skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is going to sound trollish, but I'll take a shot anyway: in three to five years, you'll be able to replace "MySpace" in this article with "Facebook" and it'll make perfect sense.

Making money is the key. MySpace wasn't able to do it with 100 million users and Facebook won't be able to do it with a billion users. Someday, perhaps, investors will learn that it's hard to make a killing by throwing free parties. If you're Twitter or Tumblr any similar social site, learn from these mistakes! By having Pro accounts, Flickr could last for decades with a decent return rate. Twitter and Facebook, on the other hand, will burn out in a few years if they don't find a sustainable source of revenue.
The Apache Projects – The Justice League Of Scalability
Most people install flash anyway, regardless of whether or not it's preinstalled. Ideally, everyone could just kill flash and that would be awesome, but a huge amount of content is already made in flash and there are a few areas where standards are not implemented consistently or at all (eg. the Device API for accessing webcams and microphones, though a version of Android does support that and the ConnectionPeer interface for peer-to-peer connections). Flash isn't used exclusively for video.

When it's 2028 and all the h.264 patents finally expire, it would be great if Google were to add h.264 back to the chrome browser, but of course, the browser landscape would probably be so vastly different that it would be hardly relevant.

YouTube is reencoding the videos in WebM. But it's doubtful that the h.264 videos will be removed because of Apple's stubbornness in only supporting a single format (However, I'm quite sure Safari plays whatever videos are supported by the pluggable QuickTime engine, so once someone makes a QT plugin that adds WebM, it'll play in Safari. The same way IE9 implements video codecs).

Gruber only lists 4 or so companies that use H.264 with <video>. There probably aren't too many more that exclusively use h.264 with <video>. Certainly far less than the number of people who use flash video.
It's also the only part of the web where the de-facto standard (h264) is owned by a commercial entity

Flash is still used for video more than H.264 both for historical reasons and because it has some (albeit rudimentary) content protection. Goolge is supporting/promoting Flash in Chrome. Ostensibly for security reasons, but it is not an easy move to explain.

Google is dropping H.264 in their browser for strategic reasons.
Awesome, they just invented a small part of Ted Nelson's Xanadu project. Say what you will about Xanadu being vapour-ware but at least Mr Nelson designed it properly to handle problems like deep-linking and track-backs which the Web has to employ workarounds for.
I realize Gruber is very pro-Apple, but this article makes no mention of them. In fact, it seems this article is solely in terms of Google (and just slightly Adobe, and a few content providers).

Imagine, if you will, this was written by someone who wasn't pro-Apple. Does it not all ring entirely just as true?
Yes, Flash, which also plays H.264 video...
China is continually at war with their citizenry. I'm sure they'll find a use for it in Tibet.
The next line reads:

> All other royalties will remain in place such as the royalties for products that decode and encode H.264 video.[12] The license terms are updated in 5-year blocks.[13]

Secondly 'end users' by their definition doesn't include content creators who distribute or encode video. The consortium is going after the supply side, not the demand side.

To me, this is a good idea because suppliers are typically large or at least static entities that can easily be identified, and charged. Trying to catch end-users is a fools errand, and makes one a target for hatred ala the RIAA.
Spotify uses Vorbis and has ten million users.
Hi, you are new here, so check out: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

For instance:
"Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important."

As well as:
Submission guidelines -
"If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

Welcome, I hope you find Hacker News as entertaining as I do.
As to Gruber: he has no credibility asking Google tough questions.

Why do you need credibility to ask questions?
groovy++ seems to beat scala, at least in some tests:

http://groovy.dzone.com/articles/why-scala-actors-15-20-time...
I take it you are a Flash supporter? Because Flash plays H.264, and Google ships Chrome with Flash. So Google Chrome has not lost the ability to play H.264, it just does so through Flash now. If Google were to stop shipping Chrome with Flash that would be saying something.
And furthermore, content creators are going to be asking these exact same questions.
Ok here, are some answers, off the top of my head. They are not Google's answers, but what I imagine Google would say if they felt like being honest.

1. No Flash wont be dropped. Why must we be forced to the extreme absolutist position in one direction or another? We try to do what is right, but we are also practical, and will not attempt things that will cause too much trouble for their benefit. It is always easier to affect the path of technology in its infancy than after it has been established. Flash is established; we will not try to fight it and will let it die a natural death. HTML 5 video is in its infancy and we will try our best to guide it in the right direction.

2. We will probably leave that up to the manufacturers. However, once the WebM hardware accelerators start shipping, we expect h.264 support to drop because no manufacturer likes to pay per phone licensing fees.

3. Youtube will still retain h.264 support to allow compatibility with iOS devices, until iOS devices start supporting WebM.

4. They will have some time to think about it. First we are not dropping h.264 support immediately. Even after we drop support, they can still use flash to support their h.264 video (as most of them already do) so they do not lose anything. But we are making it clear that we are throwing our weight behind WebM, and they will eventually figure out that they are paying h.264 license fees for no good reason.

5. We are. Lots of people on the web are. Many people that have to write checks to MPEG-LA are. Many people that are thinking of doing a video startup but are worried about the licensing costs are.
The Mobile Sensing Group at Dartmouth
disclaim.er?

It's time for Eritrea to join Tuvalu (.tv) on the TLD money train!
Curation is the New Search is the New Curation
If you're just going to make ad hom accusations, there's no way of pleasing you.

I addressed templates, which to the extent I've seen them, are a confusing nightmare. You can say that's because I'm not smart enough, but I'd retort that I don't want to debug something that smart.

Non-nullable references you can make a case for, but but it's minor and you can also say 2 types of references complicates things much more than one type of reference. Java dodges all kinds of confusion by only having one kind. And context management, which is such a relic that I had to google it, seems to be a hack to make memory management easier to deal with. Again, clever, but I'm not sure I want to debug it. How about avoiding static state and dodging the whole problem.

Java has 50 keywords total, including "void" and all primitive types, and it can do almost all of what C++ can. Yes, the OO model is a product of 1995. See smalltalk. EJB is "enterprisey", Java is not. And all organizations, regardless of hipness, need maintainable code.

Anyways, certainly nothing is perfect, so I'd love to hear more thought-out reasons why Java sucks.
Your bar for what is awesome is really low.

This is really convenient. But its convenient in the same way that getting a 3/8 socket is convenient. Needed for some jobs, but I wouldn't call it awesome.

The Motorola Xoom, borderline awesome. Teleportation, awesome. Adding support for a programming construct that has been around for 25 years, at least, hard for me to call it awesome. Would you call it awesome if they added 6502 acceleration? I'm sure that would be convenient for your assembly language Commodore 64 games.

If this is awesome, what isn't?
Report reveals the dirty dozen top spam-relaying countries
Completely agree bonaldi. What a stupid move by Google. In order to promote their own technology they are setting back HTML5 video another year or 2 so they can fluff around and whine about which video codec is better.

I could understand other companies not implementing WebM because it was a new codec developed by Google with no existing community or anything around it.

But such a widely used codec (all my videos are H.264), I don't understand.

Can't they just all support each others codec's, get this stupid war over with and start a large scale push of HTML5.
1. a boatload of page view info you are sending off to google

2. it's another dependency that you don't control
How does it compare to the personal shopper / stylist of http://www.tobi.com/
or the BBB
Macrophobia
I'm not a Java fan, nor have I read much Java code at all, but I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that somewhere there exists beautiful Java code. Even if for no reason that there's been enough of it written that somebody wrote beautiful Java just by sheer luck.
January 14, 2008: The day the market lost faith in Apple
OpenStudy Partners w/ Yale & NYU to Offer More OER Study Groups | Hack Education
In Russia, Source Opens You
The Engineering IT Supply Manifesto
I think there are enough SaaS product around to warrant a .app domain, then runrate.app/ would be my suggestion. (I live in the theoretical)
Google Science Fair (for kids aged 13-19)
Considering they have been securing massive massive mineral resources in africa for the next 50-100 years, I am sure that we will be at war with them in the next 20.
A lot of your points I'll concede are probably better in Ruby. At least they're defaults in Ruby, while the solutions in Perl exist on CPAN (AnyEvent and POE for example for solutions similar to Fiber exit on CPAN but not in core).

However either you've totally missed the last four years in Perl. Perl has been challenged by Ruby, Python and Perl6. Because of this we've had a lot of developments that you gloss over or ignore.

> I can remember the Ruby syntax for defining a class. In Perl I had to look it up every time. Also Perl has two competing class systems.

The Perl Syntax for defining a class is pretty straight forward. I'm awfully sure I haven't had to look it up in a decade:

package Foo;
sub new { my $class = shift; bless {}, $class }
1;

I'm not sure what the "competing class" system you're referring to is though. Perhaps you mean Moose (first released in 2006 when you left). The assumption that it is "different" is incorrect because Moose does roughly the above, except the `new` method is inherited from a base class. The Moose syntax here is:

package Foo;
use Moose;
1;

Given the Moose syntax, I'm not sure what is harder to remember than Ruby's syntax:

class Foo
end

Additionally there is MooseX::Declare which hacks the Perl parser/tokenizer to allow new keyword syntax (a feature added to core 5.12) allowing you to say:

class Foo { }

> Good Perl practice involves boilerplate such as 'use strict'. I hear about lint tools and such and it makes me think the situation has gotten worse since 2006.

Yes it is unfortunate that Larry didn't predict what the good defaults would be in 1987 (Perl1) or 1994 (Perl5). With Perl 5.12 good Perl practice involves:

package Foo;
use 5.12;

I'm not sure that this is necessarily "worse" than 2006's:

package Foo;
use strict;
use warnings;

It is 2/3rds of the line count, but really we're talking about one line. Additionally I'm a very active member of the Perl community and I haven't heard about "lint tools". Perhaps you mean `perltidy`? This isn't a lint tool, it's a source code beautifier ... like html-tidy.

> Ruby IO operations throw exceptions when they fail. Hence you don't need the '|| or die "could not open!"' idiom.

You can use the (now in core) `autodie` pragma to eliminate this idiom from Perl too. Yes it's unfortunate that the idiom could spread for the first 20 something years of Perl making the nearly-anal-backwards-compatible defaults not enable it.

> The Ruby Array class and the Enumerable module are good. I've become dependent on methods that aren't as readily available in Perl: include? each_with_index all? any? permutation. Also the intersection and union operators: & and |

These exist on CPAN in various modules. List::Util, List::More::Util etc. Yes it is unfortunate that they're not more easily available. This is part of the price paid to backwards compatibility demons and keeping the Perl standard library (relatively) small.
I've created a web site called "PublicLog.com" which is at http://publiclog.com

It's 100% public.

It's for sharing your activities (past, present, future) and learning about other user's activities.

(I know, I know the UIX design is horrible! I'm working on improving it!)

Hope you find it useful.
I saw a billboard today from AT&T that advertised 97% coverage of the US. And that's probably optimistic.
Faceted Search on Mozilla Input using Sphinx
20 to 35% of amalgam fillings are silver so this material has much smaller silver content than most metallic looking fillings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amalgam_(dentistry)
Analysis on this score has been done by an x264 developer (this came out around the same time WebM was announced): http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377

Money quote, from the conclusion: "With regard to patents, VP8 copies too much from H.264 for comfort, no matter whose word is behind the claim of being patent-free. This doesn't mean that it’s sure to be covered by patents, but until Google can give us evidence as to why it isn’t, I would be cautious." There are examples given throughout the post.
While we're looking through previous 'could have been facebook' social networks, I remember receiving invites to sixdegrees.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SixDegrees.com

This old article from 1998 is worth a look:
http://www.dougbedell.com/sixdegrees1.html

Social recommendation:
"You can get a movie review from Siskel and Ebert, but wouldn' t you rather hear it from friends you trust?" he asked."

Value in data:
"In exchange for traffic at its site, Six Degrees sells advertising on the site and its demographic information compiled from member questionnaires."

The wall:
"Logging in brings users their own personal bulletin board, where only their first-degree circle may post messages. A powerful internal search engine lets users locate those with similar interests, contact Six Degrees members worldwide and spin out from their sphere of influence. "

You can speculate about why it didn't get further.
I would speculate the network of people online regularly just wasn't dense enough for adoption, it didn't have the viral hook of signing up to view photoss, and the dense clusters (universities) to grow the network out from.

Still, they were thinking far ahead of the game.
Bitterness, Anger And Betrayal At MySpace
> The big deal breaker i see is the mobile devices who natively support H264

And of coure it's only a coincidence that most of those are the ones competing with a Google product.
"Who would be happy?" != "Would a majority be happy?"

I didn't assert everyone would be over the moon with Flash gone. I'm saying that you don't have to look hard for people who would be. Killing H.264, a popular format, in a growing browser is much more of a headscratcher.

>Apple's doing what Apple wants, users be damned; of arrogance born out of success.

I think you've got that mixed up. Apple's success is a function of its arrogance. Every smash hit they've had came from arrogance, whether you pick the iMac, with its embrace of USB, to iTunes, with its crazy, user-friendly licensing, or the iPod, with its paltry storage space and simplistic UI, or the iPhone, with its lack of a keyboard or stylus... etc.

Apple's success comes from having the balls to say "Fuck you guys, we're doing it this way, because it's better." As usual, they got it right with Flash. And history has shown that in the end, users were at the very center of those decisions, even if the consequences were initially unfamiliar.
Just thought I'd throw this out there that a really nice alternative is luntbuild http://luntbuild.javaforge.com/ and if you are an open-source project you can use quickbuild for free (or pay for it if you are commercial): http://www.pmease.com/
I so guess all these years of exfiltrating military design secrets from the West has finally paid off.
Saying what? We hate our users?

Do you understand what Google has done with "Flash"?

Since 99% of their users WILL have Flash installed anyway Google decided they would make sure their users would have the most up to date version without the user being involved at all. No other browser does that.

In Chrome 9 the Flash plugin is sandboxed.

Google's moves are 100% pragmatic.

Why the hell is there so much support for a software patent cartel among Hacker News members? I thought software patents were a major danger to startups...
And I thought people were happy for HTML5 video because it eliminated the need for Flash. We've turned a full circle.
The Perl community has a strong movement of anti-clever, or at least "clever as a last resort" these days. Much of the Modern Perl movement is based upon being solidly engineered over shiny and polished. Take for example Moose's stated policy of prioritizing Correctness over everything else.
I am sorry but this is just a rumor! Check this out: http://www.iricvalley.com/2011/01/facebook-shutdown-is-just-...
TinySrc: Scale images to fit mobile browsers
The Simplification of Computing (or: Why Geeks are Niche Users)
Doesn't facebook take a cut out of all the little apps and games that make money through their site? And facebook has the opportunity for targeted advertising far beyond what Groupon offers.
Further proof of MySpace as a failed company is that one cannot delete one's profile from the site without jumping through an exhaustive series of hoops which culminates in adding the words "Delete my profile" to your profile.
Cars is my least favorite Pixar movie. Far too much of the payload was nostalgia for the era of Route 66. An era that my parents could have caught the tail end of. I suppose also my personal philosophy is that the past is important but that trying to lock the past in is not a way to commemorate or honor it, but a way of being imprisoned by it, and the central story just falls flat for me. YMWV, of course.

(My next least favorite is Finding Nemo, because Nemo's dad is my mother-in-law, on film. Only she hasn't had the epiphany about needing to let go of worry at some point. Again, YMWV.)
Finland: 16 people/km^2

Almost full coverage: http://www.mobileworldlive.com/maps/network_info.php?nid=377...
Already there, already doing that. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corundum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_alumina
Or, to ground this in actual HCI terms: from a screenshot alone, you should be able to see the affordances of a design. If you need more than the screenshot to find your way around the app, the app is badly designed in other ways (mystery-meat navigation.) Thus, it is actually the Principle of Charity that would have us evaluate the app by a screenshot.
Yeah, I wish those compared to Apt.
Suppliers are also people who take videos of their kids and post them on the internet.
I don't miss the eye-candy. Suspend/resume works fine. Battery life is fine.
How does it benefit me right now?

As a person who deals in video on the web, they want to instantly double my cost to encode video by fragmenting the near ubiquity H.264 currently offers.

As an iOS device and xBox owner they want to obsolete my hardware.

As a Chrome user, they want to force me to use the crappy Flash player to view H.264 content.

I don't understand why they can't promote and improve WebM and maintain H.264 compatibility. Which browsers stopped rendering GIFs when it became an issue?
> So they begin to spend $Bn on more and more elaborate weapons systems to challenge a non-existent threat.

The threat that this is a change to is primarily the USA's F-22. Which definitely exists.
Anyone afraid?
How often do you have the fear that someone will beat you to a working product?

After posting here the last time, I have decided to work on an idea I've had for a while. The project has been quite a handful already (but so much fun!!) and I'm doing it in the evenings after work. It will involve truly extensive work in the future (hardware, DSP, audio, iPad programming) - but I think it's a very cool (and much needed) product idea.
I have started to prototype the hardware (since I remember the fundamentals from before) and my hope is to bring in outside expertise to finesse each component to perfection as I have a working-ish prototype.

But for some reason, 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.

Anyone else have this fear? Is this normal? What did you do to overcome it? Is the solution just to jump in and see how it goes?
I agree it's pragmatic, it's just not enabling "open innovation" like Google claims. It's just enabling more dependence on Flash.
A hot war between the USA and China is unlikely, IMO. Both sides have the potential to face too much damage, even if nuclear weapons aren't used.
It's because it's the best codec we have for moderate-resolution video, and it already has almost %100 of the market (played back via Flash). Making it available in <video> would allow people to drop the Flash part.
And here's the money quote from the comments (post stolen from mrbrubeck: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2093675)

This comment in response to that post makes an interesting point; the most similar bits are likely the most carefully vetted, and may be written deliberately to avoid patent infringement. Patents on standards can be very narrow; as long they cover exactly what's in the spec, then any implementer of the standard still has to pay up:

"Patents are about _details_ so the mere fact that something does something like something else, isn’t necessarily something at all.

As we’ve pointed out before, many codec patents are exceptionally easy to work around: They specify every little detail because it makes it _much_ easier to get through the examination but doesn’t harm the patent’s ability to read on the final standard because the standard specifics exactly the patented behaviour.

D_S, for all his undeniable H.264 experience isn’t an expert on patents or even the H.264 patents. We can assume that in cases where VP8 looks similar to H.264 those would have been exactly the cases where care was taken to differ in the right places. I’d expect the primary risks for VP8 to be anywhere _but_ there."

more at http://blog.gingertech.net/2010/05/20/vp8-adobe-is-the-key-t....
Which, as others in this thread have pointed out, means it was likely explicitly designed to not violate H.264 patents.
Shiny & new != better. This is pure awesomeness for people looking to write applications on Android that require very high performance and want to minimize the costs in doing so.

On top of this, providing a more comprehensive native API may allow other languages (Haskell maybe??) to tie into the Android SDK - now that would be very nice!

Don't be so short-sighted.
Yeah. There is no way Google of all people could launch a Cell Phone OS based on a Java variant and beat Apple by the end of 2010. Stupidest idea ever. I'm still laughing.
You are not thinking long-term enough.
97% of where the population is covered– by 2G. Not 97% of the US's area or with 3G or even covered with adequate capacity for high population areas.
I unsubscribed them from my Google Reader today. I have MG fatigue, he posts more often than necessary, and his article contents are repetitive, predictable, and rambly.