skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Going back to OS-specific codecs would limit codec choice to what the OS vendor considers kosher.

Not true. e.g.:
http://xiph.org/dshow/
http://xiph.org/quicktime/

Why am I not free to do this with h.264 in "open" browsers?
Personally I find them slow, low in quality and poorly designed for smaller screens. Like one of the other comments here mentioned, I would much prefer a wiki or a GitHub gist.
Well, the point of using varnish is to keep you from having to access the backend any more than is absolutely necessary. It's incredibly trivial to generate HTML showing a user's username and karma, and even if it weren't it could be stored in memcached. Generating the front page, the comments pages, etc. is the hard part, and varnish can keep that from being generated any more than is necessary.
I don't have time at the moment to give a proof in Coq or another constructive proof assistant, but it boils down to the fact that "n is even and n is odd implies n = 17" is a function that can never be executed.
This is Blizzard we're talking about. Their production values and the amount of years they spend perfecting their games is incredible. I can't imagine them doing such a thing.
He doesn't mention this (I guess it goes without saying among mathematicians), but part of the problem is that in mathematics one fact doesn't generally seem to cause another: certainly there's no adequate causality that can trivially be verified by intuition or common sense.

So mathematicians can only prove theorems by working with the definition of "implies" that makes no causality requirement.
The interesting part is that we are talking about private companies that depend on easements to function. When a business depends on easements, there is probably not a true free market going on. No regulations in that case are very dangerous.
What tool do you use to focus?
What technique do you use to focus while working? in the sense methodology like GTD, ZTD, Pomodoro or softwares like OmniFocus, Things etc
> the Drake Equation is a religious statement. That is, it is a creative speculation

Creative speculation is not religion just as thought is not superstition.

Creative speculation + experimental verification = science

Creative speculation + certain belief without evidence = religion

Creative speculation + allowing uncertainty = reasoning

Creative speculation + action = decision making

Creative speculation + business implementation = startup
From a pragmatist standpoint, something like google can't trust an RDF document any more than it can trust the META keywords tag. Anything a site can assert about itself will end up as fodder for spam and manipulation.

Not to say that individual trusted datasets don't benefit from the RDF logic layers you can apply. Just that it's mostly impossible to have anything more than a set of curated datasets.
First guy to completely crash the internet ;p
It looks like Pamela Jones of Groklaw plans to cover this case in full. Based on her reporting, it doesn't look like things are going well for Sony so far:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110112115731533
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110114185542531
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110117161946648

Apparently, they are having trouble even establishing that they have the right to sue the defendant in a California court.
H.264 for <video> guaranteed that there would never be a single, ubiquitous <video> format. The end result is that the best case you could hope for is some combination of H.264 and Flash wrapped video.

WebM doesn't have the same problems that were keeping that last 20% from adopting H.264. With Google, Mozilla, and Opera, you've got about 30% of the market on board with WebM already. If Microsoft can be convinced to adopt WebM (and, honestly, I don't think that's too much of a stretch), that's around 90% of the market signed up.

If that happens, your only holdout is Apple, and I think even Apple is going to have a hard time stonewalling the change given the way they've spent the last year preaching the wonders of the open web.

So, basically, what I'm getting at is that with WebM, there's at least a chance everyone could end up settling on a ubiquitous codec. With H.264, we already know it would never happen. An unknown probability greater than zero is a better prospect than a p=0, in my book.

>How would retaining H.264 support make WebM support in other browsers less likely to be so?

Fragmentation. <video> isn't a useful standard unless you know it's going to work. Some browsers supporting one codec and others another makes that impossible.
I would like to ask, "how do you know this"?

Umm.. check my profile, I worked for Comcast for 4 years I know their broadcast and HSI infrastructure pretty well.

Comcast has a residential cap of 250GB/month as being acceptable usage by a customer

Yes and if everyone used it at the same time your network would crawl. Bandwidth on Comcast (And most networks) is a shared service. Caps be damned there's not an ISP in existence who can survive massive simultaneous usage by all their users (such as everyone using Netflix around 8pm in the evening). Unless you want Comcast to throttle down their limits?

Again you keep making this argument a battle between Netflix and Comcast and its not. If Netflix used Akamai as their sole provider of CDN services (who have CDN agreements with Comcast) this would not be a Netflix issue. This is a Level3 and Comcast business dispute.
This is a genuine question - do asian american guys remind you of your parents?
But my experience is that groups tend to follow the person who is loudest, not the person who is best qualified to lead them. It is very much possible for one rotten egg to ruin the whole batch.

I know nothing about managing a board, but how does one deal with this aside from being the loudest blowhard on the board?
I would think that hundreds of years of engineering (mechanical and electrical) and solid products used all across the globe would be more valuable than a search website, and I would definitely be wrong.
OK, I just upvoted purely for the reason of keeping it on the front page a little longer so someone more qualified has a chance to glance at this. Without any evidence and no qualification to judge myself, it seems highly unlikely.
Need office space for your startup? (San Francisco, SOMA)
It's on the arXive, so you know it's legit.
Yes, you are right. I was confused. BMW engines deliver pigs to markets so people can eat. One can buy and sell virtual pigs on FaceBook by playing Farmville.

To me, actual bacon is more valuable than pretend bacon.
How tweets and the web can boost the power of long-form thinking
Venus is also very Earthlike (potentially much more than Mars in the past) and could have had liquid water and life before the runaway greenhouse effect.
http://xkcd.com/384
I don't think one example constitutes a conclusion. While demonstrating the nonexistance of an algorithm for 3-SAT problem would prove P!=NP, the existance of an algorithm merely means "Move along, let's try a different difficult algorithm"
Isn't that simply debasing the value of all internet and software technology companies, then? None of them are older than BMW, and none of them make engineered steel products. Yet, I'm very sure that more people use Facebook and, say, Windows, than own a BMW.
Full-screen shell & text editor.
_The Elements of Computing Systems_ (http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/) follows a similar approach, building an emulated computer up from NAND gates. Highly recommended!
On the Mac, Self Control every time! It'll block access to domains you define for a set period, e.g. news.ycombinator.com, email.

http://visitsteve.com/made/selfcontrol/

http://gregdetre.blogspot.com/2009/10/self-control.html

The only downside is that I can't seem to block reader.google.com without also blocking all of google.com...
> It's definitely not science

Why not? It's proposing an underlying model, which in turn provides a framework for investgation as well as a way reasoning about things in the absence of harder data as. Sounds like science to me.

What would you propose as a more scientific approach to estimating the number of communicating civilizations in the galaxy?
Being always logged into gmail, clicking on a Google doc auto-adds your google account to the list of viewers (for everyone else to see) and also clutters up your personal Google docs listing by adding any doc you've viewed.
Yo, this is RTM!
sounds like science to me...
It doesn't stick too strongly to time. Around 1999/2000 they have a "other purchases" text spot. For acquired companies it includes Flickr and Delicious along with what seems to be companies acquired around the bubble and early decade.

It would make more sense to separate out purchases done during the bubble with stuff like Flickr.

It also doesn't mention Inktomi or Overture.
Cooties - Web Based HTML 5 Animation Software
The interesting thing is there are plenty of SC2 maps/mods that use the word "Warcraft" in their name. There are even ones with "World of Warcraft" in their name. Yet Bliz only chose to go after this guy. None of the other maps seems be getting this kind of attention. The practice of Bliz fans making mods using other Bliz IP has been going on for years. Even the original Starcraft game had Diablo maps. Something really struck a nerve with this one and showed up on the Bliz legal dept's radar.
Universal Makes Record-Breaking Donation of Music to Library of Congress
The Problem(s) with the Browser
Zero Cool....
Just this months there's another paper on arXive that uses 3-SAT to proove P!=NP http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.2018

A list of articles published on the P=NP debate is here http://www.win.tue.nl/~gwoegi/P-versus-NP.htm

Looks like someone thinks they've solved the problem every month or so :)
Sarcasm, right? The arXiv has very little quality control (intentionally).
No. Sweden ranks above the U.S. on 2 of the 3 lists on this page, and as it explains, a more sensible list would be based on PPP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP...
Here, Sweden is above the U.S. on 0 out of 3 lists. Perhaps an even better list is PPP per hour worked
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP...
Sweden is below the U.S. on 1 of 1 lists.
Perhaps an even more sensible list would be one showing U.S. States individually, since EU nations are generally comparable in size and population to individual States.
As of 2009, only Luxembourg and the UAE exceeded Connecticut in PPP GDP/capita (only the former exceeded the District of Columbia). Luxembourg is a tax haven, and the UAE is an oil nation.
So I have an idea. For HTTPS responses that are cached to disk, 1. do we care about the security of the files on disk? 2. if so, do we do anything to actually secure this content on disk?

If 2 is 'No', could we perhaps encrypt the content with the SSL cert (or some piece[s] of it) before written to disk? Say you have an app you want/need to benefit from caching but the cached data contains sensitive information you'd like to make it harder to get at from a long-term perspective. Take some unique bits (or lots of bits; they're kind of small) and encrypt the cached data with it, and make a hash so you can reference where this cached item came from without explicitly noting where it came from. This would let you store the data with the knowledge that if somebody recovered a hard drive with this old data it would be difficult for them to figure out where the cached data came from and how to encrypt it.

I realize i'm basically asking to use public information to encrypt private data. This can't be too difficult to 'hack' around but you'd need to know what website and certificate created the cached copy (so those entries should probably leave the 'history' as soon as the browser exits). I'm not too familiar with SSL certs in general so to add extra protection you can add something like Firefox's Master Password to the encryption scheme so it's "genuinely" encrypted without data which can be found or guessed like in the SSL cert.

Sorry if this is off-topic, just popped in my head and now i'm curious.
Ask HN: Why can I not comment on one post?
Ok, I've hit an odd snag. I was trying to reply to a comment on something I submitted earlier (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2120202), but there are no comment links or boxes even though I'm signed in. Plus, I see comment links everywhere else, just not on this post. Does anyone know why this might be?
3-SAT isn't just NP, it's NP-Complete. So a solution for 3-SAT is also a solution for all other NP problems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-complete
If all you want is distance between points
(x1-x2)^2+(y1-y2)^2+(z1-z2)^2 = dist^2 works.

However, in games you frequently want to check the intersection of lines, or spheres with plains, cubes etc. And for those equations you often have to deal with the inverse square root function.

PS: Anyway, my point was more abut the process. First you try A, which culls 90% of your objects, then you try B which culls 95% of the objects then you do the full and actuate solution if you have time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragdoll_physics takes a lot of CPU time, and now days games need to be even more realistic.
Ask HN: How did you discover your niche?
How did you arrive at your target audience for your product/service/idea? Did you stumble across them or was it carefully planned out and executed?

I'm in the research/discovery phase of finding a market to create a service for and I was curious about how you found your customers. Thanks!
That's incorrect unless I'm misreading you. 3 SAT is NP-complete, which means that if this algorithm's polynomial performance holds up, you can generalize it to solve any problem in NP in poly time.
Just because its on arXiv doesn't mean its legitimate. Its more likely that it is legitimate if it gets published (with a few exceptions like the Poincaré conjecture.
Instead everyone in the Lisp community (pg included) is still enamored with using continuations to produce ugly URLs and unmaintainable web applications.

If you read the source of HN, you'll see that it doesn't actually use continuations.

I find the source of HN very clear. Have you read it? Is there a specific part you found so complicated as to be unmaintainable?
This is one is good too and in 3d

http://www.graphycalc.com/
> I don't think one example constitutes a conclusion.

You're wrong. 3-SAT is NP-complete.

Quoting Wikipedia:

"But if any single problem in NP-complete can be solved quickly, then every problem in NP can also be quickly solved, because the definition of an NP-complete problem states that every problem in NP must be quickly reducible to every problem in NP-complete (that is, it can be reduced in polynomial time). Because of this, it is often said that the NP-complete problems are harder or more difficult than NP problems in general."
Rare Huge-Format Koran Digitized for Study
The prior probability of it being correct is so low that we should be flagging it, not upvoting it. There's many, many false "proofs" of P=?NP out there.

If I write a paper formatted in LaTeX saying that I cloned a T-Rex in my backyard, should it be upvoted so that an expert in cloning can take a look at it?
The existence of an algorithm to solve 3SAT in polynomial time is sufficient to prove P = NP, since 3SAT is NP-complete. That is, any NP problem can be reduced to solving 3SAT.
Failure can be interesting. Consider the attempt a few months ago by Deolalikar. The ensuing public discussion, which including many big names in complexity theory and at least one Fields medallist, was very enlightening.

This particular attempt involves someone claiming P=NP, and they have code. Even people who aren't complexity theorists can jump in on this one, by analyzing the code to verify it really is in P, and by trying to find problem instances it fails on.
3-SAT is NP-complete, so if you have an algorithm to solve it in polynomial time, you've solved them all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3SAT#3-satisfiability
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-complete
Problem is, I'll be out, say at movie, something goes wrong, I get a frantic call asking what is up, have to taxi home to sort it out. So an iPad/iPhone app would REALLY help there.
OSI & FSF in unprecedented collaboration to protect software freedom
How is it the end user's fault that Comcast's network can't handle everyone using the service they paid for?

I understand that everyone does overselling because it's profitable, and makes sense, but don't expect the customer to not use what they are paying for because you have oversold your services.
More tech workers get bonuses, pay raises: survey
It is almost certainly not correct, simply because so many have tried, and none succeeded.

However, this guy seems very cool - he is humble about his work, appears very serious, and even puts his code on github. And even if wrong, his approach might be interesting.
I use Tiny Term on my iPad
I don't disagree with much that you say. There are many explanations for Android's success - some of them are due to characteristics of Android (openness, more power and flexibility, Google branding and services integration, etc), others are due to failures of Apple(carrier exclusivity). These things help explain it but they don't change the facts of it.

You take a similar line about Android - eg: why did Google not support an iPod Touch like devices? We could say, "sure, iOS looks more successful than Android overall but that's just because Google doesn't support non-phone devices yet" - perhaps it explains why Android doesn't have overall more market share yet, but it doesn't change that facts of the situation - in overall marketshare iOS wins hands down.
Because it's dead.
Still it's hard to say that a company that makes well under a dollar a user is worth more than someone with a profit margin of many thousands on each sale. That said though a lot of the companies I know on this list will probably face game changes in their industries soon.
I know nothing about N=NP debate, but does the claim P=NP and the existence of a published algorithm (https://github.com/anjlab/sat3) make this claim easier to verify than the claim P!=NP. Isn't the point that P=NP has great practical significance that will be immediately recognized?
It doesn't add your name to a list anymore. Not for months.
HBase 0.90.0 Released: Over 1000 Fixes and Improvements
Impressive release. Plus it's the first as an Apache top level project. On the downside, it is unfortunately not compatible with the latest Hadoop release (there's a solution for that though)
We just want to know what the flaw in his reasoning is.
I'm not at all an expert on this material, but some random points to get people started:

0. This guy looks orders of magnitude less looney than the usual P=NP prover. I hope someone who knows this material well steps in soon.

1. This guy has implemented his algorithm. This is a very good sign -- most garbage "algorithms" are exposed to be broken when people try to implement them.

2. Most 3SAT problems are "easy". Being able to solve a particular problem doesn't mean that the algorithm works in general. He would have done better to demonstrate his algorithm on "known hard" problems.

3. He states a running time of O(n^4 m), but his experimental results don't scale quite like this; perhaps his analysis is wrong, or perhaps there's just a monster hiding behind the big-O.

4. If he is correct, and his algorithm is optimal, we probably don't need to worry very much about cryptography yet: It looks like this algorithm is far too slow to be a practical attack on existing cryptosystems.

(EDIT: Oops, in the time it took me to write that, 18 other people posted comments. Well, so much for getting the discussion started...)
Python Wins Tiobe's Language of the Year Award for 2010
Don't be so simplistic, that's like saying that stealing a car isn't theft because it is just driving and anyway you are just moving it somewhere else. The economic consequences of copying are a deprival of revenue, that is tantamount to theft and 'theft' is a good word to describe it.

What really ticks me off about thieves is how they try to quibble over definitions as though that changed the consequences. Making an unauthorised copy of something that is supplied for money IS theft.
The trailer looked amazing, I really hope he just changes the mod's name, and continues with its development.
Thank you :) May it be the first of many. It seriously couldn't have happened if not for all our awesome volunteers and all of you who showed up and hacked for 12 LEGOtastic hours straight on a Friday night in NY.
Well we could have stopped progressing without renaming the spec. You have to make sure we keep improving the Web, and if we don't, take over! That's what we did to the W3C when they stopped, after all.

(You can also join us. See http://whatwg.org/ for details. It's basically an open community.)
Thanks for that!

I actually just signed up with Optimizely today and really love the way they run A/B tests so far. I need to think a little deeper on how to integrate these tests with the rest of my metrics, but it's a really good (and easy) start. While I haven't reached a level of real statistical confidence yet with my first test, I've already been able to increase engagement with a single change on my landing page by 35%. Wow.

clickable: http://www.optimizely.com/
That would have been me, although I attributed it to Ray Kroc (McDonalds) and was corrected.

I came to this thread to simply say "persistence", and had a wry smile seeing this at the top.

Of all the thousands of pithy statements I've read over the years, that one has stuck around and served me well for over two decades, probably three now.
In particular, it’s nice to remove the confusion around whether an HTML4 document was any different from an HTML5 document. Now it should be easier to explain that the interpretation of every web page anywhere can be described in one standard called “HTML”.
The simple explanation is that things like the radio spectrum over which wireless anything operates is not property owned by a company; it is a public good owned by all of us. Therefore the government has a role to regulate it.
Actually, Gruber hates Flash because Apple hates Flash. He had no problem with Flash until Apple decided to ban it from its ecosystem. Gruber's love for all things Apple is consistent and well documented.

The bottom line is that while a subpar technology, Flash is really not that crappy. It delivers rich content without any glitches to millions of desktops every day and while its implementation on phones is still not great, there is no technical reason why it won't improve to the same level we see on the desktops.

Here is why Flash is not going anywhere: the anger against it is not strong enough nor shared by enough users. Most web surfers are pretty happy about it, and as long as that doesn't change, Flash won't die.
And as always, we'd better hope that the proof is wrong. P=NP would (almost) imply the impossibility of cryptography, but even more seriously a lot of brainpower from the top theoretical computer scientists (whose proofs often begin with "suppose that P != NP...") would have been wasted :)
Can this do code-collapse? I'd love to plugin the Ace editor like a textarea and replace almost all of the JS at https://zetabee.com/text - I see that it supports hidden characters so maybe there is a way to hide entire chunks of text (while preserving them during cut-copy-paste). Has anyone worked with Ace? I tried customizing SkyWriter but it was more work than just rolling my own JS.

The demo source https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace/blob/master/demo/startup.js is pretty clean but it doesn't appear if there is a way to extend the editor's features via plugins.
hey why not? It will depend on how it could work together though, me and some friends often tried to work together but it's a pretty tough work. I suggest you get my contact email on my website and just drop an email :)
Are the resizable divs on the original announcement (http://webkit.org/blog/1424/css3-gradients/) a Firefox feature (though I've only ever seen resizable textareas), a script, or an HTML5 feature?