skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really agree with you, this is the first move in a larger push to make WebM the standard for the web, but I don't yet see what google stands to gain from controlling the video standard on the web. What do they get out of that ownership they dont get out of H264?
Heh, this is actually about 33% of the entire service. One cool thing to note is that it's entirely powered by our API; even authentication is done via OAuth2.
Have you used WP7 or the iPhone app? They're pretty good already.
And for anyone, who will use Gecko/Xul-runner as a basis for their product?
Obama Cyber ID = bad idea
I've emailed it to a couple of homeschool lists I belong to. Homeschoolers love stuff like this.

Good luck with it.
Of course maybe that realization was his ingenious motivation for writing the letter. Which means he did learn to make a convincing arguement, in which case he does not deserve his money back, and it was a dumb arguement to begin with. Which means...
Also, there are probably many people (myself included) who are familiar with implementation details of video codecs, but after reading Jason's articles decide that he basically said everything there was to be said.
The other major characteristic of Lisp is that the mapping between programs and data is trivial, which tends to lead to a lot of parentheses. I think these two characteristics are a decent definition of what it means for a language to be a Lisp.
From TFA: "optional single-window mode"

(I'm also very excited about this.)
Well, the upcoming generation of mobile chipsets supports VP8. Tegra 2, for example, supports both decoding and encoding of VP8.
I was there from July '09 until I left to launch Forrst in March '10 -- really sad to see things come to this, but I hope there is still a happy ending in store for all involved.
Done
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1030611/Prince-Charl...
MPEG LA was quoted last June as follows:

"MPEG LA doesn't favor one codec technology over another; we are like a convenience store that offers patent licenses for any number of codecs as a service to the market." (quoted in "Patent cloud looms over Google Web video plan," http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20006245-264.html?tag=mnco...)

Infringing or not, you may be like the local merchant who is forced to buy "insurance" to stay safe.
Exactly. Lawyering around paying your intended tax rate is no different than hacking a system. You're using the rules of the system to circumvent "intent" of it. Yet hacking is seen as morally wrong and dodging taxes is perfectly fine.

Maybe we should just make a law making it illegal to dodge your intended tax rate, just as there are laws against circumventing the intent of a computer system.
Ask HN: Please review my startup www.Swayable.com
The HN community has been a great resource to me in learning all sorts of startup advice/tips etc. I'd like to get some feedback/reviews on my startup http://www.Swayable.com
1) Price has a lot to do with how softly we land. The reason the bubble became as infamous as it did was the aftermath, not so much the bubble.

I am not an economists, but it doesn't seem to be a depression from where I am sitting - people don't walk in thread-bare clothing, nor are there "no help wanted signs".
When I thought about law school two years ago. I spoke to many lawyers and law students. They all told me the same thing.

1) Do not get into law right now. It is experiencing an outsourcing much like tech did in the early 2000s.

2) ONLY, and seriously ONLY, go if you truly love to study law. You will NOT find a job, and most likely you will have to do crap work for awhile.

What made me decide to hold off law school was the fact that I would accumulate too much debt and not be able to pay it off in a timely matter.

A LOT of law students that I spoke to had his grandiose dream and vision of a top job making hundreds of thousands.

One friend told me up front, he chose not to listen, he thought that everyone was just being pessimistic telling him not to get into law, he like most young students, didnt realize how bad it was, no matter how many warnings they got.
This was pretty heavily reported (editorialized, in the Business sections non the less) in this past Sunday NYTimes, enough that I blogged it. . .

NYTimes links

Is Law School a Losing Game?:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/business/09law.html?_r=1

I Want My Money Back (On Everything):
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/business/09law.html

My thoughts: http://jaynesyourway.blogspot.com/2011/01/hear-one-about-law...
Why bother explaining? If he doesn't want to get it, approach it as a contract work: a limited offer where you do what he asks you within a limited time frame and he pays you in exchange, and after that you bail out.

If he already thinks that's what your role should be anyway, then you got yourself a low risk contract work.

Chances are, soon after the work starts, he himself will figure out after a while that this model won't work out, and then you can have a deeper discussion with him, where he actually has some experience to base the discussion off of.
A summary in layman's words?

More specifically about the implications.
What you are describing is the actual default behavior of the app. The only configuration option is to turn off Watch Instantly altogether (for people like my parents).

The app also pulls your DVD or Bluray preference for discs and only applies those to your queue.
Freeciv.net, wow, never thought these people were so far into a web port.
It seems to me that I read once of a device at the Library of Congress which is a purpose built laser scanner for extracting such waveforms from old records, even the drums.
I'd be interested in having access to the Wine database, not necessarily the actual reviews -- although that might be nice too.
>edit: And given trends in solid-state drives, local storage will be cheaper and more energy efficient than a wireless network for a long time.

At some point, though, you get diminishing returns. If all you're doing is playing mp3s at 192 kbit/s, existing wireless is fine and future wireless will be more than adequate. There's no need to add the expense of putting local storage on a mobile device if you can achieve the same end cheaper with cloud hosting.

Now, this is all academic, as we're talking about a radio, and I don't think they're likely to be around by then. Whether or not a device includes local storage will be an economic decision given its intended usage and market conditions of the time, which nobody can predict with great certainty.
Out of curiosity, were none of the major tech publishers interested in a book on SproutCore?

I hope it goes as smoothly as they hope, farming out the writing tasks in parallel. I've found it tough to work with just one distributed co-author on a tech book, much less 60.

I'm working with the Three20 framework for the iPhone, and it suffers from similar documentation problems, though it's gotten better in the last few months.
Carnegie Mellon CS Professor challenges Sony by mirroring Geohot's PS3 hacks
>Paying the lowest amount of taxes required by law is certainly not evil

Lawyering around your "intended" tax rate is no different than (black hat) hacking. It's using the rules of a system to circumvent its intent. It's pretty well accepted that (black hat) hacking is morally wrong. How is one morally wrong and the other not?
http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=43402 claims PHP is using an unmaintained regexp that gives incorrect results.
The article's author was simply trying to make a point, not implying that Apple was in any way likely to actually drop support for h.264. The post I was responding to never addressed the possibility that Apple might do such a thing. Let's get real here.
Google removing jpeg support from Chrome (satire)
Additionally, Team fail0verflow's github is also mirrored: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/GeoHot/mirror/ps3publictools.git/
It seems to me this is the sort of thing that needs an on "on-going conversation", not a one time lecture. Just like you build user experience and community and all that over time, you build understanding in folks who are clueless over time, not all at once. If they won't invest the time, put limits on how much of your own time/energy/whatever you will throw away on a lost cause. Yes, a good example or anecdote or metaphor may help open their eyes but it is probably the beginning of the process not the end.

Peace.
Announcing YUI 3.3.0: AutoComplete, Charts, DataTable, Dial, Resize & more
Puppet: Sanity and continuity for your vital infrastructure
Michael, do you also see Appleseed, Diaspora, OneSocialWeb and Buddycloud as part of a "federated social network" movement?

Are there any concrete steps the different projects are taking to work together?
I give my deepest respect for anyone who fights for open software. I wish I would do more..

I've never met RMS, and as far as I call tell he might be a bit weird, but I still owe him the greatest degree of respect. Thanks to him, and to people like him, I was able to grow up with software I could hack on my own. I started learning proper programming in the early 90's, and I could do that using free (I'm not going to qualify what type of free we're talking about. If you don't know, you're not on HN) software and the reason is for people like him who lead the way

(ok, this post might be more about protocols rather than software, but the main gist of my point still remains)
Minimum Viable Blog: What Blogging Taught Me About Startup Methods in 2010
Raising Happiness
About a decade ago, David Touretsky (the professor behind this) hosted a "gallery" of versions for the DeCSS decryption software.
This is already looking to be a worthy successor to the book Founders at Work, with a greater focus on practical and usable advice for entrepreneurs (instead of anecdotes and war stories). The B2B advice from Sean Murphy, for example, is excellent. Thanks Gabriel!
Napster is more associated with the other Shawn in people's minds, I think.

The few people who remember Napster, anyways.
This paves the way for web frameworks and related utilities to finally make the move to Python 3. They were held back by WSGI.

(that's my understanding anyway. I'm no expert.)
I graduated in 2010. I wonder how long it will be until they start teaching NoSQL in school.
Considering how long it took Flash to gain hardware acceleration on platforms aside from Windows, I wouldn't hold my breathe. MobileFlash on Android still ranges from "Sucks" to "it's fine".

I haven't tried Flash video on my android tablet (it has a YouTube app) yet, but I've also rooted it and flashed the firmware to remove a software underclock so my experience may not be representative of any stock devices.
I'm very much hungry for more screencasts, more books, and more Sproutcore tutorials. It's an amazingly powerful framework, but its not easy to learn without some frustration.

I love this idea, and hope it goes through. I'll definitely be contributing
I guess it just goes to show you that once you sell, anything can happen, even if you're selling to someone you trust and respect.
Wikileaks volunteer detained and searched (again) by US agents
Point a laser at a police helicopter, go to prison
Another vote for linode here. I have three VPSs there and their host never went down. The network is never lagged and the only time I opened a support ticket was to ask if I could donate my account from a deal from appsumo to a friend.
I agree with you that there is a market for talent, but I wouldn't call it a free market.

I've seen it first hand. I was (briefly) a PhD student at UC Berkeley, and I left with a MS. Quickly, I was earning low six figures with stock options to write software that did optimization (linear/nonlinear programming) for a startup. A buddy of mine at Berkeley did the same thing for a professor as a research associate for about 15K a year.

The difference? Well, of course he may be passionate about research, I can't rule that out. But you can't discount the visa factor: I have citizenship, and he doesn't (or at least didn't at the time). Maybe he could have left with an MS and still gotten a work visa, but would he have wanted to risk that on a startup? His options are simply more limited.

I also heard (sorry, no cite) that UCSF took a hard look at its own PhD programs in response to very long completion times, and concluded that some of these 7 or 8 year PhD candidates were almost certainly being held an additional year because it's very difficult to find someone of that skill level to staff your lab. I suppose a US citizen could finally get fed up and leave - but keep in mind that US citizens actually have turned away from these programs in droves. While the mainstream explanation for this is poor science education in American secondary schools, a RAND study concluded that americans are avoiding PhD programs in the sciences largely because of excessively long training programs, poor job prospects, and low pay relative to the "professions" (MBA, JD, MD, DDS, etc...)

I think that if PhD programs truly had to compete in a "free market", the current system would collapse. Right now, I think they have managed to avoid change largely because international students are willing to put up with a lot to get a visa, and the professional schools aren't as accessible if you aren't already a US citizen, so they still have takers.
As long as your working set of data and indexes fit in RAM then it should perform well.
Most definitely, I think we all see ourselves that way. There was a Federated Social Web conference in July that was pretty well attended by the different projects, and I believe a follow-up event is in the early planning stages. We also have a federated social web mailing list, with w3c representation.

We're all interested in inter-operability. It's still too early to tell what shape that will take, we're all experimenting in different directions, but from my take on it, the future looks bright for interoperability.

We may find ourselves with 3+ protocols early on, but they'll all be open, documented and available to anyone, and the different projects hopefully will try and support more than one protocol. But eventually, something will rise to the top, it's just too early to tell what that will be at this point.

But that's not hindering anybody's progress, in fact, in a lot of ways, the platform can be a lot more difficult to build than the protocol.
I think its just 1-3 developers, unless I'm misreading. Still, I'm sure it'll be a challenge to get good content from them as they are not going to be compensated directly for their work.
...and from the original article[1]:

"Not too surprisingly, there was not a massive disparity in the results of my little test."

1. http://searchengineland.com/google-vs-bing-the-fallacy-of-th...
Tax revenue is necessary to maintain a functional government. When the government doesn't get enough tax revenue to pay for the things it spends money on, it must either increase taxes on everyone, or borrow money from other people to finance its programs. Either way, everyone else ends up paying more in taxes. That's why people treat taxpayer money as "their" money.

The government could choose to spend less money and avoid decreasing the tax burden on everyone else, but then the services everyone receives would decrease, and only those who don't pay as much tax would benefit. If we hold spending constant, someone who doesn't pay their fair share of taxes is increasing the tax burden on everyone else.
Attacking High Frequency Trading networks
Take the one thing a computer can do better than humans and use it as a captcha? Huh?
Sometimes bad UI is a feature (and a selling point)
> "I'd not go as far as calling this ridiculous. True, this feels wrong, but it's a fairly weighted decision - average users would tolerate "old" Flash-based fallback instead of native HTML5 <video> (most users won't understand the difference), but wouldn't tolerate lack of ability to play Farmville."

I agree that cutting out Flash would have a MUCH bigger detrimental impact on the user experience than dropping H.264 does; mentioning this was just to point out that their seemingly altruistic-ideological claims about the “openness of the Web” were fundamentally fallacious. If openness of the web was truly so important to them, how do they justify dropping H.264 but not Flash, which is arguably far more threatening to the "openness of the web"?

> "Unfortunately, "not right now" means "never". Google is already late with this decision, but as HTML5 <video> is not too widespread, there's still a possibility that they'll overturn the situation."

I don't believe this is really true. WebM, as it stands, will at some point take off, be put to the test in court trials over patent litigation, probably come out clean or with a one-time-then-safe-forever settlement, and take over market share from H.264. This seems almost inevitable to me, simply because right now H.264 is the de-facto standard but it has nowhere to go under its current licensing scheme. It's not compatible with the web as it is today. So the only thing that would keep WebM from taking off is MPEG LA changing H.264 to be "web compatible" i.e. royalty-free for use on the Web. But if they do that, then there's no real need for WebM to take over, either.
Confessions: The Shopping Cart
Not really. RMS has harshly rejected terms like "open source" for free software.

"Openness" is a relative and meaninglessly vague term in this context. Anything short of a open-sourced program and completely public data is less "open" than some alternative. The complaints that 99.99% of people make about APIs have less to do with "openness" than poor communication by the provider in the forms of bad documentation and unwarned changes.

TFA: "Facebook Connect is not open. It's controlled by one company."

Yes, because if it was another company, you wouldn't care about this API. The API only matters to anyone because it's Facebook.

I adore free software, but "openness" is a lousy justification for trying to work up umbrage about the difficulties of working in a parasitic developer ecosystem.
PBS launches free iOS app for watching full-length video
Promising but one huge issue in mind:

You have developed a broad service and there is nothing wrong with that. But you need to focus on one particular vertical to grow. Let me explain why.

As you will discover the challenge is not in developing the site (though that is not to be minimized). The challenge is in growing the user base. The only practical cost effective way for a start-up to do this is by word-of-mouth.

When you target multiple verticals (sports, handbags etc) people are not going to become passionate about the site. And people are not going to come to it again and again for opinions. A few visionary souls may try it out but never return.

So you need to pick a vertical which gets people in that group to come back again and again to your site. And refer it to their friends. Thus a viral loop is born and a community comes alive. And then you can move to an adjacent vertical. And grow from there. Its going to take time. And it is hard to focus on a vertical because you will feel that you are reducing the size of your market.

But you need to focus. Pick some sector/user demographic. Quora did this brilliantly by focusing on the start-up group. Facebook did .edu. etc.
WSGI defines the interface between web services written in Python and HTTP. mod_wsgi is the Apache implementation. FLUP is frequently used to gateway WSGI to FastCGI (for use with nginx). There are others.

Until now, people writing WSGI applications (mostly framework authors) have been held back by lack of standardization. WSGI adapters such as mod_wsgi have been tracking PEP 3333 for some time, but web application/framework authors have been reluctant to move forward without standardization.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss wrote:

"The lack of a WSGI answer on Py3 is the main thing that's keeping me, personally, from feeling excited about the platform. Once that's done I can feel comfortable coding to it -- and browbeating those who don't support it."

See http://mail.python.org/pipermail/web-sig/2011-January/004902... for more of his point of view on why PEP 3333 is important.

So: standardization has arrived. I would say that lack of WSGI for Python 3.x was the primary factor holding back widespread standardization on Python 3.x. It will take some time for adoption to occur nonetheless--there are other factors. It is extra work to maintain a project with Python 3.x and 2.x compatibility. Also the Python 3.x standard library needs more users to smooth out the lumps.

Nonetheless, this is a big deal and should be celebrated :-)
Just wondering, what is your background? You say you've never done web development- have you done other types of dev work?
Google Chrome rolls out $14470.70 worth of security patches
Prof. Touretzky reminds Sony's lawyers of this, in the linked article:

"Note to Sony lawyers: no doubt you're eager to rack up another billable hour by sending legal threats to me and my university. Before you go down that unhappy road, check out what happened the last time a large corporation tried to stop the mirroring of technical information here: The Gallery of CSS Descramblers (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery). Have you learned anything in ten years?"
Tried playing a half dozen games. If this isn't a lesson in teaching users how to play your game I don't know what is. Before releasing a game you need to silently watch someone else try to play your game for the first time and take notes. All those cool features you added are pointless if they can't even figure out how to do the first level. Tank world is a good example. Wow does it look cool, but the instructions show up on the screen for just a few seconds and then go away leaving you to get frustrated and quit.
Momentfeed is Google Analytics for the Real World
The Future of Check Ins
Am I the only one who found the like button and the disquis on that page ironic?
Yes, Addison-Wesley is, as are O'Reilly and Prag Prog. The problem is not the publisher, it's the writing! That's what the proposal is designed to solve...
Uh.. Yahoo runs on Bing?

In related news. My brother is bigger and stronger than yours so SHUT UP!
Apple's stance is "why should we ship a product with known security holes out of the box and take the heat for it?"

Any user can install Flash. Apple is not depriving the user of anything.

If Google pulls the plug on H.264 on YouTube, they are depriving a lot of users of access. Mobile users (not just iOS users). Wii Users. Blu-Ray players/Web Top boxes.

Will it all eventually get straightened out? Yes, one way or another. But the sudden shift in strategy seems like Google isn't going to care one way or another to who they put out to pasture in order to establish a new de facto standard. It's very 1990s-era Microsoft of them.
Well in all fairness, I would assume that most API's and Services have some form of disclaimer.

What TOTALLY 100% open service have you ever seen?
Brad Feld says the typical discount is 20% - 40%. I think a lot of investors ask for caps as well, which is essentially pricing the round (so don't let them pick one that you would regret).

http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2006/02/whats-the-best-struc...

PG said YC would release their convertible debt agreement, but I don't think they've gotten around to it yet.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1655585
We're also all participating in the http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/socialweb/
He suggested that, by pointing out that if the country followed your ideas consistently, libraries would be outlawed even though they're generally regarded as a very good thing. Your rebuttal was that you aren't in the government.
What if Flickr fails?
Arrays can have any base in pascal including zero.

Do you mean strings?
Related: http://www.elpj.com/

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