skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As long as there's a codec installed for QuickTime to use, Safari will support it in the <video> tag. The same is true of Theora - no built-in support, but if you install the codec it starts working.
Once top vs. bottom posting is sorted out, then comes the question of plain text vs. rich text/HTML email. I used to be firmly in the plain text camp, until I realized that was dumb, via a thought experiment.

Imagine a world where we have computers, networks, word processors, the web, and so on, but someone it didn't occur to anyone to come up with email. So, we are still using the postal service for our mail needs. We use computers to compose our mail--but then we print out the document, stuff it in an envelope, attach stamps, and mail it. Finally, it occurs to someone to invent email.

Are they going to invent it as a plain text system? Of course not. They are going to try to make it be as capable as postal mail. Since people sending postal mail send documents that use rich formatting, and have embedded graphics, and have attachments, and so on, email will have those capabilities, too.

Now back to our world. In our world email was invented at a time when we simply did not have the technology to reasonably support those things. It was plain text due to technology limits, not because plain text was better.

Well, those technology limits are gone.
How To Set Up Apache2 With mod_fcgid And PHP5 On Ubuntu 10.10
I don't know....a "makers mark single barrel" would have had pretty high standards and a really "me too" feel.

I'll stick by my argument that self-imposed restrictions can really help people get innovative and avoid the me-too traps of entrepreneurship.
Microsoft set to offer WebMatrix & ASP.NET MVC 3
Apple also isn't looking to get bought out by Google for $60M. They're in it for the long haul, and they're looking to be big players. Most of the small startups I see these days, unfortunately including YC startups, seem to be launching with the idea of doing one cool thing, having no idea how to make money in so doing, and hoping to get bought out in a talent acquisition by Google or Facebook before they run out of money. In many cases, it seems to be less about entrepreneurship and more about putting together a really cool portfolio so you'll get a massive signing bonus when you get hired. Now, that's certainly a legitimate way to make money, and it makes sense for the angels and founders participating in YC and the like. But it's not entrepreneurship.

How many of the angel-backed startups these days are really looking to be long-term players? How many are looking to IPO in 10 years, vs get acquired in 2-3? How many founders envision themselves as the CEO of their company in 20 years? The fail fast mentality seems, on the surface, to be a reflection on an underlying current in the founder mindset: that entrepreneurship is a way to make enough money that you won't have to get a "real job". Just slug it out fo a few years, then become an angel yourself.
Why I Don't Like Apple (by the author of Remind)
I like the concept of "niche" stores that happen to sell books. Case in point, here in Portland, we have a New Age bookstore that sells all kinds of stuff from books, cds, dvds, clothing, all kinds of accessories and conducts events for the community, and of course has knowledgeable and passionate staff and so it has become like the hub for the New Age folks. It's doing very well too.

I wonder if this is the way to go for other niches too.
In the next decade I think we'll see an explosion in private engineering, not only in aerospace but also biomedical (companies like Halcyon) and materials (RepRap, Makerbot, increasing DIY) similar to what happened with the internet industry.

I love this:
"…somebody who has maybe been a secret space nerd all their life, made their money in software development, [then sits down and says], “You know what? All these other secret space nerds now have rocket companies. Why don’t I have a rocket company?” And they form one!

So there’s a lot going on right now, and I think it’s building on itself now to the point where honestly I give it two years in which we’ll see the first paying passengers to go on these spacecraft, we’ll see the launch of the first private space station, we’ll see a government lease a private space station for the first time, we’ll see the first private astronauts."
No, I agree. The "Ready, Fire, Aim" [1] approach is often taken to extremes. I see people do it with both their business plan and marketing approach.

But, I think the "Be relentless, never give up!" approach is becoming just as bad. A bad idea is a bad idea and you have to know when to move on or pivot big.

One is poor planning. The other is myopia. Both should be avoided.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Ready-Fire-Aim-Million-Agora/dp/047018...
The response by Isaac filled me with rage as soon as I got to 'No one actually writes code like this'. The guy provides a real example from his application, describes how alternative solutions stack up, and how he'd like to solve the problem, and gets called out for presenting a 'strawman'. Sigh, newsgroups...

I personally share the original author's perspective on this and was disappointed to see more sophisticated methods of writing concurrent code (futures, coroutines, etc) dropped from Node in favor of raw callbacks. In my experience, chaining raw callbacks is too easy to get wrong for it to be considered a reliable way of writing all your asynchronous logic, even if it is a great primitive to build a framework on top of. In particular, the effort involved in propagating exceptions all the way through a callback chain is rather significant, and making a mistake in a single function undermines the reliability of the entire chain (usually resulting in work silently being dropped on the floor). I wish more of an effort was made to address this problem.
But in all seriousness, if you want to make a lot of money, it is in your interest to understand these people and make something that they want.
I admit it: I sometimes click ads for products/services I do not like. It's like flattr, but with the advertisers' money. <:)
Our imagination can beat the best (pornographic) film directory. Imagination is the reason why books are so much more vivid than films eventhough they're "just text". It probably was more exciting¹ than the instant youporn videos these days.

¹) Disclaimer: Although, back in the LSL days I was barely past the age when I would get excited by thinking about girls during class which might explain a bit...
1:30 is neither too early nor too late.
No, and I think your point was valid. I wasn't taking issue with your article, but I always twitch a little bit when I see someone saying how great it is to "fail fast".
Ask HN: Which company (Fedex, UPS, DHL) looses the least packages?
One of those companies lost a very valuable package to our startup, just curious as to which one has the best service for both US packages and foreign?
DDG is awesome when I'm looking something specific up, but when I'm not sure what I'm looking for it seems to fall apart. I guess thats where google's incorrect/random result helps.
More Evidence That Facebook Nearing 600 Million Users
You're supposed to prune all extraneous data; usually you can drop off anything beyond 2 levels of quotation and in the cases you cannot, the text is probably well-structured enough.
I was just about to post here looking for roommates! I have already purchased a one-way ticket to SF for February 3rd. My plan was to use Airbnb for a few days until I found a place, but maybe we'll hit it off??

I recently moved out of Austin, and I'm working on a cool new telephony startup. I'll send you a message via your site.
On money, and missing the point
Interesting you should mention this: http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/13/newsie/
Ironically they truncated the public part of the DSA keys. The private key is "k".

For bruteforcing the remainder of the AES256 loader key (erk), as proposed by another commenter: There are still 13 hex-digits left (e.g. 52 bits), that might take a while ;-).
Secular zealots: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_party
Being a destination site definitely does not help your ad revenues.
This is a feature that would be used by 0.00000001% of Google's userbase. It would have the effect of shutting up that tiny subset of Google's users while allowing Google's result to continue to degrade silently. Google may not agree that it's in their long-term interests to hide a problem that may eventually make them competitively vulnerable.

It's also possible that the fast path of "simple search" -> "standard SERP" is so optimized that serving that 0.00000001% of users might involve a headache disproportionate to the payoff.
Honestly, at this point I'd be happy if I didn't have to suffer people using @somename on mailing lists.
Handy Visual Studio tools and extensions
One of the reasons I'm skeptical about advertising going forward (among several) is that as metrics get good enough, advertisers are going to want to stop paying for people like me who are minimally affected by ads.

Anecdote time..

Podcasts are still attracting plenty of advertisers, even with non-trackable generic ads, leading me to believe some advertisers don't care for tracking.

Check out Dan Benjamin's 5by5 family of podcasts - they're pretty much funded by advertising and most of it is poorly trackable. I don't know what he charges but from other similar podcasts I do know the figures for I have reason to believe it's higher than $50 per 1000 listeners per show - this is astronomical compared to trackable forms of advertising online.
A misleading, but very viral headline that is going to misinform a lot of people about the state of online advertising . . .

Let's look at the data:

a) "The collaborative studies focus on an understanding of how U.S. Internet users click on display ads." - so we're talking about "display" not contextual, search, mobile, or any of the other high-engagement / high-relevancy ads that are among the highest-growth areas fueling online advertising's growth?

b) The inventory available for "display advertising" has SKYROCKETED - from 2007 to 2009 thanks to the popularity of social media sites which we all know has notoriously low CTRs. Facebook alone contributed hundreds of millions of users and showed them hundreds of billions (trillions? more?) of units of display advertising during that time period.

If you want the real goods on online advertising trends I reccomend you read the PWC IAB Advertising Revenue report:

http://www.iab.net/insights_research/947883/adrevenuereport

The data reflects a much more solid foundation for sustained growth in the online advertising marketplace than you may conclude from this link-bait from Comscore.
Are you kidding me? Socialism is NOT secularism!

Edit I’m objecting to the article pretending that secular zealotry is a thing like socialist zealotry or religious zealotry. Secularism is never itself a cause for zealotry. And the article even implies those who are passionate about secularism despise individuality. Absurd.
I worry about anyone who believes that 1 is prime :(

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number#Primality_of_one
Luckily I'm always asleep between the time I woke up and 11:30 am.
How long was each technical interview? An hour or 15 minutes, or something else?
Would you take $1 to run the biggest tech company in the world?
Fair enough. Then all of the above minus codec improving and plus video quality slightly worse than H.264.

I mean, if you want to pitch in to buy the better one, be my guest. Maybe start a Kickstarter or something.
Microsoft releases free WebMatrix Web development tool
It's my understanding that this isn't really a bug as much as it's an infrastructure limitation (search index is separate and in many ways still legacy from Summize). To change it, would likely require a lot more than just fixing a bug. I figure they're just investing in a new search engine in general that will take care of the issue.
If you have a small pool of people, doesn't that mean you haven't worked with very many people?

They're not going to be able to manufacture co-workers for you to rate.
An alternative view would be that DF etc wear their bias on their sleeve, leaving the viewer in no doubt that they are reading a partisan view on the subject. They're the Keith Olbermann of tech punditry. Entertaining and occasionally informative if you take it all with a pinch of salt.

Ryan Paul is much less obvious about it, sure, but nevertheless continually presents his area of interest in a positive light. Typically he'll put open source software under very little scrutiny compared to the regular trashing handed out by the Apple & MS writers on Arstechnica.
Show HN: Signup for my startup beta launch notifications
Hey guys, I've been working on a new startup for the last few months and will be sending out information on being a beta tester soon. The app is a SaaS web/mobile app that helps streamline customer feedback at point of sale. It's geared towards restaurants and other service industry businesses, so if you're interested and you'd like to get an invitation (or just launch news in general), head over to http://howas.it and sign up! Thanks!
Stash is making strong generalizations, try this: http://chadao.blogspot.com/2008/02/caffeine-and-tea-myth-and...
Think a bit harder - don't you know at least one pizza chain with no chairs? Perhaps one that excels at delivering value?
Does anyone know if there are any plans for coroutines or similar mechanisms in the new versions of ecma/javascript? Python's async frameworks like monocle and diesel work around issues like that by returning another item from a generator and receiving the result again, which works quite well and makes the code look the same as the synchronous one.
Just an fyi that this appears to be a paid course (about $500) judging from the Pricing link bellow the course add button. Nonetheless it looks to be a very interesting format.
It was only a so-so destination site with 70%(50K+ visitors) of our daily visitors coming via google search.
I think the difference is somewhat more important than you give it credit for.

If Java was truly pass-by-reference, then certain things that are not currently possible would be. It would make some existing code pretty silly frankly.
How is supporting arbitrary codecs via the <video> tag any different from supporting arbitrary fonts through CSS font-family?
The “Fallacy” of a Literal Interpretation | Vlaskovits
Clickity Clickable -- http://howas.it
Comparative Advantage increases prosperity for all when both sides can reinvest and become more efficient and more productive. That's why industrialized China is a better trading partner than a non-industrial China was.

Coerced, uncompensated labor diminishes the upside. That's one of the economic reason why Europe and later the US moved away from slavery. It also decreases your market for your products.
I think they were introduced around 2 years ago. There's lots of buzz on the interweb about whether they'll be kept, right now the consensus is yes, based on T-Mobile's feedback, however, they clearly can't discontinue if you sign up for it, so get going while the going is still good.
>>>and generally act on any call to action that is presented to them...

There is also the exactly opposite behavior : non-technical people who are uncomfortable with computers and scared of doing something wrong, and thus do nothing. People who don't read dialogs not because they are lazy, but because they're sure they won't understand a single word of it. They never click, never never try to fix the problem themselves (and find out there's probably no real problem) or understand what's going on.
Anybody that makes a substantial portion of their income on ads or plans to do so had better take notice.

The one good thing is that with performance based advertising it doesn't really matter who clicks the ad as long as there are sales it's a win for both parties. The inherent problem with performance based advertising is one of trust, do you trust party 'x' to truthfully report which sales were attributable to your ad inventory or not?
I would agree with this. High standards result in great products, but not necessarily innovative products.

Restrictions can and do lead to restrictions. Think of all the limited resources in a computer 20 years ago and all the tricks played with memory and registers and bit-shifting and such to push the limits of what the hardware could do.
This is true. The problem is that I always get tempted by the New Shiny, and once you've upgraded from an LTS, there's no going back...
Based on the behaviour of facebook 'creators' like Zuckerberg, yes.
For me, learning Ruby after years of knowing Perl was a resounding "meh." The documentation is substandard compared to Perl's and it doesn't really offer anything that Perl does except for less weirdness in the nooks and crannies and some improved syntactic sugar in some cases (though when I look at Ruby code all I see is "end end end end end").

And Python certainly has its own feel. But again it's not really any more powerful than Perl and offers nothing but an alternate simplified syntax. Programming in Python makes me really miss Perl--I always feel like I'm speaking baby talk instead of full blown English. Really elegant baby talk, but baby talk none the less.
Thanks for responding! Those are good points brought up regarding his music and how he seeks to sell as much as possible. Personally I'm a fan of his(for the most part), so admittedly my view is probably a little biased. I should perhaps clarify that I was hoping that there was more about what exactly sets him apart from other investors out there when it comes to the decisions that he makes.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those that understand binary, and those that don't.
FYI this is referring only to display ads. Also, I'd take this with a grain of salt since the study itself states that view-through impacts are not to be ignored.
I remember taking an English class my freshman year of college. We had to write a research paper, and the professor proposed that we make a rule that we can't use the internet. The class shot it down hard. While not a policy, he recommended that we give it a shot if we are up to it. I gave it a shot and it was actually quite a good experience. Libraries are not obsolete, and I was very able to write about new and contemporary issues. The restrictions made it a better experience for me.

Though that was for school, where the point is often to create things that are neither novel nor profitable.
I took the tour at Makers Mark distillery a few months ago (highly recommended), and they told a mostly similar story about Makers 46 (named after the number of attempts it took to get it right), but spun it as Bill Samuels, Jr. desire to "leave his mark." Although it is fun to find business lessons in everything (especially bourbon), I came away with a slightly more concrete example in brand loyalty after being introduced at the distillery to Marker's Mark's Ambassador program. It is pretty interesting: essentially it allows you to place your name on a barrel and recieve updates about its progress. When its finally ready, you have now earned the right to purchase your "own" bottle.
I like the concept of "the most popular move for the day, voted by the group, will be taken as the group's move".

It would be interesting to use this concept in a game where the set of possible moves could be ranked in order of best move for that turn such that the users could see a distribution of number of votes versus this set. In this way you could see the quality of the groups choice and compare it to the best choice and your choice (if they were different). This would also lend itself to user scores. Not sure which game would lend itself to this.

Also you might consider number of votes as an alternative or additional progress trigger. For HN vs Reddit set it at 100 votes per side. If you don't hit the limit it switches on a per day basis, but if you do hit the limit it switches immediately. Not only would this potentially speed the game but it also could create a sense of urgency to get your vote in to have it count.
"One nice thing about ruby is that it has quite a few viable implementations floating around."

That's not nice all in my opinion.

I don't want "choice" concerning what implementation of my language to use. Unless I have some strange, specialized need, I want one implementation that is guaranteed to work. I mean, the point of a garbage collected language is ... I don't have to worry about the garbage. If I have to make special study to find which implementation has " sane garbage collection", then this purpose been lost.

The various versions are forks and for forking to work, the winner needs to be picked really quickly to allow us to move on.

The thing about C++ is GCC is good enough almost everywhere and any other implementation is going to have to be as good as that.

There are good things about Ruby but dueling implementation breeding uncertainty is not one of them.
That's a lot of traffic from a single source, scary!

The point is that as soon as your service was down the ads were the more interesting content, as long as the site was up that apparently wasn't the case. I think most advertising based websites will see this effect, I'm sure that there is a way to figure out just how much 'strategic downtime' you can get away with :)
I think it is a very good initiative. 15 years ago many did not believe that web is a good platform for e-mail. I would use web-based IDE for all the same reasons I use web-based e-mail: accessible from everywhere, no setup, portability and consistency across operating systems, new features available immediately without me worrying.
My response was mostly tongue in cheek. But I'm curious... where do you work that required code reviews before every commit? Seems like an awful lot of bureaucracy. For my projects I usually set up post-commit code review systems.
Correct. No one said that it was.

My link was to the communist party which is an avowed secular organization. Unlike a group like the Christian Socialists or the Nazi party.

I used them as an example of secular zealots because that particular movement killed more people than anyone else in the 20th century. And has religion pretty evenly matched for zealots.

Just so you understand where I'm coming from, I'm an atheist (a very secular position).
From what I understand the "46" is a shout-out to their supplier, because it is the product number of the wood staves used in the finishing process....
Silk — Three Days Later
Advertising just makes more sense in some places than others. Google capitalizes on this because they have such a broad audience.

I also rarely click on ads, but one example where I always click search ads is - when I'm looking to hook up new Internet service. The best deals seem to inevitably be available from search ads on Google.

I think if the 8 percent making up the 85 percent of clicks are accidental, well...this will shake out eventually as advertisers try to optimize their spending. But it doesn't mean there won't be places where advertising is online is highly profitable.
This is all fairly naive to be frank.

(I've made money from advertising since '99).

Ad revenue is increasing year on year. The sky isn't falling.

> "The inherent problem with performance based advertising"

Again, as someone who has made a lot of money from performance based advertising over the last 10 years, this isn't really an issue. You factor it into your ROI.
I like the concept - easy to start playing, and it kind of sucks you in - especially when you start contemplating coworkers that you haven't seen and worked with in ages.
You can probably find a couple of other languages (ocaml?), but among the languages in common usage today (including perl) java is firmly within the performant bracket.
The entitlement and general sour attitude in most of those comments is seriously soul-crushing :(
I know it was just meant to be a little fun thing, but that said it sometimes asks absurd questions like, "Would you rather work with the marketing intern or the CEO?"