skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe "web video" is too lazy of a term. What I'm talking about is video transferred via HTTP (or other protocol) from one computer to another. So, yes, that would be Netflix, iTunes, Hulu, YouTube, BitTorrent... Everything. I couldn't even guess what percentage of that whole is video embedded into HTML pages.

I make the distinction because, I think it's important to consider the problem in the larger context of digital media and connected devices, not just in the specific context of HTML rendered in a browser window. Right now we're talking about which video format is right for the HTML video tag, but the implications beyond that are huge. My response to the parent comment was not so much that I think "H.264 rulez," but that discussion of this subject was anything but "stupid" or "pointless whining." I'd like to see this discussion go on.

Late last year, my employer decided to walk away from a project that I had devoted 14 months of my life to because they were sued over SMS patents. This shouldn't be a debate about how much Apple fanboys love patents, when the debate is really about which compromises to make so that we can all make things with computers before we die. For example:

Is H.264 more of a threat to Internet video than fractured video support in web browsers? If you want to keep the debate to embedded video, that's a better question. H.264 made video finally good enough to watch on the Internet. Hardware-decoding made it possible to watch web video without melting your laptop battery. It solved real problems.
And the promise of HTML5 video reinvigorated a whole lot of beleaguered content producers and developers. People are understandably reluctant to trade those things back. If you want to persuade them, explain what they get in that trade.

I think that if we talked about it, rather than calling names, we'd find that not many people are great lovers of software patents as they exist now. But then we'd have to be honest about what we're really fighting about: which battles to pick and who's children (HTML5 video, in this case) get sacrificed on the battlefield.
Well, there was/is that trusted computing thing, i.e. putting DRM on the PC in hardware. The benefit would be denying encryption from terrorists/pirates/dissenters, like he just said. Interesting data can be stored just about anywhere, from phoning home to hidden partitions to having a small flash on the BIOS, depending on what's deemed interesting (logs, sector addresses, cryptographic keys, painted files).
Wow, that's a hell of a hack just because your smartphone maker wants to rent-seek your serial port.
Excerpt:

...there is no question that rape seriously impairs a woman's reproductive interests. To say that rape pregnancies are costly to a woman's genetic success would be an enormous understatement. Not only do such conceptions completely undermine the female's mate selection—and so the quality of her offsprings' genes—but rapists are unlikely to stick around and help raise children, putting such children at a significant disadvantage. In short, it's a catastrophic mess from the vantage point of the mother's genes.

List from the article (article elaborates on each point):

1. When threatened by sexual assault, ovulating women display a measurable increase in physical strength.

2. Ovulating women overestimate strange males' probability of being rapists.

3. Ovulating women play it safe by avoiding situations that place them at increased risk of being raped.

4. Women become more racist when they're ovulating.
MIT: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/#electrical-engineering-and-compu...
The Tiger Mother (Amy Chua) Responds to Readers
Name the Big Three Social Networks for Business
Next up: Why "Why X Y or Superior" considered harmful.
Mercurial bookmarks are roughly equivalent to Git branches. They are local only unless you explicitly push them and you can delete them when done.
Nice little site. I like the simplicity of it. A couple of points:

- It is not immediately clear to me (FF3.6, Ubuntu) that it is a textarea above the Create Code button on the frontpage.

- Marking the code and then pasting it in Ubuntu gives me all the code on one line (both ctrl-c/ctrl-v and mark/middlebutton).

- The privacy model doesn't seem obvious to me when I'm on the frontpage. Is the stuff I post public, semi-public or private? If the privacy model is public a listing of the latest or most linked code snippets could be an idea.

- I miss a link to the frontpage when I've looked at a code snippet.
Facebook is worth $2B

This is ridiculous! It is not sustainable!

Facebook is worth $5B

Oh, come on, its a social network!

Facebook is worth $10B

There is no way it can ever really be worth that much!

Facebook is worth $15B

Oh now this is just bubble bubble bubble bubble bubble!

Facebook is worth $27B

Oh ok, cmon now, you are just having us on, right!

Facebook is worth $50B

What just because it has more pageviews than Google doesn't mean it will make money!

Facebook is worth $75B

Pfffttt.. this stock is going to tank fast!

Facebook is worth $125B and is now a public company

No way this will last!

Facebook stock trading at $80, worth $200B

It is going to be awesome to watch everyone lose their money!

Facebook stock dropped 4% today to $450

Told ya it will drop!

aka. you can never be wrong or right in these threads
Why PHP is (still) the easiest web programming language to learn
How does Facebook decide which 10 friends to display on your profile?
I wonder if he did anything to market it. He's either incredibly good or incredibly lucky.
Here is my favourite drawing illustrating one of the problems with Subversion:

|
| file p.txt contains "X"
|
+<---(branch)--------+
| |
* file p.txt renamed |
| to f/p.txt, which |
| contains "X" |
| * the content of file p.txt is updated to
| | contain "Y"
| |
| |
+----(merge)-------->+ file p.txt is deleted and file f/p.txt is created
| with the content "X"
|
| BUT expected/wanted content is: "Y" (or at least a conflict)
V
5 sai lam lon cua sep moi
Sáng kiến, kỹ năng, và sự cống hiến có thể là những lý do mà bạn được thăng chức quản lý. Tuy nhiên, những phẩm chất đó chưa chắc đã đảm bảo rằng bạn sẽ là một nhà quản lý giỏi.
File Recovery Software
"Both had the maturity and view on life of someone, well...who didn't go to university"

I'm having a hard time understanding what you mean here. What maturity and "view" would this be? A lack of "getting drunk at the frat house and banging some sorostitutes" stories?

But in all seriousness, I'd like to know what kind of "maturity" and "view" spending 4 years at a constant party would grant someone, that is somehow superior to the ~12 and ~42 years of actual real world experience that the people you cited likely had?
"YHBT. HTH, HAND"
Gaussians? Why Gaussians? Why not Cauchy for example (it has fatter tail)? And why identity matrix for the Gaussian covariance?

I really like the way you are using your technical skills for computation but I think you are using it on the wrong problem.

In reality, even if your dart throws are Gaussians they need not be independent of each other.

I'm coming from math background and was observing math people(physicists as a proxy) to the approach of making unreasonable assumptions if they will simplify the problem and make it solvable.

It reminds me of the joke:

A person is walking around a street light. Another asks him

"What are you doing there?"

"Looking for my keys."

"Did you lose them there?"

"No, but there is more light here."

Edit: formatting
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2008182
and: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1987994
It may also be a function of the first couple generations of students from UoP finding out their expensive degrees carry fantastically little weight in hiring decisions.

I know several UoP graduates who have found themselves without any additional employability, no improvement in salary and a huge student debt to pay off.
Traffic, users, unique visitors?
Maybe it's the gov who posits these theories?... nah.
Yeah, I disabled this temporarily. I thought it's not a good idea to allow this in the alpha stage.
Is a degree from university of Phoenix taken serious by employers?

Not really. Typically a degree means "this person can start and finish a difficult, multi-year project" even if the school isn't top tier. However, the UoP degrees are of such limited rigor that they are more or less treated as a "certification of hobby" by HR departments -- particularly since it isn't an accredited school it's only one step up from a diploma mill.

A 2-years Associates Degree from an accredited community college carries more weight than a UoP M.S. sadly (for the folks that paid all that money for it).
Astronomers calculate mass of largest black hole yet
You can ask question on twitter, add a #ask hashtag to it and they'll appear on beepl.
Couldn't one say that poor performing students at UoP is a sign that the school's grading and student evaluation is fair (i.e. the system is working) as opposed to rampant grade inflation seen elsewhere?
I'm sorry, but this info is nearly ten years out-of-date. First, the Gutmann method was designed for encodings back in the days of RLL/MFM encoded drives. For newer drives which really push the physics quite a lot further, two passes of random data are enough to throw the magnetic domains into a statistical dead heat. There just isn't any physical room on the drive to hold old data.

Secondly, new drives reserve a percentage of the room (invisible to the user), in case some of the sectors go bad the controller will re-map them transparently to new sectors. This might leave old data in the old sectors, where you can't normally see it but an investigator armed with the proper ATA commands can. (This isn't a conspiracy of the government and drive manufacturers, it's all there in the ATA spec.) The correct way to securely erase a drive is to send the drive the SECURITY-ERASE command. The drive controller will securely erase every part of the drive. https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase The NSA actually recommends this to other government agencies, so it's probably OK.
SalesCrunch Founder In Quora To Defend TechCrunch Trademark Accusations
With Verizon, iPhone’s Flaws May Become More Apparent
Yep, same me :)

Thanks.
Most notably Gmail allowed downgrading to insecure connection until the China affair. There are other mail, messaging and social services people use there, some of them regional (e.g. Russian), where perception of security threats is low.

Cell towers per se do not maintain any logs, it is just transceiver equipment connected to communication line. However telecom datacenters provide location services based on signal strength from the handset to cell towers in the area. Many operators make these services available commercially to customers, and the data is nearly always accessible to law enforcement upon request.

Wikipedia provides a good summary of the process: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_tracking
On a purely superficial note, here are Knuth's recent Google searches, according to the Safari search box dropdown list that flashes by at 2:22:

• google calculator

• wolfram alpha

• williams cutlery

• craig gentry

• "the lost chord"

• acrobat scroll speed

• html bulleted list

• html subscript

• doerr "protocol partition number"
That's also not unusual for bioscience Phd's from land grant universities, english majors from small liberal arts colleges, or recent Master of Architecture graduates from the Ivy League.

If the measure of education is that it provides vocational opportunity, then all we can shut down all higher education except the nursing programs in the community colleges.
There's no degree there.
Crowdsourcing Social TV Research - User Insight Investing Half a Million Dollars
Wattvision (YC W09): The Tale of the Mystery Load
Exactly. That said, any setback of surveillance in the West trickles down to less options available to dictators everywhere. The technology is developed first and foremost to the "home front" of developed nations, as they are the biggest market by far. Thus even local efforts of activists have potentially global impact.
Evidence? And alexa data is pretty useless, since a large amount of traffic to both tumblr and posterous is not on their home domain.
This is an example of a great tool to complement an already existing understanding.

As someone who is not trained in Maths I'm confused as to what I'm seeing and where I should look.

Perhaps there needs to be a toggler for the six things you display. I have the feeling that if I played with just 2 or 3 of these I'd probably get it faster.
I don't think it's useful to conflate "programmers and non-programmers think differently" with "non-programmers are unable to think like programmers".

I'd say there are people better-disposed to learning to be a programmer[1] but practice also plays a big part. The end-result is that for a given individual, actually occurring situation, it is a reasonable generalization to say that the programmer and non- do think differently about it at this moment in time.

[1] That is to say, a special type of problem-solver. The individual skills or dispositions aren't unique to programmers but the combination thereof probably is.
I agree with the part about every sufficiently smart person being able to program if they're willing to learn and put the time.

In my experience most people (even students in intro to programming classes) are really unwilling to drop some mental habits and build the other ones that are necessary for programming. Some other people are just profoundly bored by controlling every little thing that happens in a computer, and would just rather have someone else do it for them. Even these people, I've found out, can be turned on to programming if exposed to it in the appropriate setting and with a bit of help to get them unstuck from the hard parts.
I have a degree from UOP, I was a product of the .com boom in which it was foolish to stay in school, with all the money floating around. To that end, by the time it was all over, I was a career man with a family. Attending a traditional university was out of the question. With family responsibilities and a start-up that had taken off, UOP was really the only option. To be honest, I had low expectations going in, but they where accredited and if I wanted prestige I could do my masters at a better school.

Anyway, I was surprised that the academics where better than that of a community collage, I would put them somewhere between a community collage and a state school. I think they earn their accreditation on the merits of academics, but lets not mince words they are by no means a great school.

Their was one thing at UOP that really was worth the price to me and that is in almost every class, they make you stand in front of the class and give a lecture on the subject. Doing this for over a year made me a very good public speaker. So much so that I started speaking at conferences.

If someone had ever told me that I would be speaking at international conferences, in front of thousands of people, I would have laughed at them, that was just not me. I credit the UOP with providing me with the platform to have all of my awkward, uncomfortable and embarrassing moments on stage in a format that no one cared if you screwed up. For me becoming a public technical speaker was worth every penny, I ever paid to UOP.

Now for most, UOP is a rip-off especially given the economy, but as far as quality of academics, if you would hire someone with a degree from a random state school then you should have no worry about hiring someone with a UOP degree. As with everything it is the applicant not the pedigree.
All the arguments against h264 apply equally to proprietary fonts only more so (since they're not even free as in beer for the next few years).

If font-family can designate a non-free/open font then video can designate a non-free/open codec.
>"it isn't an accredited school"

Phoenix is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission [http://www.ncahlc.org/#ncahlc.org] by which other schools in the region are accredited, e.g. University of Michigan.

Specific Phoenix programs are also accredited by the usual suspects as well. [http://www.phoenix.edu/about_us/accreditation.html]
Its not anecdotal if it was His mother. Not hearsay anyway.
Hmm. If this sort of thing is happening with any regularity the other side of this argument is that there needs to be a clearer, simpler way for patents to be struck down. If it's not valid for one it's not valid for any and any other position is dangerously close to extortion.
If the measure of education is that it provides vocational opportunity, then all we can shut down all higher education except the nursing programs in the community colleges.

I would say it's one of the measures of an education. But I don't necessarily disagree with your other examples.

Waxing poetically about UoP as a second chance school is true. I'm willing to be that a majority of the student body could be called "second chancers". It's unfortunate that the school has ended up with a rather negative image problem it needs to shed (that and not bother becoming a proper accredited school so credits are transferable/recognized elsewhere is a huge problem).

(Full disclosure, I could also be considered a second chancer but went a more traditional route -- so I can feel some sense of sympatico for UoP students)
I think programmers think differently in the same way long distance runners run differently or basketball players play basketball differently than non-*ers. Programming exercises a certain subset of human cognition - abstraction, symbolic expression, modeling. I do think programmers are more adept at these faculties, because they use them all the time. How much this bleeds over into "thinking" generally, who knows.
My spouse teaches there, I don't really know what the grade distribution is. However, my understanding is that poor academic performance by Phoenix students is often a function of background and immediate circumstances.
Why 2*Pi?
I recently watched a talk from 27C3 [1] about data recovery by the CEO of just such a data recovery firm [2]. (Very interesting with a rough outline of what they do and many cool anecdotes from the field.)

He more or less said that recovering all the data from a hard drive that cannot be read with its read/write head (either the original or a spare) would not be feasible or economical for his company. He said it would take several years. (And that’s without even considering overwritten data.)

When asked what’s the best way to destroy data forever he said that overwriting the data once is sufficient in any case. I take from this that at least his company and presumably other data recovery companies cannot read data that was overwritten once, even in principle (i.e. it’s not just a question of throwing enough resources at it). I have my doubts that the government has capabilities beyond that.

[1] Link to mp4 (h.264): http://mirror.fem-net.de/CCC/27C3/mp4-h264-HQ/27c3-4231-en-d...; link to slides: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/Fahrplan/events/4231.en.h...

[2] http://www.attingo.com/en/
Very odd. My browser (Chrome Mac 8.0.552.237) downloads the page (101206-knuth.asx) instead of showing it. Is this a bug on my end or on the hosting end?

EDIT: Nevermind, just realized I was expecting a web page and its a streaming media file. I confused the extension with .asp
I live inside WingIDE Pro(/Windows/wxPython/Django/) - it is the only IDE I have used that will reliably debug multi threaded apps and wxPython. We have hundreds of Python components in our product (financial industry) and Wing makes it easy to manage (or at least as easy as possible). The company fixes problems quickly (I have reported a few and they fixed all of them within a reasonable time frame). For commercial Python development it is as close to perfect as I have found. Not cheap, but well worth it...
It's not a bug, that's actually a video stream. Open VLC, and then use Open Network to open the link. It'll stream the video lecture.
> • acrobat scroll speed

Glad to see he's not just Knuth but also a human being.
It doesn't handle large binary files well, but would you track patches on them anyway? It doesn't fit git's model. Git deals with the current working state of the whole repository, not individual files.

A major problem with git is that if you try to use it without realizing its fundamental model is different, it will seem awkward and complicated. Don't think about it as "like svn, but distributed"; start from zero.
It ccurs to me that there's one possible motive for Google doing what it's doing that isn't purely cynical -- it may want the MPEG-LA to sue it now and reach some kind of settlement than wait a few years and ambush it.
I love Wing too. Now, how is $180 for the Pro version not cheap?
Ask HN: What Bay Area startup meetups do you recommend?
After looking through meetup.com and seeing a few meetups planned uncertainty and indecision set in. Naturally, my first reflex is to ask a question on YC.
The formulae are similar; are they really related? Any more than the dance of bees are related to quantum mechanical states (another recent article)?

I'm sorry, I couldn't sit through the whole lecture (2 minutes actually); the digressions and glacial pace reminded me viscerally why I had such trouble in graduate school.
Devices with the fastest growing mobile OS and hardware WebM decode are shipping this month

That doesn't make any sense. What you meant to say was that the fastest growing segment of mobile devices, prior to the iPhone/Verizon, is Android with devices that don't have WebM HW acceleration.

Again, I'm fine with a fragmented HTML5 world. There will be the Google WebM world. And the MS/Apple H264 world. I'm perfectly happy with that.
if for both Posterous & Tumblr a large portion of the traffic is hidden, all conditions being equal, on Quantcast & Compete Tumblr is way above Posterous.
I guess that's great advice, if you're not very creative and recreating other peoples apps is good enough for you.
The problem with that is that MPEG-LA's licensors can sue more than once.

In fact if I was MPEG-LA I'd do exactly that. I'd work with my licensors to ensure not everyone sue at once, but rather do it all in succession. Literally have WebM in courts everyday for a decade. And remember, only one licensor need win, and they don't have to grant WebM RAND terms. They could just come right out and say, "take it off the market". And since there's no indemnification, they could in theory even go after end-users of phones, although not likely.

Of course the same can be done against H264, but it appears far less likely.

But a "flush out the enemy" strategy doesn't seem likely given the raw number of patents and licensors associated with H264.
This is awesome. I wish there was something like this when I was in school. At one point I had planned to start a blog showcasing educational hacks like this. I may have to get that started. This is a wonderful find.
It would be nice to see some statistics, but I suspect that an english major from a small liberal arts college is actually significantly more valuable. Of course it isn't going to get you a job using the English major, but it qualifies you for the generic HR screen of "4-year college degree from a respectable institution", which opens up a tier of jobs not available with just a high-school diploma. The unemployment rates and average incomes of people with 4-year liberal-arts degrees are certainly much better than those with just high-school diplomas. Is the same true of UoP degree holders? I'm not sure, but my guess is that UoP degrees don't pass as many HR screens, especially at large companies, at least for now.
Notepad++ seems to work pretty well on MS windows. Can't really say it's any better than a lot of other editors out there.

Tried Eclipse and it feels like bloatware.

I would really like to find some middle ground between notepad++ and eclipse.
I use mutt (preferred pine) to email code patches. All those clicky-gooey email clients spindle and mutilate code patches. There are configuration work-arounds for some, but it is impossible to prevent Outlook from destroying a patch.