skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But WebM could be ours instead of theirs, no?

No. WebM could be Google's instead of MPEG-LA's. WebM is a Google project, Google-owned and Google-managed. Much like Android, it is open source so that anyone can see the code and make their own changes, but again, like Android, it is not a community effort. There's a chance that your changes, if useful, will make it back in, but in the end WebM, like Android, is controlled not by the community, but by a corporation.

Essentially the comparison being made is between open source and open standards. The WebM implementation is open-source, but it is not an open standard. There are also open-source implementations of H.264 (e.g. x264), but H.264 is also an ISO/ITU standard which anyone can read and implement. WebM, however, is royalty-free, whereas H.264 is not.

WebM has two of the three (open source, royalty free). H.264 also has two of the three (open source, open standard). If Google submits WebM to a standards body for approval, it will have all three.

Until Google does submit it as a standard, it's still Google's format, not ours, they're just letting us use it for free. Down the road they can always change the format, the container, add new features (like some kind of inline advertisement), and anyone who's invested in implementing this format will have to scramble to add the new functionality or be left behind.

Will they? Who knows, but the price you pay for implementing WebM right now is uncertainty. With H.264, you know exactly where you stand, and the licensing terms are specific, and corporations like that about it.
The ".mp3" example worries me. It fails on concatenating strings?
I don't understand your comment. Student loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy.
great point about the negative tags, it's on the list of things i'd like to add... ostensibly this would be later on when you can become a member, and you can have "tag sets" for different moods.

as far as the slick/heavily produced stuff, you should try looking through the niches at the top. tons of stuff gets lumped under "straight" porn, but there's all sorts of subcategories. right now there's ~85,000 videos in the db.
A nearby supernova or more distant hypernova could bathe the entire Earth in lethal levels of neutrino radiation. There would be no way to shield yourself from it (they can penetrate through the entire Earth easily) and no way to prevent the death of all human beings alive.

But it's unlikely. Better to concentrate on risks which are more relevant and more likely.

Do you find driving or riding in an automobile terrifying? Eating a cheese burger? You're far more likely to die of heart disease or an automotive accident than prions or neutrino radiation.
I'm floored by the irony of Indian startups outsourcing their software development.
If you don't mind hosting it yourself there is open atrium.

http://openatrium.com/
Actually, my full name is Mahmud-LeShawn Nguyen Ramirez van Cohen-Singh~
I don't think this is limited to India, we have had plenty of offers of "partnerships" etc from people with ideas. Our response has been to quote a minimum viable product cost and tell them to go find funding.

Some have come back to us with a budget and things have been built. But without a dedicated tech team studying the product they have a really tough time.

The reason we don't partner is non technical people
always underestimate the work required to build, maintain and grow a product. The equity share on offer is simply not worth the risk but the people with the idea don't see it like that.

We've had some great ideas pitched to us too, it has been sad to see the ideas attached to people we didn't want to work with.
I think cost of influence is a more important metric for judging how serious advertisers are than the overall size of a market.

Take television, for example:

"during the 2007-08 season, Grey's Anatomy was able to charge $419,000 per advertisement"

Independently, I found the viewing figures were 17-18 million per episode for that season. So about $24.65 "CPM". And that was one of the best mainstream, regular ad returns on TV (CSI had a higher audience and far lower charges per ad). That's half of what I know even minor podcasts are making..

On the flip side, a TV show tends to have many ads packed in whereas a podcasts runs with a few at most but in terms of CPM, they seem to trump most TV.
Ship or Get Off the Pot
the tags fade out when you idle your mouse

clicking on the video for pausing is a good idea, hadn't thought of that

you presume right, if you're really curious shoot me an email
DDT, Agent Orange, "hormone-leaching" plastics are not harmful to people. Antibiotics in meats are only a problem to a small number of allergic people. Of course, if you are really a vegetable or insect, then I could see why you consider the first two to be threats.
The app that can read your mind: iPhone brainwave detector arrives
Wow, wished I saw it earlier (can't edit now). Bad paste. Correct link:

http://www.infoq.com/articles/surviving-asynchronous-program...
You're absolutely right, and the time I spend worrying about any of these things is relatively low either way. As a moderately fit young adult with a good family medical history, only car wrecks are something that are reasonably likely to strike me in the next 10-20 years. That doesn't change the fact that, considering each on it's own, prions are scarier to me than the others. You're more likely to get kicked by a deer than eaten by a shark, but sharks are still scarier animals.
I might use this, actually. I don't see why people are so crazy about physical business cards. I just lose them.

A bit of copy editing: "... hand out your contact information to whomever needs it." A lot of people make this mistake, but actually "whoever" is correct here. The case of the relative pronoun is governed by its role in the subordinate clause, not the main clause; the object of the preposition "to" is not the relative pronoun itself, but the entire clause "whoever needs it". "Whoever", being the subject of the verb "needs", is correctly in the nominative case.
They cannot. He was trying to anyways. Quoting the article which is quoting the court:

The applicant testified that during the pendency of the
bankruptcy proceeding, the payments on his student loan
obligation would be greatly reduced. ... the panel
observed that the only debt that could be discharged in a
bankruptcy proceeding would be the applicant’s $16,500 in
consumer debt, as the applicant’s $170,000 in student
loans are nondischargeable in bankruptcy.
THIS is so that my girlfriend can get a break once in a while
Jessica Livingston interviews Joel Spolsky
I think we would be remiss to mention that fundamentally the Lambda Calculus and Turing Machines are mathematically equivalent, as proved in the Church-Turing Thesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis ).

And while it is true that there are functional features that are unsupported in the basic syntax of imperative languages, you can still do equivalent computation, and after all "Whoever does not understand LISP is doomed to reinvent it" :P
I'm fairly certain it's original, unless I've forgotten the source.

And yes, every single time someone has had to post a closing parenthesis. (:
New Gestures introduced in iOS
Groupon Readies for An I.P.O.
<offtopic>
It's unbelievable that people are actually have an intellectual conversation on this topic on the internet.

I <3 HN!
</offtopic>
Googles's motivation is money. also control.

H.264 is not free. and youtube could be reclassified in 2016 to pay a further royalty increase than the maximum 10%. YouTube is the largest video service provider in the world.

On the other hand google owns WebM (spent 100M on it)

Also youtube is spending a pretty penny on flash "premium" codec support. Also not free, and could also potentially save money there pushing WebM.

it is really googles's only way to go

regarding Apple, a simple solution is to add webM support to IOS. they have some time to do it. will also save them money.
As confirmed by wiki's twitter account:
http://twitter.com/#!/wikipedia

.. and the thousands of tweets coming in about it.
I don't think I've seen anyone attempt to do it with the Dropbox API and your mobile contacts, but I'm pretty sure it could be done.
Clay Shirky on Wikipedia's 10th Anniversary
> If we lose that competition, we could be driven to extinction. Best to pre-empt competition now while we have the upper hand

What's even scarier is that the most rational choice may be to pre-empt even if resource competition is unlikely to ever occur, just because pre-emption on the part of another civilization has a non-zero probability.

Basically it's the Cold War logic except with no diplomacy and with the other side's strategy likely to be guided by a strong post-Singularity AI.

Thinking through these scenarios can be scary as fuck, but since we're all still alive and well, it could be that we are truly alone.
While that is true, I think the chart is misleading in that it doesn't properly weight the tests. Failing to have any sort of globalCompositeOperation is a huge thing, but IE only lost one point for it. I would say that some of the things that the other browsers got dinged for are much smaller in comparison.
On a related note, 8 percent of Internet users are somebody's grandmother.
I've tried to stay out of this debate so far but I'd like to add one point: In my experience, the performance of H.264 playback in Adobe Flash on low-end computers is simply unacceptable. Pretty much any other option offers way much better performance: HTML5 H.264 in Chrome, Safari or Silverlight H.264 playback. I don't know whether it's their version of the H.264 codec or something else in their rendering pipeline but it doesn't really matter anyway.

We're a business-to-business shop that need to deliver web-based video content to our business clients. What we care about is our clients reliably being able to play back video on any of the thousands of their shitty underpowered old Dells. This is why they pay us so we get to come to work tomorrow. Still, we like to think that we do the right thing if we can so we would love to use standard, open technologies but this whole mess around HTML5 video codecs (and the fact that Flash is just way too slow on our clients' machines) forces us to use Silverlight instead which unfortunately also means that we can't support Linux boxes or any portable devices.
Every time I see the phrase "revolutionize everything" I want to find someone to take that bet with me at odds of no worse than 9-1.
A Basal Dinosaur from the Dawn of the Dinosaur Era in Southwestern Pangaea
Well played, Dropbox. IMVU has quarterly, company-wide hack weeks but we've never written a blog post as fun as this one and CERTAINLY never exposed the list of projects we worked on. That took guts but it looks like it turned out well.
The Long And Lonely Death March To A Goal
I liked a lot of Steve's early stuff, but when he went all esoteric and pseudo-scientific (referencing his wife's "intuitive readings" and psychic stuff, etc) he totally lost me.

Maybe I'll have to re-read some of his early stuff someday...
Others have mentioned coroutines; just to avoid repeating a good conversation that already happened on all this, here's the link:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549023
Ask HN: Review my startup - xuland.com
http://www.xuland.com

Xuland has been a passion of mine for well over a year since I started working on it. I've blogged about it on eonflex.com, and it quickly became the 6th most visited blog story through Adobe Feeds (http://feeds.adobe.com) in the past year.

Since then I've recieved variable levels of traffic, nothing big. The blog was the only public announcement made. The number of new registrations is very low, even though you can login directly using your existing Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, or Google accounts.

As you can see, the site was completely developed in Flash (Flex, to be exact) and lends itself a Facebook feel. The was done on purpose to keep the learning curve as low as possible.

My official blurb about Xuland goes like this: "Xuland is a social network based on location, rather than a friend's list. Xuland allows you to share comments, photos and links with those around you. Follow those that interest you, or see who's following you!"

On load, the application should geolocate to your city or neighborhood (based on IP). You would then see comments posted in that area. YOu can change the map to any city in the world - a nice and unique feature I think. You can post a comment, or a photo, which you can modify slightly before upload (you can even remove red-eye).

I built the site because I felt it would be great if I could talk to folks in my own town, or the next town over, that I didn't necessarily know or who wasn't already on my Facebook friend's list. Yelp is similar, but your comments are always centered around some business or restaurant. I wanted something more...

There's still quite a bit of work to be done, but I receive very little feedback. Most of it has been positive, but these are friends and family. I'm very interested in what you, the hackers, think???
People are already building immersion-cooled computers, see http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/hardcorepc_reactor

They use non-conductive oil instead of glass ;-)
Most startups in India worth the moniker of "tech-startup" do know how to program. I have visited (as a potential employee) or talked to many founders (as a potential partner) most major revenue earning tech startups in India and I'd say everyone of them had strong programming founders.

Yes many startups-founders are clueless and have a world changing the-next-facebook-idea but that happens everywhere, not just in India.

I was part of a non-tech startup once and web was just marketing tool for us, we did not want to do the website and its UX ourselves, that would be a waste of our precious time (although we ended up doing it too cos' we were techies at heart). I think we did a mistake by doing it ourselves.

So no, all Indian startups do not need to learn how to program and most tech-startups do know how to program.
The complaint was that the parent poster was postulating that amateurs have gotten worse recently, and that that could be explained by the increased usage of zoom lenses.

If I accept that the first statement is true (that amateurs have gotten worse), I disagree on the cause (that it's because of zoom lenses, as zoom lenses have been the norm on SLR's since the 80's).

I don't know objectively if amateur photographers are better or worse. I know that nowadays I see a lot more bad pictures than I used to (and while there is also an increase in good pictures, it hasn't increased nearly as much as the bad ones have). I am postulating that this is more likely due to the proliferation of digital and the ease at which photos can be shared (most people's crappy photos would only get viewed by their family members over the holidays when they dug out the slide projector).

I'm don't think it matters if old cameras took better pictures (for the most part, they did; although the other benefits of digital tend to make up for it).
Interesting, but, not really related: yours is a story about an autoimmune disorder thought to be caused by forced aerosolization of pig brains during brain harvesting, and subsequent inhalation of those brain aerosols. That was a fun sentence to write.
"Naenara" North Korean government online
This article only shows examples that supports its points. Most of the long email discussions happen over a period of a few hours and you don't need much context to know what is being discussed. For these kinds of emails (which are the majority of the messages I read every day), interleaved replying is a nuisance since you find yourself having to skip over the same content over and over again.

This is why top posting won this battle a long time ago (when hotmail appeared, pretty much).
I'm completely certain that the unbiased estimators are a class of estimators that eliminate bias. I'm completely certain that the MVUE is the one of those with the highest Fisher information subject to the Cramer-Rao bound. Those arguments are abstract, but simple.

I've just never been too sure why I should prefer unbiasedness to minimizing error (or, more generally, minimizing a cost function of some variety).

I've never understood when, theoretically, estimating a 'fixed' parameter is better than pruning it's possible distribution.

But, I've also never doubted statements of frequentist statistics made in full rigor. I don't believe they're guessing, I just think they're playing a game that they made up the rules too but got them tragically wrong.
I'm actually far less alarmed about the material. It sounds pretty great. What worries me is this fixation we seem to have with eliminating bacteria... Isn't there a downside to this?

If we spread it around as much as this article describes it seems to me like we'd greatly sanitize our environment... What happens if we greatly reduce the amount of bacteria we're exposed to daily due to some sort of invention like nano spray-on glass?
Memristor .Org
He has a daughter and might be supporting his mother as well. My parents raised me and my sister off of student loans and credit cards while they were going to school. I think it is pretty common if you have a family to raise.
Las Vegas based startup http://www.sescout.com is hiring web developers (PHP,HTML,CSS,etc).

Must be local. Email - hiringATsescout.com
Usually Google brings the big guns to their IO conference. Last year, the WebM project was announced. This year, some other surprise that will probably make this discussion irrelevant.

I'd rather spend time guessing on what the big surprise will be this year regarding web video than debating the effects of Chrome dropping h.264.

The ONLY thing I take from this move by Google is they have intention to take down h.264, and that in itself is enough to prepare myself for the possibility of serving 2 formats.

It's just one move in a series of moves Google has been and will be making.
Terminology is so badly abused in this article that it almost reads like a parody.

Also, the tasks could have been accomplished in 3 or 4 lines of SQL.
Perhaps it is the airplane crash theory of giving impetus to research. Nobody, en masse, has yet died, so what is the problem.
There was a phase when most of his articles started talking about his experiments with open marriages, giving out intimate details about the sexual and psychological effects.

I was an avid reader before that. Since I was never considering open marriages for myself, I just stopped reading when that phase hit.
I'm wondering which company LOSES the FEWEST packages.
Project Pier is pretty good, it's the open source branch of ActiveCollab
http://www.projectpier.org/
Enough to kill off the site, it looks like...
>lethal levels of neutrino radiation

I doubt that is even physically possible. Neutrinos are nearly impossible to detect because they don't interact with normal matter. In fact, I'm not sure they interact with much of anything. Does anybody know if they do interact with any other elementary particles?

Your point about concentrating on more likely risks is a good one though.
> This is strictly about the level of technology and civilization available to the average person.

So, um. How would you define this now, given that right now I have three computers within easy reach, a big-screen television and a game console in a heated apartment with lights and a gas stove - while somewhere across the world, someone is hoping they find enough water to drink so they can finish building their mud-hut before the wolves come?

Bonus points for pointing out that while my girlfriend is playing a post-apocalyptic video game, someone is probably doing almost exactly what she's doing, except with a real gun against real people?
Khan giving them a bit of scare? I bet...
Because smooth-talking salesmen are exactly the opposite of what I idolize.

Because communities like this are vulnerable to astroturfing.

Because when someone is trying to sell me something, that inspires distrust.

Because self help books are a dime a dozen and offer more hope than help.

Because someone offering improvements to my sex life sets off all my bullshit alarms.

Saying he is "villified around here" is both false and casts him as a victim. In fact he has been on the front page of HN many times.
I've heard that description before and find it more ad hoc than intuitive. Is there some valid mathematical object K such that often times you will normalize unbiased estimators by N/(N-K)? Is this K sometimes equal to some measure of the number of equations/constraints you have? Does this seem to hold a lot of force in ANOVA especially?

Sure, sure, sure. I still don't see why this normalization is required to make a better estimate (excepting when you define "better" as an unbiased estimator, maybe the MVUE).
Modes of Communication on Google NGrams
that sounds great i have some ideas, have little knowledge in both design and developing fields, but need to strengthen my programing background to get them alive.
i have a question about hosting the my site, with a very low budget, what is your advice?
Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean it's not true.
Humans rely on vegetables and insects for survival. Overuse of antibiotics can lead to the development of high levels of resistance.
The author claims that Clojure tries to do OO. While Clojure does allow interaction with Java's object model, I think it's quite a stretch to say that it tries to do OO. Use of Java interop features for purposes other than interacting with a Java library or framework is generally discouraged.
Very nice, would like to see a decent reference source for transformations.
visit www.trendguardian.com for videos
I truly believe that in a few years something like this can be running test suites on another server as I type.

Welcome to the future; Hudson (and probably other CI suites) can do this today.
It's amazing how many things can become successful if you just stick it out and work at it. No?
The first thought that popped into my mind from reading this was when is there going to be a bachelor's equivalency exam? Perhaps a new potential market for the ETS?
Sorry here is the link: http://www.trendguardian.com/
Those photos of people holding their giant panda while pumping gas do not make me feel comfortable or normal about buying a giant stuffed panda.
This is definitely a website where the main reward is getting feedback. The more feedback each individual gets, the more likely that person will return. Therefore, the best thing that one can do in this situation is to forget about traction and features and focus 100% on community building.
This has been an open secret in the industry for years, since AOL released a rather disturbing report on "compulsive clickers".

Anecdotally, I theoretically could (but, as stated in my privacy policy, refuse to) identify a small handful of users from my site who get to it through "the best result" on the blue Googles every single time. (AdWords is profitable in aggregate so I've never given this issue serious thought with regards to assessing how much money it costs or whether it would be worthwhile to educate that population to save money.)
This is great news! In most cases the materials on offer were sparse, but an initiative like this will make it really useful both for autodidacts and instructors looking for materials.
It's going to be a very interesting couple of years in the startup world, simply because of the potential IPO's in the pipeline: Groupon, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, Twitter, Zynga...

As those companies have huge exits, there's going to be a lot of young, early employees that are able to cash out and become angels or work on their next huge startup.

Some people say it's a bubble. I'm thinking/hoping it's more on the lines of a Renaissance.
"Their product is something that Amazon doesn't sell. It is unique and different."

So surely they're creators of a product first, an online store second.
"...You probably never heard of them..."

Define "win" :)
Five Emotions Invented By The Internet