skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Google Maps not working?
Hi, has anyone experienced any difficulty with Google Maps recently?

There is a terrible lag time of 3-5 min upon each zoom-in and even then the map images may not load fully.
What evidence can be presented to prove that Google search quality is going up?
For the FSF, the medium-term risk of not eradicating Flash as quickly as possible is well worth the rare chance to achieve the only desirable outcome for open source in the long term: having the world's video encoded with a free standard.

After all, not needing a Flash wrapper is a hollow victory if your open source player can't legally decode the content. The content standard is the major battle. If that is won, getting rid of the Flash video wrapper is a trivial effort in comparison.

The scenario that everyone will just continue to use Flash with H.264 is assured only if nothing else changes. But Flash adopting WebM will change the support numbers dramatically, and being the odd ones out in not supporting WebM is the only way that Apple and MS would feel any pressure to follow suit.
someone forked a MooTools version, so it is doable.

Zepto is a lighter-weight jQuery compatible library- so you shouldn't feel as bad about having it as a dependency. It might also be possible to have a stripped build of jQuery.
Google supports Adobe Flash, and has dropped support for Google's implementation of H.264 inside Chrome. One is a plugin. One was not.

I agree with your comment, and I find the Flash/H.264/Chrome argument to be childish at best.
In the UK at least, the answer to that is obvious - the government assumes that any male who wishes to work with children is a paedophile and the onus is on him to prove otherwise. So men simply refuse to endure that systematic humiliation.

There are actually no barriers to women working in IT other than their personal interest in doing so.
> "This license is fundamentally incompatible with software freedom. It requires developers to restrict how their software can be used, and to collect royalties in many situations."

According to the FSF's definition of software freedom. The FSF has quite a radical view in this regard. A Microsoft exec once described the GPL as "viral' [1] and it's a fair point. Many view licenses like MIT and Apache as being more free simply because they're not as restrictive.

This ambiguity is more pronounced when you use words like "open" because it means different things to different people.

So it would be more accurate to say that H.264 is incompatible with the FSF's idea of software freedom.

> if it gets entrenched

What do you mean "if"? It already has.

> Why wait until a fiasco?

Because anyone who writes software knows that writing code to solve problems you may never have is a recipe for wasted effort if not outright disaster.

It's a bit like the standoff between the (former) Soviet Union and the USA: not a single shot was ever (directly) fired between the two but the threat of escalating conflict kept them in check (resulting in proxy conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc but I digress).

Think about it this way: MPEG-LA could announce tomorrow that licenses now cost $1 trillion. The result? Obviously no one would pay and a new standard would arise pretty quickly. What if it was $1 billion? $100 million? The point here it is simply a question of degree.

So what keeps (and will keep) MPEG-LA in check is market forces, the limits of what people can and will pay and the threat of a free or cheaper alternative... much like any market. Switching formats is a process that can be automated so the transition cost isn't really that high.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Vira...
How often do you get to shape a company?
In April of 2011, Gotootie will launch their new product which allows people to discover, share and connect to information and other people within their surroundings, regardless of social connection. In the next few weeks, you will have an opportunity see a live preview of our new direction and provide feedback before the launch. Email us at feedback@gotootie.com for your invite.
I agree that this seems to be true for some (many) of the problems, but it depends on the requirements. Some require only written proposals, some require deliverables etc. I think it's unfair to say the rewards are too low, especially when it is always up to the solvers discretion whether or not the terms are favorable.

Full disclosure: I'm not affiliated with InnoCentive, my brother just sent me the link this morning and I thought I'd share.
Parent means you have to have lots of cash.
The main issue I have with sproutcore is that you build the UI in javascript, completely ignoring markup, which feels like a huge regression in layout managment. While this does have performance advantages and Yehuda Katz has promised that they are working on a way for developers to manipulate markup directly thats not how its built to be used currently.
Yeah, I've heard of that. Still, it's funny how downloading is different from using through your browser. Like if using an online client isn't sending bytes to your computer.
yes it is and the only people who say it's not are the ones who benefit from it
Looking for a cofounder ... please send photo?
Single links drastically change the network
The only technical fields I can think of with significantly higher ratios are either a) softer (biology), or b) have a teaching track which attracts women (math teacher).

When I was in grad school, the math major had lots of women. The vast majority were education minors. The undergrads taking grad courses (note: every serious math major does this) were mostly men.
a link to the original paper: http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nphys1...
I think you're describing aggregation which the GPL does not consider a derived work. Mere use of a GPL-licensed executable does not extend the GPLs terms to what you are doing (e.g. shell scripts, system() calls, etc). For each binary, the license terms of each statically or dynamically linked component must be simultaneously satisfied. The GPL includes a "system library" exception that excludes libraries shipped with the OS from that calculus.

The situation with combining interpreter code that doesn't access compiled libraries (e.g. pure octave M-files, or python code) isn't really clear to me. The FSF's opinion has been that a script that uses GPL'd interpreter code is subject to the terms of the GPL. I personally accept that interpretation out of deference to the FSF, but I've never understood specifically how that conclusion arises from the text of the GPL.
I agree. In reality, I have 3 or 4 hours of enthusiastic game-on work time a day. That is ok. I honestly don't believe anyone that says they can keep up concentration for longer than this (unless debugging). Here I am only counting "doing" not "dreaming" or "thinking", but I do that in my sleep.
Nice short survey on IaaS providers. Submit your view
Facebook for “Tweens” Launches Today - Are We Too Obsessed with Social Networks?
What are your thoughts on social networks aimed for "Tweens?"
Steve Jobs is a genius of the likes of Einstein and Feynman? I know that Apple fanboyism is rampant in tech circles but it's getting out of hand, really. ;)
Ask HN: Geolocation - Google & Linode
I just noticed something strange and thought I'd throw this out there to the world.

As I was doing a google search, I noticed that Google knew that I was in Portland, OR. That's not that surprising, of course, until it hit me that I was surfing through ssh, and the IP address that Google saw should have been in Dallas, TX, where my Linode server is. How did Google know I was in Portland? I don't have the google toobar (hmmm, I am using Chrome, perhaps it's built in?)

So, that's the first strange thing. The second, which is much less mysterious, but still worth mentioning, is that, as I was confirming that other websites saw my linode ip address and not my actual one, I noted that they all thought I was in Absecon, New Jersey, rather than Dallas. It occurs to me that I have no way to know if Linode actually put my server in Dallas or at one of it's other data centers, even though they tell me it's Dallas, I have no way to check. I thought about ping times to various Dallas and New Jersey businesses, but that doesn't help, since who knows where they are actually hosted. How does one find out where a server they are logged into is actually located?
You don't think the IT data disproves the more general hypothesis that females dislike working with computers ?

Or that the data that females have the qualifications to get onto CS degrees indicates it's not just an ability issue ?
There are some issues with call routing to some international destinations. We are working full time to resolve those issues. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Thanks, the interface is all from mape's wargames, I just connected the wires.
I have to agree with this comment. I've never seen a country so scared of children as is the UK.
What are your thoughts on social networks aimed for "Tweens?" Positive or negative developmental impacts?
I expect to see this changing in phone booths in the near future.

Interesting. Nowhere near as bad as I had expected, a little too alter-ego for my tastes though.
...baseline is what is used on mobile...

That's the market segment that the baseline profile was conceived for, but the phone in my pocket and the tablet on my nightstand both support the main profile. Sure, most content that I view on it is probably encoded in baseline, but there are 17 million iPads in the wild that support the main profile. Edit: it's not just iOS devices, either. The Playstation Portable supports the main profile too. There are around 62 million of them out there.

VP8 needs to skate to where the puck is going to be, as it were.
It does have a hint of 99designs about it - basically competing with others for a prize which is less than the minimum fee they'd expect to pay a competent contractor for time spent trying to achieve a solution.
Yes -- in Ruby the tool for that is `autotest`. It watches your project directory and automatically runs relevant tests when you change application code or tests.
i stopped when it wanted to access my contacts. the ability to spam my contacts is a fee i'm not willing to pay.
I've been on there in the past ten minutes with no issues. I'm London-based if that's relevant.
may you please elaborate more on why France was the most frustrating?
This is a duplicate story.
First, patriotism is for idiots. (I'm sorry but my team is not better than your team.)

Second, I wouldn't call it low self-esteem but rather a cultural meme that abhors acting snobbish. It stems from Communism. When I first got there, and someone would ask, "Jak se mas?" (How are you?), I would answer "Great!" But that was the wrong answer. That's not their culture, because no one was great under Communism. So the right answer is something self-deprecating and slightly embarrassing like, "Just ok. I walked around town all morning with my fly undone." They're very sweet, down-to-earth people and these are their steps to keep it like that.

About expats, they're like that everywhere, for the reason I mentioned. Many come and go after a year or two and are just long-term tourists who never take off the goggles of where they come from. I know a huge number of expats there and almost all of them love it.
You should elaborate, so that we don't have to read a whole book just to disagree with you :D
This quote is my favourite part of the conference:

"The purpose of cryptography is to force the US government to torture you."
So they want "Corporate Free Speech" and now "Right to privacy".....

If corporations are people, and you can't own people... then every stockholder is a Slave owner and the Stock exchange is the largest slave market ever.
What do you do, when you need to talk about the HTML5, not about it and related stuff?
<canvas>, as important as it is, is only a piece of HTML5 markup additions.
And before (I think) those, they released some kind of experimental app that dealt with large photos or building a bigger picture from smaller photos or something like that. I can't remember what it was called right now, though. :P
Do a trace route. It should end up at "theplanet", which is a data center in Dallas.
Geo Should Not Be a 1st-Class Object in Your App - It Should Simply Be Context
Blog post prompts police to seize weapons from Arlington businessman
I'm AT WORK 45, sometimes 55 hours per week. Productivity comes in spurts. I'm basically working in a field that's also one of my passionate hobbies, so while part of my work day involves grinding through mundane stuff, I am often inspired and do things I love to do. Off the clock, I often come up with solutions that help me and my peers back at the day job.
early signups on cloodly.com
techcrunch.com
A professionist is always working! :)

I mean, often I find myself thinking about work stuff even if I'm at home playing WoW or reading a book or whatever...
Notes of a native tiger son: it's a weird time to be Asian-American
Interesting, an inverted bell curve :)
- Google Docs + Wiki is a pretty good description. The wiki part speaks for itself, but there are also many cases where people (ab)use excel as ad hoc database. We want to get Papyrs to the point where it can be used for that kind of informal/ad-hoc database and form use.

- Good point about the slideshow. We're thinking we should replace it with a screencast.

- I suppose it depends on the way your company is organized. We're only a 2 man company and we already need something like Papyrs to keep track of different documents (tax regulation info, receipts, brainstorming sketches, etc). With some documents we want to know when they're updated (email notification) with some we don't. Full text search. Versioning. The ability to add notes and ideas to the side of a document. Checklists are huge (when you suddenly have to fix an email or mysql server in the middle of the night it a checklist is absolutely necessary). We've haven't found any product that would solve these problems for us, hence Papyrs.

Feedback appreciated!
> WebM wasn't an option because it didn't even exist yet.

And when WebMx is released, everybody will hound those who don't immediately change their product strategy to fit this. This is also a good reason for why Apple isn't using WebM: it's not a standard, it's as controlled by Google as Flash is controlled by Adobe.

They're essentially giving a bunch of control of their device to an outside company.
Might be a general issue. It says that my phone # is already taken as well.
Reminds me of an article [1] that demonstrated why all of your friends are more popular than you are.

A new connection is more likely to come from someone with a large number of connections (since they will be making larger numbers of new connections than someone who is unconnected). Therefore, a new friend will have more friends than you and, in relation to this link, will bring a lot more to your network.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jan/30/change-yo...
Facebook is top dog right now, so I get that every highly intelligent hacker out there is going to take their potshots at it. I think everyone needs to take a step back and seriously thank Facebook, Myspace, AOL, etc. Why? Because they got normal people to use the internet. Grandma is now a customer for us hackers thanks to Mark Zuckerberg. We can all remember a time when the internet was our personal nerd playground, and yes it was awesome; but it wasn't very profitable. Now, everyone and their mother is on the internet, and their chosen platform of choice right now is Facebook. Yes, things have been dumbed down, yes privacy isn't what it used to be, but us geeks are now pulling down 6 figure salaries for doing the same stuff we'd be doing for fun in our free time anyways. We can't have our cake and eat it too..
There isn't (that I can find?) a list of rates, but €0.55 to call a UK mobile compared to Skype's €0.29 is a big increase (90% higher).

edit: Noticed the (pretty small) link to http://www.vox.io/pricing, but still no way to look up rates quickly (without typing in a specific number for each rate lookup).

On a side note, what's the HN policy on a submission with a referral link in the URL?
Can you please give us you feedback, and what you think it is?
The key is to pour the quart of oil off somebody else's curb, not in your neighborhood.

I'm quite certain the BP CEO did not own any residential gulf-front property along the Gulf of Mexico.
Great! Glad I could help!

You should probably tie software versions (of the app being instrumented) into your tracking and reporting as well, so if errors are still being thrown, that's because the user's on 2.0 and the bug is fixed in 2.0.1
DOES ONE’S KNOWLEDGE AFFECT THE OUTCOME OF A SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS?
Gaming the system implies he did something most people wouldn't do. I don't think that's the case. Does being rich give you a better shot at a new liver? Yes. Would most people take advantage of their wealth to lengthen their life? Yes.

I would like to feel high and mighty about this, but I can't. If I had Jobs' money, you can be sure I'd be getting myself on as many lists as I could too.
Ask HN: What to do with competitor excessively crawling site?
Last week our site's performance suddenly went in the toilet, with the servers' CPUs pegging at 100% for extended periods. Without giving away too much that might be confidential about the parties involved, there is very good circumstantial evidence showing that this traffic is being driven by a competitor who is simply trying to scrape pricing for a catalog of a few hundred thousand products.

These bots were coming from the Amazon EC2 cloud, so it was impossible to identify them by IP address, but other patterns in their requests makes them identifiable. From these, we can determine that they were using over 6Mbps incoming bandwidth just for making their requests; at least the top 15 client IPs came from this source, rather than legitimate customers. They have never requested our robots.txt file, to see how we'd like bots to behave.

Because the usage is high enough that it's pegging the CPUs on our web farm, it's actually causing degraded service for legitimate customers, so it's important to me that we do something about it. It's also a headache for administration of the web servers: with usage so high, it's difficult to do maintenance without affecting customer experience.

Note that they've actually been doing this for some time, but shifted into high gear last week. Previously, I'd just put filtering into my usage reports so that their scraping wouldn't affect our BI reports. But now they're doing material damage.

What avenues might we pursue to address this? We could devote resources to finding a way to throttle bandwidth of users, but this is difficult because their usage is distributed, and we have many large corporate customers going through proxies, making them also appear to be extremely high-usage single clients (from an IP perspective). We could talk with the competitor, threatening legal action or maybe even offering to trade data with them directly. Any other suggestions?
Ok, here is how I define minimal software freedom - I give you a piece of software, along with source code, you are free to use it in anyway you please, or make your modifications and distribute it to as many people as you like. With H.264 bundled with a piece of software, that is not possible.

> This ambiguity is more pronounced when you use words like "open" because it means different things to different people.

I never once used the word in my post.

>What do you mean "if"? It already has.

You're arguing for the status quo. Everything seems entrenched until an alternative comes along.

You seem to completely ignore that the H.264 license is directly opposed to free software. There's a reason Chromium never supported H.264, while only Chrome did. Nobody except the patent holders benefits from a de facto patent-encumbered codec.
Agreed... I already signed up in New York!

http://newyork.usehipster.com/signup

Oops? :P
But isnt that just plain retarded?

Look, in VERSION 2 we added NEW features to our messaging platform that you all have known and loved for YEARS! In fact! since the freaking invention of email!

Also, given that the creator of gmail has joined FB, wouldn't he have said "uh, guys - I think we forgot something. guys??"
Autotest has been the single biggest instigator in me adopting a more rigorous testing procedure for AR than I have previously used. The number of bugs it catches practically before I leave the method I'm tweaking is astounding.

(I mostly do unit testing, but also do some testing against APIs to ensure that I'm passing them data in the format they expect. One of my external service providers had downtime yesterday, and autotest caught it about six hours before they did. I wasn't successful in waking them up, but at least I was able to push a hotfix to AR to minimize inconvenience while I waited for their API to come back.)

[Edit: I might consider, if tests were taking that long, spinning up a fleet of VPSes to munch through them for me, maybe with a continuous integration server. Unit tests should be disgustingly parallel, since they're small units of work and shouldn't depend on each other. That means if one Macbook can execute the suite in 15 minutes then you should be able to have 30 Macbook-equivalents running either in the server room or the cloud munch through the same test suite in 30 seconds, give or take a little startup time.)
if the spec has only led to implementations with severe usability issues, what does that imply?
After thinking about it for a bit, I think that is his solution...simply bringing it up and getting some discussion going.

I'd wager that community driven solutions are more impactful and higher reaching than those of a single blogger/entrepreneur.
The Money is in the List
My wife just gave birth to our second child so I'm working whenever I'm not sleeping.
A Year After (Sun’s Aquisition): The Open Source Projects
Good idea, but not necessarily great idea.
Brilliant guys, and great to see it was a success. I'll be at the London one (hint hint), though more for the coffee, marshmallows, and fun times than the technical side of things.

Breadpig is now my number one example for a growing company with a true cultural purpose.
'enwhirlpoolenate'?! Embiggen; I say. Is enwhirlpoolenate cromulent?
For those greater than 60 hours, how is your general level of health/fitness? What is your food diet?
Thanks. Yes, it does.

So, there's just a database error for some Dallas Linode IP addresses that puts them in New Jersey.

Now, about that Google thing...
I agree with you as well. Zone time is usually a 3-4 hour a day deal. Some people are honest about it, others aren't. There are short periods of time in which one can code at their top level for a long period of time but these are infrequent. In general I'd say that one can get a good 4 hours of solid work in on a given day. Once going beyond that time frame, especially on a regular basis just increases the chance of introducing errors into a system. The other time would be better spent thinking about the problems faced by the design and or relaxing to allow for ideas to form and work themselves to clarity.

When I used to work outside of my home this meant playing table tennis or fußball as a clearing ones mind method. Or going for a walk outside of the workplace.

The gung-ho brute forcing of a coding method is a dangerous path to traverse. I'm more for the cyclical clear ones mind, allow the design/ideas/concepts to brew. Commit to code the portion at hand then cool down and repeat the cycle.

Honestly, my best clarity comes at 2am, the shower and/or commutes >20 minutes.

Eric
codedevl.blogspot.com
Cannot disclose what it is, no privacy policy, no nothing, just some vague text and a signup form.

It's not the stuff that gets me excited about signup early to something, sorry.
Install npm from http://npmjs.org so you can then install any package that it reports missing.