skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great story. Of course if you over analysis it's nothing great, under neath it could simply be that the executives know that the layoffs was just a start. First round of layoffs leads to low morale, which leads to a decline in quality which eventually leads to them being removed.

A lot of leaderships like coaches are usually on short lifespans. The executives knew that by forcing the company to think about losing two top execs it was serious and maybe reconsider. In this case it was a good gamble.

Their intentions is what makes the story great, though. Honestly I would have given a list of people to layoff, but that's why I am not a great leader or a leader of anything for that matter, of any sorts LOL
Licensing isn't the (only) issue for asics. Hardware decoders are only reasonably priced if they're being produced at scale. If I'm a device manufacturer and I have a choice between getting h.264 for free because it's on the SoC I'm using and paying multiple dollars (!) for a WebM decoder, not to mention wasting valuable board space and paying for it to be soldered on, which do you think I'll choose?
It looks like they are only using a small portion of it -- selectors in init and a few event handlers. They could use one of the many pre-existing selector engines and write a simple cross-browser addEvent function
ATTENTION GOOGLE!
Flash is not open! Not only does Chrome support Flash, it ships with embedded Flash plugin!
What a hypocrite!
Indeed. Microsoft charges for their major version updates. I'm sure this is a reason why people have put excessive importance in Chrome's major version number. When you release for free you can choose version numbers for engineering reasons, when your revenue is tied to releases you ensure that each major version bump is sufficiently "meaty" to justify the purchase.
I think this is bad for HTML 5 video in the short run, but I do not care about it anymore, I wished that everyone supported Theora, and then switched to Dirac in the future, but Apple and Google made me give up of my hopes.

However in the long run I think this will be an example of 'worse is better' happening, I think WebM will win over H.264. If that is bad or no that's depend on how do you see Apple and Google, if you believe this post contain a good message or if you believe Gruber but not both, for me both are just false in their pretense of openness, which is why I supported Theora in the first place.

Theora vs. H.264 was the first big fight that I remember in HN were the majority of comments were just bullshit for me (just like this thread), although there were really good ones from both sides, I also commented in the matter, back then I said that codecs would grow in irrelevance, I belive that H.264, as a patent covered standard, will lose in the future because its licensing terms are not clear and a license for its use can be pretty expensive to people trying to win some money from web video, specially those that have no money initially to spend in royalties (like startups, open source and non commercial projects), my example back them was a cloudy video editor, maybe something that is impractical today, but that I do expect becoming at least practical for simple uses in 2 to 3 years from now.

For this type of user paying for royalties in the beginning just does not make any sense and is stressful for their financial situation, this if they want to win money with their project, it's even more complicated for open source projects, for the case that people want to win some money from their company or project a good comparison would be the college student that take loans, trying to make some potential money in the future while spending money that he does not have in the present.

I think that WebM will have the preference of this public if they are not aiming Apple products. For me this will happen just because MPEG LA was incompetent enough and did not knew how to deal with the situation, opening the standard to small business, not charging users and business that only stream the using codec, things like that that the consortium never clarified (they never defined the "broadcast market" from which they plan to charge royalties from).

More could be said about why I think H.264 will be a thing of the past in the following years, but them my comment would be too big.
Ask HN: Tips on good source code?
I got some free time before my next semester, and I got a couple of ideas I want to try out. But most of them includes multiple users and databases. That aint my strongest side, so I'm looking for some good source code I can read and learn from. Can you guys recommend something? Source code or just a good read!

My skills: Python > Java > C > *
I recently downloaded, installed and used my first database with MongoDB (beside MS Access about 5 years ago). So I guess that a project that uses mongodb and django would be awsome.

-Kristian
The article says it's unclear what the company does, but after reading 50 Cent's tweets the other day I looked into it and it seems like they have the marketing rights to 50's new line of headphones: http://sleekby50.com/

Disclosure: I do not own any shares of HNHI

Edit: Looks like he also has a sizable stake in Sleek Audio as well
Bearing in mind that we are talking strictly in the financial sense — and not, for example, about risky medical decisions — can you explain what you're talking about further? What major risky investments do doctors make on a regular basis?
"I have made it longer because I have not had time to make it shorter." ("Je N'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parceque je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.") -- Blaise Pascal.
The Secret of Great Bread - Let Time Do the Work
Gmail creator Paul Buchheit: Would you buy Facebook stock
Blekko is still very far from proving that its horrible name wasn't a huge mistake.
That's a good question. What's better, a .net, etc. domain, or a .com with a post-fix.

My personal opinion is to pick a more unique name. But, I'd say postfix is better. The domain name without the domain code is more brand-able than the full domain e.g. BaseCamphq is recognizably different, but doing basecamp.net wouldn't be as unique.
I thought this looked intriguing but since I am on a Mac I cannot even download their informational pdf... they block even that attempt to find out more. Pretty stupid on their part as now I'm not only not interested, I'm annoyed.
The price is the risk that a random bad act like this may occur, not the sacrifice of a life.
Firefox (at least on Windows) has a special Flash installer baked into it for several years — if it can't find the plugin, it prompts you with an infobar, which then kicks off a streamlined installer that downloads a xpi package and installs it even without administrative privileges. Theoretically that plugin repository mechanism is crossplatform, and on some Linux platforms it can install a mplayer plugin, but it's purpose-designed for Flash and I'm not sure there are any other plugins for Windows in the repo that Mozilla hosts.

When they first implemented it, they also got a special license from Adobe to distribute the Flash xpi from addons.mozilla.org, and did so happily, but I think the file is hosted by Adobe these days.

They've also baked in a special Flash updater too — if your Flash plugin has known security vulnerabilities Firefox will prompt you to automatically update it: http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2009/09/16/helping-people-up...
What's so great about CPAN anyway?
Not as a result of trading.

Actually, trading can and does increase the total value of the system. If I own $100 of Intel stock and you own $100 of AMD stock, exchanging half of our stock (so that we each own $50 of Intel and $50 of AMD) leaves us both better off, since we each have less risk.
I like this, but if your market (namely small businesses) is not very technology literate, explaining the non .com name is tough.

I've had enough clients that have called me asking why the example.io.com doesn't work. They were surprised when I explained that not all websites end with .com. Go figure...
Always get a .com if you can.

How about ledgerleader.com - thats available.

I might be willing to sell bitsprout.com if you like it - but I may also use it.

dollardoc.com
littleledger.com
mintbit.com
dinerodocket.com

all available....

If you'd like some other ideas - i'd need to know more about your app.
Well it is short, unique and somewhat phonetical. I'd give it a B.
Upvote this if you made at least 2 cups of tea for the first time today after reading.
There have been several articles of this ilk on HN of late. It seems to me that science and engineering education needs to focus more on the philosophy of science, the techniques of experimental design, and statistics. The scientific method as taught in junior high school is only part of the story.
I don't like your access for 3 signups model, though. Since I have no idea what it is or who you are (other than my intuition that you're a nice guy), you're asking me to bet my standing with 3 others - and more importantly, their contact details - for an opportunity of unknown value at some unknown point in the future. Perhaps it will be awesome, perhaps I'll be splashed all over pathetic-wannabe.com. This is a risk I don't mind taking with my own email address, but which I'm unwilling to subject others to.
I don't think you can generalize this as being binary. It makes it a hell of a lot easier for someone to spread the word if the name rocks. Your product has to be killer enough to over-compensate for a bad name, but imagine a killer product and a killer name.
1337 People Who Solve This Puzzle Gain Entry to Hack Club
So you left academia to become an HFT programmer because you thought academia was too unproductive in the context of larger society? That's one hell of a scathing critique of academia and, er, um, I can't help but wonder if the money might have had something to do with it?
Prototypes shouldn't be in HTML.

Edit: Clarification, when using "prototypes" with clients I pretty much always mean mock-ups. Try not to write code unless you have to.
That was exactly how Michael Eisner ran Disney.
37signals really missed the point.

Are they seriously calling them out for not offering more constructive criticism? Um...that's not why that site exists...

On a side note, there is nothing stopping 37signals from creating a webspace dedicated to constructively critiquing Mac App design for the benefit of the community in a more thorough and serious manner. But somehow, like the creators of the site, I doubt 37signals is interested in doing so. :|
yeah i too have a fear of being lured to a remote location while delivering two small sausage and pepperoni pies, having a bomb strapped to my neck then forced to rob a bank and go on a scavenger hunt afterwards only to be blown up after finding the first clue, with the bomb squad arriving 3 minutes later.
App is crap. Maybe it's okay if you're a mobile-only product.

Since you're going to be dealing with people's money you want something that imparts a sense of trust/stability/credibility. You should probably spend up to a couple grand (if you can) on a great domain.

Your name (AND DESIGN!) is a huge factor for this kind of company. Follow Mint's example.
We hired a naming company, and they couldn't come up with a better name -- most of their suggestions were too boring.

http://www.skrenta.com/2008/01/about_the_name_blekko.html

If we succeed, the name will be considered great. If we fail, people will blame the name. Does the name really affect anything? I bet good results are more important.
WP7 Update Glitches in Trial Apps
Here's a better link to the details:

http://breadpig.com/hack-club/
Ask HN: Why is there no Web-based auction for securities offerings?
I was thinking that with sites like SharesPost creating a second market for private companies, why is there nothing like that for funding rounds? The closest thing I can think of is Kickstarter, which is limited to "pledges" rather than investments.

Arguments against would include:

- limit of 499 investors, though this is presumably easy to cap via the fact that it's an auction

- requirement of accredited investors, though SecondMarket et al. presumably contends with this already

- not knowing necessarily who the investors are; this one seems pretty tricky

- issues of disclosure, particularly if the company wants to keep its accounting statements secret; this one is especially tricky

Is there something I've missed here? Could someone more familiar with securities offerings chime in with whether this has been attempted or what the barriers would be (beyond the obvious one of getting startups and investors to actually sign-up)?

Why is there no eBay for securities offerings?
To date Chromium has always supported whatever codecs its bundled copy of libavcodec was compiled with.

Hopefully they do not purposefully constrain the codec support, like Microsoft did. IE9 uses the system's DirectShow plugins, but whitelists the specific codecs because they don't want to dynamically load shitty DivX binaries into the browser and expose them to the DOM. It sucks but it was the right decision considering the circumstances.
They discontinued the iPod Mini when it was the highest selling music player in the world. I don't think they let sales stop them from replacing a product.
Free DimDim Replacement & Alternative – Banckle Online Meeting
Simple Questions for Google Regarding Chrome’s Dropping of H.264
Which then makes me wonder: If they had gotten laid off, how many of those employees would have followed them to the next job?

If your employees are valuable enough, and loyal enough, you might actually win either way in that situation.
Assange: WikiLeaks to speed release of leaked docs
Do I really need to have been born in the USA to be able to read published statistical data about the population? That seems to be an odd dependency.

As I said, my intent was not to belittle, nor is it to "win" any kind of contest. The desire to be part of a winning team has turned the tide from reason and logic to emotion in modern discourse (and especially politics). I don't care if I don't "win" as long as I'm forced, at a minimum, to reevaluate my position and beliefs.

Also, what do you mean by "saintly"?
Of course you're right. You can succeed with a bad name and fail with a good name. It's just a mistake to make your job harder than it needs to be (since it's already so hard!). With as much money as you guys raised there's really no excuse for having such a poor name. IMHO.

Note: I'm a fan, and hope you guys kick ass -- I'm just being honest with my opinion.
Lawyer fears Assange could face death penalty in US
Mine is similar. My journal file is the hidden file ~/.journal and my script is in my home bin directory. It sets up a cat from STDIN, so I can just jot a few things down and ^D. I wanted something that would be as easy to use and non-intrusive as possible. And I used the %% on a line by themselves as the divider, as I also do in my Quotes_Aphorisms file, so scripts for searching and manipulating the fortune databases will also work on them.

#!/bin/bash
echo "%%" >> ~/.journal
date +"%a %Y-%m-%d :: %X" >> ~/.journal
cat - >> ~/.journal
Bullshit.

Multiple companies, including Apple (and Nokia, which ain't exactly a minor player in the mobile market) objected to HTML5 mandating support for a particular codec, largely on the grounds that we don't really know the patent situations of any of the allegedly-unencumbered codecs.

Meanwhile, multiple people objected on the grounds that mandating a current (or, really, several-years-old now since that's what it is) codec in a spec that's not expected to go final for at least a few more years, and which has an expected useful life of around a decade, is just frankly stupid. It'd be like having a spec used today mandate XBM as the standard image format because that was the least-proprietary thing available 15 years ago when early browsers were being written.
Fermilab, the Tevatron, and Linux
Jon "Maddog" Hall blogs about, "Having your heart ripped out: Tevatron accelerator to close."
You're dreaming if you think Apple is going to add WebM hardware decoding support to iPhones. That would basically mean that all previously sold iPhones would be marginalized, it would increase the hardware costs and space/power requirements, and there is no market advantage to supporting the WebM format as there's no WebM-exclusive content.
Funny story: I posted a crowdsourced project to name this. All these ideas are better than the dozens of entries I've received so far. I posted a comment describing why I like EverNote as a name, and its mechanical relation to their business. Entries started flowing in with the words "ever" and "note" in them. Face palm.

So we're developing an online accounting system for entrepreneurs, startups and eventually lifestyle small businesses. It will combine the beautiful interface of Mint.com with the rich features and GAAP compliance of QuickBooks. We'll be sporting automatic bank pulls and reconciliation. The goal is to have an accounting application that is always updated and reconciled, so it actually can be used as a tool to make financial decisions with, and not used as an after though.

I like the alliteration examples here. I think mintbit is too close to Mint and dinerodocket is too close to inDinero (both substitutes, but not direct competitors). I'd LOVE more ideas :) One I'm leaning towards is ledgered.com. My partner didn't like it, but I just want to make sure I'm not crazy.
why not post original interview (including transcript, copy-pasted verbatim by TC):

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11404

what's with this TC/AOL loyalty on HN? I think those two outlets are loathsome.
Not to take anything away from these guys... but big chunks of what constitutes a "social network" like Facebook go back many more years than this. Go back to the 1980's (at least) and look at folks dialing into BBSs with dial-up modems (acoustic couplers, even!) and phreaks using telco loopback test circuits to set up illicit conference calls, etc. The idea of an online "social circle" was very real back then as well.
There's a pastor in Kansas who "Thanks God for the violent shooting" in Tucson
Through competition among each other, aren't the HFTs reducing overall arbitrage opportunities in markets? Therefore, as a small-time, long-term investor, aren't I enriched by a highly-competitive steady-state level of HFT market participants?
I agree completely. I don't think we necessarily need to spend a couple grand on a domain to deliver on those senses, but you're dead on with design. Thank god I'm a UI rock star. Maybe just Guitar Hero level rock star...
Yes, we're open to remote people
>Other video services begrudgingly make the leap and start encoding their video in WebM format to support a growing number of users.

Or they just support those users instead by serving them Flash - which they have to do anyhow to support IE6/7/8 and Firefox 1/2/3, avoiding the hastle and cost of more video encoding and storage. And none of the rest then happens.
Glass that's Stronger than Steel
Well, Mozilla's already gone down the road of hypocrisy ("H264 bad! Plugins insecure! Keep shipping Flash!"), so why not Google, too?
Lessons learned from porting Rogue to Common Lisp
Right now 50's lawyers are telling the SEC that he will never do this again and apologizing profusely in efforts to at least stave off a trading ban and more likely avoid jail.

The death knell for 50 in these tweets are explicit instructions to take a position in the stock, guarantees on returns, the normally low trading volume on the stock, and of course the undisclosed position that 50 had in the stock. It's basically a recipe on how not to promote a stock. Doing your own IR is about as smart as being your own lawyer.

Slinging stock is somewhat similar to slinging rock in that there are a lot of things you can do which will land you in jail. 50 should know better than this.
Gingerbread NDK Awesomeness
You don't need the browser format detection scripts because it's built into HTML5. <video><source codec="video/webm" src="kitten.webm"></source><source codec="video/m4v"></source></video>
Mind if I ask how much you paid the naming company? Unless you have money to burn, I can't imagine paying a company to name your startup.
That is from impression as a non-american, as someone who used the service while I worked there and from looking at usage data. Even during the peak of MySpace it was never the #1 social network in most other countries outside of US.

The music stuff remains niche outside the USm and I think the level of "americana" (which FB never had) hurt MySpace in markets with an anti-american slant (Europe, etc).

In key markets, like Asia, social networking as a vertical looks very different which is why it didn't get the traction like local services did.
Yes, that's the word I was trying to think of and couldn't: "allure". And you're right, Apple definitely has it in droves.

Anyway, thanks for listing off the Bionic and the Atrix. I had heard a bit about the Bionic, but nothing about the Atrix so I'm off to check those out. The Atrix does sound incredibly cool.
This wonderful article has helped me help a great many people over the years and I'm glad he's rehosted it again after the original domain got snatched.

There is only one thing I find missing — I think it would be prudent to avoid the use of "typed" or "typing" wherever possible. I much prefer to refer to properties being "typechecked" or systems using "typechecking" — it's otherwise quite easy it forget that the types are only manifest when and where they are observed.
You know what I would love to have the HTML5 guys add to the spec? Some way of keeping libraries like PrototypeJS and jQuery in the browser cache at all times, so that pages could just use them without worrying about the size.

Perhaps some kind of alternate src attribute on script tags, so you could list a local copy (for reliability) as well as Google and Microsoft CDN URLs, and the browser would go with the first one it had in its cache. And if individual browsers wanted to distribute jQuery (et al.) along with the browser itself, and define an URN for it, so much the better.

This is just something I thought up in the past few minutes, so take it with a grain of salt, but as a web developer, I would love this.
Java is strongly typed. As a counterexample, here's some valid java:

String str = ""+5;
Some well-read fellows called Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren wrote a book called How to Read a Book.

It serves two useful purposes.

1. It provides a framework for thoroughly digesting important books.

2. It is a rich vein of humour for visiting friends to mine when they spot it on your book shelf.

http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Touchstone-book/dp/06712...
I just realized, doesn't Jupiter have constant lightning storms a couple of orders of magnitude more violent than ours? Just imagine the sort of animatter generation those might be driving!

We gotta get another probe out there! Unless maybe we've got something that could pick up the signs back here...?
I see your point, and I think I have reacted a bit grumpily, but it was somewhat disheartening to, ten minutes after going and spending 5 minutes searching through my links and finding the appropriate one, check my threads and find that I've been downvoted to 0 (it was the case briefly) while you, who the links were directed to, replied with the direct link and got upvoted. That left a somewhat sour taste in my mouth.

I'm not a big fan of blog-spamming either, and I can see how those particular links could be seen as such. Most of my links actually include some additional insight (and one of those did). It felt like a fair trade-off that I'll go and find almost ten high-quality answers to your question and in exchange get to at least post them with the link from the resource on which I collected and found them...

Bah. I'll keep on sharing my links, but next time I'll tend towards just sharing the links which have additional insight, so I am less likely to be accused of blog-spamming.