skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Anyone else still plan to use H.264?
It seems to me that H.264, despite its patent entanglements, is still by far the best choice for video encoding. It's the only codec supported on every major platform (considering native support and/or Flash player support).

What are your thoughts? Will you continue to use H.264 for the foreseeable future?
It's cheaper to print a 310 page book than a 360 page book. That's why.
The obvious connection, of course, is that the developers of Duke Nukem Forever needed to read Volume 4A (in fascicle form, at least) in order to actually complete the development of the game. ;-)
There's no reference in that dead post to what the startup was, and no context here (or there) for anyone to guess why it would have been removed.

Worse yet, anything said here as to why it was removed would be speculation.
Color me surprised, I didn't know that InformIT was the publisher now. I guess I gotta get out more. I think I bought mine in the 80's (paid $43.95 for vol 1, list price).

Dang, I've been waiting a while for vol 4.
Interactive projected visuals on skate ramp for Tron Legacy premiere
The Russians used similar tactics to ensure the nuclear fallout from the Chernobyl disaster wouldn't reach Moscow:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1549366/How-we-mad...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3943013.stm

The Chinese also used cloud seeding to clear the smog-filled skies over Beijing for the Olympics.
The line between narcissistic and introspective is always thinner than we think. Something I've noticed recently is how few pictures I'm actually in: I take loads of pictures but I was only in a handful.

While I'm not personally inclined to Twitter a picture of myself every time my mac wakes up (several times a day), I can see the benefit in this to some people.
It reads like we're having a child-off between exceptionally gifted Chinese children, and exceptionally gifted American children. What about normal children?

I'd love to see these anecdotes turned into evidence.
Even if it's legal, it can still be "corruption" without the modifier. If you are circumventing the limitations placed on your position of trust, regardless of adherance to the letter of the law, I would consider you "corrupt".
Just pointing out colors in brands that stood out in the last year... I understand you'd like hard scientific data about color associations, emotional and social associations that have impact on the trends... But we're an inspiration company.

And in the end, color has an impact on brands... but it doesn't make a break a brand... Maybe I should write a longer post about this.
So in what way are the mouse and iPad bullshit? I am curious about your criteria.
I see monospace typefaces in email all the time. The fact you like your emails extra-infected does not mean I share your enthusiasm for HTML mucking up my monospace formatting when someone sends an email with source code in it.

Read and learn a bit:

http://blogstrapping.com/?page=2011.014.10.05.57
China, not the Fed, has ultimate control over their monetary policy.

sure, but since 1994 they haven't really exercised that ultimate control:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1_RMB_to_US_dollar.svg

and despite all promises to the contrary last year, they are still not exercising it to any substantial extent:

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:CYB
Aha, a time to put forward my personal mantra about when you "know" a particular programming language. It is not perfect, but it is more meant to be thought provoking. It is:

"You only know a language when you know when not to use it"
That cost MS hundreds of million dollars in development and lost opportunities. You can only do that if you have no competition. If they had added USB support to NT4 we wouldn't have needed to go to win2k. Really MS, NT4 can't support USB? They should have evolved NT4 rather than fork it into the win2k -> xp -> vista mess. They could have had the worlds best UNIX but internal dogma forced them piss in their own watering hole.
From context, I'd guess that wrong means "nondeterministic".
I've heard of at least a few rails deploys where the dev environment is MRI, for fast CI / test suite runs, and production is JRuby, for all the other (numerous) benefits listed here.

(Although i can't google any examples in print)
Indie Pop the Y Combinator of Music
Formatting.

It's tougher to render (for instance) source code in a clear, easily understood fashion in a proportional font than in a monospace font. The same goes for a lot of mathematical and scientific writing, cases where red-pen editor's marks are needed, and so on.
There's only one way to stop this trend...
Could be a cultural thing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqESVHhzeyU
Here's the paper's abstract: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6014/183.abstract

Here's the supplemental materials: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6014/183/suppl/DC1

Does anyone have a link to the actual paper?
Not 5-band - umts band 5, aka 850MHz. The first Nexus One supported only umts bands 1, 4, and 8. Bands 1 and 8 are European. Band 4 is North American AWS, but only T-Mobile in the US and Mobilicity and Wind in Canada operate band 4 networks.

Band 5 is the more common 850MHz band used by AT&T in the US and Rogers, Telus, and Bell in Canada.

The first Nexus One supported bands 1, 4, and 8. The next one supported bands 1, 4, and the critical 5. The current Nexus S supports bands 1, 4, and 8, and is mostly useless in Canada. And all of us up here would just really, really, really like it if Google would release that band 5 version.

Pretty-please, Google?

Edit: ack - corrected a bit
Maybe not, but those things may still wield pretty heavy influence. Advertising is a strange world of subconscious desires and difficult-to-rationalize preferences (colors and shapes of buttons, for example).
What -- you dislike it if it's off-site, but it's okay in comments?

I don't get it.

edit: It's not linkbait. It's really long -- too long for anyone to be likely to read in comments, and too long to throw away in a temporary context.
Who are the 42 people who upvoted this, that's what I'd like to know. This is so obviously trolling that I can't even begin to refute it.
I'm convinced the original article by the Chinese mother was some kind of satire. I simply can't believe a reasonably intelligent person (a Yale prof!) can write that with a straight face-- the bit about not letting kids participate in school plays takes the cake.
Should I Work for Free?
At my job I had the choice of the company buying me a Windows-based Dell notebook, or just using my own personal MacBook Pro that I paid for; I chose the latter. Sometimes I get a little riled up about the fact that they didn't offer to reimburse me for the expense, but on the other hand I'm glad that I wasn't forced to use the same tools everyone else does.
I guess it is called 'normal bacteria'.
Apple to cut down on 'free'apps that rely on external subscriptions?
War on War on X?
> I wasn't familiar with PollDaddy, so know nothing about this market, but on their homepage, they don't have a poll. They don't show me what it is like from a user perspective.

gopollgo doesn't have one on their homepage either. The link is actually one to an existing poll. Try http://gopollgo.com and you'll see.

I do think you should add a poll on the homepage or at least a screenshot of one to draw users in.

I love the site though. The UX is fun and engaging.
I hope you don't mind, I used your comment (with credit) in my blog post response to this question: http://devgrow.com/profiting-from-non-profits-theres-always-...

The gist of my argument is basically the same - there are several examples of people developing game-changing ideas that have no real business model, yet they are still able to profit it from them in some form or another.
Yes, rather careless with my words there. Updated that and some other words too. Damn, I should write 10x more.
Emulation, Simulation, and the Human Brain
A the risk of being tarred and feathered for pedantic behavior, the W3Schools doesn't post misinformation. They posted information that was accurate at the time, and then let is sit up there for 5-8 years as the state of the art improved.

[edited for grammar]
Taking pictures with your Linux Laptop every time the lid opens
As there is this apparent meme about taking pictures on opening a laptop lid, I thought about sharing my little hack for machines running Gnome. Save this somewhere and have it started every time you log in:

#!/usr/bin/perl
my $cmd = "dbus-monitor --session \"type='signal',interface='org.gnome.ScreenSaver',member='ActiveChanged'\"";
open (IN, "$cmd |");
while (<IN>) {
if (m/^\s+boolean false/) {
`mkdir -p ~/Bilder/snapshots`;
`notify-send -u low -i gtk-orientation-portrait --expire-time=3000 'Smile!' "Taking photo in 3 seconds.\nSaving in ~/Bilder/snapshots/"`;
sleep 3;
my $date="`date +%y.%m.%d-%H:%M`";
`ffmpeg -s 1280x720 -f video4linux2 -i /dev/video0 ~/Bilder/snapshots/$date.jpg 2>&1 >/dev/null`;
}
}

When I made this a couple of days ago I originally didn't thought about releasing it. It was just a little evening amusement. But maybe somebody finds it amusing as well.

A little off topic: I wanted to do this as a shell script originally, but how would one implement the "while read from pipe" part in bash?
99.984% Availability in 2010 is an absolutely incredible accomplishment, and the Google Team deserves a ton of accolades.

They are making two (2) changes for 2011:

o Removing scheduled downtime - that's now included
in their SLA. That's Huge.
o Removing transient outages from their downtime - an
outage of a few minutes is now included in their downtime
calculations.

This sets the bar for the industry in terms of what type of availability they need to shoot for enterprise class SaaS. Nice to see Google pushing the envelope here.
Profiting from Non-Profits: There’s Always a Way To Make Money
All it has is a link to the download for git. Is this a placeholder for something?
I agree that a clearer definition of wrong here. My guess is that it has to do with the solution being empirical and not-guaranteed, rather than analytic and airtight.

Just because the solution isn't perfectly analytic doesn't mean it's wrong, though. In fact, it seems hard to argue that the solutions which work well in natural systems are wrong.

Really, we need a lot more research like this that takes well-working natural systems and distills the underlying model. It seems a bit arrogant to try and independently solve problems when existing solutions are sitting all around us.
Also the headphone jack is available on all phones and if you develop for 30 pin interface, you have to design different hardware connector for different phones
Using Perl, Mojolicious and Redis in a real world asynchronous application
You would be wrong about that. Consider that with MVC you don't have the entire, massive Page Lifecycle thing and a control tree to parse and walk through (decrypting ViewState, assigning control values, and so on). MVC is actually faster than ASP.NET WebForms.

But it's faster in pico seconds (meaning it's immeasurably faster) and if you're worried on that level - you're doin it wrong :).
Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double)
Sex in Space: The Final Frontier
like the Nexus One or Nexus S

Which doesn't help those of us that actually want to stay with AT&T and still be able to use 3G. (Yes, we do exist).
Similar ideas to what Simon at Buddy Cloud expressed:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2076932

If you look back over the history of many technologies, you will see that closed often precedes open. Profit motive is a powerful force, but it is frequently overwhelmed by the motivation of freedom.
Your argument is a non-sequitur.

The original argument was that there was no point in investing, because if you'd invested 10-15 years ago, you'd have made a lot of money. That argument is wrong for obvious reasons, which I will spell out anyway; just because something did well in the past is no reason to think you'll lose money on it in the future.

Your argument is that if you invest in something and it goes down in value, you lose money. That's true but not relevant.

Eli's point seems to be that it's possible to make money on an investment after it's had an explosive growth stage; the obvious truth in counter to the initial falsehood, and in no way addressed by your comment.
The Nexus One is available in AT&T compatible 3G frequencies.
If the Chinese keep up their peg, holding RMB is equivalent to holding dollars.

If they fail to maintain the peg, the RMB will most likely rise. Most US consumers are already exposed to the downside of this risk - they have expenses which will rise if the RMB goes up (e.g., all the goods they purchase which are made in China).

Holding RMB is a hedge against this.
Is this some magic box that only gets enabled with so much karma? I don't have it..
How are old color choices, from well established sites considered 2010 color trends? Pandora? Really? Is flash a trend now too?(Pandora is playing now fyi)
Reading between the lines and with a healthy dose of cynicism and probability, what is "really" on this laptop is enough irreplaceable data that if not recovered, it will significantly impact and possibly even ruin this researcher's career. Odds are good there's at least one grant with now-unattainable expectations/deadlines. There is a small but finite chance that losing it might actually set a cure of one sort or another back, but, sadly, a much larger chance that it won't help a cure and never would have. Most cancer research doesn't advance the cure dramatically at one stroke, or it would be cured, after all.

(I'm not saying research is worthless. I'm saying that, on the whole, plink a random study and all the research behind done for it and the world won't be very different on the whole. The whole matters more than the parts.)

Still worth $1000 to get it back, for both the data and the career.
But we're an inspiration company.

And what greater inspiration for knowledge is there than properly-gathered statistics? All I'm saying is that you guys could do a lot of interesting things if you relied more on well-selected samples over multiple time series. I don't think your post was at all bad, but it leaves me begging for more information.
There is way too much stuff on the Tour and Features page. Features is especially bad.

I think it is great to have that kind of indepth information, but probably on a deeper page. A prominent link from the homepage should give a higher level view. There also looks like there is a bunch of stuff the average person (your customer) wouldn't understand.

Here is just a short list of things: MVC, entire open source bit, under templates I'd remove everything except the talk of 19 languages and email templates. Vanity URLs, search indexer, drm, etc.

Keep that info available, but put it on a deeper page.

I'd figure up like 5-10 big features, figure out what benefits they offer and sell on those benefits.

Frequent use of the word module. Instead of telling me you have a built in message board, you're telling me a forum module is available.

Over all, it is way way too jargon heavy.

Let me browse the kwolla code online rather than having to download it.

Kwolla logo on the purchase page doesn't link back to the index page (though this may be by design)

Make the Live Demo link more prominent... And when I go to it make me already logged in so I can get started, rather than telling me what username and password to use.
After the debacle with the Microsoft AMAs at reddit, I'm glad to see a response that isn't just marketing bullshit.
1.for animals, between two evils - humans or radioctivity - the radioctivity seems to be a much lesser evil.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-UOHn9PvJ0

2. can't not to mention the "Roadside Picnic" (though written long before the Chernobyl)
Thanks -- I'll definitely put one on the home page. Thanks for the feedback!
Try the "start" arrow at the top
Tunisian President Flees After WikiLeaks exposes Corruption
What's wrong with that? Nobody owns an interviewing style.
Touch Trigonometry - a visual representation of the trig functions
Ah, so only 95% of Android users are getting screwed. Carry on then.
Here is a one possible solution: using a grammer
http://www.grammaticalframework.org/
Google is pathetic if you search in Russian- I just started writing a blog post and was amazed at how much better Yandex is.
Here is my sample searches- see for yourself
http://scandinavianstartups.com/blog/google-5-countries-away...
Really? Where? Every last unlocked phone store on the web that I've checked is out of stock with the AT&T compatible version (which shouldn't be a surprise given that it's out of production).

Can you post a link?
Mixpanel's hiring software dev interns for the summer
Mixpanel is looking for summer interns.
In 2008, I interned at Slide, Inc and it was one of the most valuable summers of my life. I went from college hacker interested in starting a company to learning deeply about product design and what it was like to work on a team.

That summer I was fortunate enough to work with an awesome PM, Adora (who taught me the essentials of product development) and Max Levchin. I am still not sure why Max ended up working so closely on the product we working on. Our product was new and had the least business value of all the things Slide was working on but it was still exciting. If I had to say, I think he just liked that we worked so hard on it.

At Slide, I was determined to work hard. I wanted to know if hard work paid off so I worked from 10am to 12am. It did: Slide offered me a full-time but I declined.

At the end of the summer I had huge takeaways:

- I knew I wanted to start a company. Immediately.

- I knew grad school didn't matter out in California

- I didn't realize it at the time but I grew a huge network of fellow Slide people ("Slide" mafia). Some of these people are my closest friends now.

- I learned so much about product, working with others, and how real companies "do it."

- I learned smaller things like: git, python, vim, etc.

- I could've never built Mixpanel without having been at Slide first.

If you're looking for a similar experience to my own, Mixpanel can provide this. Apply for an internship: http://mixpanel.com/internships/ or jobs@mixpanel.com

Sincerely,

Suhail Doshi

Founder
It's a Git tutorial. Click on the "START" black arrow to start the ride.
I'm a little confused by what Jordan is questioning here.

This is basic market economics isn't it? Deal is hot, angel wants to get in, deal gets a high valuation. If one angel didn't give it a high valuation, the deal would just go somewhere else and get funded. Is it setting itself up for future disappointment leading to a down round? Maybe, maybe not. And if it is, then the market will correct itself over time when angels see that none of their high valuation deals are getting funded.

Maybe that's what Jordan is trying to do? Force a correction by talking sense into people?
Visual Designer for Mixpanel Analytics
The best ones work because they use great stock photography where the shots convey a clear message: http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lexcpscLrw1qziezc.jpg
From their paper:

"To estimate the impact of energy harvesting on the phone, we modifying an iPod Touch to measure battery current and voltage. We play an audio ﬁle that generates the required 22 kHz tone and ﬁnd that the iPod draws 91 mA at 4.04 V when the harvester is attached and 37 mA at 4.04 V when the harvester is not attached.

These ﬁgures illustrate the substantial inefﬁciency of this approach compared with directly supplying power to a peripheral. We note, however, that the power output of an iPod is higher than an iPhone, making the numbers appear worse than they are on the iPhone."
Frontend Engineer for Mixpanel Analytics
Not trolling, really, but - In America, what is the upside to buying an unlocked Nexus? AFAIK, my plan options will be the same price whether I have a contract or not, so really I'm just costing myself an extra $330 dollars. OK, so I get to "choose" carriers, but again, if I choose not to use T-Mobile, won't I be stuck with edge?
Wow, thanks for all of the feedback!

Yes, the logo on the payment page intentionally doesn't link back. It's an anti-pattern, and I'm playing around with if it actually will work or not.

I'll be working on the copy extensively this weekend, again, thank you for the feedback.
In Tron Franchise, Cyberpresent Looks a Lot Like the Past
Just when I thought there was a chance that this topic would get a break on HN. I guess I appreciate the link, if Google hadn't tweeted about it (I'm assuming they will) I probably wouldn't have seen this link.

Their answers are right, but it's the answers that aren't present, that are more telling. They don't address why they're removing it, why they chose to do it now, or whether or not they'll be consistent across their platforms. In my opinion, those are the only questions worth asking.

Their answers about H.264 having little adoption with the <video> tag and about having to dually encode with the current HTML5 video scene anyway is spot on. WebM gets you native playback in every major browser but IE, with Flash fallback working in IE. There actually is a day, very soon that, Flash assisted, anything will play WebM.

Of course, hardware adoption is still a huge question mark which I noticed Google also failed to discuss further in this post.
I don't want to discredit anybody, but we (well, I) have no clue what was the app like. From the sound of it, it could have been a text box filled with names and addresses on a white background, and this can be achieved by dragging and dropping in the Interface Builder.

Even if that is the case, there still is a point. Developing for iOS (or OS X for that sake) has been made easy. Just fire up Xcode and start typing. Contrary to Android platform a year or a two ago (last time when I checked it out), many more clicks and bits were needed before actual code could be written.
This article made me contemplate that pure uptime percentage is not the best way to measure availability. Surely having 5 to 10 second outages 10 times a month is better than having a single outage for 4 hours?
I find owning a Canadian iPhone in the US to be a great proposition. I never worry about "on-air updates" one day bricking my phone. I have no mobile contract. I can also resell my phone and expect to recover a lot of the value.

Combined with a Google Voice account it's just awesome!
New CSS3 Gradient Support in WebKit
My Droid Incredible got 2.2 pushed out within a few weeks of when I bought it (mid september). Get your Droid from a quality company and expect good results. Get your Droid from some second-rate gadget company and expect to be stuck with 1.6 forever. Seems like a buyer-beware issue, not an Android issue.
Worth noting they may have had to go through additional testing. When you submit an app that needs MFi hardware, they make you submit the hardware as well and test both together. They may have demanded something similar for Square.

Also worth noting that square is not drawing power, doing so might make them reject your app. Especially because this harvest method is fairly inefficient (power is being converted twice before its useful). Draw on the iphone battery may be 4x the power used.
Nobody sells them brand new, but there are plenty of them to be had on eBay: http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=nexus+one+att
It was built by a Finnish company called Plustech 15 years which went bust and through a series of takeovers ended up as john Deere