skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, mp3 is widely used because that's what the pirates chose back in the dial up days, when a lossy codec met their needs perfectly. You might still remember a time when mp3 was not supported by many players.

H264 meets the pirates' needs perfectly now. It has the best quality per bit-rate out there. And pirates don't care about royalty fees.
True, but corruption's a two-way street - the people who write the checks are as bad as the people who cash them. Healthcare is a market that just doesn't seem to clear properly and the corruption is a symptom of market failure rather than the cause.
<Obvious answers here>

When you discount "learn on the job" and "read books", i'm really not sure what's left, or what you expect the people who have achieved success by doing these things to tell you (while omitting those things.)
I'm on the lookout for interesting projects to hack-on and forensics would feel like home. If your still looking at this thread mail me at Bcounsell1 () Gm/ail <> com.
Pithy, but when you look at the pictures it's totally worth it.
That's not my reason, and I've never once mentioned it. I don't care a bit about other people's security. It's an important issue, but life is short, and I've got other stuff to worry about.

My applications have to run in people's browsers...if there are a significant number of people using crappy old browsers (of which IE8 is one), it affects my life and my use of time.
When I read Scoble's post, it was clear that he was being sarcastic.

I'm surprised that anyone (and especially a senior Microsoft guy who claims to love Scoble :) would write a long serious response criticizing individual points from that post.
It's interesting how answers seem wiser when put in a different context, e.g, "Q. What do you think of the current economic climate? A. Dragons!" I think oracles operated on a similar premise.
If I was head of Windows Phone 7 Developer Relations I wouldn't be writing public blogs critical of Scoble's evangelizing Android development.

People might misinterpret my motivations.
I was seriously just considering ps3 vs xbox 360, Sony's just made my decision so easy. I'll never buy a thing from them again.
For a company that makes billions of dollars every quarter, more cash than many small countries, thousands of times more than the Mozilla Foundation and Opera combined, it strikes me as pitiful that IE9 is still "coming".

Somehow Microsoft can make a word processor as extravagant as Word, but they can't make a standards compliant browser as good as Chrome? Either they're idiots or they're not taking it seriously. Priorities are wrong.

Microsoft is dead in the water and everyone knows it. The Ballmer dog and pony show is a disaster. I truly hope that Microsoft can have their post-Andy Grove Intel moment where they refocus on products that make sense instead of expensive, fruitless pursuits.

Intel went from making the ferociously hot, high-power Pentium 4 and the useless Itanium and nearly having their asses handed to them by AMD into being a world-class competitor with such incredible products like the i7 chip.

Get it together Microsoft.
First they came for the embedders, and I was not an embedder, so I did nothing...
"What is next? Telling every kid not to open 'a system' to figure out how things worked?
Or may be lets ban engineers to be engineers?"

Sears catalogs and manuals used to have exploded-view diagrams so that consumers could determine how to repair broken products (and so that they could select the proper part to order from Sears). We need to return to that world.

I sincerely hope that we will see a backlash against corporate control of consumer goods.

The more we know about what we own, the more we can learn, the more we can modify things suit our needs, and the more we can reclaim. Fixing something means it won't enter the waste stream. The sort of individualism that hackers embrace imparts a strong sense of ownership over possessions (and code). Think Ikea. Part of the appeal is the pleasure and sense of ownership that come from assembling furniture yourself. Why should electronics be any different?

I have a project in the works to help spread knowledge about the inner workings of things:

http://takeitapart.com

It is what it sounds like. Sign up if you like, and I'll send a single email when it launches.
Maybe the Oracle of Delphi. The king would take that to mean he needed to go to war with China.
The Great Substitution
I don't like the "licensed not sold" line. A copy was sold, U.S. law (generally) backs that up, and that means there are certain things you can do with it such as loan it out or give it away/resell it. You can't copy it, but that's because of copyright law, not because it's licensed-not-sold.
Referer: http://www.sony.com
I have a fantasy of every botnet in the world visiting his site DDoS style, but without the DoS part, padding the list to be miles long of printed court evidence.

GeoHot's blog, geohotgotsued.blogspot.com, specifically mentions that his hack got very little attention outside of the standard homebrew hacker scene up until the point he was sued and every tech blog and publication linked to him. These actions are just absurd. GeoHot even states that he has come across means to restore the cryptography on the device, which could effectively shut out piracy. I doubt he'd ever hand it over though. There's no reason to be nice to the guy who's kicking you in the crotch.
Top student charged with fixing grades for cash
Not being funny - he actually has a Prius which does give MPG readings, but he finds that it's not that accurate. Just because a car has a fancy in-dash computer doesn't mean that it's any good at keeping track of its own fuel consumption.
From one frying pan to another.
Uh,

There is no line aside from line the state is able to draw in the public mind...

The story with every "linking is a crime, sharing is a crime, enabling is a crime" case is that the outcome depends on how much sun light is cast on the skeevy dealings of opportunistic public prosecuters deeply embedded in the fly-over-states of Christanistan.
It's too bad, too. They took a huge risk with Cell, and it's finally paid off. This kind of behaviour is simply inexcusable, however. I have a ps3, but I don't want to buy new games for it. Not really sure what to do.
http://scri.ch/247
IF they put you into a featured listing! First you have to figure out who to sleep with on the App Store team.
With a bunch of webdevelopers we tried to give IE9 some complicated stuff and I have to tell you, it is really buggy.

It is just an other buggy browser in the series and it is way behind on the standards side of things. They are doing things other browsersmakers did in their release more then a year ago.
IDEABOLT: How about a company to manage/create a similar signature look for (currently) smalltime company founders. Suggest (and/or buy and send) cool sneakers, writbands, gadgets, etc. for you to make your mark.

Would you pay for such a service?
Mysql Replication in Amazon EC2
An introduction to mysql replication in Amazon ec2. Targeted for beginners to rise enthusiasm in cloud.
On the Still-Undefeated Tyranny of Apple
I'm not an MPEG-LA booster by any means (was involved with VP8) but for the sake of clarity, they can't and don't charge arbitrary royalties. The agreement for being involved in H.264 was to provide a license under "RAND" terms, meaning Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory.

What that means in practice is that you cannot charge Apple $1 per copy and Google $10 just because you hate Google. You have to have terms that apply to everyone equally, and they have to be 'reasonable', which presumably 100% of your gross revenue would not be.

That said, I do believe the patent holders have the right to circumvent the pool and cross-license directly from each other. I'm not too clear on how that relates to the RAND policy, but my cynical guess would be that it can be used as cover for some pretty sweet deals.
What's their take on XBox 360 games? Oh, yeah, about that.
I suspect its possible to find someone to force you to learn things you wouldn't otherwise learn for free.
Does anyone else think that the definition of multitasking got corrupted? Perhaps it became influenced by computer multitasking, where two or more things are done in seemingly real time. What I always took multitasking to mean was that over the course of a work day, week, month, a person would have a lot of different responsibilities and would need to switch among them.

Today, I designed an icon, provided customer service, wrote some technical documentation, did a little programming, and a few other disparate tasks. Each of these tasks required a different skill set, and there was a productivity hit every time I needed to get into a new frame of mind and, in some cases, figure out where I left off. So in this context, multitasking was activities done over the course of the day, not simultaneous ones.
> In IE8 you barely even need to tweak sites to get them to look right.

You're kidding, right?
Yes,

And problem is???

Usually these folks' discussions are more interesting than the original article.

I value hn because it has a variety of quite interesting individuals. Somehow some percentage have interesting take on physical fitness and physical culture - I have talk movement classes professionally in between hacker gigs and find the hn's folks' idea interesting and challenging.

Fitness is a very individual thing. If talking about individual experience with it is evil, give me more evil, please.
Startup Visa Documentary
It's unclear why they haven't integrated Facebook with their iOS apps, but iMovie and iPhoto both have pretty good Facebook integration. Apple wanted to launch Ping with Facebook Connect, but Facebook shut it down. Whether Apple 'hates and fears' Facebook, they haven't shied from integrating it with their Mac products.

Also, who (or what?) exactly is doing this hating and fearing? Management? Marketing? The webkit team? Accounts payable?
While patents do confer a form of monopoly protection to an inventor and their assignees, that does not give anyone the right to form a cartel of multiple patent holders who work in concert to fix the price for the combined product.

MPEG-LA's workaround for that, which is what is at stake here, is some sort of carve-out with the FTC, stipulating that because it's an emerging standard, MPEG should not be subject to the normal restrictions on patent pooling.
http://scri.ch/1qo
Privacy and control of your own data.

But I'm certain that can be solved. Just run the cloud on your own hardware and backup to your friends (encrypted obviously):

http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/
My intention was not to discount them at all. In fact, I've learned everything I know about web development on the job. I just didn't want the existence of obvious answers to deter anybody from sharing the details of their individual experiences. And all of the responses so far have been exactly the kinds of things I'm looking for.
A great many people rely on social proof if there is any when deciding to trust someone rather than taking the time to find out for themselves. In fact, we all probably do that to some degree. You can't have firsthand knowledge of everything.
Justin.tv is protected by the DMCA Service Provider exception b/c it did not actively filter content hosted on/through its servers. Channelsurfing.net did filter content -- indeed, it selected specific content for retransmission. That is why Justin.tv is not liable but the channelsurfing guy is.

As to why he's being charged with a crime...we'll find out when they release the charges against him. It may be as innocuous as tax evasion for not reporting the income from the ads on his site.
He said to take up a sport that you love. Rock climbing is my passion as well but most certainly not for everyone. I am in much better shape now that I am a rock climber than before because of two reasons I do it a lot, and any outside trip is a hike with heavy gear. I honestly cannot stop thinking about my next climb and that is the kind of thing that will bring you fitness as a side effect.

If you love (insert sport/fit activity that you cannot stop thinking about) then do that and be super fit because you love it. That was the op's point.
Swapping US $1 bills to coins would save 5.5b over 30yrs
Well, not everything that I bookmark is 'favorite' either - but I see your point. This is a downside of the 'gamification' trend.
Ah, that makes a world of difference. Thanks for the correction. Next question... when do you I get my invite? I tweeted under gexla - johnDOTfullerATgmailDOTcom
The UK is very much America's little brother. A little less so under Brown but they still love following U.S. precedents.
Webkit has no problems providing an experience that the IE team thinks is subpar (in particular, lacks full 2d graphics acceleration).

Similar for Gecko: it's doing compositing acceleration on WinXP, but not 2d acceleration.

Now maybe the argument is that IE9 should support such a mode of operation. But by the same argument, Firefox should still have a supported PPC version of Firefox 4 (even though it's JIT can't generate PPC code, so JS would be interpreted and hence very slow). Some people _are_ making that argument, by the way, but the general consensus is that this sort of decision about what sort of quality they're willing to put their name on is up to the Mozilla project. Why does the IE team not get the same courtesy?

I realize that you may disagree with their quality metrics (e.g. you may think that a modern JS JIT is a must-have requirement for a modern web browser but 2d graphics acceleration is not). But it's not clear to me that this is obvious, or that this will even be true in a year.
It's a win/win for Google. The long game is this: either they win the fight outright and webM becomes the video standard, or they use webM and the specter of long, drawn-out (and expensive) litigation to force MPEG-LA to rethink their royalty policy.
Why does continuous deployment help? It helps by pushing many small updates instead of a few large ones. For a large code base with many developers this is a big benefit. To use it you need excellent automated test coverage and a reliable deployment tool. For a small team, it is probably a waste of time to setup.

I recommend focusing on only the most important tasks for making your product "something people want" (to quote pg). If you're spending a lot of time wrestling with deployment, automate it. If it is a few minutes a day, focus on other things.

I'd also make sure to think carefully about which components you do and do not learn deeply. If Capistrano is important to your product and you're spending time with it, learn it yourself. If you're spending more time on frontend website app development, learn a web dev framework instead. This is a judgement call.
How Rsync Works
Here you go. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2290675
I actually think Prism was the first concept, they started it before smartphones got apps(tores):

http://prism.mozillalabs.com/

EDIT: ok, maybe the iPod was first ?
Gawker Traffic Reportedly Down 25% Following Design Changes | WebProNews
I used to collect viruses - found "in the wild" when my friends and co-workers' machines became infected.

I disassembled them and studied them a bit. Very interesting! I remember some ancient boot sector viruses that spread via floppy.

Haven't thought about them in years.
They are broken from the _user's_ perspective, yes.

They are not necessarily broken from the app developer's perspective.

Changing IE so as to break them would cause MS a good bit of grief (and depending on the contracts they have with people might cost them money directly).
RIM’s Risky Bet With BBM For Non-BlackBerry Devices | WebProNews
Also natural: A furious ball of gas floating in space, waiting for the right imbalance to terminate our brief existence.
Google To Shut Down Gizmo5 On April 3
I'd like to subscribe to Daring Fireball, but I can't. He just posts too often.
Clicker.com, a Giant Waste of Time, Acquired by CBS
Maybe tptacek just has a really great applicant pool ;). You also have to account for specialization. I have no clue how to do optimized gamedev.

If you want more Lamport goodies:
"Paxos Made Simple" (distributed transactions done right): http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.69....

"The Byzantine Generals Problem" (harshest failure model known and how to cope with it): http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...

An interview where he talks about his approach to systems, particularly formal reasoning and specification: http://www.budiu.info/blog/2007/05/03/an-interview-with-lesl...

His publication list - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...
Libya's Internet Goes Down Again
The drug that also up-regulates NGF is available over the counter in Russia, and it's called noopept (GVS-111). Good luck finding it in stock anywhere.
Round peg in a cube farm: Will your next company be as innovative as you?
Sock puppet? Hardly. I just never bothered posting here before. This is my real name and i'm one of the co-founders of a successful 100% bootstrapped and profitable company that produces commercial plugins for WordPress.

I posted to show support for Page.ly because I know Josh and Co. at Page.ly bust their ass on a daily basis running their business.

The #winning was a lame reference to Charlie Sheen.
Nine easy steps to online video success
I can confirm this, I applied for my ESTA online a few weeks before leaving and I paid with my credit card and printed it in a few minutes.

That said, the process of going to the US was every bit as onerous as described, being asked questions multiple times, being subjected to a backscatter scan (which I declined and got patted down, tested for explosives, etc), etc.
If you have Chrome, open the link in Incognito mode and it will let you read the entire article.
Yes. My problem is very similar. Sometimes its because I think I'm stupid, but sometimes I'm almost afraid to start (because I'm worried about failing) or the task just seems too large. Maybe my approach has too many issues that I don't know how to address. Sometimes its just that I don't know where to start.

When I was in college I also had this problem, but then I would realize things were due in a day or two and I'd just figure everything out (often in one all-nighter). I'm finally starting to get over this.
He did qualify that statement with "basically" and if you think about it, a "callback" function really is just sending a message.
We actually haven't been approached about funding by anyone, which is ironic considering we are actually very profitable. But then again, investors seem to love unprofitable investments for some reason. But that is a good thing. Being bootstrapped means more money in my pocket and nobody to answer to except my business partners, not an outside investor.
No, the problem is Internet cafe and pubs. They contribute the largest proportion of Chinese Internet users. And they all have a very special something: 还原卡[1]. Basically it's a either software or hardware controls INT 13H, so all data write to HDD is dropped once system is reboot, and the system is as clean as a fresh system install. And yes, they all have pirated Windows XP SP2 with outdated software/games installed years ago and the admin don't bother to upgrade their system because "nothing is broken". Some of the applications defintely requires and regular upgrade, like anti-virus software and MMORPGs, often they use a network mapped drive to a LAN server. So everyone gets a latest version while the OS partition remains static for years.

IDK why 还原卡 is so popular in China, nearly every public computer has one. Perhaps it's because virus and malware are so rampant in China.

And for Maxthon, it use the system default WebBrowser control, so it's version agnostic, it can be either IE5, 5.5, 6, 7 or 8.

[1]: http://baike.baidu.com/view/905.htm
The Five Habits of Great Innovators
For your first point (and I only know this from accidental experience), it is extremely easy to bypass emissions equipment on a car, 1995 or newer.

On cars from 1995 an up all cars had to have an OBDII compatible port that lets car manufacturers read out the codes, but it was primarily designed to speed up emissions testing. Instead of putting the car on the tread mill now all they have to do is plug in the computer and get the codes back from the car. The car is continuously monitoring its output anyway to get the right fuel/air mixture to get the best possible gas mileage.

The way it does this is with a series of O2 sensors that are placed near the exhaust port on the engine and continuing down the exhaust for one or two more.

The thing is that if one of those sensors is faulty or dirty it will return that code, however since cars also have to run when the sensor has broken or just isn't installed the computer will completely ignore it and not fire a code for it at all. On my car all of my O2 sensors were broken, and I didn't know it until I brought it into a mechanic as I didn't think it was running correctly. I had passed emissions since my computer said everything was fine, but if it had been put on the tread mill (which would have cost me the same $27.50, so the state makes the same money whether they computer it or run it) it would have had "high" emissions because the fuel/air mixture was not right and I was basically dumping unburnt fuel into my exhaust.

After the O2 sensors were fixed my car ran much better.

It surprised me that my car didn't throw a code for the O2 sensors being completely gone as far as the computer was concerned, but it just goes to show that some things are easy to bypass.
> Of course that was because the USSR was an evil empire with an out of control military, a bloated sense of it's own importance and a paranoia about foreigners.

Wait, are you implying that that is now the US, or should I make that implication?
I started writing my story but it became too long so I posted it here.

http://dbasch.posterous.com/how-did-you-become-a-hardcore-ba...

Tl;dr: in 1998 I created an mp3 search engine that got significant traffic, had to learn on the fly, ended up going to Inktomi where I joined a team tackling much bigger problems. We all learned a lot over the next four years.
Where do you buy your affordable meat and produce?

The grocery store (and I don't mean some specialty place like Whole Foods -- if we're talking about eating on a tight budget, something like Wal-Mart will be much more helpful).
That makes sense. But I still have to wonder how many projects need the extra 1 or 2 axes. Any examples?
Facebook Hits Record $75 Billion Valuation
No, public performances, even if no money is traded hands is not allowed. Read the FBI warning, you know, that thing you haven't seen for years ...
Good luck trying to get a US court order to make me do something when I am not under your jurisdiction ...
One follow up re: how I personally learned distributed systems. This was a great course, and the lecture notes are public: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-440-sp11/index/lecture_i... .
If you do iOS consulting, partner with someone who does Android development - you can both benefit. Android is not Java, but it helps.

A two-for-one deal (Android + iOS) is a better marketable offering if your clients have to attempt to reach most of the mobile marketplace.
Google returning 404 errors on mobile phones
Pirated doesn't mean can't be upgraded. Pirated means you can upgrade whatever you want without WGA.
ActiveX works fine on IE7 and IE8.
This secondary market is far from liquid, take the crazy valuations with a grain of salt.
> Could you link to a Twitter account, e-mail subscription of some sort? There's a 95% chance that I forget everything you just wrote after I close this tab, unless Techcrunch, Daring Fireball, and HN shower you with attention.

I think the "threads" link works pretty well for this.

>A "report" button for individual comments would also be great.

Isn't this what flagging is for?
PDF link for those unable to view Powerpoint:

http://terrytao.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/cosmic-distance-...

It is good stuff, worth a read.