skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
cookiecaper, you are my new fav HNer.

I have an iPhone and other H.264 rendering devices, too. It sucks to know that WebM might be a problem. But I'm not so sure worrying about my phone purchase warrants this baffling cry of nonsense about Google dropping H.264.

Flash is installed everywhere, providing video, interactive content and millions of web experiences - but Steve says its gotta go. Fine, I concede that a proprietary sandtrap that encapsulates 90% of the interactive content on the web is probably a crappy thing.

So why the hate on Google for dropping royalty-laden H.264? Isn't this the same proprietary lip-stick-on-a-pig bullshit argument that Adobe was shooting around about Flash when Steve Jobs declared it the enemy of battery life?

It would be different if every single browser supported H.264 and Google was pulling the carpet out from under everyone. But that isn't the case.
Nice! The Hacker News logo in Palatino is very very elegant, but Helvetica makes the body more readable. What about using Palatino just for the logo?
WebID Incubator Group launched at W3C
I switched from svn to hg for personal stuff too. Like the author of the blog post, I looked at git and found that it was nonintuitive. hg commands are close enough to svn commands that I felt more comfortable sooner.

I don't really get the big issue with branches in svn though. Branches and tags are "cheap" operations in svn, and making personal branches, etc. was something I used to do. Merging back into trunk was never a huge issue either. Maybe I've been lucky; also our team was not very big and different people weren't often working on the same source files at the same time.
Won’t You Be My Wireless Neighbor?
H.264 hardware is everywhere, you shouldn’t imply that it is only in iPhones.
SQL -> NoSQL?
Why does every article about NZ have to have a picture of Gandalf?
You can mix and match yourself, as for me -- I like to keep font variation to a minimum.

a[href=news] {font-family:Palatino, 'Liberation Serif',
Georgia, serif !important;}
One of the volumes (I think the subtitle was "Sorting and Searching") was used in my undergrad CS program, and I definitely didn't go to MIT or Berkeley.

It's comprehensible, though it's definitely not written in an "algorithms for dummys" style. Check it out from a library and give it a try... you might be surprised.
Because Apple and Microsoft are able to obsolete these plugins if they choose so (I'm not saying it's the best solution, but it's legally and technically feasible), and others don't require those plugins.

It's not that easy the other way, where you've got closed reference implementation of Flash (and you can't get it without plugin) and there are patent royalty payments for H.264 decoders.
One more note about the wiring, it seems to be outside of a bathroom or bathtub of some sort. Note the toilet paper and its reflection in the tile.

I don't know if that's helpful, but it's good to understand all of the details; thanks for your analysis, elbrodeur.
What's New in Radi 0.5.4 (an update to my HTML5 animation app)
Very deft career move, Garry. You'll have more access to more people, see more fresh ideas, and have a much larger megaphone.

Y-C's gonna be awesome for you, but I really can't wait to see what comes next. =)
The "before" link goes to a thumbnail image.

Very nice!
I would think that a bugging device would be much more discreet. :) That was a pretty ugly job. Must be something more to it.
Is it just me or does this not really work as a user style on Firefox? (I still see the orange bar at the top of the screen, etc...)
Do you accept patches?
Posterous Co-Founder Garry Tan Leaves for Y Combinator
There was no WebM back then. The only alternative was Ogg Theora (even before 1.1 improvements IIRC), which Google didn't consider as suitable alternative.

Google doesn't have RMS's consistency on the matter. They balance practicality with idealism.
I thought the music on pinkberry's website was pretty cool: http://www.pinkberry.com/
You're right that MPEG-LA does not indemnify licensees of H.264, no. Licensing doesn't eliminate the risk of adoption. It substantially reduces that risk. (Largely because patent licensing also function as a protection racket.) MPEG-LA will defend their patents, though.

See, it's not gonna be the content producers (like Google) that the patent trolls go after for WebM; it's gonna be the makers of the WebM-decoding graphics chips. I guess it remains to be seen where Google will be in that fight.
Around 2000, highest earning occupations are by far in finance. Some entrepreneurs will make more, but when comparing 10 smart people in finance and 10 entrepreneurs, the average earnings aren't even close.

Prestigious depends very heavily on who you ask. I don't think you can come up with one answer even 50% of a population would agree on today.
Large organizations can suffer from diseconomy of scale. Office politics, slow response time, and duplication of effort are some of the problems that decrease the efficency of large corporations.

Which is to say, big doesn't alway win either.
altogether a means to an end, mercurial and git are both good. i personally use mercurial. have worked with git in the past and was having trouble with the gerrit web front end and the fact that it required java.

i also use bitbucket and since having been bought by atlassian, was able to get lots of free private repositories. i think some people mentioned that they accidentally left cookie secrets in their code on a public github project.

i'm still too early in development to get into the perceived branching woes that others are talking about, but i'll let you know when i get there.
I haven't used mercurial in anger, and mostly use subversion instead (because that's what my workplace uses at the moment), but:

1) sometimes you commit by accident. This happens to me a few times a year, from hitting the up arrow the wrong number of times and pressing enter.

2) sometimes you say something in a commit message that turns out not to be true, or is just a typo, and especially if you're using commit messages to tie commits to tickets in your bug tracker, this can make code show up on the wrong ticket, or not at all, which is quite confusing for a later maintainer.
I don't really agree with her response. Her critique that the singular goal of this parenting style is to get kids into a good college. To me, it seems like Chua's approach is to prepare her kids to have the skills (focus/discipline) to be successful in life. The blog's critique seems to be missing the point. The post could argue why Chua doesn't instead prepare her kids for blue collar skills, which would be the bigger issue of why blue collar skills are no longer valued in America any more, the way they are in Europe (but is rapidly changing).
Getting Started with AppHarbor – Heroku for .NET
Feel of the game is very similar to this Ninja game (http://games1.org/flash-games/NGame) done in flash. Its amazing how much can now be done in HTML itself.
First impression:

To be honest, the site itself looks a bit amateurish -- weird or no padding in the text boxes, cut off tags that don't fit into the .tags div, usernames sticking out of the boxes (at least in FF on a mac), eg. http://songfountain.com/discussion/749

The Site Feed arrow is below the fold on the home page, so my first thought was I have to register to even browse the site -- you might want to promote the feed more prominently to engage visitors before you make them join the site.

Your tagline ("Song Fountain is the most effective way to discover new music!") sounds too much like a marketing claim, especially since the site doesn't look to be a major player and it's hard to believe it's more "effective" than last.fm or Pandora.

In the video you're describing the functionality of the site like you would in a technical manual. You might want to try to talk from a user's perspective ("How do I achieve this and that with Song Fountain?").

So there, that's my first impression. What are your plans about the site? Is it a side project (for fun, not money) or do you want to make it big with it?
A simple explanation of the transformer/wires is that he could be documenting an attempt to electrocute him.
"Accelerated Disruption", by Eric Lefkofsky
"When he showed that user-definable, verifiably associative combination operators can provide magnificent opportunities for automatic parallelization..."

To the extent that I have a programming style, I find myself increasingly thinking of it as Primitive-Oriented Programming. If you want your final program to have some desirable property, be it correctness, scaling, parallelizability, or even more complicated things like one I work on where the interface must have the property "able to be remoted across this certain protocol for various reasons", the best way to achieve that in general is to create primitives with this property, create ways to combine them that maintain the property, and build up from there.

It's very hard right now, because 1. modern machines and programming languages make it hard to create these properties in the first place, so many corner cases to cover because nobody pays any attention to this idea except by accident 2. modern languages tend to make it borderline impossible to verify that properties are being maintained (think things like type-level verification) and it's so easy to violate them that you need this help 3. if you're programming in a team environment the concept that there are certain properties that should be maintained and if you violate them things won't work is extremely foreign to pretty much everybody so in summation 4. you pretty much have no support for this from any angle, the way you can get languages that support and/or mandate OO or FP.

And as a special subcase of this, yes, if you want parallelizable programs the best way to get there is with primitives that embrace it at the bottom. This is why, for all Erlang's faults, it's so much more fun to write parallel programs in Erlang, for instance. The primitives support the concept and there are a number of ways in which you can't get yourself in trouble because there's simply no way to accidentally mutate a variable in a foreign process with the provided primitives. You can't even express it. This is also why Haskell is so exciting to me, because it both starts providing this verifiability to some extent and also shows me where my command of this is weaker than I'd like. (Designing usable primitives is hard because if you accidentally, say, make it impossible to "go up" then when you need to you're in real trouble. There's a reason why most languages make it so easy to break out of the constraints, because generally you have to if you want to get real work done.)

Anyhow, while to be honest the rest of Fortress has been unexciting to me, mostly because it's targeting programmers writing code the types of code I don't, this is one of the more exciting ideas that could come out of that effort and the need for multicore-capable languages in general, and I hope this sort of approach spreads.
Mondays: Chrome;
Tuesdays: Frustrated with WebKit inspector, switch to latest Firefox 4 beta;
Wednesdays: Annoyed with sluggish performance, switch to Safari;
Thursdays: Feel like I'm not on the cutting edge, switch to Chromium;
Fridays: Realize I'm a front-end developer and need Firebug, switch back to latest Firefox 4 beta and hope Firebug's been updated since Tuesday
Even in C++ it's pretty trivial to parallelize a loop with openMP.

The compiler could do it automatically but it's only a single line preprocessor directive.
Congrats Gary! Woo!
An Encoder Is Not A State Machine
I was enjoying the README and then I hit the part about using hashes to determine staleness, which is a good idea, but in the Python implementation those hashes are stored in a sqlite database. That seems a little excessive for a lightweight build system.

This is something that seems like it could be handled by the file system:

> $ cat .redo/artifact-source/src/path/to/file.c
> f572d396fae9206628714fb2ce00f72e94f2258f

Or the reverse (hash to source path).
Thank you for running this poll I am working a greasemonkey script for HN and I will definitely be adding Chrome support before I release it.
update: the comment below gave me an idea to add Amber Alerts to Xuland as well ;)
I agree with your rant and am grateful for every day I don't have to program in Java.

Also, I just noticed your username... are you the same beagle3 as on Reddit? If so, I like your comments, particularly the ones about APL/K/J.
Should Gaga endorse her $1M Elephant Lady Gaga painting?
That was sarcasm.

As an aside, Duverger's law appears to not hold in Canada, which is FPTP (regrettably IMO) but nevertheless has seen repeated rise of major third parties (CCF/NDP, Reform/Alliance who now de facto hold power).
yea I don't doubt it.

the reason it hasn't surfaced as a best practice yet is probably because best practices for async programming haven't been a hot topic yet either.

and the point is exactly that a snippet doesn't fit the bill. its easy to abstract complexity on a snippet. its only with the full fledged solution that you start to see best practices emerging and making a difference.
this is why stealing is bad.
Compare with B.Gates for example who bought the DOS for 50K instead of stealing it.
> No one really cares about the desktop.

Last time I checked desktop usage was still is 90-99% range, 3G bandwidth — even with H.264 — allowed only low-quality video streaming, and operators were tightening limits on their "Unlimited†" tariffs.

If you really care about mobiles today, you're encoding special mobile-only (low-res baseline profile) version anyway. Codec war on desktop doesn't really affect that yet.
Want To Know What Your Friends Think? Ask Polling Site GoPollGo
It likely means "over 40 different radioactive isotopes were released". What can you expect from CNN (or any other 'mainstream' news?
Every Chinese mother I know (that would be quite a few) found the Amy Chua article to be repulsive.

The is an old saying that we most hate in others what we most hate in ourselves.

A number of Chinese friends of mine say that they recognized Amy Chua's description, it is how they were raised. So certainly some out there fit the description. Whether or not they think they do.

...and it strikes a chord because people are too sensitive to perceived criticism of things that matter deeply to their psyches...

AKA cognitive dissonance. You're absolutely right.
Congrats Garry! Looking forward to more awesomeness.
Freemium Is Not a Business Model, Trust Me
TAOCP site http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/taocp.html now estimates volume 5 will come out in 2020, and there are already links to errata in volume 4A
Whoohoo happy birthday jQuery. Changing the web one dom at a time...
if you'll ever have to use windows:
win+break => system preferences
Thanks a lot for the feedback, yeah the layout is in progress. Showing the feed at first could be better for people to see first. I'll work on the video too lol. It's serious.
Instructions for installing on Chrome - http://goo.gl/jxhj8
Just recommended this to my wife, a physics instructor at IU East; some of her local engineering hopefuls are good at tech but definitely fuzzy on math, and this should help a lot. I love it.
Not always, but the rise of information technology allows big groups to cut the large company overhead in a way they never could in the past. Recent technologies favor large (sometimes stupendously large) groups over small ones, so if large corporations were viable at all in the '70s, they're much more viable now.
clickable: http://somelabs.com/HN-Tweaker.html
"These findings are compelling, but I'd like to see some corroborating studies in peer reviewed journals"

Uhh, I say exactly that on a monthly, if not weekly, basis.
If you allocate the time, and have the desire, you can approach TAOCP in any manner you want and get something out of it. I read the 3 volumes cover to cover, including reading the exercises, but not really doing them. I did gloss over some of the really long hard algorithm analyses. At the beginning of the first volume is a refresher on all the maths Knuth uses in the books (a little over 100 pages).
And yet they acted like reading it was a horrifying, mandatory experience. And then they voluntarily extended that negative experience by talking about it online. It seems inexplicable to me, but there it is.

Seems like another data point in favor of the theory in this article.
I'm not sure what Google's motivations are but they are taking a huge risk here. If WebM gets a strong patent challenge, or isn't widely adopted/supported for other reasons, then Google is going to demonstrate their ability to pick the wrong horse in a very high profile way. It will be interesting to see what type of fallout that creates. Imagine a new world where Google, with all of its power, cannot influence the future of the web? I think that would have some major ramifications.
#stage48 on IRChighway (using mIRC 4.72 which was a transitional version that includes colors but still operates under the old/original scripting style)
>Really, the highest earning "occupations" (or most prestigious) change as time goes: - in the 1800s many smart people became authors or poets.- in the 1950 many became physicists - around 2000, many became entrepreneurs (or even venture capitalists)

"Many" smart people become just about everything in every time period. I doubt we have the data to justify the assertion the ratios have changed over the years.
1. This is how I talk. I call BS when I see it.

2. Follow the guidelines yourself, the condescending crap doesn't fly too well, and is no more or less insulting than anything I said. Further look at the insults you directed towards me. Do you really think your insults don't count but mine do? That act you are committing there, it's called hypocrisy.

3. It is sad you must fall back on pointing out the guidelines instead of addressing the parts about how authority doesn't work according to your claims. It is either an admission of ignorance of how things really work, or a diversionary tactic to avoid having to admit wrong. (PS -- continuing hte diversion about guidelines doesn't change this set of conclusions, no matter how you justify it, the deduction doesn't change).

4. I've been here about as long as you have. Feel free to peruse my comment history. I gladly contribute nicely to non-moralizing discussions, and I call people out when they act disingenuous or jerky. Your attempt to change your moralizing into some sort of "look at me I'm a pillar of the community" is at best an attempt to pull some dirty politics style trick. This loses you even more of the moral high ground you pretend to argue from.
Has Google donated the patents they hold encompassing WebM to the public domain?
I don't think the author claimed that the liberty movements are winning, just that they don't have the resources to fight both at home and abroad.
Freedom of Information Rallies Tomorrow (Sat Jan 15)
Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

Section 2.1.4 – Use a single word space between sentences.

In the nineteenth century, which was a dark and inflationary age in typography and type design, many compositors were encouraged to stuff extra space between sentences. Generations of twentieth-century typists were then taught to do the same, by hitting the spacebar twice after every period. Your typing as well as your typesetting will benefit from unlearning this quaint Victorian habit. As a general rule, no more than a single space is required after a period, colon or any other mark of punctuation.
Writing History Essay Papers
Writing a history essay requires the inclusion of facts and assumptions. Then students need to take a stand and present their theories. As facts need to be incorporated accurately, students need to be sure that the facts they present come from thoroughly researched material.
Ah, it is problematic to say the frickin' least...
>However, if you find that you're losing duels against people who you think poorly of consistently, or losing ALL of your duels, that might create ugly feelings I guess!

Might be time for a little introspection, I would think.
I migrated http://weekplan.net yesterday in just a few hours. The main difficulty was the incompleteness of the documentation which is easily solvable.

Asp.net Mvc3 + NuGet + Razor + AppHarbor is becoming a viable alternative for productive development.
Controlling for ability? Entrepreneurship has no barrier to entry the way finance does; there's no job application to say "You didn't go to an Ivy League college, so no job for you". So if you take ten random entrepreneurs and compare them to 10 smart people in finance, of course the average earnings won't be close.

I suspect that if you limited your applicant pool - say, "10 people who could get into YC" or "10 people who scored perfects on the SATs", the returns for entrepreneurship vs. finance would be much more even. I'm not sure entrepreneurs would come out ahead, but you're far more likely to catch the Herokus and Reddits and less likely to catch the folks who start a restaurant or a RoR CRUDscreen with no plan for monetization.
As extreme as Chua is in the article? No. They are certainly strict especially when compared to the stereotypical "white" mother, but not like Chua.

I have to admit, most (not all) of the Chinese moms I know are rather more liberal and open-minded about child rearing. Still much more grade/achievement focused than most American moms I know, but not as extreme as this Chua woman. I mean, even the more strict Chinese moms in my social circles wouldn't prevent their kids from attending sleep overs, as one example. Yes the kids study a lot (and do test prep plus attend Chinese school on weekends) and play an instrument (with much longer practice times than one might expect) and would be chewed out for anything less than an A (A- for the easy going moms) but still... not as draconian and goal oriented as Chua is portrayed the article.

With one mom in particular, who is one of the more disgusted with this article (she called the other day and we spent a good half hour talking about the WSJ article), I know her sons consider her a pretty typical "chinese mother", and probably moan about her to their friends (I'm their uncle/godparent, btw), and while she is strict and expects a lot she is still nothing as bad as the caricature in that article.