skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>You're right that Flash is an entrenched, defacto standard. It is, however, much less of one than it was three years ago, and that's pretty much entirely due to one factor: iOS doesn't support it. The HTML <video> element has traction entirely due to the fact that it's the only way to play video from a web page on an iOS device. You don't have a choice between <video> or Flash: It's <video> or nothing.

So is this debate about what's best for the future of open standards on the web, or is it about what's best for iOS?

>short term
>myopic

S: (adj) short, shortsighted, unforesightful, myopic (lacking foresight or scope) "a short view of the problem"; "shortsighted policies"; "shortsighted critics derided the plan"; "myopic thinking"

http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=myopic

Sounds like exactly what I meant. It's focusing on short term consequences at the expense of long-term benefit.

As I said, dropping H.264 may result in the already entrenched Flash being used more in the near-term; in the long term it could help HTML5 <video> see better overall adoption.
Sounds like a switch to async I/O would be helpful.
Lots of marketing/management people do. They conflate "HTML5" with "competent work in HTML, CSS, and Javascript, especially the canvas tag with animations designed to replace the use of Flash" these days to such a degree that it's already maddening.

There's this concept that all our ugly outdated product needs is a little bit of HTML5 and we'll be awesome just like BigNameCo. It's a total failure to understand the technology and a misappropriation of the term.
really HN? i've seen this article a lot of times already and its previous title was really spam "5 clients that"...

18 upvotes in 3 hours?

I don't want to be judgemental but I hope someone is trying to cheat
Experimenting with the app store
Don't know how secure it is in this implementation but it should be easy to implement something that requires you to cryptographically sign the transaction.
Unfortunately we'll still have to carry our wallets until our ID is on our phone as well.
He is talking about content providers, not devices. It is really diificult to find main@ bitsreams in the wild.
This could be resolved using consistent hashing or a critbit tree.
Depends on your definition of "Earth like". Mars would fit some definitions - rocky, atmosphere, water present.
How many languages have a REPL that gracefully handles class/type redefinition at runtime? Even some dynamic languages (Python, I'm looking at you) fail at this.
I'm wary of using them myself, but note that Google is actually using a different hostname for HTTPS versus HTTP, so this isn't an option for them.
1: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Robert_Tappan...

2: same acronym as RTFM, but polite.
When I read this headline, my immediate thought was "Oh, he must have forgotten to shut down the copy of his worm that was running on the HN servers."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm
It's definitely not a decision I'd recommend for everyone. It all depends on what your "actual life goals" are as you mentioned. For me, I knew that gymnastics was only something I could do for a short time in my youth and I wanted to go as far as possible with it. I had made the Junior National team at one point and competed in several USA Championships against all the big guys. I wanted do to whatever it took to succeed.

In terms of impressing people - that's never been a goal. I was greatly ridiculed as a kid for being a gymnast and even as it got a little more "cool" in high school and college, its got nothing on football or basketball. I did this for me - and for the coaches, teammmates and alumni at Stanford Gymnastics who were so dedicated to earning a victory.

It's the fact that we won as a team that means the most to me. I would not be nearly as proud of an individual win.
Which is why it's good to have a mature VM underneath your language. Paul's choice of basing an implementation of Arc on MzScheme was a very good one (I remember people criticizing him for not building a standalone implementation with a new VM).

I write time-critical applications in Clojure and JVM's -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC flag is a lifesaver. We no longer get those multi-second pauses when full GC occurs.
Yieldbot Corners Largest Opportunity in Online Ads;Makes Ads 63x More Relevant
The lonely battle against solitary confinement
Well, HN is written in Arc, which is a layer on top of MzScheme. MzScheme handling of sockets is actually already done with the select() syscall, and its "threads" are lightweight non-blocking threads (think Erlang). So it's already async but with "sugar".
Did you just tell people running a company that reinvented funding with their custom written news site written in their own programming language with a custom web server that they shouldn't re-invent the wheel?

They think they can build a better wheel. They seem to like doing it and have a habit of it. There's nothing wrong with that.
The term "jet" (or turbojet) tends to mean that the thrust comes from the exhaust of the engine, and all the turbine's power is put back into the compressor. In a gas turbine, the turbine captures more energy from the combustion to drive a driveshaft, and the excess exhaust is dumped (or in this case, used as additional thrust for control).
The New Peer Review: Trial by Twitter
I find GBK's menu very... "creative". I always go for the basic plain burger which is frankly great for meat purists like me :)
Please review my startup: BuzzLabs
Hi Hacker News,

Always been a lurker, love what I learn on here. Would appreciate your thoughts (good, bad, ugly) on a startup I've been working on. The company is BuzzLabs, a six-person Seattle startup. We've received strategic seed funding from a large player in the local business space.

The goal is to save business owners (think restaurants, hotels, spas) the hassle of checking dozens of sites to find out what people are saying about them online. They want to focus on improving their business instead of surfing the web and figuring out what's relevant and interesting to their business.

Our technology aggregates social media activity for a local business (i.e. reviews, tweets, blog posts, etc.) into one place, and supplements that activity with deeper analysis and trends. Behind the scenes, we're doing relevance filtering, scoring, classification, and natural language processing to make the report relevant and meaningful.

We've built two separate products on the same technology platform: Find My Buzz (http://www.findmybuzz.com), and an interactive dashboard (http://www.buzzlabs.com). Find My Buzz
is intended to be a lightweight, stop-and-go version of the dashboard -- simple, less-frequent printed consumption by small business owners. The dashboard is for larger businesses/chains with lots of online activity, where daily, aggregate "real-time" brand monitoring is crucial.

Any feedback would be appreciated. I can also be reached at [jason at buzzlabs dot com]

Thanks in advance,
- Jason Tan, CTO
unless it will be followed with an article that presents the distribution of the number of clicks per user on the link till understanding the joke/giving up.
Chief Yahoo.
VC/Startup valuations; taking it to the ping pong table.
Hey there... Jonathon from Ludlow Ventures here. We do VC a bit different... Had a little fun with one of our startups yesterday.
Rtm's phrasing implies that MzScheme is making a syscall for each socket in turn, so it sounds like it isn't even using the basic select() or poll().
FTA: From the comfortable distance of Wall Street, the bloody battle looked like a healthy jog around the park: the news of Jobs's resignation sent Apple stock up. "Most professional investors are happy to see Jobs out of Apple," said Don Sinsabaugh, a partner in Swergold Chefitz & Sinsabaugh. "He ruffled a lot of feathers on Wall Street with his brashness and self-confidence." More importantly, CEO John Sculley will now be able to run the company with a free hand.
Hi Hacker News,

Always been a lurker, love what I learn on here. Would appreciate your thoughts (good, bad, ugly) on a startup I've been working on. The company is BuzzLabs, a six-person Seattle startup. We've received strategic seed funding from a large player in the local business space.

The goal is to save business owners (think restaurants, hotels, spas) the hassle of checking dozens of sites to find out what people are saying about them online. They want to focus on improving their business instead of surfing the web and figuring out what's relevant and interesting to their business.

Our technology aggregates social media activity for a local business (i.e. reviews, tweets, blog posts, etc.) into one place, and supplements that activity with deeper analysis and trends. Behind the scenes, we're doing relevance filtering, scoring, classification, and natural language processing to make the report relevant and meaningful.

We've built two separate products on the same technology platform: Find My Buzz (http://www.findmybuzz.com), and an interactive dashboard (http://www.buzzlabs.com). Find My Buzz
is intended to be a lightweight, stop-and-go version of the dashboard -- simple, less-frequent printed consumption by small business owners. The dashboard is for larger businesses/chains with lots of online activity, where daily, aggregate "real-time" brand monitoring is crucial.

Any feedback would be appreciated. I can also be reached at [jason at buzzlabs dot com]

Thanks in advance,
Jason Tan, CTO
They may also turn 480p and higher to be webm only; effectively making h.264 low quality, intended only for "legacy mobile devices".
It seems Google is deprecating the http resource, though. If you visit http://code.google.com/apis/libraries/devguide.html#jquery, all paths are listed as HTTPS.

This seems like a good solution -- just encourage everyone to use HTTPS to avoid the cache fragmentation.
Just change "fraction of Earth‐like planets that develop life:" from 1.0 to 0.1 and you get 1

That guess could be off by many orders of magnitude as we have exactly one data point right now
I use it to swap pictures with my mom, aunts and uncles and cousins. You get out what you put in...
AS an experiment I just implemented the GC tweaks for our test suite (we're using RSpec), it gave us a 42% improvement in run time...

Before: 914 seconds
After: 538 seconds

Awesome! Thanks to Jamis for sharing!
I know what the canonical name is, but that's not a name, it's a url.

This community is a 'thing' in and of itself and merits a name independent of a rather sterile subdomain.
It is about 60,000 km^2 bigger, while we have our pedantic hats on. Approximately the US state of Vermont is the difference in size.
I think this is bolder:

"fraction of Earth‐like planets that develop life: 1"

For all we know that could be .001 or .0000001
Natural portraits London
The browsers that do support it run on the platform by the same vendor.

I don't understand the significance. The same APIs are accessible to any other browser. If someone has evidence that Mozilla, et al. have been technically locked out of using the media APIs on Windows or Mac OS X, I'd be interested in the details, and if someone has evidence that they've been locked out of using the media APIs on Linux, I'll eat my hat.

they use their vendor's decoder and nothing else

I'm not sure what you mean. If you mean something like "Windows will only support h.264 and you can't use anything else", then that is exactly wrong.
I preferred the webkit syntax. Guess I'll have to update my chrome extension now.
Sorry, guys, it was entirely my fault. I got Michael Grinich's iphone HN app and just love the damn thing. :)
Why I choose Emacs over VIM
I assume "Earth like" in this context means planets that resemble the only planet known to hold life at least enough to be capable of holding life themselves. The problem is we don't even know what that means exactly. It's also assuming that life can only exist in "Earth like" conditions.

Also, if Fraction of Earth‐like planets that develop life = 1 and Mars is an "Earth like" planet, are they assuming life evolved in Mars too or something?
This article is from 2009. Clojure was not as well known as it is today, otherwise the author would certainly have mentioned it, because he came from Java. There is one commenter who mentions it, but it didn't pick up.
As it turns out, Google does serve the script with SSL at https://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js if you request it. So, //www.google-analytics.com/ga.js works.
Internet Explorer will download CSS files twice if served with the relative protocol "thingy": http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2010/02/10/5a-missing-schem...
Care to talk more about how you're using Backbone.js and jQuery Mobile?

I'm interested in this combination and wondering why this project wouldn't choose to build on Backbone.js. It seems they would just be reinventing the wheel here and losing the benefit of using the same library on full apps and mobile.
I went to a lecture by a chemist working in chocolate production (this was about 14 years ago though) - they said that Hershey taste and hence the American chocolate taste was down to off milk.

When chocolate factories were set up the milk couldn't be kept cool in transport and so went off before it could be used in the chocolate. They remedied this when the process had been improved but people wanted the traditional flavour and so they went back to off-milk flavoured chocolate.

It was a great lecture they handed out pouches with about 14 different samples including chocolate at different stages of production and, the quite frankly disgusting, original style of Hershey chocolate.
Well, it is true that CL and most Lisp have a standard library that's about as well-organized as PHP.
You:

a) may be able to persuade your vendor (Apple) to support webm in your device,

b) for the time being, you are going to watch low-resolution, low-bitrate version of youtube. All higher quality streams will be webm and you can return to point a).

Any further questions?
Kobo Books iPad Easter Egg Revealed
Nuance releases SDK for mobile apps
They are only using one core. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2116987 for verification.
Based on RTM's description, it sounds like even select() would be a huge improvement. HN needs to solve the C100 problem before worrying about C10K.
help HTML5 <video> see better overall adoption

Who says it needs help?
I have to ask.. Is someone's ego so badly hurt and/or their job threatened that every mention related to the push for standards towards HTML5 they somehow feel that their beloved Adobe Flash skills are threatened?

This is sad. If HN had a down vote option, it would most definitely be in use for those article.
I don't hate Asian values because I wish I were whiter. I have a problem with my parents giving me extra math problems to do that were way beyond my grade level, and then telling me they were surprised that they'd never seen any girl where the harder she tried, the worse she did. They were assholes who reduced me to a good GPA and nothing more. Think a little bit harder about why so many Asians don't like their parents.
i think you mean 5 million
I thought it was from the story of the "Three Billy Goats Gruff". I don't know if that is the origin of if the story was built around the idiom. Seems a possible etymology though.
Chicken Steadicam
"This is a Great Article on Recursion"
> Firefox 4 caches HTTPS responses basically the same way it caches non-TLS HTTP responses.

Can you please explain this sentence? I hope that doesn't mean "we now treat https just like http." Thank you.
> So is this debate about what's best for the future of open
> standards on the web, or is it about what's best for iOS?

Dropping support for h.264 means slower adoption of <video>
How's that better for the open standards?
The most infuriating part of this is, that FSF and Google are so busy with their own agenda, that they forget users.
I really posted this with the hopes of having some discussion about the validity of slapping together a few generic websites to squat on these domains that I own and build some back links to some other sites.

Does any one have any feedback to that degree, good or bad?
get a better domain name - besides that... great job!
Hacker News Munich Meetup
It's time for the second Munich Hacker News meetup. The last meetup went really well and it was nice to meet everyone. Yeah, even including Mr. Trojan developer ;)

Once again, we plan on drinking a beer or two, talking about what we are working on and sharing interesting ideas about the future that could be...

If you would like to attend drop a comment below.

Venue: Cafe Ringlnatz (http://goo.gl/maps/xr3l) Haimhauserstr. 8 U-Bahn: Münchner Freiheit (we have reserved the back room where it’s quiet and easy to talk)

Time: Tue., January 26th, 19:30 onwards.
The Maker Generation in the Enterprise
BTW, there is an effect at ISO to do a royalty-free ("Option 1") MPEG:
http://www.robglidden.com/tag/mpeg/
I'm okay with the Field of Dreams interpretation of astrobiology: "If you build it, they will come", so to speak. All you need is for life to take hold once and it'll take over a planet in just a few billion years. Of course, my own hunch is that suitable chunks of rock (planets, moons, etc) are somewhat more rare than the default value[1].

[1] I plugged in .1, among other variable changes. On the other hand, I got the number of communicating civilizations = .02, so either I'm too pessimistic or we're just really, really lucky.
How do you expect this number to change?
Thanks for the link. I actually already had that site open in the next tab over from this thread. Good stuff.
My understanding is that MzScheme / Racket has a proper event loop.
A phone can also have a virus or trojan horse app on it. Even easier to take your money if you can get access directly on the phone. Forget radio waves, just get the user to install an app on there that will transfer funds over.

I think all of the smart phone operating systems have had a trojan horse app on them at some point. Most of them probably just did simple things before like a backdoor, making phone calls or stealing info. If your phone also controls your money...
really? they should've sold out when they had the chance
RFID is Hitting the Apparel Industry in a Big Way…
HackFwd Blog - Build 0.4 Talks: Marketing
That one seems to be the most unreasonable assumption of the set to me. Specially if you consider life seems to have happened just once on Earth.
This conversation was so priceless, i excerpted it at http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=2091&cpage=1#comment-...
I can't tell if aantthony (the github handle of the creator) posted this. aantthony, are you here? Folks might want to ask you some questions.
Anyone know if they're referring to "accept filters" here? FreeBSD folks can "man accf_http" if they're curious, which does prevent a request from being handed off to the application until the complete (and valid?) request has been made. Certainly not a "hack" but a feature of the OS itself.
For those that don't know what CDN is here supposed to do:

http://blog.patrickmeenan.com/2010/03/google-to-offer-cdn-se...

If I understood it correctly, the idea is to refer to the web resources in html in such a way to let the clients access them with the minimal possible latency, no matter where the clients are.
> Chrome's support doesn't make an immediate difference to
> you or to content publishers.

True. But FSF calls to abandon support or h.264 altogether.
I don't see how that helps me.
It still happens even in major metropolitan centers like NYC. I still vividly recall being gawked over by a crowd of extremely rowdy girls on Halloween day, having "Look, it's Jackie Chan!" thrown at me. They were pretty much shrieking about it and on the subway, no less. Nothing to do but have to actually listen to that nonsense. It shocked and sickened me for a while.

Granted, the girls in question seemed to be from generally poorer, low-education areas. That still doesn't excuse it in my book though.
At the beginning of the year I uninstalled the Twitter desktop client and my gmail notifier. Without those 2 items lighting up my menu bar, I find myself way less distracted throughout the day. This keeps me from breaking my programming concentration and I end up spending more time on work.
Prototype could remove need for 3D cameras
Yep, antimatter15 had to call it out.
Want To Be Just Like Steve Jobs? Mimic These Life-Changing Career Events
I can echo this also; though for more than the tiniest amount of command line typing, I set the iPad aside and pick up a notebook/network/whatever.
Awesome video! I think all business deals should be decided like this...
Q: Auto-gyro? A: Theoretically, yes. Practically, maybe.

Auto-gyroing would require pitch control of the blades. The toy quadcopters control by differential thrust and torque. For attitude, they control the thrust of the different motors to get a vectored thrust effect. For orientation, the pairs of motors are spinning in opposite directions, so if you spin a pair faster and a pair slower, the torque imbalance between the CW and CCW spinning motors will spin the quadrotor body.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrotor

Autorotation in a helicopter is done by setting the blade pitch negative so that the rotor is driven by the air wooshing up through the rotor. When you are close to the ground, you pull collective, trading the energy stored in the spinning of the rotor blades for vertical thrust to slow your descent. If you do it right, you land gently with a much slower rotor speed. If you do it wrong, you fall the last five feet. :-O

(Auto-gyro works like a helicopter auto-rotation. I suspect auto-gyros typically don't have as much blade pitch control as a helicopter. As I understand it, it is much safer to land an auto-gyro with forward velocity and a roll-out rather than vertically like a helicopter.)
How to write a Twitter bot in Python
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/lang/lisp/code/tools/xref/0....

SLIME has been using that since 2004, ILISP has had who-calls since I don't know when, likewise Lispworks and MCL. Allegro has it too, since at least 1999 according to usenet (it's the :who-calls top-level command).
Factory Farmville: An Online Game's Industrialization
When the equation was first proposed, I'd guess they assumed Sol is an "average" solar system, and given that we have Earth, which is by definition Earth-like, and Mars, Venus, and several of the Jovian moons, which could all fit a suitably loose definition of "earth-like", Drake might even have thought he was being conservative.
Expert: Stuxnet Just Latest in U.S. Hacks of Covert Nuke Programs
Managing and Motivating Employees in Their Twenties
Very excited about their technology - they have been really stealth to date but have some BIG time beta publishers who are purportedly amazed w/ it so far. Literally serves personalized (altho founder hates that term) ads on a site on a visitor by visitor basis.
Court: attorney-client e-mails not private if you’re at work
Unless they built their server with nand gates, I don't see running nginx reverse proxy to be incoherent with their philosophy.
it's called TABLE TENNIS. :)
Senator Al Franken: No joke, Comcast trying to whack Netflix
The infographic mainly does subjective value judgements and no real data is presented? I was expecting something a little bit more substantial....
RIM exec talks PlayBook, App World, QNX on phones
We've been using backbone for few of our projects. Here is a prototype we are working on right now: http://whiteboard.couchone.com/whiteboard/_design/whiteboard... it sits on top of the couchdb/couchapp. We did spend some time evaluating different options before we started (including SproutCore and JavascriptMVC). The main reason we decided to go with Backbone is that it's so much lighter. You can actually open the source and understand what is going on. You can plug in your own UI and templating engine easily. Backbone basically allows you to glue different elements together via Backbone's model/collection architecture (it's almost like a real backbone connecting different body pieces together :)).