skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the contrary, I think you'll find raising money is equally difficult in, say, London. I know some well-connected people, with a track record of previous successful businesses and exits and connections throughout the VC/angel community who still struggle to raise seed funding for pre-revenue ideas (even some which are showing traction).

Compare that to the Valley, where it seems that the main test of whether you can raise money is to put a mirror in front of your mouth and check that some water vapor condenses on the mirror (if there is no water vapor, the entrepreneur is dead. do not fund)...
Sure, if you compile it from source it's more unpleasant work, but normally I guess distributions take 'security' patches very seriously, and last time I had to install/upgrade PHP it was easy as

Installing:
> apt-get install php5-xxx

Upgrading:
> apt-get upgrade

Now, boohoo, that's so much work those users are forced to do...
I'm way behind on the book part :)
Could you guys please review my start-up/website(exaggerated.com)?
I have worked hard on the site (over a year and a half of development)- I have not promoted it yet, and it has remained fairly confidential so far.

I have struck a deal with a content provider, and I am now working on optimization to fasten the loading of the pages.

I have fully funded the site so far.

What do I do now ? please advise...
I'd like to draw more traffic.
should I promote the site with ads ? launch a thread on reddit ? ask each and every blog design to talk about my site ?

cheers
Nathan
Maybe a professor should coauthor a paper with geohot?
It depends, sometimes it is laziness, sometimes it's because of money problems, sometimes it's strictly cultural thing - I know a 31 years old guy who after a year of living alone decided to go back to live with his parents, just because it's more comfortable for him. I even heard stories about guys in their 40s being owners of well prospering businesses still living with their parents. And as much as shocking it is for people from northern cultures it isn't necessarily all that bad - cultural differences make the world more interesting.
Dealing with an unexpected Expedia itinerary change
> you are still obliged to pay MPEGLA license fees under most circumstances

As far as I am aware software patents only hold in the USA and a few other countries that the US has strong armed into accepting them. So I don't think you need to worry about the MPEGLA coming after you if you are somewhere on the other 90% of the planet.
In short: yes.
It's not the first time that the word in question has caused a song to be censored or banned. A few years ago, the BBC's flagship radio station (the imaginatively-named Radio 1) censored the same word in the Pogues' Fairytale of New York:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7149525.stm
And then there's Haskell...
At least you can create a company (a Ltd) in the UK easily. It's at least one order of magnitude more expensive in Italy.
Google's move is not about "open". The term "open" here is just used as a horse upon which the knight is riding. The long-term ulterior motive is to dominate video on the web.

The h264 removal in Chrome is probably an experiment more than anything else. It will make people remember the h264/WebM debate again, and it will show that Google takes a stance for WebM.

The long term goal is to fragment h264. First move is this. The next move is to play an alliance with Adobe: We can make your Flash survive for 5 more years if you include WebM playback in it. Then you play the piece where you force Apple to adopt WebM by virtue of Youtube: you let it hint that Youtube will in the future only play back WebM. At this point in time, all Android devices have WebM hardware decoding circuits (notice that mobile phones have an incredible short half-life time. You don't see a 3-4 year old mobile phone much these days).

At this point, all of the internet is WebM capable and h264 has been limited to every device which is non-internet. The MPEG-LA consortium will have been marginalized by this time and will have to bite the apple and add in WebM support as well.

/conspiracy
I've recently started using a tablet/pen, and for most purposes it's a good mouse replacement, and it's also better for sketching. Using buttons on the pen is a bit fiddly, but tapping the pen is an equivalent in most situations. For playing traditional kinds of PC games I notice that the mouse is still by far the best option though.
you couldn't make it up. Can't these people write a contract and police it?
Every browser should just support every codec in the universe. I don't care if it's illegal or patent infringing. Do it anyway. VLC, Mplayer, and ffmpeg are all open source, all work, and are all still around. This goes for image formats and audio codecs as well.

Let's just make forks of Chromium and Firefox that include built-in support for as many codecs and file formats as possible. Someone wants to use a psd in an img tag? Sure! Someone wants to use a flac in an audio tag? Go for it! Want to use a bink video in a video tag? Be my guest.

Even if it's illegal, who cares. You can do it the same way that Windows Media Player and Ubuntu handle it. Every time the user comes across a video they can't play, a popup asks them to click a few times, and then voila! They have the codec.

Web developer are always going to have a crappy time of it. We will never ever be able to simply make one site one way and have it work nicely on all devices with web browsers. Give up on that dream. But the dream of making things good for the users, is achievable. Aim for that first.
Actually for the longest time console games relied heavily on auto-aim features to actually make the online games competitive.

I play both between console and desktop and whilst I find console play more fun, I do find I'm far better at desktop. In Unreal Tournament I was known for my crazy Ion Canon bombings (alternate fire several times and then hit each one with a regular fire to make them explode from well across the map), this transferred over to Halo where I was known for my carbine headshots at similar crazy range... on Xbox I'm now known for shotgun and melee because the aiming fucking sucks, still generally lead on a server though so I can't complain too much!
Rene Descartes walks into a bar. He says to the bartender, "Give me a Bud light." The bartender asks, "Do you want a glass?" Descartes says, "I think not.." and promptly disappears.
I have fully funded the development of the site so far.
It was launched a few weeks ago and has not been promoted yet, so it is still fairly confidential.
I am now working on optimizing the site to fasten the loading of pages.

It's a lot of work by the way (over a year and a half of development.)

I would like to draw more traffic. What should I do from now onwards ? buy ads ? launch a thread on reddit ? ask each and every design blog I know to kindly talk about the site ?

I'd love to have some piece of advice from your community

cheers,
Nathan
That's a simple one, chicks dig scars...
I was waiting for someone to bring this up :)

Does anyone know of an FPS multiplayer game that users can play from both a PC and consoles? It would be interesting to see the outcome .. and I know where my money will be.
Well... there's a reason Quake-like fast-paced games are not popular on consoles. Sure - I have no problems playing slower games like Deus Ex on a controller, but for typical multiplayer FPSes that wouldn't work. Essentially you just learn now much you move the mouse to do a 180 turn and you have it in muscule memory. The moment you move the mouse, you start turning. With controllers where you actually control the acceleration of the movement, that experience is much worse. You simply cannot make a precise turn around on the spot without a lot of training. On top of that you're usually limited to the specific number of buttons unfortunately.

Of course you won't notice most of those issues on the console games... because they're designed so that you don't need more than N buttons, they're not as fast as promode quake, they add other elements to shift the idea from the raw fps (multiplayer q1/q3-pm being prime examples probably) to a goal based game, team play, etc.
Wow, I just saw that this was the original posted joke. I guess great minds think alike. Inferior minds don't read what they're responding to.
Neo-Malthusians equate life to 10 tonnes of carbon
Italy is a place with many talents, but that's not enough, for two reasons at least.

First: why should I stay here when people have no money to pay me for my talent?

Second: let's say that I want to start a startup, it's extremely hard to find talented people near you. I live in a relatively small city, which with the province makes about 500k persons I think, and I know nobody who knows rails well. And we're talking about rails, what about Clojure, Objective c, etc.

Maybe there are good people out there, but for cultural reasons you don't even know they exist.
Rapper 50c Earns 8.7 millions in using Twitter to recommend Stock - Blogherald
I don't know how it works on USA, but here in Brazil he would be arrested for that scam.

Can he be arrested for that there ?
Microsoft web design contest for HS students (US)
For Project Euler, they are all textual questions and require reasoning rather than mere calculation.
I think an IPO for Facebook won't happen for quite a while. Def not before 2012.
Don't let your surroundings determine your mental state. The guys who survived the concentration camps in Germany were the ones who had found peace, meaning and value in their lives even in the worst condition imaginable. Practice being happy for no other reason then choosing to be happy. I'll add years to your life.
I may feel more sympathetic to the author of these questions, but they are ultimately just as rhetorical and passive-aggressive as Gruber's - i.e. not a particularly useful contribution to the debate.
I doubt they are failing at spam, at least not in the common sense. My gmail account received 1000's of spam emails a week, and it's a rare for one to pass the filter, and even rarer for a genuine email to not.

It most likely a much simpler explanation: web results with content explicitly generated for a specific target search string is simply getting closer and closer to being actual genuine content, and thus harder and harder to differentiate and filter.
I understand where you are coming from with this but let's consider the security implications of embedding just anything in the browser.

A prime example is embedding custom fonts with CSS. The code that handles them wasn't built with arbitrary fonts downloaded from untrusted sources in mind (I think the guy that wrote the code said that's insecure and a bad idea).
A look at some (Linux) RSS readers [LWN.net article]
My problem is that between work in work and work in startup I need to write in about 8 languages.

This applies in all languages:

vec1 = rnorm(100)

system.time(vec1)

mean(vec1)

And, I can get my colleagues to fix it when I screw up, even though they are not R-heads.
> Here’s a way EmanciPay will help newspapers.

Sigh. http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/02/why-small-payments-wont...
if you cared to look at said plugin, you would realize its worth nothing, it just replaces <video> with a windows media player active x object. it does not provide the same javascript api, it does not support scaling, pausing, transparency, overplay and so on, to make it short, its a joke. sadly it seams to be good enough for people like you to suggest it would actually work.
Making $1m of gross income and making $1m of savings are two very different things.

You probably won't sock away $1m working for a bank.
As a caucasian central european I find it racist that some Brit deems himself another race than me and majority of Canucks, apologies to all Brits of Asian, Semitic, African, etc... descent.

Disclaimer: I deem majority of Canucks of Caucasian race - I might be misguided and therefore unintentionally racist.
Yes - I'm really struggling to see why anyone who delivers video would do anything other than:

does it support H.264? if not then play with flash.

which is easy.

Especially compared to - re-encode all my stuff and change complex encoding workflows.

The average user isn't even going to be able to tell the difference.
Delicious WebApp Hacking
And there's a version that replaces the middle, offending verse with instrumental. In Australia growing up at least that was the version that got the most airplay - I had street cred because I knew the words to the second verse of MfN (and the Flintstones - but that's another story), though if you sang it in front of people who didn't realise those were actual lyrics you might have some explaining to do.
Data does not leave the UK - it resides on servers hosted in the UK and is accessed from India.

Er, right.
> First: why should I stay here when people have no money to pay me for my talent?

That's a good reason to leave.

> Second: let's say that I want to start a startup, it's extremely hard to find talented people near you. I live in a relatively small city, which with the province makes about 500k persons I think, and I know nobody who knows rails well. And we're talking about rails, what about Clojure, Objective c, etc.

That's why you move to a bigger town, just like people do in the United States. And the province of Venice has, according to Wikipedia 829,418 people.
Indeed. I really tire of the overuse of the term "racism".

Racism is "the prejudice that members of one race are intrinsically superior to members of other races".

It can also be "abusive behavior towards members of another race" presumably justified by the former prejudice.

The British are not one race. I am British as are my Black, Asian and Oriental friends and colleagues. We are from different races; we are all British.

I am not being a pedant.

Racism has been an excuse throughout history to subjugate, kill, enslave, torture and experiment on innocent people. It is a real issue for many people in this world today, mostly the non-Caucasians.

Racism is a BIG deal. It is about Liberty. It is about what makes us human.

Banning a pop-song because it is played by black artists is almost certainly racism. Banning a song for the use of the word "faggot" is not - even if all of the artists on the song are black. And, yes, racism towards Caucasians does exist but it is mostly a small problem for people living in East Asia. Positive discrimination, though often accused as such, is not racism. (although it is, clearly, discrimination)

I disagree with the banning this song but not because it is a "British Classic" (in my opinion it is not - it's just a fun pop-song) but because the word faggot is used in context - in the character of a bigot complaining about his life in comparison to that of a Pop star. In the video Dire Straits show themselves to be the faggots.

Also, I'm fairly sure that the characters being portrayed are supposed to be Blue-collar Americans (faggot is not a commonly-used British phrase - "Poof" would have been the 1980s British equivalent).

So, if anything, there's an argument for it being Blue-Collar-Americanist.
Interestingly, because it has true threading, it's actually harder to debug threading problems with JRuby than it is with MRI. MRI will tell you precisely where a deadlock happens, where JRuby just locks up. So it's good to have both.
This just brings you into the uncanny valley of NLP. To say that this is almost as good as native fluency is like saying that current CG animation is almost photo-realistic. Like so many things in technology, closing the gap of the last percent turns out to be as hard as the first 99 put together.

The need for phrasebook-level fluency in another language may be diminished soon by technologies like these though.
Could someone please come up with a better (and learning) RSS reader? I mean:

- never show me duplicate articles (duplicate is: points to the (almost - yeah, clever) same link)

- I can rate the items (if I want to), than it sorts based on that rating

- then allows filtering of items based on everything (especially rating)...

I'd donate...
Ask HN: Structured approach to learning Python/Django
Can anyone recommend a sequential order of books and resources to read and learn to learn Python and Django?

Suppose my objective is to create a simple webapp and host it on Google App Engine, what should I be reading when?

I've started with Learning Python the Hardway and I'm currently going through Head First Python. Next up on my reading list is The Definitive Guide to Django Web Development Done Right.
Though it is possible to get $1m in 5 years, if you are an workaholic with a quant. PhD:

http://www.quantfinancejobs.com/jobs/quant-trader.asp
Counter-examples, converging sequences and giving immediate answers
Darpa Wants a New Language to Explain Everything
مشاهدة مباراة السعودية والاردن
مشاهدة مباراة السعودية والاردن
My website featured a permanent 'Under Construction' graphic.
This reminds me of the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit, which includes similar graph visualizations but also a handful more:
http://thejit.org/

I've used it in the past to visualize the structure of Google Wave conversations, and intend to use it in the future to visualize related products. (Unless I use this one instead, of course :)

I think that a graph interface like this shouldn't be the only way to get at some set of data, but at least for some people, it can be a really new and compelling way to explore it.
Hah!

My Russian tutor says that my accent (which is mimicry based on Russian from songs, films, etc.) sounds almost native EXCEPT for how I pronounce ы. I can't quite get it down correctly. :(
If you're looking to host on App Engine, I strongly recommend http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596522735

It is a great intro to App Engine & the datastore generally but also puts a bit more emphasis on Python/Django than on Java development, so it is well suited for Python devs.
AnyOne know when this will be available to install? I'm itching to try it out.
I agree that mouse/keyboard is better for first-person shooters, but FPS games are still wildly popular on consoles. Halo and Call of Duty are the biggest examples.
Android uses the Dalvik virtual machine, which is a clean-room implementation and different to JVM. Basically the .dex files are about 45% in size of compressed JAR files. Dalvik has been optimised for small RAM & slow CPU (compared to recent notebooks and desktops).

If you Google "Dalvik VM" you'll find lots of interesting information, too many to list here. There's a Google presentation which is very good.

So the answer to your question, is that so far, AFAIK, there is no compiler that directly generates Dalvik executables into .dex files. Currently, you need a Java .class file or a .java file and get it translated into a .dex file. But a retargetable compiler, like llc, could be customised to generate .dex files directly. An interesting project.
"that's why you should train your mind"

henryw's summary is good, but it misses that point: an important part of the article is developing the mind over time. The same way one gradually learns a skill like programming, one can learn to develop some of the things mentioned in the article. (I only wish I would have read such an article 10 years ago and gotten that point.)
Thanks for your response. Was this all on Symbian platform? Does that platform give you access just to the active cell, or also the neighboring ones? I wonder if using the full list of neighboring cells could help, that's available at least via Android API.

Nope, it was not ContextPhone. Something for basic phone tracking.
Of course this can only happen if said project is based in a country which actually upholds software patents. In countries were software patents are void MPEG-LA's claims are also void in which case I'd like to see them try to sue the developers/projects operating there...
Banned from what exactly?
I am far from a lawyer, but there are several international patent treaties, signed by a wide range of countries. See - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_internationa...

Also there's the World Intellectual Property Organization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Intellectual_Property_Org...) of which the majority of counties are members.

Yes, specifically software patents may be considered a bit of an unconfirmed area, but I doubt it's something many people would want to risk going up against.
I don't understand your rating request. What's the use case?

If you rate the item after reading it, you won't want to see it in your incoming stream of new items, so I don't see how you can sort based on ratings.

If you rate the item before reading it, what are you rating it on?

As I said, I don't understand what your use case is.

(But filtering --- yes, I understand completely.)
Once money/licensing is involved, it does become an issue of openness. Think of it as the letter of the spec versus the spirit of the spec.

If h.264 becomes the de facto standard for HTML5 video encoding, then a browser such as Firefox, or any free/open browser, will be financially unable to implement a completely standards compliant browser due to the cost of licensing.

Yes, one could supply other codecs to support the video tag since no codec is specified in the spec but if the majority of content out there is focused on h.264 then the effect is the same as not supporting the video tag at all.
can you please give more info about this:
"FX trading systems to allow low latency trading"
what is it ?
My website was actually a gopher:// site.
Stringology—The “Real” String Theory
It looks like you changed the header color before the redesign -- how?
An argument for argument from authority - I don't have time not to trust people
Actually, I also think this is quite a good story.

It's a nice reminder to check your assumptions.
Leisure Suit Larry in HTML5
Make Your Content Stand Out
Java is pass by value
And this is a bad thing?
Better title: "How hard work, determination, and a move got a start-up to second base."

Great story and lots to inspire, especially

...the team went to every last event in Silicon Valley, called every person they knew and asked around for help.

But in all the hoopla, it's easy to forget that getting funding is not the goal, it's just one of many intermediate steps. In spite of appearances, the real hard work is just beginning.
Sorry, but I realised that my previous submission of this item somehow lost part of the title, and I wondered if that made a difference to whether it got noticed. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't, don't know, so I thought I'd try again.

ADDED IN EDIT: I see the title has been silently truncated here too - it did say:

An argument for argument from authority - I don't have time not to trust people.

ADDED IN FURTHER EDIT: Well, I see my comment has been down-voted. I don't know if that's because they disagree with the item I'm pointing to, or upset that I've re-submitted. <fx: shrug> Don't really care, although it would be nice to get a reasoned argument in either case. If you really think the re-submission shouldn't stand then just flag it and it'll get deleted.

OK - FINAL EDIT: I've tried again to fix the title and this time it's worked. I've decided I really don't understand what's going on, so I'm going into the Big Blue Room for a bit. I should do that more often ...
Dell makes its own motherboards and hard drives? No, it buys all the hardware from suppliers.

Accenture is a little tougher. They ARE the outsourcing, which proves my point about the outsourced company having to make a profit as well. But they still provide solutions for their customers, which will include physical hardware, which they don't even put together... They just order it.

No company stands alone. They all work to minimize cost and employee count, and maximize profit. Saying some numbers are inflated because they do this doesn't make sense. They ALL do it.
There already are global gestures for VoiceOver and zooming.

You can disable/have to enable them, but only globally. I do not know whether applications can be programmed to ignore or override these behaviours.
Google already knows its search sucks (and is working to fix it)