skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That video is done with an HTML5 video tag. The thing about the HTML5 spec is that it doesn't actually specify what format the video should be in, so different people use different formats and AFAIK no browser supports all the common choices out of the box. It's an unfortunate state of affairs, but it seems essentially irreconcilable — this is why WebM could have been a big deal. Apple chose to use the QuickTime file format here, presumably on the assumption that iPhone users will have iTunes installed and QuickTime with it.
M$ - Silverlight
Adobe - Flash
Google - WebM

Calling Apple out as if they are some how evil here is disingenuous. All the players are pushing their own formats.

Doesn't safari work without quicktime and support the <video> tag in html5?

How about calling Adobe out for "ruining the internet" with flash? I'm glad Apple kept them from ruining the iphone (like they are attempting with android).

[Edit: correct Flash to Adobe]
Thank you for your feedback.

1. About the reward; the returner does not know what the reward will be, however we do mention that there is a minimum $20 reward.

The business is built around the idea that the general public is good. They generally want to return someone's lost stuff. What we've found so far is that the label just makes the process possible, and painless.

That's why we have the "Good Karma" badge :)

2. Thanks, I have fixed the typo.

3. About the expansion with tamper proof stickers, that's certainly a possibility. We haven't done much corporate business yet, so we're not sure the demand for that sort of thing. Our early customers have mostly been individuals.

Thanks again for the feedback.
Yeah have some respect and save same space amongst the top stories for violent ranting about node.js
Most Y Combinator type starts I've seen are webapps, which can't exactly be pirated.
I have severe difficulty with the idea that's actually what's happening here, the iphone was nothing new when it came out and the good parts of it were assimilated into pretty much everything after it, and the better phones that came out after that point continued to beat the iphone in the feature and performance war generally speaking, it seems to me that apple got annoyed that the usability improvements that they made ended up being so trivial in the grand scheme of things and were/are unable to compete with the pace of evolution in the marketplace so wanted to try and force a result in the courtroom.

For this, I think they deserve what they're getting here.
That's the only way to get started in areas of copyright monopoly.

Think of it like any startup not checking if there are patents they infringe. If you think there's nothing wrong with the patent system, then you should be "pissed" about that too. But sane people tend to not be.
Perhaps part of it is this: I have an iPhone 3GS and didn't upgrade to an iPhone 4 when it came out because I was locked into my contract. By the time my contract ended, the 4 was 8 months old and I decided to hold off on upgrading until the 5 came out.

By releasing a 4s, Apple is most likely signaling that there will be a radically new phone released soon. (less than a year) I'm going to get a 4s (the new features are great and I can't really wait 6 months) but I probably won't ever actually get the 5 due to carrier lock-in.
How to Estimate the Value of Time Spent Talking to Somebody
So was the first McDonald's a startup?
pg's experience is clearly out of the ordinary because he is pg.

But I've had a not incomparable experience after having lived in SF for 3 months. Palo Alto is packed full of people doing interesting stuff, and you're bound to bump into them
Boo! Thanks for the heads-up. I'll track down the author or another GHC dev at POPL or one of the co-located workshops.
What if Siri could listen in on my phone calls?
Let's set aside all of what we think we know about Siri for a second and just focus on what it's base function is: voice recognition.

Then imagine applying that to a telephone conversation with all of Siri's wonder! I believe this could be even more powerful than just a virtual assistant when you call upon it...

Not just to have a transcript of the conversation, but to actually pull out useful information and create a history of the conversation, a summary from Siri's understanding.

Perhaps it could tell that you agreed to a meeting (or a date!) and put the event in your diary. Perhaps it could understand the other caller giving you their details such as email address or their physical address and automatically add that to your address book.

Sounds kind of creepy, bit if there was ever such potential, I think it would be absolutely killer!
Also a classic -- http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2251299.pdf?acceptTC=tru...
Joe, why are you so obsessed with making the web look like iOS? Just curious.
Five Worst Practices In Database Encryption
Starbucks takes phone orders from robots now? ;)
Thanks for the feedback, I fixed the PHP error.

The colors don't mean anything, just personal preference- not unlike iPod nanos.

We shipped out the labels your cofounder bought earlier today.

What is your business out of curiosity?
Virgin Mobile is $25 a month with unlimited data (and text) plus 300 minutes of talk.

edit: I have no idea what "unlimited" really means here.
Make Your WordPress Blog Look Like The Facebook Timeline
All I can really say is that I'm getting fed up of it. In keeping with your analogy, I'd certainly prefer one that gave me the odd slap and told me to get my shit together if I tried pushing my luck.

(programming languages and sado-masochistic tendencies would be an interesting avenue to explore...)
More Startups Adopt Transfer Restrictions, Insider Trading Policies
Yeah, anywhere in the World.
You should get up more frequently than every hour: http://ergo.human.cornell.edu/CUESitStand.html
Have you tried native scrolling in Safari on iOS? It sucks.
I understand the direction you're going in, and in order to scale, it's inevitable. I don't begrudge you that.

But my understanding is that in the past, you guys made something of an implicit guarantee that you would look at all submissions and be the point of introduction for great companies who don't yet already have an introduction. The necessary shift you are now making will eliminate this opening.

You mention that there is a community of gatekeepers and scouts, but I really don't see it this way. One cannot, by policy, contact anyone on the site without already having a "follower" relationship with them.

It would be nice to see a handful of angels/vcs take upon this mantle of being the go-to talent scout for great but unconnected businesses. There's no reason these people couldn't use AngelList as the platform on which to do it, of course.
This sounds a lot like SAP's in-memory database, HANA:

"SAP HANA is an integrated database and calculation layer that allows the processing of massive quantities of real-time data in main memory to provide immediate results from analyses and transactions."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2011/10/04/why-sap-hana-is-a...
In all fairness, that was written in August of 2009... 2 years is quite a long time for browsers to improve their script engines. I'm certain you're also running the latest Safari/Chrome/FF whereas many of my friends and family still are not.
When I meet people from the Valley they tend to talk how my startup might succeed and the interesting directions we could take. Conversely when I meet startup people from London (where I'm based) who haven't been to the Valley they tend to talk about why my startup might fail, usually focusing on competitors. Both are useful to talk about, but I think this reflects the optimism/cynicism divide between the Valley and everywhere else.

We said we'd move to the Valley if we were accepted to YC this winter, but I think the culture over there might be reason enough to do it regardless.
Virgin Mobile does not sell iPhones and throttles after 2.5GB of data usage.
The "D" just stands for "Dynamic". DRAM & RAM are pretty much interchangeable.
Gold Testing Upper Channel Line: Analysis 4/10/11
He was only illustrating how thick the Valley is with that kind of people, not claiming they'll come up and say "Hi" if they don't know you. I don't see how being Paul Graham makes it any more likely that people associated with startups will be at Oren's Hummus or in front of some random yogurt joint when you arrive (unless we're postulating some PGPS technology that tells entrepreneurs where they can meet Paul at any given time).
The social aspects of Rdio are what I love a lot. The ability to follow people, view and subscribe to their playlists, collaborate on playlists, etc.

All of that makes for a better overall music experience, especially for people always on the search for new music.
I really like this ad. The song is pretty catchy, too. It's time for Android to move on from the "Droid" like commercials. Perhaps those were good in the beginning to impress the very early adopters of Android, but Android is already very mainstream right now, and ads like the Droid don't resonate with many of the potential customers anymore. And they really need to stop advertising "specs" so much. Tell/show people the real "benefits" of using that phone. Don't show a nation-wide ad and talk only about specs, or worse yet, showing the phone very little in the ad.
All I'm saying is that in biological sciences, exactly how we "work" (and in particular, how our brains work) is still very much an open question, just as whether a machine can have intelligence is an open question in computer science. Unfortunately not having evidence for other theories does not even come close to proof of the theory in question.
I read this in comments when the last time CmdrTaco posted on HN. Full points for ethics.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3058565
Being a product manager is a lot like my experience in college. It's easy to do a bad job and get a C but takes a lot of work get an A.

I can't believe it's been over a year since I submitted my article covering the same topic:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1627668

I focused a little more on early stage startups, but a lot of the same rings through.

A lot of people have had experiences with bad product managers. From the feedback from my team, I don't think I fall into that camp. Here's why:

* I learn as much as I can about our technology stack. I try to understand what's hard and what's easy to build. I even write code for our app when I have a chance.

* I try to remove blockers so everyone else can do their job better.

* I give anyone on the team the opportunity to comment on the work that I'm doing. Nothing we're building is ever a surprise.

* I make our longer term goals clear and try to show how what we're building this week gets us closer.

I've never worked with bad product managers. I've always been the lone product manager on a team and have taught myself how to do the job well. It's something I enjoy doing, but can be pretty stressful. Ultimately, the buck stops with me and the success or failure of the execution of the product is on my shoulders.
It's just if the tab looses focus for more than a second or two it closes.
Why they watch the price to go up for short sale opportunity instead of just buying at the lower price?
Hopefully this hurts ATT & Verizon to the point of changing their pricing!

Though they are probably going to wait and see if Sprint adds a cap like Verizon did before making any prices/services changes on their end.

Hopefully this Sprint unlimited offer lasts more then six months!
Also missing from the list: Trello, a team collaboration / project management software. It's so free form that it can be less or more than that.
http://www.trello.com
IPhone Jailbreak 4.1 - Best Tutorial and Steps for Jailbreak iPhone Safely
Coffee - Can It Reduce Your Prostate Cancer Risk?
Tsunami Survival Capsule
So when Dove says "I've done it before", you're calling her a liar.

I think sometimes people think they've done it before, but by their statements, make it clear that they don't have the quite the perspective they're claiming. I regularly see people conflate early life independence (college, ramen, etc) with familial or generational poverty, which are not the same thing.

try buying a cheaper car.

This puzzles me. $5,000 is about the cheapest you're gonna get without having trouble within the first year. But assume you go cheaper, say, $2500. You still have to finance, because you don't have that kind of pocket change.

Now, the price is so low, nobody wants to give you a 2+ year loan on something that's hardly gonna make it out of the parking lot. So you get one year financing through the shady dealership themselves, again at 20% or something ridiculous.

That puts you at almost $250 a month for a car that's probably pushing 30 years old, with no guarantees. Did you really just save money?

Spending $65 racking up minutes and text messages is not your only option;

A one hour phone interview or discussion with your kids teacher can run $20 with a Tracfone. Imagine your brother was arrested, and you couldn't figure out where he was being held. This isn't a matter of chatting with your friends.

You can downvote me, I can take it, but it's amazing to me that people think that these scenarios are out of the ordinary.
It depends on how you define 'superior'. There is still value in 'ease of development'.
Any reason why you believe the Siri app sold previously is the EXACT same functionality as that inside iPhone 4S?

For one, I believe the iPhone 4S version works offline too.

If so, the "relaunching" part is not accurate, as you imply that what got relaunch is the SAME exact thing that was previously available.
Matching iTunes collection only matches songs which are also available in Rdio's catalog. Everything else you'll still have to open up iTunes to play, and you can't even mix and match.
It looks like you can now login without facebook. Good on them--I will give this a try.
I mentioned this the opposite way around a little while ago (mute the audio in countries where it isn't licensed, rather than blocking the video outright), but the conclusion was generally that the video and audio are muxed together into a single deliverable. The file is almost certainly pre-generated (once for each resolution) to avoid the server-side costs of merging them together for streaming.

I guess in theory you could generate a 'demux mapping' and the client could request byte-ranges corresponding to only one channel, but that seems incredibly complicated, would generate huge requests, and is probably bypassable on the client-side anyway (more of an issue for my idea than yours).
>I believe his net worth is somewhere near $800 million.

With 7% of facebook, his net worth is quite a bit higher. Given a facebook valuation creeping up on $100B, his net worth is probably in the $4-7B range.
What's the most epic photo ever taken?
Marketing Multi Level Tip: The Hedgehog and the Fox
Google updates privacy options for Google
But it can (and should be) fixed. It's not that difficult.

Choose a convention (ie: always $haystack before $needle), find the methods that don't conform, and print deprecation messages for them, add their replacements.

Then in the next major release, remove the deprecated methods. Hell, you could even put the deprecations in in a module so that those who can't/won't update their code won't have to be left behind.

It may be impossible to write a good language from the start, but that shouldn't deter from fixing those mistakes.
At some point I stopped clicking on the links in HN altogether. Instead, I go straight to the comments with an 'open link in new tab' command. If the article is worth reading, I go deeper from there. But the filter comes first.
Interviu cu câştigătorul lunii septembrie
Would be awesome to have a real-time visualization like this of traffic.
But let's say that you created a company from the ground up: 0 customers to 1000 customers in 18 months. Assuming those are good numbers, is it fair for the board to remove you? By adding a new CEO, could they clash with the culture and hurt sales? IMHO, adding a new CEO is like trying to predict the future. Nothing is guaranteed. If it ain't broke don't fix it.
How To Monetize Your Blog
Very very cool! :)
How often do Startups Join Together?
You can (and people do) use Capistrano to deploy php code.
You sound surprised. How could that feature work otherwise?
More interesting to me than the content of the email itself is the length. Jesus, that's a three-page email.

I have no idea how a long-winded email like this can be convincing. Effective communication is about quickly and concisely providing a message of substance, not writing 3 pages of fluff that could have by written in a paragraph:

Hey,

I love what you guys have been doing with Spotify. As you know, I had a very similar vision when I built Napster. I would love to extend my help in any of my area of expertise, whether it be the music business, the social space or potential investment.

Let's grab coffee and talk a little more!

Cheers,
-Sean
Show HN: PortCam, Instant Video Monitoring
Good explanation of benefits of being in a startup hub. However, are there advantages to being OUTSIDE a hub? I can think of at least two:

* Living and working outside a startup hub, you are more likely to encounter a problem nobody else has worked on before. In startup hubs, you have large number of startups working on small number of similar problems, while large chunk of profitable opportunities remain untapped. Why? Typical startup people don't encounter these problems. They are not talked about on startup blogs and you won't encounter that problem walking down University Ave in Palo Alto. In many cases, these opportunities are taken by old school, dinosaurs-like software firms who overcharge customers for their crappy software.

* Living outside a startup hub, you are exposed to users who are a good sample of the general population. This is not true for startup hubs, where users a lot more tech-savvy. While it seems at first that being surrounded by tech-savvy users is a good thing, this in fact may be a problem because building your startup based on feedback from these users may steer you in the wrong direction. You end up with couple of thousand "early adopters" who are enthusiastic about your product, but you are not able to expand further because your product just doesn't resonate with a true average user. On the other hand, if you can get a true average user to be your early adopter, the feedback you get from them will help you make a product which is attractive to a large number of users.

Of course, hubs are way overrepresented in the past success stories. However, more startups are started in the hubs, so it's not clear how actual success rates compare. I would love to see some stats for that.
You keep using that word, "Systemic obsolescence". I don't think it means what you think it means.

For one, it doesn't mean "buying a company that makes a product, stop selling that product standalone and bundle it with your own offering".

It means adding an artificial end-of-life to functionality in the things you sell. Not to stop selling (or in this case offering) a thing altogether.

If that was the case, any company discontinuing any product life (Apple discontinuing the Powerbooks e.g) would be "systemic obsolescence" too...

From wikipedia: "Planned systemic obsolescence is the deliberate attempt to make a product obsolete by altering the system in which it is used in such a way as to make its continued use difficult. "
How to upload a file with PHP
Since this was before the iPhone 4S was shifted from early summer, it made more sense a few months ago.

More sense than zero isn't significantly different from zero.

I said this a few months ago, and I stand by it now: there was no reason for Apple to refresh a product that had 4-week delivery times. They couldn't stock iPad 2s in Apple Stores, so it made zero economic sense to refresh only 6-8 months later.

(I think this was cletus's point, and FWIW I agree with it 100%)
because of dumb bureaucratic stuff.

most of the time your papers stay in one place for no reason for years ...mostly when it's going trhu the IRS equivalent.
Hey, I am interested in this as well, would you please forward the email to me as well? Thank you for your time and reply.

You can forward the message to me @ forrestpaul05@gmail.com
Random thing just happened ... as I'm reading about the Deuterium levels on earth versus the meteors, Pandora started playing a song by "Deuter" on an album called "East of the full moon". Was this a coincidence or some sort of unexplained phenomenon caused by some energy field that I emitted while reading the article?
The problem is not that "two different dudes implemented it. At different times. Probably, from different continents. They didn't notice it at the time". Is is that it was allowed to be added to the core library without it being questioned and fixed before it was too late to fix for compatibility reasons. That is the ultimate problem. I would rather a language or framework or library move slowly and correctly than add things haphazardly.
More importantly is why didn't it come out sooner

I think the simple answer is "they wanted to release iOS 5 with the new phone." Rumors point to a lot of delays in iOS 5 development.
This isn't the same as holographic 3D like the article claims. It is true that it will look different from different angles, but that isn't all that impressive. You could say that a television is sort of like a painting that moves. If you were to take a painting and then wrap it into a cylindrical shape, that wouldn't make it 3D, it would just make it differently shaped.

Likewise, this technology just projects onto on oddly shaped object. It doesn't magically add any of the depth feeling that you get from, for example, watching a movie with 3D glasses.

The reason this is so difficult is that when you view a real object, it reflects light in all directions so that your eyes actually see two different images when you look at it from two different angles (your two eyes, or any other arbitrary viewing angle).

Imagine that you were trying to make a projector that no human would be able to distinguish from a real window. Imagine that you had the requirement that the user would have to be able to look in different directions out the window and get different views just like a normal window would. What you would have to do is create pixels that can project different colors in different directions and maintain complete control over which color was projected in each direction. In short, you must create a pixel that will look different depending on which direction you view it from.

If you think of it this way, you basically would have to control each pixel as a series of subpixels, each subpixel pointing in a specific direction. To make it realistic, you would probably need thousands of subpixels for each pixel, increasing the requirement for number of pixels by thousands of times and decreasing the required minimum size by thousands of times. Also, you have to make the subpixels point in only one direction.

And that, my friends, is almost impossible.
Sure, I don't doubt it, I'm just saying it helps a lot to be among the more powerful people in the valley; the people you know that you run into are apt to be of a higher caliber.

Can I say again that I think Graham is probably right in this post?
Major PHP versions are the evolutionary jumps for the language. They don't tend to worry as much about backwards-compatibility when going from PHP3 to PHP4 to PHP5. I've read that PHP6 was supposed to take it further and outright remove a lot of deprecated and insecure aspects of the language, but I don't know if or when PHP6 will be released.

I agree that they should take things even further and really clean up the language before releasing the next major version. Fix the needle-haystack vs. haystack-needle inconsistencies, function naming conventions, and so forth.

The adoption rate of a new major version on shared hosting providers is relatively slow, so it'd be a perfect time to really shake things up and clean it up.
Oracle Public Cloud