skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
there's nothing restricting it to porn except for the fact that porn is one of the only types of video that humans tend to watch without desire for context. it's not as often that you find someone lining up 100 tv shows in a row, watching 10 seconds, and then skipping to the next. i intend to to use the technology in the future (on a different site) to give a `gist` of a style of film. so you would choose "show me what noir film looks like" and you could just skip through clips real fast to learn.

i agree, there's plenty of room for improvement. i spent about a month building the player, and it's my first project in Flex. i am however keeping track of all the clicks, which i can use to provide natural ranking later.

agreed, i could really benefit from a UI designer... unfortunately i build and design all by myself, and my design aesthetic isn't necessarily simple/obvious.
Is it free because it's in beta?
Why Did Groupon Diss Google? $15 Billion I.P.O.
@bdon yes! effective testing and writing good technical documentation are often missed out too. There are so much to testing; automated, security, regression, etc. All of it caters to different phase/part of a proj/app, I guess partly most people think that testing is not necessary.

Name one good technical documentation you see recently? Not easy really, there's a few threads on HN on it. I guess that's why most used a wiki for their technical doc, so that anyone can just come in and help correct any error documentation.
see also reddit and 4chan

Welcome to the internet, have a nice day.
Is that known and understood?

Prions aren't terribly well understood, there aren't a lot of them. If I'm not mistaken there are doubters that don't believe the some of the diseases attributed to prions are actually caused by them. I know it's still just theory how it is that they work.

At Colorado State University there are stables where deer were stabled while chronic wasting diseases was being studied and they are off limits forever now.

On the upside, it seems like they tend to be slower acting diseases but it's still a bit scary to think they can aerosolize.
Perhaps, though the disconnect here is that open source fanboys pretty much dislike H.264 as much as flash. Neither is open source by OSI standards: http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd. All the screaming about running from flash seems kind of silly when you point to something like H.264 as the alternative.

It is a standard, but that means little with all of the royalty-bearing patents surrounding it. It is royalty-free in a limited use case, but still can't be included on your typical linux distribution legally.

Not that I think Google is being altruistic. They obviously have a vested interest in controlling the video format youtube uses. Now is the time to bring a new format to the table, too. Gives them some breathing space to fight it out before worrying about paying royalties for H.264 or its successor.

I'll happily deal with a couple more years of flash (and honestly, we were going to anyway, ie9 isn't going to sweep away 7 & 8 anytime soon) to get WebM as a standard instead of H.264.
As a young autodidact struggling to fit into the traditional education world this is a welcome gift. To me a traditional diploma granting institution is now akin to a rubber stamp. You're not paying for the education, you're paying for the brand under the assumption that it will get you a job. I could rant, but I plan on doing it in a cohesive and informed blog release or something at a later date.

MIT diffuses my cynicism with steps like this. In an academic system I do not trust there are clearly intelligent like minded people enabled to make a difference. After years of dreading my involvement with academia, movements like this make me want to wander back in with an open mind.

If anyone involved with MIT OpenCourseWare ever reads this please know that I respect and appreciate what you have done for people thirsty for knowledge. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
I was pretty much in the same boat as you, having seven years of experience but no hard CS qualifications. I was recently contacted by a Facebook engineer who'd seen my blog and who encouraged me to apply.

The team I interviewed for was less technical than a core engineering team but the process was much more straightforward and actually easier than I expected. I'm from outside the US and had heard about month long hiring processes and day long interviews but in reality it was three short phone interviews and a single in-person interview which they paid for. I got the feeling they were looking for a personality fit rather than just engineering skills.
US Patent system so dysfunctional you can patent a stick from a tree
"Originality isn't easy, but it is simple. Just don't do stuff that's already been done."
Why a project switched from Google Search Appliance to Zend_Lucene?
How did you get enough folks to sign up (without any prior announcement) to get reputation data for hundreds of thousands of folks? Just from sending it out to friends?
Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science - Scavenger Hunt
I will arbitrarily define it at the time of the collapses, based on my rough knowledge of history and completely arbitrary whim, by looking around me and deciding everything based on the people I see.

Oddly, I lost a bet to myself with you comment, I figgured the first bit of pedantry would be over my statement regarding prizes being awarded at the end of the collapse. Such a thing is:

1. Even harder to judge

2. A much less useful time to be giving out caches of valuable supplies than the bits on the way down.

Anyway, given it is an apocalypse, odds are neither of us would survive, strictly statistically speaking, so who cares how I judge. If I remain alive, I am honestly not going to wait around for you for the argument given you are most likely dead, and I hope for your sake you would do the same for me by prying the cache location out of my dead hands.

As for your girlfriend's game: I have heard, and seen myself, that even the places that are most "terrifying ugly and bad" (first hand: the slums of Detroit and Pre-Katrina new Orleans, second hand: mogadishu, slums of bombay, etc) are surprisingly civilized. The "crazy fight for survival" based entertainment scenarios are about as realistic as the "evil corporation", "massive government conspiracy" and "small team of highly trained operatives" ones are. Such things may exist, but they are both more boring and more interesting than any such entertainment ever will be. Just sayin...
As someone new to clojure I gotta say that multimethods are pretty nice.
Prion's are pretty amazing as examples of self-replication. The fact that they (and viruses) are considered "non-living" always seemed like an arbitrary distinction to me.
What else would they call it? (use DPRK everywhere?) They don't recognize the "other" Korea. South Korea does the same, e.g. at http://www.mofat.go.kr/
I'm not really sure I see the problem here. This kinda thing happens all the time in video games, its how genres get started.
What an amazing theme song.
Is it just me or you also think that the fact that he mentioned and linked to his company 3-4 times in the article shows that the article was written to advertise his infinite beta shop?
had that idea in 2006... than youporn came out and i called it a day... :/
...aerosols containing as little as 2.5 per cent brain tissue from mice...

2.5 percent? As in 1 part in 40 tissue? Is that not as ridiculous as it sounds?

Edit: Thinking on it, that probably means the suspension which was aerosolized rather than the aerosol itself, which explains the conclusion that 10% suspensions might be dangerous to handle. Is that normally how you measure aerosol concentration?
I like your mistake better than the original intention (and I thought it was a deliberate and witty pun). I think it captures the spirit of problem nicely :-)
Heh. We still support IE6. It's 6% of our users. It doesn't need to look good on IE6, but it needs to work.
The one about "computer games" from series 2 was also a stand out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBcrTucxiRc

You can even play one of the fake games ("Diarrhea Dan") profiled in the episode on the BBC site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/lookaroundyou/programmes/compute...
You can't bill 2000 hours as consultant/freelance in most cases.
Why would you prepare for an IPO so quickly after closing a $950 million funding round? Is their burn rate that high?
There will always be a free version. There will at some point be a paid version with more upload space etc. (more info here: http://reverbapp.com/help/#how-much-does-it-cost).
Yup, that's what I'm thinking... I think it would be cool to hack something up like that.
Just because it catalyzes water into ice 9?
They didn't raise $950m to extend their runway. No one raises this sort of money for that. They're already highly profitable. They raised that money to hire a metric ton of salespeople to expand the business even faster.
Why is this shit showing up on Hacker News? There are plenty of places I can find funny videos if I want that. Please don't let it infect this place.
Arguably Posterous fits this criterion.
Interesting demos of the tech:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPWews7tj_k
The death of Myspace: A former employee looks back
> there's nothing restricting it to porn except for the fact that porn is one of the only types of video that humans tend to watch without desire for context.

I don't think that's true, it's a great concept for other topics as well. For example, I enjoy tech talk videos, it would be nice to have an app like that for lazily looking at new and random stuff. There should be other areas where a lot of videos are sifted through in search for random nuggets, like cooking videos, and stuff like that. Youtube playlists just don't cut it...

> i agree, there's plenty of room for improvement.

I didn't mean to be overly critical, I like both the idea and the simplicity of the design very much. Any improvements would at best be incremental and very small.
FF3.6 here... not centered, won't close. Cool in Safari as mentioned but far too exclusive to consider using anytime soon. Things we get to look forward to though.
Then there's jwacs (http://chumsley.org/jwacs/), which does CPS conversion on JavaScript without inventing weird new terms or requiring runtime libraries.
well, you can always use virtual stuff, xen, virtualbox, qemu among others ?
Actually, ex-Soviet nations have a huge emphasis on mathematics and similar scientific disciplines. You may get quite a few "Your requirement is stupid", but the code quality will probably be not that bad (assuming the code you need is heavy on algorithms).
Yeah - this post doesn't actually contain any insight into whether or why Indian startups don't have programming talent, and why they specifically need to acquire it. It's just typical fundamentals of startup logic with a linkbait title.
"... Look at the odds against Facebook, Myspace had music, videos, local partnerships, mobile integration, millions of bands, four times as many users, the marketing sway of the FOX media empire, 22 international offices and $900 million in cash from Google. And Facebook still won out. You can’t deny that is impressive. But how did they do it? ..."

Better hackers?
Bill Gates has predicted that the best higher education will come from the web and will be cheaper - this is just another step. [Article: http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/bill-gates-education/ Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2Qg80MVvYs&feature=playe...]

In the same vein as MIT, UC Berkeley has many lectures on availble on Youtube. [http://www.youtube.com/user/UCBerkeley]
I've had some decent code written by people in the Bloc countries for a pittance. Was for pretty simple stuff, though, no idea how they would have fared on more challenging things.
what company makes this and when can I invest?
Not to mention buy out every Groupon clone in a market that they're not already in.
That isn't illegal or immoral.
Am I crazy or was there not a single reduce query in the post? I've been working on map reduce queries for a little while now, aggregating statistics over feeds and stories posted, normalizing over item frequencies, and generally doing simple stuff.

I was very excited to see the second half of MapReduce. The reduce queries are always harder to write. If map is addition, reduce is division. I was hoping for examples on different reduce queries that are more advanced than the standard count tags in a list of lists. But no reduce period, so am I missing something?
http://www.eventbrite.com/event/1207546805
Sign Up: KC HN Meetup (January 26th, 5:30, McCoys)
just tried to connect from south korea and got redirected to http://www.warning.or.kr/

hope i dont get the wifi's owner in trouble :(
In what way is terminology badly abused? There isn't a single use of the word "cloud" in the entire article and the only "buzzword" terminology used appears to be used accurately and sparingly. If that isn't your contention, why not explain otherwise? How does the abuse/misuse of terminology detract from the quality of the article or make it inaccurate?

Further, your argument that the same could be accomplished in "3 or 4 lines of SQL" is a straw man. The article never claimed the specific task was shorter/easier to do using MapReduce and Cloudant; the author made an example based on common use cases—one that didn't require architecting a full requirements specification for when one would find Cloudant/MapReduce/Non-relational databases superior to a few lines of SQL for various values of "superior".

Your comment is vague, largely irrelevant, and completely useless regardless of its accuracy since you provided absolutely no arguments to back up your claims. The fact that it has even two points is disheartening.
An interesting thought, but the square was just a masking tape outline that couldn't be messed with.
Before digg v4 came out, I did not know what TC is, i relied on digg for great articles
Marketing, for lack of a better word, is good. Marketing is right. Marketing works. Marketing clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Marketing, in all of its forms; marketing of oneself, of your business, of your community, has marked the upward surge of mankind and marketing, you mark my words, will not only save Hacker News, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.
yeah, i guess when you think about it... people just sit in front of the tv and flip through the channels until they see something they like. though i would argue that the main cause of that is due to commercials.

if you're interested in trying to rig this up for a different purpose (cooking vids, etc...), i'd be game to try it out. it really wouldn't take much code-wise. shoot me an email.
I use AdBlock.
If I ever do come across ads, like in videos, I usually don't even watch the video in order to avoid the ad or turn the volume to mute while the ad is running.
When voting on duplicates, how many people end up switching their vote the second time around?
Whoa. Seriously? Is South Korea known for heavy online censorship?
Ask HN: Which Y Combinator backed company do you think has the most potential?
Over the years, Y Combinator has seem to have made some very wise investments in companies that turned out to become quite successful. What do you think are those companies that have the most potential in today's standards? Think about at how much more popular the companies can get and not just where they are today.
True, but the theory behind character and fitness tests is that if he is desperate for money with which to repay his debts, he may be more susceptible to coercion, blackmail, and criminal elements.
I just started using Pivotal Tracker for a small project this week after reading about it here on HN. So far, so good.
Someone with a large amount of debt is more likely, in the bar association's eyes, to seek illegal or questionably legal means of repaying it.

In this case, there's also the fact that the lawyer in question tried to file bankruptcy to lower his student loan payments, and to discharge some of his credit card debt. He also decided to take on a low-paying job as a public defender -- admirable, perhaps, but in his financial situation, irrational.
I do think this is a genuine attempt to spread knowledge.

Even being cynical there is no real downside for them.
People will still want to go to MIT 'for real' and they will still fill their lecture halls with paying students - even if MIT could expand to take everyone that wanted to go there - this would dilute the MIT brand.

Allowing everyone else to get the knowledge for free simply kills the competition, there is no market for a staet-college online course when you can have the best for free.
I would say it's immoral to ignore your debt obligations, yes. He went through a program that cost a lot of money, and which he promised to pay for over time. He's not a victim here. One can't always choose to do whatever they prefer, especially when in debt to others.

There are many startup lawyers who bill >$400/hour, and I'm sure even the lowest paid lawyers who aren't public defenders make a fairly respectable salary. Paying off 150k of student debt on the kinds of timelines those things are usually on isn't outrageous.
Ask HN: Questions about wordpress business(freelancing + premium themes)
Hi, HNers, I have few questions about running wordpress business.

I am sure that many hackers in here have pretty solid experience about wordpress business so any comments will be appreciated!

1. paid premium themes/plugins business
For my limited experience, premium theme business seems a quite profitable business.
Although from some comments from HN, the profit for this business is decling now. (tasty theme and wpreviewsite plugin), personally I still think it is the way to go.

But anyone in here had experience about promoting/marketing the premium theme and plugin?

Correct me if I was wrong, in general, these premium themes doesn't seem hard to code, some plugins, for example, gravity forms, takes time to build but still, not the rocket science.
so i guess the problem is down to how to promote, do marketing, and sell these theme/plugins, any ideas suggestions?

2. freelancing Wordpress theme development

Quite often I am asked about quoting projects for wordpress theming dev work, , mainly about convert the design into wordpress theme.

But at least 8 out of 10 quote request I have, the client doesn't have very clear idea about what they want to have or the scope of the project doesn't have very clear cut.

So things bite me are:

* submitting quote takes my time, and I am not able to charge the time for quoting projects so I dont want to invest hours before I can secure the project. How do you guys handle this?

* for the vague project, if I put defensive ballpark (i.e., good buffer for the margin), the client could go away. but if I ask too much details, the client could go away either and as I said, I dont want to invest hours before I can secure the project.

* communications are expensive, i.e., if i have to confirm many details with the client during the project so not good profit in the end.

small things, for example, some clients don't have good knowledge of wordpress, it could take me another 20-30 mins to help them to setup. Do you guys charge for this kinda of tasks?

So for freelancing part, I am looking for the good process to streamline the job. So I can spend less time on crap part and focusing on deliver good service and keep the reasonable profit.
yea but I thought I had to check in the code before those tools could come into play. I think they could run if I pause editing my code and it happens to compile.
Check out Thomas Thwaite's TED Talk on "How I Built a Toaster from Scratch"

He mines ore and creates his own steel, copper, and plastic. It just goes to show how much specialization and trade is required for the simplest of modern technology, and how interconnected our society is.

http://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toast...
Exactly. I thought it was a stroke of genius. That they're now making money hand over fist off of something that turned a lot of people off and rubbed them the wrong way is great. Now if only they can beat the bad press and manage to find their niche without choking they'll be set.
"In a nutshell, it's a realtime threaded conversational web app."

This means nothing to the Average Joe/Jane. Hell, it doesn't mean much to me. Maybe work on a better introductory line, use analogies and offer use cases/examples?
First bacteria that figures out how to stick to this will have nice place to live and develop, plenty of human associated food and no competition.
This isn't rate my English... Only startups... Just sayin'. Anyways the feedback about clicking to pause is good... It should also open your affiliate link in the background or new tab. You'd need to be signed up for the ppc type for that to be beneficial.
The article seemed to mention that he was not contributing to the family's expenses.
I feel problem in India(not sure about other regions) is that more people get into Software/IT for money than for the love of technology. We will be better off leaving technology to people who get it or love doing it. Convincing/asking people to learn to program will hardly produce stellar startups.

Then, I think there is no harm for non tech people who see technology more as an enabler than end goal seeking technical expertise outside.
Can somebody explain what I just read? I had a lot of trouble following it.
Are you sure? Salman Khan did graduate from MIT, so I figure things tend more towards cooperation than competition.
This will probably be a deal breaker for me, it will probably get passed over by most users because they don't realize that its happening until it happens to them. sigh
I'm assuming anything in the "base" library counts as core; in it, you have pointer/buffer manipulation (Foreign.* ), synchronized mutable containers (Control.Concurrent.* ), ST (Control.Monad.ST), and various mutable containers (IORef, STRef, HashTable).

It's true that Haskell has many immutable types, but that's true of almost any language. Haskell is no more immutable than Java or C#, and certainly nothing like truly immutable languages such as Coq or Agda.
Enforcement of the preference for inline replies has (as I understand it) waned greatly in recent years. As I understand it, people who began conversing over email seriously in the late 1990s or early 2000s are much less likely to have learned about this than old-timers.

(I say this as someone who started in the late 90s and later converted to inline replies when I realized their benefit several years later. Many people my own age -- even technical ones -- think my inline replies are abnormal.)
Exactly. The "fail fast" notion is anathemic to most worthwhile pursuits, from school to skill acquisition to sports... I'm not sure why it's suddenly considered a virtue in the startup world.
What fits on your back? is great for a snack? http://www.inventables.com/technologies/water-soluble-glass
Imagine that regular glass had not yet been invented, and someone came up with it today. I suppose people here would be questioning its safety.
Updated story suggests $15-20 billion. I must admit to being astonished by both the valuation and th size of the company (3100 staff). I thought they were foolish to spurn Google, but if these rumors prove accurate that'd make me the foolish one.
Heheh, that's pretty cool. What's really cool is to do the opening crawl of the original Star Wars in it (with soundtrack). If I had screencast foo right now, I'd do it... Anyone?