skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yea, like getting rid of refreshes and swapping content, counting that as a pageview. Or measuring if user is gradually scrolling, as you'd have to for reading. Or swapping display ads and counting that as impressions, which is what they really want.

Whatever they do, the UI can be a lot smoother.
It's much easier to get a month-to-month contract when you're not getting the free phone. That in turn gives you nice leverage when you call to cancel in four months, complaining that you're paying too much.
"I haven't seen anything else yet (though I might just have missed it) in western Europe."

Actually, it's very common in Europe. They're called "SIM only" plans. They don't include a phone, but are way cheaper.

Example: http://shop.vodafone.co.uk/shop/sim-only-plans/all-sim-plans

"There are even countries (e.g. Belgium) where you don't get pack-ins (so the phone is full price) and the contract price's as expensive as in subsidized countries."

In Belgium, operators are prohibited from selling subsidized phones. Instead, consumers buy their phones full price and sign up for a SIM-only plan.

Example: An iPhone 4 16GB costs Euro 640 ($850) at Mobistar Belgium. Their iPhone plan costs Euro 45 a month ($60). The plan includes 6 hours of outgoing calls (incoming calls are free), 600 text messages and 500MB 3G data. Spread over 2 years, that would be the same as paying $95 a month for a plan with a subsidized phone. That's about the same as it would cost in Belgium's neighboring country, The Netherlands, where phone subsidies are allowed.

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=nl&tl...
Why? Larry Wall is a idol to Matz and the influence of Smalltalk in Ruby is evident.
Do you have any mobile voice/data service? Prepaid? Or, just use wifi?
We need help with the disappearance of Security Researcher Dancho Danchev
Most professionals have and maintain their own tools -- but tools in most other professions if poorly secured can't emit malware that sabotages everybody else's tools.
Maybe you get strace output from a running program and it uses that to evaluate what dependencies/versions you need?
And as somebody else pointed out, they were cancelled due to prior art... in other patents!
+ historically means "Do not give me any pages that don't contain this word." This used to be very important back when search engines were stupid, and basically ranked on the sum total number of occurrences of each term in the search. Searches for multiple terms would frequently be dominated by results that mentioned one of the terms many times.
Guy Steele: "How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not"
Not quite; in (let ([x 1] [y 2]) (+ x y)) there's a set of parens which aren't used for function (or macro) application.
> Isn't this a huge reason for people going to blogging platforms?

Yes, but that's not what it's lampooning. TONS of ads and websites invite people to "share their story" or try to take advantage of user generated content. It's a cheesy cop out. No one wants to share their Doritos story on the Doritos website.
Age of surveillance: the fish is rotting from its head
So Much For Standards, Google Says WebM Plugins Coming Soon For Safari And IE9
My before-launch checklist.
"I don't want to put in the effort to switch to the new stuff, and my old stuff likes the old stuff better anyway, so Google is a jerk for trying to make the old stuff less common."

- No the argument is that H.264 is still a much better supported format which works much better with an existing workflow, tools and media players (and a negligible licensing cost).

Re-encoding to WebM does me no good if a large section of my target devices don't support it. If they support H.264 but not WebM I'm sticking to H.264, and happily paying the relatively negligible licensing fees.

You also seem to be underestimating the complexity of re-encoding a video library. Its a massive and costly undertaking and hardly just taken care of with a shell script. You generally don't "re-encode" existing H.264 video to WebM. You re-encode baseline video at a higher bitrate down to WebM or H.264 at various bitrates. Frequently these source baseline videos are not stored as digital files - they are multi GB in size. We work with the UFC and re-encoding their content at one point required them re-sending digital tapes to the encoding house so they have high quality source video.

Let alone the actual process.

Even if you own your own encoding tools you generally need to re-encode, QA the resulting video, push it all out to your CDN and then change every link you've got point to the new video URL. If you're not encoding your own video but using an existing service you frequently have to pay for both bandwidth and encoding costs to redo your video you often pay per-minute of video. Its an extremely costly undertaking.
This is also why America has only two large political parties.
Using Python and heat maps to determine the best place to aim on a dart board
Tunisia: President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali forced out
This point has already been discussed a lot, but I'll just review it quickly for you.

Basically, if you use any software at all, you can't go around living your life in constant fear of patent threats. WebM is probably safer than most because you have a big entity to fight most of your battle for you, presuming such a battle ever materializes.

Of course it's possible that MPEG-LA will be angry to see their H.264 revenue stream run consistently drier and sue in hopes of retaliation and a declaration that all WebM users must pay MPEG-LA royalties anyway. There's no guarantee that this will happen, however, and that MPEG-LA hasn't made an attempt to "nip this in the bud" demonstrates that they may not be all that certain they have a case here.

Google released WebM explicitly to circumvent the restrictions with H.264 so I suspect they did their due diligence and deviated from the H.264 patents in the necessary ways, but as above, there's nothing you can do if you irritate a group that has money and lawyers and wants to try their hand at milking something out of you. That's a general fact of life whether you use WebM or not.

If you're really worried about the FUD MPEG-LA puts out to scare you into paying protection money, then I guess you are free to pay that, if it makes you feel happier. But "Google shouldn't promote free standards because it might make someone angry and then they might sue you" is just not a very solid argument -- we can't refuse to do anything because someone might sue us. There will always be vultures out there, and we can't stop progress because of them.
A combination of both uptime percentage and mean outage time (or mean time between outages.. which is essentially the same thing).
It's probably less effective when your audience isn't forced to read your text.
Except it's not true: you pay MPEG-LA to license known patents under their ownership. They don't indemnify you from patent lawsuits stemming from patents they don't own.

They say so explicitly on their website:

http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/FAQ.aspx
Q: Are all AVC essential patents included?
A: No assurance is or can be made that the License includes every essential patent.

So there's no different in that respect between WebM and h264.
Sony Must Show It Can Sue PS3 Hacker
I'd love to see these anecdotes turned into evidence

That's not going to happen. This is a pissing contest between Olympic level pissers.

Me, I'd like to see these two families in a wrestling match - just the mothers and daughters obviously, the fathers don't seem to have much of a competitive streak.
Which is why you upgrade your phone yourself.
Sounds to me like they're counting up all requests in total and determining which of them experienced some issues, and then labeling that downtime. The translation into minutes is really in a different type of units.

The fact that they're including delays of just a few seconds is what makes me think this.
Anyone know how redo compares to SCons/CMake/Ant?
Nice demo, though I'm not completely sure how you are 're-defin[e]'ing communication.

Is there a pun I'm missing? Why the hyphen?

before clicking the link, I thought 'well, at least you've targeted a huge market.

But upon seeing the animated message, I couldn't figure out why that 're-defines' communication.

You've definitely done a great job of making it easy to create a cool visual message and edit that message, but do I want colourful animated messages? I'm just not sure.
also interesting that the android version only has 1000 to 5000 downloads.
Tunisia: the first Wikileaks revolution?
Recently I've become quite worried about using Linux for the same reason. Microsoft has suggested several times that some of their patents may be encapsulated in Linux and users could be opening themselves up to lawsuits. Now, they haven't mentioned the actual infringed upon patents or where Linux has done so, but they could at any moment.

More seriously, MPEG-LA indemnifies you from nothing. However, like the webM license, you lose all right to associated patents if you sue a licensee, so there is some protection there (in both cases).
Faith In Climate Catastrophe
You missed the point. There is no anecdotal evidence in this article.

She is trying to say that the difference between her kids and the chinese children are that her kids turned out to be "gifted" without pressure from her to succeed. Chinese children are "gifted" as a result of strict and never-satisfied parents. She's saying that if her children turned out to be just average, it sounds like she would be perfectly fine with that, as long as her kids were happy.

The main point of the article is that american kids are given more freedom to explore their true interests and aren't formed into the model ivy-league applicant.
It's a script to run ffmpeg over your video directories, scp/ftp/whatever it out to your CDN, and update a database somewhere (or use permalinks that don't care if the extension changes, or just keep the old extension on the filename even if it's not accurate anymore -- your users aren't seeing it anyway). It's definitely a scriptable undertaking if your application has any sanity.

I recognize that there is an associated transitory cost, like the extra disk space and bandwidth used, but, again, such costs are inherent in working in a quickly developing field of technology. HTML5 is new, still only a draft, and most browsers' support is adequate but not really "mature". Things are going to be changing with regard to HTML5 video, canvas, etc. now and in the future -- you may want to stick with Flash video or links to video files until HTML5 stabilizes further.

As stated, if you don't think it's worth your while to transcode to WebM, no one here is forcing you. You are totally free to keep everything H.264 and give Chrome users a Flash fallback.
If they were to force H.264 out they'd clearly have to make an exception for devices that were not capable of playing WebM. To think otherwise would be idiotic (and is an obnoxious straw man argument on your part). But that's not hard to do.

So that doesn't invalidate my point which is they should either REALLY force the issue or drop it. Right now they're making a half hearted effort that guarantees fragmentation.

(As for your first point I agree with the other reply)
> If anyone created a problem of having to do "twice the work" it was Firefox...

Huh? As I understand it, H.264 was never an option for Firefox due to the patent encumbrance and licensing fees they would incur for distributing it.

The people who chose to use H.264, despite knowing that the second most popular browser wouldn't support it, made twice the work for themselves.
> As is, there is a very cogent argument to be made that the MPEG-LA group has already suggested that some of their patents may be encapsulated in WebM

They've been saying the same about Vorbis for the last 10 years and yet never sued anyone. By the way, Vorbis is being used a lot by the billion dollar video games industry.

> H.264 isn't free, but it's a known cost and licensing from MPEG-LA

Actually no, MPEG-LA and its users have been sued many times by patent trolls, read up the wikipedia article. H.264 is no safer, the MPEG-LA is just good at spreading FUD.
LinkedIn shuts down Cubeduel, the viral co-worker rating service
Just merely that you have the thought of a business model in the back of your head. Is going to affect how you build this.
You need to sort your stuff out and figure out what you want.

Do you want to build this app because it's fun, do you want to invest in startups, or do you want to contract for cash?

What it sounds like you have is equity in the school of hard knocks.

The question you need to be asking yourself is: If you had $7500 in cash would the number 1 thing on your mind be investing in this company? If the answer is no, then don't convert your note. You can also neglect to convert your note and take cash. It sounds like you want cash up front.

The company now has $150K in the till, if they can't figure out how to get a guy who did 2X what they asked for $7500 then it's not a company you want to be an investor in. Go for a free consult with a lawyer and he'll explain the options your client is not providing you with.

Lessons learned:

Don't accept payment in convertible notes, accept cash up front.

Don't do 2X the work you're being paid for, talk to the client and get paid 2X.
as mentioned in the post, since firefox is 25%+ of the market and will never budge, it was alway going to have to be webm or plugins.

no one (hopefully) wanted this situation, but the reality is that the different parties involved disagree strongly about what codec should be the defacto standard.
The American mom and daughter would win. She's a world class Judoka and her daughter won an Olympic Judo bronze medal and is going into MMA. Probably need a more neutral event then wrestling :)
how does that fit into a build system? why would you require inspection of a running program to resolve build-time dependencies? and moreover, it's not like running a binary requires it to open all of the header and source files needed at build time, so how would you glean any useful data from it?

and what about systems that don't have strace, like BSD or OSX or solaris or windows? there's dtrace on those platforms (minus windows), which requires root, and requiring root access for dependency resolution isn't exactly a great idea.
Better Means: Software driven non-hierarchical management
What is the best way to shoot an instructional video for my startup?
I am looking to get some screen capture software, and film myself going through the site.

What are some tips on creating this demo/instructional video?
Fox shoots man
Node.js doesn't fit in there because it's not concurrent. There's some threaded IO under the hood, but there's only one thread executing javascript.
Seed funding and non-profit startups
Tell HN: Anyone need an inexpensive Rails dev for quick work?
I'm a college student looking to earn a bit of extra cash. Cost of living where I live is relatively low, so I'm pretty affordable for small projects.

Lately I've done:

http://codr.cc
http://365.io (not my design)
http://jrn.al (not my design, work in progress)
http://wrttn.in

I could definitely help you with your MVP or early prototypes, but cannot take in heavy load/heavily complex work since I still have to prioritize school.

You can e-mail me at jmonegro@gmail.com if you're interested and we can work something out!
Here's a proposal, and it may come from having just glanced at The Last Psychiatrist blog: this year, the HN Lenten penance will be "no postings about education." Nothing about American schools awful; nothing about American schools actually not awful; nothing about college admissions; nothing about Hd or Sd or M*T. No Michelle Rhee, no Gates Foundation.

Will it be good for your soul? Dunno, consult your local cleric. Will it be good for your mind? YMMV. It may not make you thinner, but it will make HN thinner.
Here's a Chrome App for SVG-Edit
It appears possible that the Wikileak's cables and social media played a significant role in the revolution.

Hopefully whats next for Tunisia is democracy not chaos...
Why this is being downmodded is beyond me.

Edit: seriously, the parent's explanation is reasonable, well stated and relevant to the discussion.
Free and downloaded isn't the same as free and replayed.

I download Xbox Live demos of almost everything, I may only buy 1/100 that I try (exaggeration). I'm sure this game has some modicum of popularity, but you can only truly tell by longevity when something is being served to you for free.
Also, a book written by Vance Packard at the height of 1950s advertising called "The Hidden Persuaders", if you can find a copy. All about 'motivational research' and how subconscious cues can be used to sell and persuade. Very interesting -- for example, how some customers liked extremely-strong-smelling soap because it provided them with the same type of 'defense' in a socially-accepted way that B.O. did.
If using a baseline format was their real argument they wouldn't be supporting a patent encumbered MP3 format for the audio tag, same as Firefox.

The "if you don't fight every battle at once, you have no morals to fight any battle" angle is bullshit. It's agenda-driven juvenile sophistry, and the real world doesn't work like that.

And while I find the WebM initiative questionable (h264 is technically superior and widely supported already), I find it unbelievably boring (and predictable) how it has become a proxy for the iPhone/Android fight. I doubt the Android team had any bearing whatsoever in this decision, and every Android handset out there is just as screwed by the lack of hardware decoding.

Suddenly boring zealots like Gruber and Siegler are experts on web standards and video codecs. What a depressing day. Seriously.
http://benno.id.au/blog/2008/06/06/memoize-build-framework
iPhone apps in Objective C are hard. Many people teach themselves to program, but usually it's done incrementally, in much simpler environments. Building a working, native iPhone app as the first program you ever wrote is indeed pretty amazing.
Investor Peter Thiel Pours Money Into His "Utopia," New Zealand
The Wikipedia article on Reed's Law, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed%27s_law, is all about connectivity and the number and diversity of groups. That is just a resource waiting to be exploited, but there is no hint as to how the inherent grouping within a set of users can be exploited. That is where the magic comes in.

See also, Reed's Harvard Business Review article, The Law of the Pack, http://www.ecademy.com/downloads/reedslaw.pdf.
Question: when you think of a significant industrial disaster, or say the worst industrial disaster does Bhopal come to your mind ?

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

Among the many tragedies of Bhopal one id that it has very little mind share. Except for the affected of course.

Here is an anecdote that I learned from a friend of mine who is Bulgarian. Fish markets there make it a point to tell you that their fish isn't fresh. Their major water body is the Black sea and rivers have been driving Chernobyl effluents into it. Fishes concentrate the poisons in their system. So fish, unless it is imported, is considered unsafe.

Edit: Heard in 2004 and he was living in the US then.
Really? Asian Moms aren't like that? Anecdotally, let me assure you that my son's high school is full of them. All but one of the best musicians are Asian. All the best mathematicians are Asian. These young folks have little life outside of lessons and competitions.

All those 'quite a few' Chinese mothers you know, you said were repulsed. But how many of them fit the description?
Why would Google do their due diligence and not share it? MPEG-LA has detailed very clearly where each patent claim applies to the H264 spec.

Google owes it to its users to go through the MPEG-LA document and do at least one sentence explaining why WebM doesn't infringe each point. It would be a month exercise for a dev and product manager, but well worth it.
A journey through the bowels of proggit
I read a lot. But the books that moved me the most were about Greg Mortenson's adventures building schools in Paksistan and Afghanistan:

Three Cups of Tea (http://www.threecupsoftea.com/)

Stones Into Schools (http://www.stonesintoschools.com/)
Read it all, thank you.

And the only known is, they get money when he clicks. The rest is speculation and straw-men.
Wow, a lot more sources than I was expecting. Thank you very much for providing this!
Tim ferriss on his mentor, where he's investing, and that new york times review
Greek banks are less than reliable at the moment...
He's right, you know.

I was talking to a technical founder the other day, and we were laughing about how the best thing right now would be to have a boss that is not yourself. Someone who would make all the decisions about what you should do, and then get out of the way so that you could just focus on the code.

But, that would be too easy...
The whole distributed concept really works. No more "WiFi is down, so I cannot commit". As well rebasing is a nice tool which saves a lot of headache, especially for people trying to figure out what you did a lot later...
HTML5 Canvas Gradient Effect
Why a small team chose Mercurial.
After using git and then using Mercurial, it was clear that Mercurial was a better fit for our company, how we develop. For educated people on git/hg, these might be a surprise. But the people still considering git or hg its a good look.
I agree.. I would submit more of The Last Psychiatrist to HN, but lately it's been auto killed by the new submission filter.

The Last Psychiatrist reminds me a lot of Gary Brecher's War Nerd blog. Both offer a raw cut-through-the-BS point of view.
Looking forward to an invite.
Not to mention that 5 million iPhone installs of things is about $50m in gross profit for them. Surely that is enough to afford this $10k server.
Sony must how jurisdiction over PS3 hacker
re defining it by allowing people to communicate with animation as well as text. I guess it would be more accurate to say I am trying to open another channel of communication or providing a new method of communication. Ideally I am allowing anyone to create a message with animation and use that to send communication.
I think people's backgrounds create a strong bias in what they think qualifies as progress or a solution. Business people want to tweak the deck, the sales pitch, the marketing, the business plan, etc. Designers want to improve the UX, the typography, the color scheme, the layout, etc. Developers want to write more features, add more tests, refactor, obsess about performance, etc.

The way I currently summarize this is:
What’s the simplest possible thing you can do today to learn what you need for tomorrow?
Is this purely instructional or is there a marketing purpose for it as well?

If it's marketing then I suggest:
Music, Voiceovers, Pan & Scan, and Ken Burns effect.

For the most part software videos are boring, I'd rather put my hands in boiling water than watch yet another railscast.

Add music thats exciting, and nothing with words in it.
Go to your local broadcasting school and find some students to do the voiceover work.
Lastly, get some other students to do a decent job of editing the clip so that the focus is on where the action is, pan and scan around the app to create the appearance of motion, etc.

See Google's parisian love as an example of how to make compelling software videos.

Or conversly:
Epic meal time, where cooking meat is made somewhat exciting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpKtarjTvqU
Open-source FUD: Android more vulnerable than iPhone
So basically if you don't completely exercise your program while creating your build system, your build system won't know about all your dependencies?

Suddenly make is starting to seem pretty nice...
redo has the same problem of git because both are supposed to be used in as a small part of the UNIX environment. In this regard, it is not different from make.
They have a really great attitude, even when not knowing if it is just a limit or an actual ban.
10 biggest Wikipedia hoaxes in first 10 years