skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A couple of things:

First, Google is interested in boosting the web indirectly because it puts their technology (adwords) out there in the right place. If you watched most of your video over WebM over the net, it would indirectly benefit Google. They also know that a large part of their power stems from the fact that they do "nice" things for their users, while their customers pay Google to facilitate a link between googles users and googles customers through adwords. Using their market share for the "greater good" is highly valuable to them in the long term.

Second, if you own the WebM format, you could use it to bully the MPEG-LA members individually. MPEG-LA is an alliance with the sole purpose of keeping everyone else out of the alliance. The patent pool in MPEG-LA is a defensive measure - not an offensive one.

None of the things Google does seem to be short-term invested. It rather looks like they are shooting for 5-10 years ahead.
Yeah, Google really screwed themselves with that blogpost. To quote from a ZDNet article "Out of 250 words, open was mentioned 8 times." I don't know why they feel the necessity to paint everything that they do as open. This move itself could have been explained in one line like so: "We believe that the de facto codec for HTML5 video should be royalty-free, and to that end cannot continue supporting H.264 in our browser any longer." That much would have sufficed, and avoided a lot of the pointless bickering.
Actually, it's not obvious to me that the knowledgeable guy is the better candidate for CEO. Depending on why the second guy was successful at running grocery stores, he might actually be the better choice.

This is the lesson I've got from the fall of Borders and other big retailers: they didn't seem to know which business they were in. Borders was in the retail and hospitality business, not in the books business. Because of an identity crisis, they did a poor job at both.

Instead of trying to survive by ignoring Amazon, they would have probably done better to go into the grocery, apparel or restaurant business.
Font faces and color in email can join top-posting in the bin of terrible ideas.
Some of the crown jewels of CPAN that have been ported to other dynamic languages leave quite a bit to be desired. For instance, last time I was helping a friend with a scraper I was really disappointed in brokenness of the Python port of WWW::Mechanize, and found the Ruby port to be incomplete for my friend's task. Eventually I wrote the parser for him myself and directed him toward another friend who was fluent in Python and Perl who could show him the ropes with Scrapy if he wanted to rewrite it later.
This is why good internships are so important while your an undergraduate in CS (or many other majors for that matter).

Depending on the university you go to, CS != Software Engineering. You don't encounter, and may not be even aware, of concepts like code reviews, build systems, or version control. By participating in an internship you are forced to address these gaps in your knowledge.

That being said, I don't think I would take away a single CS course I took as an undergrad and replace it with a course on software engineering practices. There is just too much strictly CS knowledge that is necessary for an undergraduate to learn.
Adobe tackling 'Flash cookie' privacy issue
Utilizing the Social Graph as a Relevancy Source for Data Ranking
50,000 naked men/day is about 1,500,000 naked men per month, so $100,000 would be less than 7 cents per naked man. As this is highly targeted traffic, that does not sound completely unreasonable.
Like at an internet cafe or someplace with free wifi?
Another simple approach seen in many places (e.g. Nucleus OS) is using ASCII characters. That way, you get a unique identifier and as you get quicker at recognising them, you also get to immediately ASCII character values in hex, which is great for e.g. looking at coredumps..

>>> 'SEMA'.encode('hex')
'53454d41'
People get upset that they toil away at their jobs all day and he gets rich from seemingly nothing. Even though the truth is that he's a fantastic salesman and a really smart guy who works hard selling his admittedly mediocre books and himself.
Abusing set_trace_func for fun and profit
That would require more than simple CSS. I'd have to venture for the first time into the Greasemonkey. I'm not sure I like how that sounds.
The median household income in the US in 2008 was $52,029. Probably with health insurance, but still. If $60k is pretty tight, most of the country has it pretty bad.

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html
My suggestion is that this link to the App Store should be at the top, not the bottom of the page (I had to look through on the page to figure page to figure out how to get the app)

Point being, letting me install the app on my device ASAP is critical
I'm embarrassed to admit that I was standing in line at a Borders (Or was it a Barne's and Nobles, anyways, one of them) in Emmeryville after catching a movie, waiting to purchase a book that had caught my eye - the line was moving somewhat slowly, so, while waiting, I popped up my iPhone, brought up the amazon web page, found the book (for about 20% less) - bought it, and started reading it in the Kindel App before I got to the front of the line.

I felt somewhat bad about just handing the Cashier the book and leaving the store, but it was a really long line.
If Google is truly whole-heartedly after the openness of web video, they should go ahead and disable H.264 playback in the bundled flash plugin in Chrome. It's technically just a simple wrap around the stock flash plugin. Given their cozy relationship with Adobe, they might even get a special binary from adobe, cut down the download size of Chrome and save bandwidth cost (which I believe is a greater saving than the $6.5 million)!
Not part of the core language, is an add on. Nice trick, but Perl - that is to say, the language itself - still has pretty crappy OOP. Or has Moose been adopted as a core part of the language now?
The problem with interleaved posting is that it becomes very confusing once you get beyond two or three replies. Especially when you have multiple people, it becomes difficult to track the nesting level of the current line so that one can determine who is "speaking" at the moment.
One nice thing about ruby is that it has quite a few viable implementations floating around. MRI or YARV are probably what you have installed on your computer by default, but if multithreading and sane garbage collection are concerns of yours, JRuby is the right implementation to target. I'm not sure what's wrong with ruby's variable scoping, but I haven't used it for a while, so my memory of the ugly details of the language is a bit dim :)
Yes, it's impressive that he managed to do a pump and dump over Twitter and that 240% returns is a fantastic number, but it's an illegal way to make money, it's the kind that earns you jail-time. Is that the sign of a great investor?
Obsessed with FaceBook - Infographics
Most of these phones could be weeded out by simple criteria (like no updates to recent Android versions). Unfortunately it is difficult to get that information among all the noise.
Membership has its privileges
Two Startup Guys Looking for a New Roommate in SF
Could it be that most of those phones are actually OK, so that one could pick after other criteria, like design?
Great point. We'll add that.
"Now, even though the new application is basically anonymous, I still occasionally glance at the messages that are posted — basically as a QA measure, to make sure that it's working correctly and nobody's posted anything that has broken anything."

Is it normal for facebook app creators to monitor the data streams for 'messages of interest'?
That was the feeling of most chatroulette users initially (not realizing what the other person 'got on his hands').
No, it's like I've paid attention to the various posts by Asymco, Daring Fireball, and Marco over the past couple of months. I fully anticipate Gruber will link to Marco's piece, Asymco will add some sort of twisted perversion of data that supports it, and so on.

I read the piece and thought it added nothing that hasn't been debated and discussed countless times before.

Yet, the market has spoken, hasn't it? A year ago such was the argument about why Android could never succeed, with so many confusing choices and options against the iPhone's simplicity. Android has done pretty good for itself in spite of that, I suppose. In fact I thought the current angle was "of course Android would do well with so many handsets and so many options".
Aren't blogs just one giant top-post after another? I think most-recent-at-the-top is actually quite natural for unbounded conversations, where the most-recent posts are likely to be the most relevant, and you almost certainly don't care to read the entire history. Email fits this pretty well.

(As an aside, I think the Q/A nature of the example given is unfair, since Q/A conventionally goes top-down. Compare to this, which seems quite natural

28
> How old are you?

It's even more natural and obvious to go bottom-up when multiple layers of quoting are present:

28
> How old are you?
>> I'll answer exactly one personal question.)

As for the interleaved style, it's somewhat a matter of taste, but I find it often creates nitpicky, disjointed conversations; responding in paragraphs rather than lines encourages more cohesive, literarily satisfying exchanges.
The original title of "Mother, Superior?" was not nearly descriptive enough.

And considering that the article focuses on how the conclusion of the book is in direct opposition to the conclusion of the article (and how this decision was made by the WSJ and not Chau), I found the title apt.
I'm more worried about developing mobile apps for all these different phones. Minor differences between hardware profiles and firmware versions can lead to major headaches for an app developer. If that concern leads to fewer apps, then it sucks for the consumer.
Some people made this argument about the Bell system breakup in 1974. Doubt they still feel that way.
The project seems to be dead these days, but if you're interested in writing OSes, take a look at the Flux OSKit:

http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/oskit/

OSKit aims to be a set of libraries that dramatically lower the barrier to entry on OS development.
And this is without reading the text? So you'd suggest using a less abstract image?
Interestingly, that's exactly how I read top posted email:

Yes, I'm not sure I agree with all of that since I just got on the thread and haven't bothered to
read the entire uncut history of the message, but your point about cats is will understood.

Bob said:

> three pages of stuff
>
> Alice said:
>
>> five pages of stuff
>>
>> Sue Said:
>>
>>> Something about cats in the middle of four pages of stuff
Get the 'BetterPrivacy' extension for FireFox and it will help remove the Flash cookies. You can manually remove the cookies or have it automatically clear them on browser exit.
But with computers you have a keyboard, monitor.. eventually mouse.

These things were pretty universal and even carried over from machine to machine.

Even then the marketing was more about the OEM branding than Microsoft for a long time.
Believe it or not, but I actually like Libertine and have no particular fixed interest in Helvetica. I could have suggested Liberation Sans, or DejaVu Sans just the same.

I just saw a similar re-layout with Georgia that I liked and was a bit primed for serifs. :)
Hardware diversity in an OS is almost never a flaw. Even Apple knows this: look at the iPod line. The simple fact of the matter is no one device is going to fit all the needs of all users, whether those needs are real or just perceived. I agree with Marco on a lot of things and admire his work, but he does have a weird blind spot when it comes to Android (like his opinion that it is going to be much less relevant now that there is a Verizon iPhone).

The one device model does have its positives, of course. But the advantages are either too niche or too minor to matter. Fragmentation is the favorite knock, but outside of the tech world not that many care. A significant percentage of iOS users don't even update cause they don't realized they can. Software is somewhat easier to develop, but the advantages are overstated here. Accessories are nice, but those are post sale for the most part. Very, very few people buy phones based on a case or a dock. But even if people hate choosing from similar devices, the manufacturer will win in the long run if they have a plurality of the choices. And in the end, whether or not that is good for the customers, that is what matters.
Yahoo's Last Move at Growing a Media Empire: A New Sports Magazine
Not going to happen. There are probably patents in there that they will use for the next codecs.
I'm confused, doesn't Gmail do top posting?
Java is pass by value with mutable objects. Pass by reference is a different thing.

I think Java causes this confusion because it's so restrictive about what you can do with pointers. In C, the difference between a struct and a pointer to a struct is very clear. In Java, the fact that X x = new X() stores a pointer is sort of invisible.
Perl 5 runs on more platforms than the CLR and JVM do.

In theory. In practice, if it runs on one JVM, it runs on any JVM. No questions asked.

Perl is full of, "Oops, that crashes on Windows" traps. If you know where they all are, you can avoid them, but it's hard to be sure you've found the last one. The fact that the camel book has a section with tips for porters is telling.

There's a big difference between Java's robust guarantee of portability and perl's "best effort" philosophy.
should be chlorinate, not pollinate, we need less idiots, not more
Also, all the different MP3 stores really make my head spin. Why cant we all just buy music and video from iTunes? Give me a break. I bet walking down the cereal isle at the grocery store is a nightmare for Marco.

This, like all of Gruber's work, is pure brand loyalty. Look - I get that a lot of people really like Apple products. I own several - they're slick. But at the end of the day, Apple just puts way too much effort into insisting that you operate entirely within its ecosystem. And it makes me uncomfortable using their products.

Oh, you want an iPhone? Cool. Of course you'll have to use iTunes. Oh, and if you're using iTunes you really should have a Mac because iTunes on Windows is awful. And if you want to play it on a stereo you'll need one with a Apple licensed connector. Oh, and if you want games on it just head over to our App Store. And if you want to put your photos online, you'll just need a $99 Mac.com subscription...

No thanks. I'll take choice any day.
So this SEO expert walks into a bar, grill, pub, public house, Irish bar, bartender, drinks, beer, wine, liquor
I initially thought they were directing the feeds of the naked men to adult websites. In a way supplying the 'content' for adult networks.

If they took that approach, they could keep the naked men and not 'punish' them by sending them away. The naked men still think they're publishing their genitals on the Chatroulette network but in fact it's really being piped to an adult webcam site where paid subscribers watch and rate them.

Doubt any adult company would pay that much for naked men though, I don't think the rates for naked dude talent are competitive.

You would think after a while the naked men revenue would tail off as more and more are kicked off.
It's a "war over semantics" only insofar as is my claim that "a dog is a plant." Using the standard, well-accepted definitions of terms in programming language jargon, Java is pass by value.

You can make the semantic argument that the terms "pass by value," "pass by reference," etc. have meanings other than the standard, well-accepted ones, and indeed that would be a "war over semantics," but what's the point? Similarly, I could argue that the definition of "plant" is "something with four legs," but what's the point?
Time and time again, people fall for marketing stunts. Before getting your knickers in a twist, read the book in question and magically find out that (place author name here) is actually making a quite different argument.

Don't believe what newspapers tell you. More often than not, you're worse off after reading them.
Open your eyes: an urban layer on top of the web
Does it use vCard in any way?
The main reason their cache was useful back then is that many pages were long gone and the links were 404s. Inktomi marketing always tried to play up our freshness compared to Google. In 1999 they had some pages in their cache that were 3-5 months old. We were pushing new indexes once a week, no page was older than a month. Seems quaint now.
This is the problem with frequentist estimators: it's not clear what part is math and what part is subjective guessing.
Improving the PACELC Taxonomy
I can tell you exactly how, as many others already have in this and other discussions: flash is a plugin; h.264 support is native browser code.

Google bundles flash for one reason only: to make sure that users aren't given the chance to shoot themselves in the foot by not upgrading. Everyone downloads the flash plugin because sites require it. It has 98% penetration (perhaps less now with more people using iDevices, but still very high). But people never update the plugin, which is a major security issue. Google has solved that problem in chrome.

And you are mistaken that flash is part of the internal workings of chrome. You can disable it: see about:plugins. And there is no need to update it since chrome takes care of that for you.
I'm curious as to what your issue with Ruby's variable scoping is? It seems very straightforward and intuitive to me. Especially compared with Perl's mix of dynamic and lexical scoping.
I don't know if I'm missing the point here, but I don't see anything wrong with getting tests done and letting people know who did the testing and where.

Unless Ferris is claiming a personal endorsement of his program that does not exist, this is a non-issue. The university and physician seem to have been given ample opportunity to divorce themselves from the published results and/or retest. The refusal to do either because Ferriss doesn't work for the civil service is churlish.
I would actually go the other way on this one. I really think we have too few truly different mobile devices. Ignoring the OS, we seem to be in the chase-the-iphone phase after a while in the chase-the-blackberry. It seems like we are missing true differences. I was encouraged by some stuff at CES (mobile phone is brains of laptop), but I really am looking for some wildly different form factors.
Most commentators aren't neutral, this is nothing new. I'm not, and you yourself clearly aren't, based on your extremely one sided posting history on this subject. Would you prefer it if other HN readers read and responded to the content of your posts, or dismissed them as trying to spin everything in Androids favor?
It always impresses me how a company 6 months after coming out of an incubator has established such impressive relationships with several large credit card companies.
Its easier to take down a website than to remove a book from someone's bookshelf. It might be easier to copy a website, but, content gets lost from the web all the time.
Get a metaphorical microscope and focus in on call semantics in Java. Arguments no matter what their type are pass by value. So then What are you allowed to pass as arguments to a function in java? Primitive types, it is impossible to pass an object to a function in Java. Then what actually happens when people claim they are passing an object to a function in Java? It is passing a primitive type of type object reference to the function. It is doing so by value.
I've been doing it longer than that, but I don't quite agree that "it's the only right way". I top-post maybe half the time now, depending on the kind of reply (as you note) but also my audience's expectations. For example, when replying to a developer list for an open-source project, I'll usually use interleaving because it's the style in that community. In business contexts I'm more likely to top-post because that's what everyone else does (and as another poster noted, Outlook is broken).

I guess we don't disagree too much; I'm just saying I don't try to force interleaving where it's not likely to be appreciated.
darn it, the ipod version of that app won't do barcodes.
Is Graphene The Plastic Of The 21st Century?
Wikileaks gives $15K for Bradley Manning's defense
PS3 Root Key now Public Domain (Exhibit T, page 247)
Writing your own bootloader is actually an excellent exercise in getting to know the intricacies of the memory mapping on the PC architecture. After you're done you can always decide to go for a read-made one but rolling your own is definitely useful if you plan on writing your own OS.

NIH applies like always, but if you plan on taking control of the machine you might as well begin at the beginning. Rolling your own BIOS would be a step too far I think :)
All that choice, and yet there isn't a GSM model with high specs, a 5-row keyboard and a front-facing camera. Some of the author's points are valid, but ultimately I think the market will be better served by more choice than what's currently available, not less.

A problem, as I see it is that there are so many nearly-identical devices out there. Making a device just like the one the other guy is selling a lot of may be an easy recipe for profit, but it's a bit lame. Manufacturers showing a bit of originality might help them get ahead more than "me-too" devices.
How MySQL solved their sales & marketing challenges
Bristol's dancing is also seriously offensive but we didn't put her in jail.
Dropbox Forums: The Official Dropquest Thread
I confess to having no coffee this morning, dealing with new students, and having a co-worker tell me they wouldn't buy an iPad until it had a pop-down keyboard like their phone. Plus, I think I have driver issues with the new sarcasm detector on my laptop.
Is Lockheed Martin Shadowing You?
I believe there are Firefox and Chrome extensions to blacklist sites from Google search results.
Android upgrades: Which manufacturers can you trust?
'Reebooting' brain could ease ringing in ears
The Economist: Did the Internet kill rhetoric?
IPhone Game “Cut the Rope” Sells 1 Million Copies in 10 Days
How many people can say they made money the white-boy version of slinging crack rock, AND slinging actual crack rock?
Cool helper. Namespace pollution is still an issue even with popular libs.
Yes, I was, for context.
You need to educate yourself on some of the happiness research that is ongoing. It appears that people are very, very bad about predicting what will make them happy. There is also apparently something like a happiness equilibrium -- lotto winners and recent amputees actually return near their previous happiness level, one year after their "event".

http://www.biopsychiatry.com/happiness/happiness-measured.ht...
Virgin Throttles Speed for MiFi Users at 5GB of Usage
Reasons why list-based posts work well online
I didn't say it did. It's just surprising to see that much of a difference, regardless of the cause.
Reading Asymco makes my head spin. I can never understand what the hell he's talking about, and I do computational modeling by day.
I find that the cache is useful now because articles get posted to social news sites, the influx of traffic brings down the site, and Google Cache is a handy mirror that usually seems to have the page already.
For dark schemes, Wombat (for Vim) would be better, in my opinion, which is based off Desert. Or even Twilight (for Textmate).

To OP: no, that's not too nice. Maybe if you were going for accessibility and high-contrast ...
The elitist out-of-touch circle. These guys like their iPhones, because they believe them to be "The Best". They just can't understand why other people would want anything else, and if people DO get something else, then there must be something wrong with them.