skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
WebM is an inferior codec to h264.

One of the most important properties of my media formats is it's accessiblility.

The fact that h264 is heavily patented by these creeps makes it inferior for my purposes by a large measure.

What business wouldn't pay a slight file-size penalty (to maintain the same quality) in order avoid being bound to some per-seat licensing agreement with all its associated administrative and reporting obligations?

Drive space is most-rapidly-decreasing cost in the world and bandwidth isn't too bad either. Patents take twenty years to expire. Do the math.
This is why I registered microsoftcountdown.com. It's not the browser the only thing we need to dump - we need to get rid of the whole company.
Right. That explains the infinite, insatiable lust for our Treasury bills, notes, and bonds.

Until I see the world protest US actions in the only way that matters( e.g. refusing to finance our government's activities ), I will continue to laugh off the "world hates the US" babble.

Stop buying our toilet paper and I'll take it seriously.
I think this was discussed on LWN; if you get the patches from Red Hat and redistribute them, Red Hat will cancel your service contract. So it could work, but only once.
My girlfriend is currently training for a half marathon and was told to never ever run on the treadmill with it set flat, so she goes with a fairly decent incline (not running up hill, but definitely should get some resistance) the entire time at a minimum.
In general use, you can use real libraries instead. Or, you can choose not to use C++, which is also a good choice.
Prague and Shanghai (Igor, the author, was also at Shanghai)
Let's bear in mind that the author is a guy who went to several different specialists across disciplines. I'm don't think he's talking about a lack of motivation - I think it's more about trying to continue to be active in a healthy way.

The author's incentive for going to the gym was so that he could go climb or surf or ski or whatever and be both "fit" and injury-free. It's a critical distinction. There was probably a time when all he had to do was go out and make those activities a part of his existence, but I would wager that as he has aged and had different responsibilities come up just making that fitness a side effect wasn't possible. Instead, he probably tried to go ski X times a year, but got hurt the first time, and the subsequent trips never happened. He probably tried to go climbing weekly, but something tweaked and suddenly he was only climbing monthly. When it's harder to go out and run 5 miles like you used to, you're less inclined to go run 5 miles, and might slip to 3. When 3 is eventually harder than before, you might just not run at all.

I think the article is speaking more to concerns as you age and you can no longer get away as easily with just participating in the sport. Rob Shaul and his mtnathlete.com and militaryathlete.com sites address those problems quite directly, and unfortunately it involves a lot of painful work that is mostly gym based. He's designing the mtnathlete workouts to help skiiers stay healthy and be ready when the season arrives. He's training military personnel to be more durable and harder to kill. To explain, the site is a few years old, but when he started it it was as Crossfit was just starting to ramp up in popularity. Despite the advertising that it makes you better at everything athletic, Crossfit is usually all about Crossfit - there are Crossfit games now and it is in many ways its own sport now. Rob's site was very specifically geared to mountain athletes who wanted to perform their sport at a high level possible with less injury. It's not a gym program just for the sake of being a gym program.

There was a time when I could go out and make my life about doing whatever sport it may be - climbing, running, basketball, etc. - and recover quickly and easily from the activity. Now my body has aged a little, I sit in a chair too much, and suddenly a small nagging injury never goes away, and I'm less motivated to go run several miles or play basketball or climb. By incorporating durability training like the article discusses, I'm more able to avoid those prolonged periods of inactivity and keep motivation up.
While we're on the meetoo's we developed something similar last summer http://whiteboardy.com
Test Equipment
I think you're unclear on what is not being shared. From what I understand, old version of RHEL had a vanilla kernel, and then an RPM with RH patches to that kernel, as well as the documentation for those patches. New versions of RHEL will not have a vanilla kernel; it will only contain a kernel with their patches pre-applied. Documentation for those patches will only be available to subscribers.

The code is not being treated as the commodity, but the documentation for that code.
Where did you get these stats?

There are a lot of people who prefer other products over Apple's in the same way that there are still a lot of people who still prefer a feature phone over a smartphone.
You may be correct, but aside from wasting 2 weeks to plan the site, 2 weeks to the design the site, and another month to build that site, I don't particularly feel any other regrets as looking from mine point of view, there isn't anything more important than to achieve inner peace with oneself.
Nothing special.... rails 3, ruby 1.9.2 (this is my first rails app ever!), mysql, hosted on aws. stammy used Sass for the css styling. I wrote a few scripts to spin up more servers as load increases.
You know what - actually the story does not make me feel like I can do it. It makes me feel like he's probably hundreds of time cleverer than me. He was handrolling assembler as a teen - back then I was doing VB6.

All these programmer stories about how they developed OS kernels in x86 MMX extensions when they were 4 years old on Sinclair machines while skipping 4 grades and making hundreds selling lemonade never make me feel like I could do the same. They just make me feel like those guys will always be ahead of me - they started so much earlier.

I want to hear about the talentless hack who used VB6 to clone some popular software and convinced a big company to purchase it for a few hundreds of thousands after he spent most of his teen years reading science fiction and watching movies. That would make me feel like I could do it.
Let's say this over and over for years: "Microsoft doesn't want IE6 to die".

When Microsoft creates a web site for killing IE6 let's start saying "it's not enough, microsoft has to die too"

brilliant.
Another Cloud Ping
Anyone interested in Email Marketing to BETA test?
Hello all,

I have a web app that is in closed BETA and I was hoping to get a few more BETA testers on board.

Is anyone here interested in Email Marketing and tracking the performance of Email campaigns? If so, I would really like to hear from you. In addition, it would be great if you will soon be sending a campaign out.

Please just tweet at me: http://twitter.com/abs_farah

BETA testers will get a pro account free for 6 months when app fully launches.
This is a follow up to the earlier AWSPing post. I just created a very similar http-based ping based on that, but with the following difference:

* Use JSON-P to avoid same-origin-policy request failures (this also fixed the Opera failures)
* Repeat request 6 times (1 warmup + 5 measured) and display mean, median, min and max latency measurements
* Allow ping against 40 different provides including 4 AWS regions
Apparently, that is already the case for certain countries:

> Citizens of the following countries are required to have airport transit visa when they are passing through the international transit area of airports in Germany: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Iran, Iraq, Jordan*, Lebanon, Myanmar/Burma, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syria and Turkey.

http://www.immihelp.com/visas/germanytransitvisa.html
How I Learned to Let My Workers Lead
This submission illustrates the decline of HN.

- It invites a bunch of snarky comments.
> The world interprets the US as damage and routes around it.

- No solutions to problems, just complaints.

- Is there a solution?

- Aren't these kind of submissions better left to Reddit?
From what I've read, most sources are expecting late March availability.
Really nice site and a great idea; looking forward to your writeup.
Dead lifts work your back.
It's unfair to compare most of these people with Felicia Day.
I hate this attitude. Especially when we all know that it is impossible to be productive for 12 hours a day, 365 days per year - let alone the 16, or whatever hours, some 'hackers' claim to do

I would rather work an effective 4 hours a day (which you end up doing, or less, anyway, between all the web surfing and snarky comments on HN), take a few weeks off a year, take the odd year off, and actually enjoy life through meeting and interacting with other people.
Acheron: A Common Lisp to JavaScript compiler written in 100% Java
Click-able link to the submission mentioned: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2289425 .
Do they have ie9letdown?
Video formats should be open and free to use/redistribute. Otherwise, startups can't get off the ground quickly (YouTube being the exception).

Charge for encryption/licensing formats.
Or there's a lot of pirated Windows XP running in China.
I wish it wasn't a white shirt. Those get too dirty far too quickly.
Imagine the increase in development speed of projects that aim to create a true decentralized internet, if the bill passes. The killswitch might not be so bad after all.
That's the most annoying thing about the page. If Microsoft really cared about getting people off of IE and onto something modern, they'd also offer alternatives for browsers which ran on XP beyond IE8.

I don't necessarily begrudge MS for not making IE9 run on XP... it can be hard to write code for older platforms, especially when you live entirely in the new one. But other browser makers are making their code work on XP, and they should be promoted as valid choices.

This just feels like a way to browbeat people into upgrading to Windows 7 rather than solving the real problem.
I just created a very similar http-based ping based on this, but with the following difference:

* Use JSON-P to avoid same-origin-policy request failures (this also fixed the Opera failures)
* Repeat request 6 times (1 warmup + 5 measured) and display mean, median, min and max latency measurements
* Allow ping against 40 different provides including 4 AWS regions

http://cloudharmony.com/ping
Am I the only one that hears this like a Black Sabbath record being played backwards? I tried a couple of them and noticed no appreciable difference in the noise being presented.
Negotiating the startup offer
I like it. The only thing that bothered me was that I couldn't find the prices. But it looks like that is because the prices don't exist yet.

I would definitely look at using this, but only for a pretty serious application. Nothing I've worked on so far has required that level of authenticity, or verification of a working phone.
I find it especially worrying when the post contains no information, is created from a throwaway account and contains two major grammar fails within 3 sentences.

It would seem much more acceptable if the submission told us something more about the startup than "like Pokemon but online" and didn't look like some random add from the bottom of craigslist.
How do you ever manage to poop?

(serious question, though I appreciate the fact that I just asked the most base question in this entire comment page)
I think you're missing my point: if it's infant mortality that keeps average life expectancy down, it's false to say that "caveman" diets are optimized for only aging to 30. I think it's closer to the truth to say that cavemen either died at birth, or lived a natural lifespan closer to modern man than an average would indicate. So you can't discount a "caveman" diet because average life expectancy was (and in some cultures still is) 30 years old.

And I think it's a straw man to say that accepting a "caveman" or "hunter gatherer" diet means we need to accept -every- aspect of "primitive" life.

EDIT: http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/pdrdraft04182...
How would a comment pining for the days of yore have fared two years ago?
There's also a blog: http://lispnyc.org/blog/acheron
It's clean, concise, and to the point. Great layout and everyone looks really polished. I look forward to your tricks and shortcuts write up.
WTF!!!... what could be the reason..Because it's for you today it might also effetc someother submissions..they gotta do something about it!!
555-387673
That's a ridiculous straw man.

Yes, running will make running easier for you. That's great if you play sports. But sports aren't the only time people might get winded. It may be more common here in Asia where people aren't as reliant on cars but I, for example, have to about 20 minutes of walking and several flights of stairs involved in my daily commute. So do most of the other people I see in the subway. I've moved a fridge maybe once in my life and as for your other example... I haven't ever been involved with anyone that heavy. YMMV.
can you share gems used?
Looks very nice. Do you support international numbers or just US only for now?
I'm almost surprised they don't run old computers as thin clients/remote x terminals connected to charitable server farms running in The West.
Chinese hackers love IE 6. This would be my guess as to why IE 6 has a higher count there then anywhere else. I don't say this out of spite, our site just uses an exception notification system that floods my inbox with tons of bogus requests from china. They can't all be proxy servers and have a user agent indication IE 6. Just a thought, not meant to be negative...
Talk about instant content farm...SEOs around the world are rejoicing at the prospect of a million songs worth of unique data
terminology is being muddied by calling these 'web applications'.

how about 'browser apps'? or just, something else
What a pointless exercise - fill in the form and it doesn't even tell you how you did. All I got was "Thanks! Your response has been recorded.". I was hoping for an explanation of the bits where my understanding was flawed.
"Friends don’t let friends use Internet Explorer 6"!! (who thought that Microsoft would say this one day)
Those are stats from Feb 23/24, BTW.
Staying in the gym is also a hell of a lot better when it's -15 outside with a mean wind and snow on the ground.
Firehost Is Expanding Rapidly, Adds New COO
You can do TCP listen on 0.0.0.0:80 (any IP on port 80), but I never saw TCP listen on XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:* (specific IP with any port) ;)
Without IE, the only other big browsers out there would be Firefox and Chrome, the former largely and the latter wholly funded by Google.
Red Hat:"Essential knowledge that our customers have relied on to support their RHEL environments will increasingly only be available under subscription."

FSF: "the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its user"

However necessary Red Hat might consider this move to be, it is just as clearly a move away from the spirit of the GPL however much it may conform to the letter of the GPL.

At the same time, open source companies need to compete on some basis and hiding information seems to be one basis. Is there an alternative to this? (serious question)
New portable camera sees inside solid materials and structures
"I sometimes wonder whether I will outlive T-Mobile or vice-versa"
This is really hardball. Is it a tit-for-tat that has escalated out of control? More generally, with the general state of smartphone litigation, what happened to the gentlemen's agreements between companies that hold patent portfolios? It doesn't look to me that it's going to end well for anyone.
Auto Terre Haute, Indiana
Ah, I get it. You are using a captcha not for its resistance to automation but as a way to make a user pay (with time) for an action.

If you start with the assumption that no one will try to attack your site, then you don't need a captcha at all. You can give the user any annoying/time-consuming task (e.g. "click a square ten times"), or you can insert an inconvenient delay in vote submission. However, people may object less to the inconvenience of something that looks like a captcha, because they are used to them.

Needless to say, almost no one uses captchas for this purpose. Instead, they use captchas to make their sites more resistant to automated abuse -- as you almost certainly will need if your sites become popular.
This is a perk for Y Combinator companies and has been there for as long as I can remember.

Whether you consider it distasteful or not, there's been no more moves in this direction since - so I wouldn't consider it a portent of things to come.
The day I built my first VB6 program ranks as one of the happiest days--circa 6th grade!

At the time, I couldn't believe I can build a calculator that looked just like the Windows calculator.
Seconded. When I press "Verify w/Call" it says "international phone numbers can only verify by TXT message. Please use the TXT messaging option." But Verify by TXT doesn't seem to do anything. Is it supposed to work?
Why can't there be an “ultimate” programming language?
I'm using Twilio defaults -- Which means International is SMS only, and US+Canada works with Voice or SMS.
Love to know what your using to deploy it.
I'm not saying you should stay home and work every day, I'm saying there is no way to turn SXSW into what it isn't - something for hackers.
Sooo... Microsoft links people to Microsoft's browser. This counts as controversy? Shady behavior? Please.
absolutely
--

gem 'rails', '3.0.4'
gem "mysql", "2.8.1"
gem 'capistrano', '2.5.19'
gem 'capistrano-ext', '1.2.1'

gem 'awesome_print', '0.3.1'
gem 'closure-compiler', '1.0.0'
gem 'compass', '0.10.6'
gem 'devise', '1.1.6'
gem 'fancy-buttons', '1.0.4'
gem 'jammit', '0.6.0'
gem 'jquery-rails', '0.2.7'
gem 'haml', '3.0.25'
gem 'hpricot', '0.8.3'
gem 'hominid', '3.0.2'
gem 'kaminari', '0.10.4'
gem 'postmark-rails', '0.4.1'
gem 'ruby_parser', '2.0.5'
gem 'twiliolib', '2.0.7'
gem 'uuidtools', '2.1.2'

group :production do
gem 'passenger', '3.0.4'
end
medhack, are you able to tell a little bit more about what you're scheming? I am trying to understand where you're going with this. Web-based application, Windows-based... whatnot.
Businesses should use Groupon to bundle deals, not selling single items for deep discounts. This increases a businesses' volume and transaction costs go down per sale.
They're withholding documentation for "open source" code they wrote. You're welcome to argue that's okay, sound business, etc. but if they were committed to open source they would release documentation alongside their code.

And until recently, they did.
Ah, but I have congenital ankle problems which make standing or walking for long periods (or just the wrong movements over a short period) problematic. My life is a balancing act of pain risk. :-)

I find that maintaining the posture that my 8th grade typing teacher enforced is solving all of my neck issues. It's just difficult to maintain awareness of posture when I'm concentrating really deeply on a bit of code or documentation. Weight training helps me overcome the changes to my musculature that occurred from a lifetime of such computer use.
A lot of users don't understand the concept of a browser. 'Internet Explorer' is that thing they use to get to their internet. "What the hell is this Morzilla, I want my Internet!"
Sweet & simple.

2 questions:
- works world-wide or US only?
- how much do you charge per verification (SMS / voice)... can't find on a website, but I see I have $20 balance
Hard for me to believe there's no mention of spam accounts in this post.
Building applications for mobiles using jQuery Mobile and CouchDB
/blekkogear
I build something similar 4 years ago.

http://www.obneq.com/
Fonolo is awesome! My company uses their business service and it handles user input and waiting on hold too.
It should work, although I have only nominally tested international numbers. What country are you in?
Amazing--I've worked on projects before where if the barriers to integrating with existing solutions were lower, phone verification would have really helped. This is an awesome example of a niche problem, with an elegantly simple solution. If only you made this a couple of years ago...
I want to hear about the talentless hack who used VB6 to clone some popular software and convinced a big company to purchase it for a few hundreds of thousands after he spent most of his teen years reading science fiction and watching movies. That would make me feel like I could do it.

Then I suggests you read one out of many salesletters from people trying to sell their e-books to get rich quickly. They are specifically written for people who want to get rich with no innovation and quality at all.

If I read stories like these, it reminds me I have to work a little bit harder to be able to compete with the talent out there who have an edge on me. Why? Because these stories tell me that hard work, curiosity and dedication pay off.
"You should quote the entire paragraph."

I didn't quote the entire paragraph because I figured everyone read it and I just wanted to point out the most objectionable part. However, looking back at the paragraph you quoted, I realized I don't just disagree with the incorrect claim that 20 minutes gets the job done. The claim about bike riding "getting the job done" and treadmills being a poor substitute is also objectionable. Many studies have shown that running generates a higher VO2 rate than biking. This holds true even for tri-athletes, who typically have more cycling than running training. Swimming is much harder to measure, but I sure wouldn't take the author's word for it with all the other unfounded claims in the article.

I could probably find another half-dozen issues with the article and quote them all, but that would make a really long comment, wouldn't it?
"If a high school drop-out with nothing but a typing diploma could do it, so can you."

I want to believe it, but not necessarily true. We all have different abilities. The author is very talented and has acquired (and/or was born with) the ability to do business.

On the other hand, there is no way of really knowing, unless you try.
"Intel’s SSD 510 costs more and it can serve up better sequential numbers than Vertex 3. However, it’s actually slower than its predecessor in situations where you’re working with lots of small files. The applications where this 250 GB drive makes sense are fairly clear cut. But again, it looks like you’d get a better all-around experience from OCZ’s Vertex 3 when it becomes available." [1]

"My biggest complaints about the 510 actually aren't about Intel's use of a 3rd party controller, instead they are about the drive's lackluster random read performance. In a horrible bout of irony Intel fixed its sequential performance and moved backwards in the random department. Random read performance, as it turns out, has a pretty major impact in the real world.

Random write performance is also pretty low by today's standards, however the impact on most of our real world performance tests is minimal. It looks like we may have hit the upper limit of what we need from 4KB random write performance (at least given current workloads)." [2]

[1] http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-510-solid-state-6gbp...
[2] http://www.anandtech.com/show/4202/the-intel-ssd-510-review

From what I can tell, it's worth waiting for the OCZ Vertex 3, which will be faster, and quite possibly cheaper too.
To some extent, it is a good thing that the warning banner is ugly because it will annoy the users, increasing the chances that they'll do something (i.e. upgrade to a newer browser) to get rid of it.
Please do write that blog post!