skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Google is no more on board with WebM today than they were yesterday--they've removed support for H.264, not added it for WebM.

They've made it very clear the intention is to add it. I've said it's not happening overnight, and I really don't understand this attitude that if it hasn't happened instantly then everything is worse.
Goldman Vs. Apple: Who Generates the Highest Economic Return?
It certainly would make it easier for a professional programmer to verify, hence it has a certain appeal to this audience. Probably not so much for a mathematician.
That's 0.05 second for a single request: actually pretty good.
I've read the paper fairly closely, and it mostly seems like the author is hiding a conflict-driven search in ill-stated data structures, which allow him to perform a faulty analysis of the runtime of his algorithm.

I've implemented a SAT solver and read the literature extensively. This paper is not up the standards of clarity imposed by that literature, see, eg, "Efficient Conflict Driven Learning in a Boolean Satisfiability Solver" (Zhang, available for free online). There is a world of difference in the clarity of presentation between these two papers. There might be an English language barrier problem operating, I don't know.

If the author did some work to polish his presentation and state definitions more clearly, as well as submit his SAT solver to well know competitions, (http://www.satcompetition.org/2011/), I'm sure he could get some attention from the relevant people. Given how clear it looks right now, I'm too busy with my own research to try and pull out the hidden conflict-driven algorithm that I suspect exists in this paper, as it would be very time-consuming for little expected gain on my end.

If his algorithm beats the pants off all the others in SAT 2011, well, then I'd get right down to work.

Homework for someone who has some time: download his code and make it run on SAT 2010. Compare to other algorithms from that competition. Not, of course, a definitive test, but it it performs even in the middle of the pack, then you'll know it is worth a closer look.
Or someone selling you an operating system and telling you you can only install it on hardware purchased from them. These things are far from uncommon in technology. (I will refrain from mentioning the other example that came to mind because I don't wish to target a specific company to the exclusion of others, since such practices are widespread.)
I'd love to combine this concept with my (shameless plug) ASCII art Kinect demos:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2106077

Looks like it's time to learn Javascript.
Forging on ahead and leveraging the publicity of the cease and desist incident worked very well for the Words with Friends guys.
1) One time pads require a secure channel to transmit the key, which must be the same length of the message. It is not a feasible cryptography scheme, more of a theoretical framework.

2) Integer factorization is trivially in NP (the decision problem "n has a factor < x" has a certificate: the factor)
Reading the actual page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Associates_Int._Inc._v...), the "workaround" is a clean-room reimplementation. Unless you were referring to something else?
Best Buy Launches Buy Back Program (solving an e-waste problem too)
The JVM really is great and the garbage collecting outstanding. Anyone who has written a real high performance app can tell you that.
I launched with a fairly broad product and a number of target user types in mind. Over time, I've refined my product to match the most responsive user types and their needs.
Thank you -- it does. If it's not too much trouble, do you have any examples or anecdotes for when HTML made layout really easy, or scripting made layout really hard?

In my experience, there's a sweet spot for HTML/CSS. If I keep things really simple, it makes layouts a breeze. The moment I introduce complexity into the design, I usually wish I had the control of a scripted layout.
I don't understand why the Internet is not government controlled. Would you leave road maintenance to private companies? How about air traffic, or sewers or water? The Internet is as important, if not more important (in a Constitutional way) than these services, but we leave it in the hands of self-interested parties.
Yeah, and, seriously, a Russian?! Please...
Music (specifically stuff I’ve listened to for years so I don’t get distracted by something new and catchy).
For more details on Oozie, see http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2010/07/whats-new-in-cdh3-b2-oo....
All control flow is a subset of continuations. The stack is a continuation (calling a function is call-with-current-continuation, return is just calling the "current continuation"), loops are continuations (with the non-local control flow, like break/last/redo/etc.), exceptions are continuations (like functions, but returning to the frame with the error handler), etc. Continuations are the general solution to things that are normally treated as different. So continuations are just as efficient (or inefficient) as calling functions or throwing exceptions.

In a web app context, though, it's kind of silly to keep a stack around to handler something like clicking a link that returns the contents of database row foo. People do this, call it continuations, and then run into problems. The problem is not continuations, the problem is that you are treating HTTP as a session, not as a series of request/responses. (The opposite of this style is REST.)
seems to me that an agenda for a major scientific meeting falls into the category of "science".
Help me fix photo sharing
One the one side you have flickr who has the most amazing community but a product that has stagnated. On the other you have instagram who has had explosive growth using new social mechanics like follow. I think there is an opportunity to build a community aimed squarely at flickr, but using new mechanics. Something like twitter for images. For a taste of what it looks like this is one of the screens - http://jasonstrachan.com/clients/shoebox/SB_05.jpg

I am a photographer who has been photo blogging for pretty close to ten years (http://www.gosu.co.za) and could never find the right place to share and interact with other photographers, so I though I would scratch my own itch.

Who are we? We are a team of two who have build stuff in the past (http://listgorilla.com) I am a designer/user experience guy and my co-founder is a Java developer with great experience building rock solid applications.

Who are we looking for? We are looking for someone who loves to build stuff and has a strong background in Javascript. We are offering a meaningful portion of equity and chance to work on a team who is motivated and committed to building great experiences. If you happen to be a photographer even better.

If that sounds like you please email me (oneintenthousand@gmail.com) with some background and I'll take you through the idea.

Thanks, Jason
Yeah, I have no idea. All I know is that proper threads do not bloat anything, and that proper IO watchers are not O(n) over inactive connections.
I agree with most points. But I violently disagree with "Git is easier to learn".

I love git, but its command-line is just horribly designed:

* git reset on files takes them out of the index, whereas without files, it moves the current HEAD to a different commit. It should be split into 2 commands, and the command that does the opposite of "add" should be named "unadd".

* Similarly, git checkout on files overwrites their content from some revision, whereas without files, it moves HEAD to a different branch. It should be split into two commands.

* The git guys should decide what the staging area is called, and use that same name everywhere. Not "Staging area" in most docs, "Index" in most commands, "--cached" in diff.

* It is very difficult to lose your committed work in git. But there are too many ways to accidentally lose your uncommitted work in git: "git reset --hard <refspec>" (which is pretty useful for purposes other than losing your work). "git checkout .", "git clean -f", ... Irreversible loss of work should not be so easy, and should have interactive prompts defending it, or preferably just not be irreversible.

* git "push" and git "pull" sound like they should be opposites, but they aren't. Many such bad naming choices plague git's command set.

* Rename a branch? "git branch -M". Rename a remote? "git remote rename". Be consistent!

And the list goes on and on...
Thats the great part about a public market. Anyone may speak as long as they put their money where their mouth is. (Or conversely put their mouth where their money is, aka. talking your book)
filo@yahoo.com
I've tried many things but nothing has helped more than turning off the internet.
Why is the Burning Man ticket system so slow? (~10k transactions/hour)
That's why I said "almost" :) AFAIK, cryptography without P != NP is an open question.

BTW, quantum encryption is not encryption as we know it (a purely functional deterministic bijective transformation of the message), as it requires special hardware, optical fibers, etc...

As of EXP etc... I am not aware of any (theoretical) encryption schemes that use problems harder than NP (actually most use circuit complexity, so NP/poly, but it is related). In designing encryption you often want polynomial verifiability (for decryption), and that implies NP membership.
You can't ask a chalkboard to be coherent.
The problem is that these complicated business relationships are affecting our access to necessary services. Would you tolerate your sewer being cut off because two private parties didn't want eachother's shit going through their pipes?

If this were just about a bunch of TV shows it would be different, but this is about the fundemental communications medium of our society. How can we so tightly regulate utilities and over-the-air television, but be so lax with something just as important?
Let me add that one "thread" per connection works in Erlang for up to 80k connections easily. And since each "thread" is actually a process and each with their own GC, long pause-times are never a problem.

It is not the year, but the naivety that is the problem here, if any.
Pagination/"More" uses fnids; looking at the source it's a callback, but from an HTTP client perspective it might as well be a continuation.

How do you test and debug things like that that have random URIs and function names and get GCed on a regular basis? That's what I mean when I say continuations lead to unmaintainable web apps.
Why on earth would Blizzard-Activision want to stifle this? It makes two of their biggest franchises look awesome at the same time!

Edit: actually, this could be used as grounds for trademark deprecation down the road. EA could make a game using Warcraft in the name and use the existence of this as grounds for a defense if B-A didn't try to defend the WoW and SC trademarks. They should just license the rights to this guy imho.
That's what I meant by "it depends on your definition of Earth-like". Mars and Venus are at least debatable, many of the planets being reported as "Earths" in the media aren't. (Yet. I freely acknowledge this will change, and soon. I have no doubt that we will find rocky planets of the approximate right size in the approximate right orbit in the near future. Getting a bead on their chemistry and such is going to be a lot harder for a while, though, but we'll crack that too, eventually.) I tend to favor "actually capable of supporting life" but the equation doesn't seem to actually require that.

Mars has the strike against it that it is arguably on the frozen side of the zone of life. Earth is actually already on the somewhat cold side and has spent a fairly large portion of its life as an ice planet; some have speculated that our frequent ice ages have contributed to our diversity of life by moderately predictable periodic mass extinctions, but of course this is just a theory in all the bad senses of that phrase. Venus is possibly too far on the hot side but I have an easier time envisioning life on a relatively hot planet than a relatively cold one. We have extremophiles here on Earth and who knows what they'd be able to evolve into if they weren't in such a small niche? Whereas cold really puts a stopper on life; a critter can evolve that can survive being frozen and possibly even carry on simple life functions but only at a very slow rate, and for all we talk about how fast and robust life is it does not take very much slowdown of life before you can't get an intelligent civilization evolved before the sun ceases to support life. Life is thought to be ~3.5 billion years old here, and it's hard to pin down exactly how long the sun could sustain non-intelligent life but it could be as little as ~1 billion years. Cold life has a real challenge getting to intelligence in time. (Also why I don't spend any time wondering about life in nebulas; they may be a science-fiction staple but at the rate they could live they don't have enough time to evolve into anything interesting before the heat death of the universe.)
It's ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union. UCLA is the University of California in LA.
I think the confusion is simple. They believe that an even number is 2n, but think about n over the naturals. Often they'll also be confused about -1.
I don't understand why it was neccessary to be an asshole though. It's not like Mark went around pitching his book to beginners. The jacket description is pretty clear about who it's aimed at.
With regard to converting Photoshop in to HTML templates, here's an interesting post from 37Signals on why they don't use photoshop:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1061-why-we-skip-photoshop
China goes shopping
Soon there will be more smart phones than desktops, and most of those run Linux, so the desktop has become irrelevant :-)
Wow. This is actually great concept. A document like this, with the real-world knowledge and expertise we have here at HN? That would be one hell of a resource.
Several locations have tried this (including my home state of Utah), and the cable/telco duopoly lobbyists got new laws passed that prohibited or severely restricted municipal broadband projects.
A quantum channel provides protection against eavesdropping for random data, but does not provide security for specific data. A shared quantum channel can be used to easily produce a shared one-time key that only the two parties involved know, which can then be used to encrypt specific data over an unsecured channel.
What makes a good data API?
Hmm, I have had ideas for something similar, but which involves having to choose a side of the argument (ie, agree with parent or disagree) before posting. Once chosen, you can only vote on your 'side' (either up or down). Poor arguments on your 'side' can be killed with sufficient downvotes, so that the ensuing set of arguments hopefully ends up being the best set. This tends to happen in an informal way on HN, but only because people largely behave. In other forums, not so much. Perhaps glomming together your idea of maximum posts per user on a topic, along with side-based voting, some type of civil debating platform coudl be developed. After all, in actual debates you get 2 chances to state your position and a final sum-up.
hah! Sounds like Google is turning into an Apple.
Collecta Shutters Its API, Says "We're Changing"
This is not a good sign. I went Android to avoid these kind of practices. At least I can still sideload. Does anyone have an apk for it?
ISPs probably should have a monopoly within a town

Better yet, separate wireline service from the ISP. You rent the fiber, coax, or twisted pair copper link from the local infrastructure provider, who neutrally routes your traffic to your desired ISP.
YTPlaylist - Instant YouTube Playlist
Hi friends,

We would like to invite you to try out our new website at

http://www.ytplaylist.com/

The purpose of this site is to help users instantly search for Youtube videos and instantly create playlists. You can also share your custom playlists easily with your friends on Facebook or Twitter as well as embed your playlists on your own websites or blogs. Lastly, you can save your playlists for future use all without the need of registration or login. If you like what you see, please share our site with your friends. You can also visit us at:

Twitter:
http://twitter.com/ytplaylist

Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/YTPlaylist/128295783903665

YouTube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/yumefave

Thank you

The Yumefave team
That's how they did it in this case, but the precedent for determining infringement uses filtration, not the process by which you created the implementation (clean room or otherwise).

Of course, if you do walk this close to the line, you probably don't want to leave a paper trail that you're doing so.
Ask HN: At what point do you consider finding a revenue model for a product?
I've seen a lot of products become immensely popular before they even attempt to implement a revenue model (just look at Youtube). Obviously, there needs to be a compromise. Taking money from the beginning is sure to stunt the product's user growth, but waiting too long leaves you with the loss of potential money. What is the best way to handle the situation?

Also, transitioning into a revenue model can be tricky for many people. Does it require sufficient preparation from the beginning in order to successfully make the transition while retaining most of the users?

The answers will vary based on which revenue models people are talking about (advertising, subscription, etc.), so make sure to specify.
I didn't lose money, I just haven't received any additional royalties beyond the advance.
I'm replying here, since the threading has gone deep enough on your last response that I can't reply to it. Normally, I'd give up at this point, but I finally see where the misunderstanding is so I'd like to make one last comment. You said:

They've made it very clear the intention is to add [WebM]. I've said it's not happening overnight, and I really don't understand this attitude that if it hasn't happened instantly then everything is worse.

Chrome supports WebM right now.

Support for WebM and H.264 is not mutually exclusive. You can support one, you can support the other, or you can support both. That's what Chrome has done up until now: Support both. You could use either one, and it would play them back perfectly well.

Chrome is not adding support for WebM. They aren't adding support for it, because they already support it and have done so for as long as it existed.

Switching to a world in which everyone supports WebM in <video> tags does not require that a single browser drop support for any format--not H.264, not Theora, not anything.
Yahoo7 buys australian groupon clone for $40M
I'm a PHP dev and completely recognize our breed as dirty coders who don't like to deal with memory management.

That said, why is it you feel you have to move away from PHP? I know my question isn't an answer but I guess I feel like I have to understand why you want to move to Ruby before I can suggest ways to do so.
Eat this: "The continuation that obeys only obvious stack semantics, O grasshopper, is not the true continuation." -- Guy Steele
I like that, I just need to find them...
Great roundup. People are clearly excited!
Guess it's time to switch my SSH key to 4096 bits ECDSA. Good bye RSA.
Authorize - Python library for interacting with authorize.net
http://www.kongregate.com/android
Everyone is debating here as if Google's decision to promote WebM was static. That's not the case. This is step 1 in a process that could rid the world of Flash.

We need:
1 - Google to publicly put out a strong message (has already happened)
2 - iOS to support WebM (yet to happen)
3 - IE, and others to support WebM. MS has pledged support in IE 9; Safari will follow iOS. Firefox will.
4 - YouTube to gradually switch content from Flash to WebM. Maybe HD content is only going to be available in WebM for starters. Google can do a gradual switch over a course of 5 years or something.

So: Yey, Google! Even big evil companies can get it right sometimes.

Note also that Google, as the owner of YouTube, can kind of strong-arm everyone into supporting WebM. And by everyone I mean Apple which has a traditionally high resistance to any technology it doesn't control (or at least has a say in).
An Amazon marketer might say that's Beanstalkapp's problem now
"I haven’t gone too far yet so I am not sure if I have gone far enough"
The majority of requests probably come from live accounts in good standing or from people not even logged in, so the majority of requests could still be cached.
Why would a polynomial time algorithm become instantaneous if you stick it behind an API?
While I'd prefer that Google didn't pull this move, you still can very easily download it from Kongregate themselves.
Four Years. Go. A Campaign to Change the Course of History
EU moves to strengthen individual data privacy protections
The Demise Of Lean Dean Singleton And The Rise Of Private Equity
I always thought the purpose of Arc was to be cruft-free, "don't include it unless it is actually needed".
That is if they are high flying one day, and bankrupt the next. What usually happens is that they slowly sink in size until they are excluded from the index, and some other up-and-coming company is included. It's not common for a company to go bankrupt and be delisted, but it is common for companies to sink lower and be removed, and then perform very badly from then on as index funds sell them down.

So you're correct in that bad performance by a firm in the DJIA will affect the index, however, really bad performance by a company will not be completely reflected in the index, only the first part of their decline. And that will be somewhat mitigated by the inclusion of their replacement, which is usually a growing company.
Direct Link to app file:
http://cdn2.kongregate.com/assets/files/0000/1998/Kongregate...
I agree. Wikis are a much better choice for this type of thing. They can also take a bit of time and effort to maintain against vandalism.

I recently picked up http://startuptacklebox.com to start collecting this kind of information on a blog. I've started to realize that a) I don't have as much time as I thought I did to research and summarize regularly, and b) a WordPress blog might not be the best option for collecting this information together.

If anyone would like to talk about building a persistent repository of startup-related advice and tools, drop me a line at jon@startuptacklebox.com.
HippieWare™
Not being able to handle 20 requests/sec quickly, in 2011, for a read-mostly website is just shameful.
Cassandra vs HBase
Totally. "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you first need to recreate the Universe" -- Sagan.
"Public," in this case, I believe, includes the need for them to disclose earnings reports.
Oops - sorry.
To pick on a small part of your comment: Do any theoretical computer scientists seriously worry that a proof that P=NP would threaten cryptography? It's not like a proof would suddenly make an i7 able to factor huge numbers in polynomial time. Also, while all polynomial-time algorithms are considered "tractable" in theoretical CS, that doesn't mean that they're all practical on current hardware (nor does it claim to mean that).

I suppose a proof that P=NP would still technically threaten cryptography, because if you assume that computer hardware performance increases polynomially with time you must concede that any given crypto technique will become practical to break after some amount of time.
3 Historical Methods To Succeed At Affiliate Marketing
that's a little bit of a stretch to be claiming this. Not saying it's not a shitty move just that they need another 5000+ shitty moves to be like apple.
A friend of mine opened a company (EURL) in 2 weeks and for about 300 euros. Honest. It'd be twice as expensive in, say, Estonia (I run a business there).
I mostly agree, but given where it was posted (oppugn.us, a site for "rants"), I would cut some slack. If it was posted on Zed's "real" blog, Shedding Bikes, then I would agree with you completely.
69 points! Perfect score.