skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could the MPEG-LA be sued if Google has patents that cover h.264? I'm not sure it could and if so we'd see a divergence between the interests of the MPEG-LA (who need to maintain control) and the groups contributing patents to them (who are afraid of a patent war).
I don't, but I appreciate the note. Will update (we've been busy - a good thing).
>If you wish to go to a system whereby there is no patent system, then recognize that people wouldn't be revealing their inventions, and thus things like android couldn't exist, because they wouldn't have a source of technology to copy.

Congratulations. You win the 'most mind-bogglingly retarded statement of the millennium' award.

In reality, I'm aware that nobody is actually stupid enough to hold such an indefensibly ludicrous position, so you're clearly trolling. Good job though, it's the first troll so successful that I'm not going to read HN again. A community that could give this trash even a single upvote is not a community I want to go anywhere near.
Well there is no reason why all of those files couldn't be made available by the same server that is currently acting as the master seedbox - and thus would still be for $3.99.

No, he decided to put that burden on everyone by putting it up on bittorrent.

Give a man a fish and he can feed his family for a day. Let the man catch his own fish and he can feed his family and community for a lifetime.
Yes, youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/user/LSBFLondon

I have a facebook account, but I don't want to give out all my info, so I am watching the videos on youtube.
I think the Go project uses Mercurial but does code reviews using Rietveld. They have some python code which helps in sending patches for codereview to Rietveld.

I haven't used Review Board, but I have however used Rietveld and I don't have any complaints about the UI. It also provides the "interdiff" feature, just choose the patchsets you want compared for a specific file, when you go to the diff page.
Most published research results are false
Ask HN: Too old for Y Combinator?
Seriously, who's the oldest co-founder in any Y Combinator company? I'm pretty sure we would be the oldest, should I be worried? ("Look out, here come the graybeards!!")

Old thread, here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=248811
Agreed. There are things you love and then things you do. Hopefully you can find something that lets you do both, but a lot of people don't.
What makes fructose fattening? OHSU researchers find some potential clues
I dislike when essays swear at me, particularly long ones. If you want me to take what I am reading seriously, I expect you to choose your words carefully, and using the word "shit" doesn't smack of careful word choice. I kind of swear like a sailor when I talk sometimes, but not when I write.
Challenge To Rupert Murdoch to Drop Apps For HTML5+The Web
Yeah I fail to understand why a separate interpreter is desirable for this problem. Seems like something for a Python library.
word on the street is that Gap-Groupon deal worked out horribly bad for Gap. They were hoping people to spend more than the 50$. And it seems that a very,very small number actually did that. Majority limited their purchases to very close to the coupon amount. I doubt if Gap will be doing a Groupon again.
Maybe an extra hour, if you don't worry about making it too slick and pretty.
I thought it would be fun to do it entirely using unix tools.
Sent it off using a recursive bash function, with du, dd, bc, and expr.
I don't understand this observation. The alternative would be to show, what, a paginated array of every face? Who would benefit from that, besides people who want to snipe at them anonymously on message boards?

Incidentally, in real companies, all transparency is selective. They've selected not to be transparent about any number of things, from their monthly top-line revenue to their feature roadmap.
A baby is like a startup (or a pragmatic approach to parenthood)
> Tl;dr? That wouldn't surprise me.

No, I read the whole thing.

> Obviously there are people who might apply even if they think it's too much to ask on spec.

First off, I don't think you know what spec work means. It means asking someone to do work and then paying them for that work if you like it. That is not what we are doing. We are asking applicants to implement things that will be of no use to us, because we already have them, as a demonstration of both skill and determination.

> except insofar as it's a pretty clearcut instance of your shirking all responsibility

What responsibility am I shirking? If you want the job, then you do the thing. If you aren't confident enough in yourself, then so be it. It isn't my job or responsibility to be your mom and encourage you to apply and tell you that you are good enough and you should go for it! You should know that already.

> with the kind of callous indifference to the work and time of others captured neatly in your closing shrug.

As I said, if you are doing the task, you are doing it because you enjoy it and maybe you can use it as a learning experience or on your portfolio. It isn't a callous indifference to work -- we're asking you to do different work. Instead of a resume and cover letter, we're asking you to program.
A community of sufficient size is always going to have people whom you consider complete idiots.
There is no false dichotomy. The connotation of "off-shoring" is that the purpose is to reduce costs because median wages are an order of magnitude lower in third world countries. Costs aren't reduced if you've still got to pay people middle-class first-world wages.

I agree with you though. Talented developers are a scarce resource and can command high wages wherever they are located. Developers aren't like factory workers, they need a high level of education, many years to become proficient, often excel ONLY if they are strong critical thinkers, and need little more than a computer and an Internet connection to be productive. Further, software development is simultaneously and continuously INCREASING in both demand and complexity. It seems as if there will never be a point at which developer wages will be going down relative to the World economy as a whole.

If I live in Mumbai and I'm an awesome developer, I'm going to bill a high rate. People will pay it because the alternative is to hire a fleet of $10/hr developers that will create a cluster fuck. Anyone who's better than them can command multiples of that.
No matter how often you want to review code, I think it could work for your team like this:

- dev works on a feature branch, making multiple commits and pushes

- once ready, squash all the commits and submit it to gerrit

[- perhaps have hudson/jenkins run the unit tests at this point automatically]

- have the code review in gerrit

- once the review is done, gerrit would merge it into the develop or master branch (depending on your git workflow)

That approach blends in nicely with git-flow (1). If you want to be sure that no single dev is pushing to the develop or master branches you'd need to setup per-branch permissions, which can be done with gitolite (2). Too bad github (even the self-hosted version) doesn't support per-branch permissions, which forces organizations that use it and only want gerrit to be able to push into the main branch to do excessive repo forking instead of using feature branches. Also I'd love to be able to do ad-hoc code reviews in github, as the interface is the most beautiful of all imo.

[1] http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/, https://github.com/nvie/gitflow, http://jeffkreeftmeijer.com/2010/why-arent-you-using-git-flo...

[2] https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite
How long till people start gaming this & submitting bad customer support tickets, just to spite them?
I would say that LinkedIn groups are a great way to find opportunities. Also make sure your profile is completely up to date as recruiters are always scanning for qualified developers.

Regarding the visa issue, that is a different story. I know next to nothing about how to work around that, but I might look into contracting with companies somehow first as your own business entity? (again only guessing...)
I prefer Illustrator for my mockup and design needs. Still use Photoshop for photo manipulation though.
Looking at the photo, there isn't any visible sign that there are tags. I waved my mouse around to find them, but I imagine most people will miss them. Maybe you could have the rectangles initially show, and then fade. I think you need some visual clue.
Picasa's UI was done entirely using Photoshop files. Layer names=widget names, etc. Our small-company team loved it. But at Google, I found very few engineers who wanted to touch Photoshop, ever.

Biggest issue with using Photoshop in your actual production pipeline: "programming in the large" - you can't do code reviews or merges on PSD files, not nearly as easily as .cpp files. So as a team gets big, it is very hard to scale up.

Often the tools (Flash [not Flex], Photoshop, etc.) you use as a small team of <10 people just do not work when you have 20-50 people working on the same project. Then again, maybe teams never should get that big!
WebM exists at all because Google has tried to create FUD with H264. Fear royalties going up by some crazy amount, because you're uncertain what this well-established organization (MPEGLA) will do, and doubt that you can afford the costs of crazy royalty fees in 2016.

This despite the fact that MPEGLA has been licensing for ubiquitous technologies like MPEG-2 for over a decade.

So I guess FUD meet FUD.
There is one non-disastrous way for this to work out. Nokia becomes the Dell of smartphones.
Aw, LoC as a measurement? Can we use negative LoC for lines removed? :)
I've not tried Keynote, but I loooove hotgloo for wireframes and quick mockups. If you haven't used it, I suggest checking it out.

www.hotgloo.com

(note: not affiliated with hg in any way)
> it's just their Ops Manager and Senior Product Developer using the term.

Information Cowboy is my title, actually. :)

And I was using it as linkbait, just to be clear.
Note, Scoble has been wrong on Smartphones from iphone first launch, to android and now WP7..
If you do not sync and test your changes against the latest, I'd argue that you're being careless - how do you know things still interact properly?

Feature branches are the way to work (for me). You're pretty much on your own in there, and once the thing's done you push to main.
I had a similar experience with FTD when using a coupon code from the "My Coke Rewards" promotion. I imagine this is their standard operating procedure.

It's the only site I've used where you can't fill up your cart and then apply a coupon code. You have to start from scratch with a special URL that apparently changes the prices as you're browsing.
I think that was tongue-in-cheek. The people behind Reddit are as silly as the people who use it. I know _I'm_ a silly Reddit user.
Marsh, these appear to be people walking off the job because Nokia management is insufficiently nurturing to Symbian. How much sympathy can you muster for people protesting on behalf of Symbian?
Such a lame link-baiting story. These kind of things happen all the time... it's channel conflicts and speed errors typically--not malice.

Look at the headline, look at the author.... it's manufactured link bait.

let's move on and talk about an important startup launching something cool. techcrunch is lost and adrift.
Wish jacquesm is here to contribute to this discussion (and defend his article). Having said that, the article cannot be evaluated to be good (or bad) just based on his reputation and I'm sure even he would agree.

By the way, did you see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2206189 :)
Not to mention you can always get 20% off FTD if you do a google search for a coupon.
Not Dead Yet: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Java – tecosystems
Such a short service could equally well be explained by a concerted “takeover” effort.
Software is a property of hardware. I can yell at my computer all day and it won't do a thing. Sometimes, there is a software error. Sometimes, there is a programmer error. The computer doesn't "know" or "care" the difference.
Instead of buying that shiny new iMac in 1997, and iPod and iBook in 2002, put all that money directly into AAPL. You'll thank me in 10 years.
Simple Erlang Browser Graphics
Stack Exchange’s Architecture in Bullet Points
Outsourcing != off-shoring. Nobody is saying outsourcing is bad, as I'm sure a very large portion of HN's users are freelance developers and/or consultants.
How is this questionable? The business owner is always free to refuse. Always.
I don't want to flag this, per se, but readers should be aware that this particular article is rather old. The theory has been picked up, criticized, defended, and a subsequent paper published.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Exceptionally_Simple_Theory_...

http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/garrett_li...
puppet out, puppet in
Photographer. Subject does not mention mockups.
Or perhaps people just don't want to have to pay a central licensing entity to use a video codec? I'm sure Google stands to save a lot of licensing fees if they don't have to pay into MPEGLA's patent pool. It has nothing to do with FUD and everything to do with wanting an unencumbered format.

Edit: This is the same reason that most video games these days use Ogg Vorbis for their music and sounds, because they save a lot of costs by using an unencumbered audio format.
Microsoft-Nokia deal might be the best thing that ever happened to Android
Not to mention that the Facebook App's interface and usability are horrible.
There are bad developers everywhere, they just don't try it with local people because there's very little cost advantage. Good developers can demand high wages regardless of where they are located.
Everyone on TV crying sure seems like it would be super annoying. But I find the notion that journalist should, or even indeed ever could, be 100% objective and impartial - silly.

Silly and most prevalent in America. Curiously also in America we have Fox news which clearly does not abide by objectivity even as it advertises itself with it.

My point is simply that pure objectivity is an impossibility.

Attempting to reach pure objectivity can lead you down a wrong path, just look at how American journalists contort themselves in order to be nautral, facts and reality be damned.

In Europe it is much more prevalent that everyone has a bias, know what it is and keep it in mind as you read, watch, or listen to them.

I'm hoping that Al Jazeera, which is accused of having copied the style of fox news if not the substance, does not follow American journalism down the path of a bias free utopia.

I hope Egyptian journalists who show any kind of emotion at this news, are only jokingly reprimanded. As long as it doesn't turn into a soap opera, bias ought to be expected of mere humans, even if they are journalists.
just out of curiosity, why is the QT android communist?
Guess they shouldn't have written those unit tests.
Based on this and many other similar stories I've read, I've formed a general law about offshoring: if you want it to succeed, never ask your engineers/engineering managers to do it.

I'm part of the management of a large product development setup in India, and here's my comment on a very similar story earlier on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1481732
I want to download your business card
Greetings YC,

When someone I am interested in keeping in touch with hands me their business card, the first thing I do when I get to my computer is type their information into my address book. Downloading a vcard would be easier, so I created a website for people to share their business card information: https://this.vc. The idea isn't new, but every business card I receive doesn't have an easy way of getting its info digitally.

What features would make this a must have service for you? Could this become a basic CRM for small business? A simple way of connecting with interested customers?

Or:

- The business card toting world doesn't need a service like this
- The new generation business people do not use business cards
- Nobody uses an address book anymore
- Everyone uses facebook these days

Thanks!
-Roberto.
I think you're right. Look at the gap between WP7 GSM and CDMA launch. It's definitely not a trivial problem.

I think as developers unfamiliar with the tech we'd like to think that different radio stacks can be abstracted away, but the reality is likely very different.
Goodbye old Nokia. You will be missed.

By whom? The old Nokia was a terrible software company, with so many abject failures at creating platforms (Symbian, N-Gage, Ovi, etc.) that I don't think anyone else in this business can compare.

It's a good thing that they're getting out of software and concentrating on stuff they're actually good at.
If that's the case, what are they for?
Why Nokia's decision to ditch Symbian for WP7 is actually good?
Interesting (take-home?) interview question: how many people are in this picture? How confident are you of that number? What are your tightest upper and lower bounds?
I was fearful and uncertain about webM when I first read the analysis of the spec from "Diary of a x264 developer". Well before a lot of this fighting began. The fear, uncertainty and doubt comes from no real answer about anything. If this generates an answer by having Google fight whatever patent claims turn up in court (or a pool created for webM), we might actually get a hard answer in some form of official legal document. It may not be the answer we all want, but I have a hard time putting all my faith in a spec that was originally created in the dark, bought, opened, having the owner not submit it for standardization and basically tell you that you're on your own if you decide to use it and get sued.

I'm sure MPEG-LA wants it's money by creating a pool for webM, but I see this as maybe removing the FUD by forcing Google to defend webM and hopefully knock down any patent claims submitted.
Symbian was not a failure... it was a giant succes for quite a long time. That's like calling MS-DOS a failure.
you just did.
How NBC Wanted Conan O'Brien to Dump His Twitter Account
Choose your side: East vs West vs Middle America  Startup Stadium
Oh nice! I had thought about using a script to isolate a rough-but-inclusive range of bytes from inside the file and then piping that into grep, but your way is certainly purer and more fun.

edit And now I have a good reason to learn more about dd, du, and bc!
A friend of mine is working on a similar project called http://kidsabacus.com
Cucumber with Cucumber
“Emotions have historically received a bum rap from decision researchers”
Agreed with cschmidt about some visual clues that there are tags on the photos.
The site mentioned you'll host the photos uploaded by the users ... is it for free? I'd imagine if the idea takes off this won't be for free for long.
From my experience, I know one type of bloggers would love this idea very much ... hand-crafters, e.g. knitters, crocheters, quilters etc.
Activist Wael Ghonim credits Facebook for starting the Egyptian revolution
The reply may _sound_ good but this issue still exists for my cousins Wordpress yoga website http://www.yogabanbury.com so I don't see how the issue can be fully resolved. Does this URL work for anyone else (i.e. am I hitting some proxy I'm not aware of?).
I don't see the point of getting a frowny face on a website for fun. But the point is, if you're not happy then putting a frown is exactly what you should do to let them know you weren't happy. Out of spite or whatever other reason, the point of customer support is trying to make those people happy customers.
A Few Billion Lines of Code: Static Analysis to Find Bugs in the Real World
Actually I wouldn't mind if Reddit were start to cache some things client-side. For example their voting is eventually-consistent, which means that my votes will be eventually saved by not always immediately. Because of this property (consistency) it would be save to remember cast votes on client (local storage or cookies, though the latter might not be such a good idea with all this 408s I'm seeing right now) and so it could spare me getting angry when after refreshing page or navigating to another view all my votes seem to be lost.

EDIT: Though on your point I don't see how doing anything else client-side can help Reddit with scaling.
I am surprised that not many people are excited about this deal. I have only heard good things about WP7 so far and things will definitely improve as the platform matures. I don't understand why people have already labeled it as a failed platform.

People are also saying that the deal is only beneficial to Microsoft. The two real choices Nokia had were Android and WP7. WP7 seems like a more sensible choice to me. Sure they will have to sacrifice things, but they might gain overall. I think Microsoft and Nokia together make a killer combination that is going to help both these companies to bounce back in the mobile arena.
We're really proud of having a low-friction deployment process at Etsy. Today, even one of our board members, Fred Wilson, deployed code:

http://twitter.com/#!/fredwilson/status/36122482490482688
http://www.flickr.com/photos/allspaw/5436215259/
Software development IS design, not production. The compiler (or interpreter) and computer itself does all the production. That's the point of software and computers in general.

Developed countries have the advantage because it is more desirable to live in them, and talented designers of all types are scarce and can command high enough wages on the world market to easily afford their higher cost of living.
Choose sides in a nationwide Virtual Hackathon:East vs West vs Middle America.
inkscape.

I make everything in SVG and use CSS to continually change the size without loosing detail.

I only convert to pixels\PNG when ready to deploy. Don't design any fixed pixel art during the development process and you will save tons of time.
There are two key drivers here:

1) Smartphones will replace feature phones

2) Nokia still leads in feature phones in terms of ruggedness and reliability

If my wife is replacing her current Nokia, she'd certainly weigh towards Nokia. But she'd want something a little more current, as long as it is just as reliable.

As nice touch phones are, the form factor required for finger interaction means it is not as convenient as a smaller phone. Symbian will continue to have a life for a very long time.
You certainly don't have anything to worry about. There is nothing age specific about YC.

I am pretty sure that I remember pg mentioning in a previous thread on this topic that there have been YC founders in their 40's and 50's.

The age range in our batch (w2010) was 18 to late 30's with the average probably being somewhere in the middle 20's.
I know the basics for mocking up a website.
In this case, the tried and true hippie wisdom still applies: "Age is just a number, man." Older founders can be energetic and adventurous, and young founders can be mature. Based on your profile info, you guys seem pretty youthful.

Also, with the Yuri Milner funding injection to YC, there will likely be more "graybeards" in the future.
Ok, maybe. That bring then the question why nobody wants WP7.
Maybe one possible explanation can be find here :
http://www.asymco.com/2011/02/11/in-memoriam-microsofts-prev...
or possibly a little condescending.
Outside the echo chamber of Silicon Valley and the web, the average age of a startup founder IS 38.
Add Northern Minnesota. The Duluth Chamber of Commerce (I think) has been pushing the "Offshore to the North Shore" program for a few years. Low cost of living + nearby universities graduating MIS people == opportunities.
Yeah, do it!
This is great! I'd love to be able to have a name of a chart and a picture. This way I can put 'Johnny Draws an A' and at the end is a picture of a toy or ice cream.
For the record, it's not a subtle dig at getsatisfaction. "Customer satisfaction" has been a term used by the companies for decades. We don't think satisfaction is a very high bar. We're fighting against low expectations.