I've been working on this for the past 4 weeks or so. It was supposed to be a weekend hack, but I kept on wanting to 'polish' it and it turned out to have a lot more features than a MVP calls for...

Any advice, critiques on design or content or business would be super great. Thanks!

Some example lists that HN might find relevant:
http://limitedlist.com/list/tech-blog-most-worthy-my-short-a...
http://limitedlist.com/list/preferred-pastebin

PS: Please do try creating your own lists, it's fun and cool!
It is going to be fun watching the first SEC enforcement action based on tweets. It is also going to be fun watching securities lawyers try to create a valid disclaimer that fits in a tweet.
Thanks. Looks good to me, but I like kids movies.
I have one problem with this, Starcraft 2 has taken up 4 – 5 hours per day of my “minerals” (freetime).

I even created a “pylon” (social network) around Starcraft. You can check it out at http://zealotrush.com (Heh, yeah I’m a protoss player too!)

Nice article though. : )
I remember using a social network called Bolt back in '98. People act as if the Internet and social networking is some new thing, it's not.
Unfortunately I'm just quoting my own anecdotal knowledge of the discussions that raged about VP8 when Google released it.

I don't think your link contradicts what I said - in fact, in a way it gels very well with it: the conclusion is that VP8 is essentially H.264 with all sorts of bits missing and tweaks that in most cases make it worse than H.264. That's exactly what you would expect if someone took a patented algorithm and went through it point by point to work around the patented parts.
disclaimer.ly? The service that shortens disclaimers.
I made something similar to this NYTimes.com feature, a few days ago: https://github.com/alexbarredo/insidelink

It's simpler, of course. It's in plain JS and as jQuery plugin
> Still many people just want their h.264 no matter what.

Then they can use a browser whose creators decide to pay for the license.
Rate my start up idea
And they will end up with neither, probably dragging the rest of us down with them.
Programming as a Second Language
There are a few things I'd like to throw in here: 1 is that I didn't even know what the fucking HIG was so I had to look it up and, hell, thanks to that website, if I ever choose to put an App on the Apple App store (highly unlikely), I will probably look up the HIG, and read it. Thankyou.

Secondly this post by 37 signals is inspired by RTFH but the headline is "There is no place for just shitting all over other people's work" - and that's a true statement.

This is something that is particularly rife in amongst programmers: they point at each other and say "what? you don't use X and do X? then you are a shit programmer". Life is about getting things done and getting things done necessitates compromise.

You should see how shit the videos I just made for my product are. They're totally shit, but it's the best I could do and I wanted to put something up there. I didn't have the money to pay a professional or the time to learn to do it better - there you go. Whilst I was doing it my own internal monologue kept saying "This looks like the investor pitch video for Prestige Worldwide" (if you don't get that reference, it's from the film "Step Brothers").

If someone posted my videos on a website called "makeyourfuckingvideosgood.tumblr.com" I wouldn't necessarily be offended because it would generate traffic to my site and I know my limitations and have no sense of pride in what I've created, but that doesn't make it right for someone to wantonly create zero value assertions about the quality of others' work (let me say, though, that I would say that humour adds value so Maddox's "I am better than your kids" is exempt).

Now lastly, I find it somewhat ironic that 37signals have posted all this shitting on the person's work who writes RTFH. Perhaps they could have included some constructive criticism on how to improve their writing, or posted alternative examples of satire they enjoy more.

Perhaps the most appropriate response would have been to create readsomefuckingsatire.tumblr.com and put that site on it.

As professionals we should all be continually learning and improving, and we should never disparage someone who has not learned or improved as much as us in a given field because, as the OP points out:

they're making something and that's awesome.

That's the key point I took out of this post, and it's an attitude I'm going to work harder to cultivate in my own life.
You've wrongly assumed that all gamma rays are from positron annihilations. In fact most of them should be from an ordinary EM effect:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung

The graph in the article is not counting positrons, but gamma photons. A fraction of those photons (not quantified) are from electron-positron annihilations: they infer this because their instrument [1] measures the energy of individual photons, and there is a cluster at/above the lowest possible energy for e-/e+ annihilation photons (511 keV).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintillation_counter
We're definitely looking at internationalizing the product in the future, but right now we're focused on the U.S. market.
We Are All Cyborgs Now - Amber Case  TED
Always remember that diaries are admissible in both the courts of law and public opinion. Contrary to actions, diaries can unequivocally prove state of mind. Furthermore diaries will not speak in the voice of those that wrote it, but will speak in the words of those that read it. So when deciding to keep a journal, ask yourself "what would Bob Packwood do?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Packwood
Knowing what he knows now, he would decide not to.
I played around with this and got it so you can both highlight and have it move the view to the paragraph of choice. Seems pretty interesting.

An issue with it though, when sending the link to someone, and then they click it, browsers (Chrome here) turn the #h[TArTWw,1] into #h%5BTArTWw,1%5D which then seems to be ignored by the script.
a significant portion of the US is rural and thus has less infrastructure. Its much more difficult to have cell tower coverage for 9,800,000 km^2 than for 240,000 km^2.
Awesomeness is a 1987 event loop?
> it wouldn't be at all surprising to see some legal action on the part of MPEG-LA

It would be pretty unlikely actually. MPEG-LA has been threatening about Vorbis for the last 11 years and nothing has happened so far, same thing with theora. The last thing MPGEG-LA want is to reveal what patents exactly are being used by WebM (if any), they'd rather spread FUD and make companies pay for licenses out of fear like they always have as the patent troll that they are. I (and probably Google too) would actually love for them to start suing so we can finally debunk those patents, which is why they probably won't.
I have written a journal almost constantly since I was perhaps 15.

I love it. I can express on it all of my emotions, but still secrets are kept. I can write on it all of my thoughts.

It is, I must say, because of the journals I have kept that I have overcome so much adversity and it is journals which help me to push myslef further, and become better, every singl day. More often I do not know it, but the simple act of sitting in front of my computer and writing my thoughts down helps tremendously towards taking me further to what I want.

The problem I think is that, all the journals I have written, perhaps five or six, are now forever gone and deleted.

The strange thing is that in every entry, though I primarely write about myself and for myself, I aboslutley feel like there is an audience out there. Yet the more stranger thing is that, regardless of the imaginary glory of the moment, a diary to me is a personal thing, for my eyes only. It is something which maks sense to me only, and sometimes, to the moment that I wrote it alone.

Diaries can be dangerous. They are a perfect tool for narrowing your thinking. What you want is repeated over and ver, to the point that you do not feel that you want it anymore but are just saying so.

But I love writing journal entires. Despite the many journals that were deleted by whim and others that were deleted not by choice, I love writing them.

A journal makes me mak sense of what is was ad could be, and tthat, abouve my childrens fascination, is why I write them, despite the fact that they end up deleted and disapeared forever.
Easily showing the client different states of a page was something I was missing the last time I used this technique.
So I created a small jquery-plugin, demo here: http://thinkcreate.github.com/jquery_protoparts/index.html
The Profile Peace Meme (in honor of the slain victims in AZ)
> Who are these fabled banks offering 10x the interest rate?

As usual it depends on country. In Australia the standard savings rate is around 4% at the moment. I can go to my bank and get 6.2% PA term deposits on a 7 month term.
which means that not one of the tablet/mobile devices out there right now supports webM.

is that true? how many released mobile devices have hardware support for the webM decoder?
I'd argue that the community by and large has for at least the last 5 years. Starting in 2005 with Damian Conway's _Perl Best Practices_ and the tools like Perl::Critic that came out of it. Add to that tools like `perltidy` (that was recommended strongly in Damian's book), a strong testing culture (see other threads on HN which discuss the automatic testing of all modules on CPAN), modern changes like 5.12 enabling `strict` and `warnings` pragmas by default. Additionally tools like Moose simplify and reduce the boiler plate associated with traditional areas of Perl's ... shall we say extended obtuse verbosity ... namely Object Oriented programming.

By and large Modern Perl code is strongly encouraged to be readable, maintainable with a sound well engineered basis. If someone is telling you it isn't, they haven't paid attention for half a decade.
As a content producer, this upsets me. I would only consider WebM if it is superior to h.264. But either way I'm having second thoughts about using Chrome and Youtube if they really nix h.264. Google thinks they are bigger than they really are.
More information on the Steamtunnels / Facebook guys' story has been archived here: http://steamtunnels.org
The digital/analog divide is a problem for me. I love the process of putting pencil to paper and writing, but amazing tools like org mode keep me on my computer. I hope eventually I discover how to properly balance these two types of logging.
If it's half as successful as Ping and half as reliable as MobileMe, Google might have a problem on their hands. (Not.)
I love Ohlife, it's just so easy and natural to send an email, it takes almost no activation energy.
The difference being that Vorbis has almost no commercial traction. If large, popular services (like YouTube, for instance) decided to go with a codec like WebM, the MPEG-LA might finally decide to make good on those threats.
So they begin to spend $Bn on more and more elaborate weapons systems to challenge a non-existent threat.

Our plan to destroy them is working, it got rid of the USSR, now China, just the USA to go.
I'm not Google but I'll give it a go:

1. No, Flash isn't just about video playback, the technology is used in a variety of ways on a variety of sites and it's not analogouse to a video codec.

2 - 4. Transitioning the web to WebM encoded video is the ultimate goal but that will have to happen gradually.

5. Adobe, initially. FSF as well
Announcing $1.8 Million Funding for PHPFog
Not exactly the same. The journalist may have done research and interviews for his column and thus may have gained insider information. If the journalists publishes the insider information, then it is no longer insider information, and everyone may trade on it. However, if the journalist trades on the insider information before he publishes it, it is still insider information when he trades on it, and that is illegal.

It is not clear whether 50 cent had any insider info. And it did not seem that his tweet published any insider info. However, there are other ways he may get in trouble.

EDIT: this is obviously not legal advice.