skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are unfair to VLC and MPlayer. Developers from VLC and MPlayer are contributing to FFmpeg quite a bit, and especially more than people from Chrome, for example...
SXSW 2011: The Internet is over
and now the status is YES, 0 hard blockers, 0 bugs... let's hope it's true :)
God bless you. I thought I am alone. I wanted to ask this question for a looong time but could not get it out.. I bet there are many more ppl like this.
Whenever anyone talks about the problems that beset Microsoft it seems almost a universal consensus that it's political infighting/poor management.

An honest question, though: is some of it the tools and/or engineers?

I've never worked in a big software company so for all I know management can have these kind of devastating effects (for this long a period of time). I suppose I just have a hard time believing that everything that goes wrong is the fault of management (Vista, Zune, WP7 at this point) while everything that goes right is brilliant engineering (2000/NT, 360, Kinect).
A friend of mine here in Tokyo owns a small music company and recently launched a series of games to help with music training. They are flash-based, but I have been quite impressed with them and have enjoyed them quite a bit! He is using a freemium model, and you can try out the games on his website without even registering. (Free registration gives you progress tracking, and subscription gives you access to all levels and games.) For anyone interested in music training, I highly recommend them!

http://trainer.thetamusic.com/
I prefer US breaking big companies into smaller entities to foster employment & competition.
Jobs would necessarily have to be much closer to home.

The onset of global warming and the oil peak are starting to prove that building economies around suburbs, highways, and long commutes is unsustainable anyway.

See this great documentary, "The End of Suburbia":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug
Hmm. What do you envision a "meltdown" to consist of? The system still has a fallback system in the event of a core meltdown that is designed to cool and manage the core without radiation release. Meltdown definitely does not equal to "release of them into the atmosphere".

I'm not overly familiar with this specific reactor design; but usually what happens is they seal the containment as the core melts, flooding the sump (where the slag would collect) with water to cool it down.

Right now they are trying to avoid that because a) there is always a risk of radiation leak from the containment and b) because the cleanup bill would catch quite a few more zeroes. The point is; meltdown is the final failure scenario, if they get to it, well, they get to it. But there is no fallback if something goes wrong at that point; so it is potentially better to try and control it at this stage, while you still have a fallback to implement.

Please don't be overly dramatic ("and you'd be condemning the US Western Coast to dangerous levels of radiation"); this is a bad situation. But at the moment there does not appear to be a major risk to the US Western Coast. As you say, best not to comment in too much depth if you don't know the details.
not. :-)
Fukishima Nuclear Accident - A Simple and Accurate Explanation
It would be impossible for anyone (but you) to untangle all the mixed emotions, motivations, expectations and desires expressed in this post. I get the sense that you are becoming aware of some facts about your career choices that you are afraid to face. Maybe programming isn't for you, maybe quitting your job wasn't such a good idea, who knows?

But you should have an honest talk with the guy in the mirror and figure out what you really like, what you are actually good at and then make a plan. Its true, as others advise, that some times you have to push your self to get to the next level or reach that important goal. But it is also true that such periods of effort and focus should not feel like drudgery. In my experience, if I like what I am doing that effort is work but not drudgery. When I start to feel drudgery creeping into my work life I know that is a sign to examine what am I doing and why. (Of course, every job has some drudgery elements such as paperwork or meetings but it can't be the whole deal).
Hasn't this been the same story for every windows mobile OS though? I gotta say I would be in the "gotta see it to believe it" phase if I were a mobile developer.
Have someone mentor you in ruby if you want to learn.
C is the language some may love to hate, but an experienced developer will create clean, concise code. I remember reading through cifsd [1] by cinap_lenrek and thinking, ``my god, this is beautiful''. No boilerplate, just straightforward code. And yes, unobtrusive error handling.

Also, a blogpost post comes to my mind: ``A Timeless, Desert Island Language'':
`And that's why I'd choose C as my desert island language. Because in less than 10 pages of C, I can bootstrap a basic Lisp interpreter (...)'.

--

[1] http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/contrib/cinap_lenrek/cifs...

[2] http://www.findinglisp.com/blog/2008/06/timeless-desert-isla...
The Christchurch figure is a debatable one, as the government is talking it up so as to justify an asset sale (national park mining and power companies are current favourites) while the true figure seems unknown (I can't find a good source, any you know of?). The EQC only pay part of some claims, but here are their stats http://canterbury.eqc.govt.nz/repair-replacement/progress
The worst thing about Microsoft is that they launch technologies / platforms without much success and then just close them up. I read that "Windows Live Spaces" is closing down, now Zune is closing shop... Imagine you invest time and energy in the Spaces network or a Zune setup, you're out of luck.

Worse, there is no upgrade path.
As near as I can tell, it is the rule right now in Japan.
Please, stop spreading FUD.

First, we didn't do an AMA on Reddit.

Then, the UI/UX part of VLC is around 1/30th of the VLC codebase (not counting external libraries) and most of the code is demuxers, decoders, protocol handlers (all custom), video outputs, video filter, clock, audio filters and libraries wrapper (not only libavcodec).

Did you actually look at the codebase before saying things like this?

Then, VLC developers have worked on libavcodec, like for DxVA2 acceleration, and have been telling people to add codecs inside libavcodec, and not directly VLC.

> there was a trend to accept the praise without coming out

Where did you see that "trend" ?

Finally, I don't see what your work is on FFmpeg or other such libraries.
Nhà đất, chung cư, bất động sản, nội thất, sửa nhà,..
Great story.

I echo the point of Stepping Away. Stepping away from something you've built must be as hard as even committing yourself to build something.
The solution is not to remove government regulation, the solution is a "death penalty" for corporations and prison time for dangerous decision makers in corporations.

That does not exist in the USA for ANY kind of industry, it's the nutshell of the problem for our entire country.
Isn't the whole point of damages to provide compensation for damage the plaintiff incurred as a result of the defendant's actions?

You've got to have a pretty huge set of balls to demand damages in an amount exceeding what your whole industry has made in the entire history of its existence.
Amazon.com is also very often not the absolute cheapest option for products when compared purely on price. It's only if you calculate in reliability/shipping/customer support/convenience that they're the completely unbeatable on average.

Anyone can buy $100k worth of servers and $10k/mo in bandwidth and easily beat AWS pricing. That doesn't make it competitive with AWS though.

AWS is providing world-class network/server infrastructure as a commodity, which is decidedly different from the kinds of infrastructure most hosting companies have.
What's the incentive for Linux users? Philosophical consistency?
That's still way below the "no health issues" threshold of 0.01 Sv/hr (so we're 10 000 times below the threshold)

(source : http://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/docs/energy-good-bad.pdf)
Dynamic Distortion & Light Beam Effects in Photoshop CS5 Tutorial
There are many Techniques in Photoshop witch are very use full to create special effects on pictures like light beam, sparkles, distortion and gives awesome result.
I don't think there are generational differences between any of the smartphone competitors right now. We're looking at missing functionality, unpolished app stores and so on.

WP7 should be able to compete with Android and iOS if they fix the bugs and add missing items such as copy-paste and multitasking.
What about IPv6?
Clicked on the article thinking I would read about traders and Wall Street trying to profit from what is happening in Japan.

Buying oil and keeping it to create less and less supply increasing prices or some other devious economical scheme ;)
Although this research is interesting, it isn't widely accepted yet. All major authorities still contend that there's not enough evidence to prove that low doses of radiation aren't harmful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model#Contr...
The idea of anybody destroying PayPal (Google, Apple, Amazon or even Facebook) makes me giddy: I'm surprised that it hasn't already been done...
American universities top reputation rankings
RIPE's Manual for Preparing an IPv6 Addressing Plan [pdf]
I was hoping that this would finally be a way to have an ELB inside a firewall, but alas VPC doesn't support ELBs yet.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon
Elastic MapReduce, Amazon Relational Database Service
(Amazon RDS) are not available for use in a VPC at
this time.

http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/#legal
Tsunami in Japan 3.11 first person FULL raw footage
Independent of the elegant typesetting it produces, TeX contains well-designed notation for mathematics, reflecting the algorithmic bent of its author, Don Knuth.

Mathematics doesn't change as frequently as desktop publishing, so it's a good bet that the TeX (e.g. $\int_0^1 \tau \, d\tau$) is going to be around as long as people talk math online.

That said, I think there are much easier-to-use and less error-prone desktop publishing tools (e.g. Scribus) for less math-heavy domains, like magazine layout.
What's interesting is how Microsoft had "Street view"-esque technology, except they made further innovations to allow not only a straight path, but a 360 walk around view. It was released to the public in 2008, its a shame they didn't attempt to pursue it more in their maps. http://photosynth.net if anyone's interested. (look for the photosynth ones, not the panoramas. A good example is http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=51b68423-ce72-4373-885f-...)
The author of said article owns the company that created this landing page: http://www.kogan.com.au

The entire page is based upon the concept of the "hard sell" — everything is price, number driven bullet points and devoid of any "soft sell" that I can fathom...
Hardly their biggest worry but Japan earthquake hits Nissan LEAF production
I once interviewed with a company that wrote medical imaging software. He explained that if anything ever went wrong with their product, their CEO would end up in jail (his words), and I'd be fired. This is for a product that didn't drive any medical equipment, but is regulated by the FDA anyway. Needless to say, I didn't take the job!

Your proposal would kill the last ounce of innovation that hasn't been already crushed by the vast number of regulations already in place.

When someone is injured or their property is damaged, that's what civil courts are for. When someone is killed intentionally, or by many instances of negligence, we have criminal courts to see that justice is done. All we need is to eliminate the regulations that people (and groups of people) hide behind and let the appropriate court do its job. And in some instances, bad precedent has to be overturned. At any rate, this is a much better idea than legislating and regulating more (which is like trying to dig your way out of a hole.)
yeah, definitely. i've switched to lout for non-mathematics-heavy stuff myself.
Isn't Tokyo 150 km from the leaking reactors? The radiation levels for those living closer must be more concerning, if it is 23x background that far away.
The closest to a "no health issues" figure in your article is 0.02 MILLI-Sieverts per hour as the US regulation for maximum allowable exposure to the public in the vicinity of a power plant. So it's actually only about 250 times below that limit. i.e. nothing to worry about right now, but that can change quickly.
Ebooks are making me recall the history of mass-market publishing
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The reason TeX is still used is because it is open source and beautiful, because it is the best at handling mathematical notation, and because of its inertial dominance in math and the hard sciences in Academia. The reason TeX has so, so many fixable problems after 30 years is because there is no financial incentive for anyone to fix it.

The answer is not to find a TeX alternative. This will not be possible in Academia for a very long time. The answer is for someone to plunk down a million dollars to hire some full-time developers to fix it. Honestly, the TeX language is wonderful; it's the editors which are terrible. A TeX editor should...

[] seamlessly hide the compilation process

[] feature a modern debugging environment

[] make 99% of commands (including everything you can do in MS Word) discoverable within the editor, rather than sending the user to the internet or some pdf guide, and

[] robustly handle all modern image types

...without becoming an unstable WYSIWYG hybrid like LyX. The only thing about the language itself that might need to be changed is some standardization of common packages. I shouldn't need to download anything to get appendices and sub-figures to behave sensibly.

The amount of professor, post-doc, and grad student time wasted on TeX is staggering, and easily justifies paying for an overhaul...if only the government or some benefactor would step up.
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LuaTeX can be used as a PDF writing library that has a "perfect" line breaking algorithm inside along with many other nice features. We use it as a base for our database publishing tool. Its absolutely reliable, has modern features (unicode, OTF) and can be programmed in a very decent language (Lua). You need to know TeX if you want to unleash all the power, but you don't need to program in TeX's macro language (which is fun but also a PITA).

I think that a new generation of TeX based applications will show up in the next 10 years.

Edit: some links:

http://luatex.org/ - official site

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuaTeX - wikipedia

http://wiki.contextgarden.net/LuaTeX - LuaTeX is now also the base of ConTeXt, a LaTeX alternative
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Ahh, the Internet. Where the phrase "open letter" is just another way of saying, "there's no way I could ever possibly get this guy's attention, so I'm just going to act like I'm writing it to him, but I'll make it public as it was really written with the purpose of driving traffic/making myself feel better/etc."

(Obviously there are rare exceptions, but they're usually not written to convince the writer's wife's favorite arguably-irrelevant rock star to change his mind. See: Thoughts on Flash, On the Subject of Patents, etc.)

Note: I don't disagree with his thesis.
I got tired of OpenOffice's IMHO clunky formula editor, so I thought: "Ah ha! Pros use TeX! So should I!" Then I saw how much fingertyping is necessary to reproduce what I was doing in OO, and I went back. Of course, I was trying to kill a field mouse with a nuke, so I should have expected to be disappointed. Any recommendations for a math-friendly TeX-lite for those of us who don't need all that power?
Good point. They seem to target the last leg(enterprise) of cloud shift with this. Pretty awesome to see how they are churning features.
the beliefs of most intellectual engineer types is that the nuclear power plant dangers have been solved.

Not at all true for the intellectual engineer types I know. You may want to reassess how much of your certainties are cultural.

it has been inconceivable to me that people making nuke plants could possibly underestimate the risks.

That sounds so inconceivably naive to me that, out of the context of the rest of your post, I'd be sure it was meant sarcastically.
It's a bit old, but still relevant:
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/85/bezos_2.html

If Bezos's personality is decidedly noncorporate, so are some of his ideas about how to run a large organization. One of Bezos's more memorable behind-the-scenes moments came during an off-site retreat, says Risher. "People were saying that groups needed to communicate more. Jeff got up and said, 'No, communication is terrible!' " The pronouncement shocked his managers. But Bezos pursued his idea of a decentralized, disentangled company where small groups can innovate and test their visions independently of everyone else. He came up with the notion of the "two-pizza team": If you can't feed a team with two pizzas, it's too large. That limits a task force to five to seven people, depending on their appetites.
More people die installing solar roof panels than in nuclear power accidents.

Do you really think the USA will stop building coal and natural gas power plants any time soon?
It's not like swine flu where something out of people's control might happen, purely based on speculation. At the moment you're fine, but that's because there are people deliberately keeping things at OK levels. If they stopped, things would stop being OK.

Not to say you should necessarily worry more yet, but just know that its not something that will sort itself out, it will require a solution.
Based on surface news, it can look that way; but honestly it sounds like you're trolling.

US was first with mass-produced cars (Ford); Japan with games (Nintendo). Both these past innovations were disruptive.

Today, the US is pioneering consumer DNA testing (eg. 23andme), portable computers (iPhone/iPad - industrial uses are appearing, it's not just games);

The suggested case is that Japan doesn't seem to be innovating disruptively (although Nintendo has been working great at some disruptive stuff: wii and a 3D handheld). Disruptive innovation is possible in cars etc, such as the smartcar, and hybrids. Note that the all-electric car, Tesla, is from the US - and it's not clear that it will succeed. That's a big part of the disruptive game.

If anything, I'm pro-Japan, but mostly I'm a fan of disruptive innovations, and I sincerely hope that Japan will find a way to become disruptive again. Maybe it's harder because they have an aging population now... yet this could be a plus, because they could lead the world in innovations to cope with that, that the rest of the world will adopt when they catch up.

Can you give examples of Japanese disruptive innovation in planes, ships, cars? (I see your account is 14 hours old, and your comment history is a mix of intelligent discussion and reddit-style quips - I urge you to favour the former on HN).

EDIT if you are interested in constructive argument here, I'll offer some of Christensen's thoughts on disruption: it is lower-cost and/or targets non-consumers of an established product (e.g. as wii expanded the userbase of "game-players"), but it's not good enough for high-end consumers (e.g. hard-core gamers); over time it improves and replaces the established product when it does become good enough (unless the innovation is "co-opted", as Kinect is trying to do with wii).
Des has very aptly compiled a list of the leading analytics tools and we’re honored to be included in this list alongside so many great tools (We use and love Chartio and Mixpanel).

I also definitely agree that it would be rather difficult for a single umbrella tool to cover everything, so segmenting the field into traditional web analytics, event-driven analytics, and social analytics makes a lot of sense. We hope to become the industry leader in the rapidly growing social analytics space, but our vision goes beyond that - like you said, Google Analytics primarily drives Adwords sales, whereas with social analytics, there are so many more actionable things you can do. Crowdbooster hopes to guide its users towards that end with our data-driven insights and actionable recommendations, such as telling you the best times to send out content (and giving you an easy way to schedule that content for delivery).
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Or may need the cash to rebuild their house, or to keep their business or their household afloat until the economy starts moving again.
Has anyone done credit card handling (input, submission to payment gateway, and storing for subscription billing and on-file orders) on EC2?

A while back I recall Amazon saying that this was possible. We're looking into the possibility of moving to the cloud, and on first look our PCI guy saw some problems. We've just started experimenting so could easily have overlooked something, but these were the stumbling blocks we saw. It looks like these new features address 2 of these 3:

• PCI requires limitations be based on outbound traffic from the cardholder environment. Amazon only allowed inbound filtering. Now they have outbound filtering, so this may be no longer problematic.

• PCI requires internal machines to be placed on internal private networks using NAT. Amazon did not support NAT. Now they do, so this block may be gone.

• PCI requires that all traffic be monitored with an IDS in the cardholder data environment. It doesn't appear possible to do a central monitoring machine with IDS in EC2.
Motivating your Sales Team
I did this once and every time I refreshed Google the ad price changed by a few $.
Nothing fancy. Often we get a few computers in such cases, and they reuse passwords. Or write it down somewhere (that's a common one).

Or you can "guess" it from likely combinations (names, dates etc.)
You say that, but your site still provides an easy way of associating people's real names with their usernames -- something highly useful for social engineering.
The wind is also not blowing on Tokyo. Could be much worse otherwise.
Assessment of of a severe accident in a spent fuel storage pool
if you want a gui equation editor, check out lyx [http://www.lyx.org/], which uses tex as its backend. texmacs [http://www.texmacs.org/] is another option worth exploring.
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especially when we leverage the same laws and protections?

As we, do you mean a few big companies, patent trolls or the bigger set of startups? I'm not a lawyer or a big expert in startups, but it seems to me that the latter do not leverage copyright laws that much.
Apple was founded with the proceeds from selling a VW bus and an HP calculator. Maybe with inflation that's $20k in today's dollars. And they were building hardware.

If anything the cost of doing significant startups in the intervening years has declined, certainly for software, but also for hardware too. Apple had to build their own factories, even after they got venture funding. Now nobodies can hire factories on demand for your hardware.

$100k in the right hands would do a hell of a lot. However, the government isn't usually the best at determining the right hands.
And power to him - if only everyone on the WP7 team cared this much. IMO these certainly aren't the words of someone just trolling for a job.
Wired has produced a good article how little connected Russians actually were at this time.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.04/russnet_pr.html