skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quicktime is worse than slow--its not even standards compliant, and most ordinary H.264 video will not play back on it properly (and that subset seems to change on every release).

From an actually-working standpoint, its even worse. I had to install Quicktime a while back on Windows to convert some weird-format Quicktime YUV files to something usable--it instacrashed upon trying to convert it. After reinstalling a few times it worked, but it took over 2 hours to start the conversion. This was a conversion from raw YUV to raw BMP. Oh, and then it took about 2 days to do the conversion for a single film. Seriously, folks.

I've constantly heard its much better under OS X; but at least my experience on Windows says its not merely bad, but the single worst media player I have ever used (yes, worse than Real.)
Finance Information
Your Guide to Finance, Loans, Insurance, Mortgages, Forex, Currency Exchange, Credit Cards and other Financial things.
It's branding. And it's entirely relevant who's dispensing the advice.
It's a small calculator-like device, more or less the size of the credit card.

Their reasoning for why it's supposed to be better than SMS:

a) you are not dependent on a third party (mobile phone operator), so that you couldn't access your account when there is no coverage, or your battery is dead, etc;

b) with SMS you get authorization once per session, with card reader each transaction gets unique authorization (you have to enter a transaction details twice - online and in the reader). So even if somebody "listens in" to your traffic, they would be just able to reply your actions exactly, not use your credentials to do their actions.

This layer of protection also exists for SMS solution, but it's limited as they use printed grid of codes for additional authorization of transactions. So that in principle if somebody hijacks your traffic for a long enough time, they would be able to reconstruct your static grid of codes. Or they could phish you to give your codes (it did happen, there is a big red warning on their homepage).
It was scribd automatically when I posted the link. I can ask pg to take it down, if necessary, it's too late for me to delete the submission.
Is that really the standard that they should be shooting for?
Doh, my cleverness has come back to bite me. Thanks a lot, brain.
I like Hurricane Electric, fine folks over there. It shows in their actions. I'd give them my business any day. Consider them if you are in the Bay Area.
I should note that things at Georgia Tech today are not quite so dire as jhancock describes them being. Yes, classes are still quite hard and you still have to take a lot of painful ones to get through (often simultaneously, especially if you want to pursue other opportunities like research, internships and co-op).

But in my 5+ years at GT I've never felt a lack of support made available to me. TAs, professors, tutors (in some cases) and other resources have always been pretty readily available. Most of all, the "fight the shaft" perspective means students are generally willing to help eachother out and work together.

Far fewer classes are graded on a bell curve, too, though the average GPA at Tech remains around a 2.7 or 2.8 and it really is uncommon for people in the harder majors to graduate with a 4.0.

That's not to say that the Institute can't use more resources to do a better job than it is currently doing. But for better or worse, GT is no longer the throw you in the pool and see if you manage to swim school it once was.
ding dong the witch is dead!
Nope, lisp without garbage collection isn't feasible. Tried it - didn't work out. Let's start with an ordinary lisp implementation, and replace garbage collection with stacklocal and manual allocation. Then using a couple of examples I'll show that you end up with a monstrosity.

You can do a lot with stack-local allocation, but not everything. I think it's fair to say that a Lisp without closures is a useless Lisp.

A clever compiler can optimize something like

(print (reduce (list 1 2 3 4) (lambda (x y) (+ y x))))

such that it works without any garbage collection. The list you create is a local variable, the lambda function is a pure function without state (no closure necessary) and reduce is also a pure function.

You might think that if you can do this, you can express almost everything without garbage collection. Unfortunately, not really.

Suppose you have `revere-list` function. E.g.

(reverse-list (list 1 2 3 4)) # '(4 3 2 1)

We previously assumed that the list was a local variable, created as a function argument. Now reverse-list must return a copy of the list, as the original list ceases to exist when the function returns. That's a problem, because it means you have to make deep-copies of every object on function calls. No big deal, you say: a lot of languages call-by-value. Well, yes, but it _is_ a big deal. Because it means you have to introduce & and * so you can describe when you want a by-copy and by-reference assignment.

So you get a lisp with pointers. A lot of fun, but not all that practical.

(= *(elt my-list 3) (+ *(elt my-list 3) 1))

Yes, it's exactly what you think it is. 'elt now returns a reference to a list element, that you have to dereference before assignment. Ugly, but it works right?

Oh no. It gets worse. What if you create a function that returns a reference to a function argument (stack-local!)? Segfault.

A lisp with pointers that can segfault at any point? That's it. I'm going back to C.

I've skipped a lot of steps here (I could go on for hours), so you have to read really carefully to see how every problem is a logical consequence of each assumption. Sorry for that...

I've been trying to find the perfect balance between stack-allocation (RAII) and garbage collection, and it's a lot tougher than it seems.
Yes, paying a consultant for the information that you just got from a free blog post is "dead and BS"
The Edited Palin: Can Journalism Be Too Objective?
Very happy to hear your report. I was told that switching to semesters was an attempt to deal with the fast pace we always felt under the quarter system.

It really was a great education and the pains we experienced did bond the students in natural support groups. I have several life long friends from that journey. Other than going to UGA and having more access to women, I wouldn't have done it any other way ;).
Their free IPv6 tunnels are awesome. I'll be interested to see if they can somehow use their foothold in the IPv6 market to become a dominant player when the v4 address crunch forces v6 mainstream.
Do you know of any specific ones? From what I've seen, RDF storage engines currently implemented, such as the various engines in Sesame, are all pretty slow.

I'm doing a bit of work on trying to implement an RDF store on top of HBase - has anyone thought about this and would be interested in throwing ideas around?
Oh my gosh, I can't imagine we all are wasting so much time discussing this. Don't we have anything more useful than being obviously self-righteous?
>> too deliberately nasty

Well said. I have nothing against tabloids per se, but I always felt that they just didn't know how to do it properly, or that the tabloid practice applied to tech scene didn't work that well. I don't miss them...
They could have easily been Facebook, but they charged for membership instead.
Clayvalet in Hindsight: Founder Mikhail Seregine dispenses lessons learned
Ask HN: Rate my startup (video)
http://vimeo.com/2231638

Would love to know what you guys think.

Beware of the discontinuity @ 6:44 :)
Sorry, no public demo available (yet).
Well, I'm not a Javascript coder, but you use accurate tick counts for performance profiling, not the coarse-grained time of day clock.

I thought everyone knew that?
I don't see how latency would be a big problem for file storage. Home user file reads and writes are very spatially coherent, right? Keep the first N bytes of each file in a local cache, and when the user starts to read a file, you're pre-buffered. Note that this is just a cache; the whole file is still reliably stored at the remote site.

Users probably use the same small subset of files over and over again, too, so you don't even need to keep the head of all the files to eliminate most latency effects.
This brought back some good memories for me. (I mean the post only). My final year project at engineering was (an attempt) to build an EEG machine (design). I was not much of a hardware guy, and did it as a last chance (at least for a while) to learn a bit more. The other option in my mind was to may write a RTOS or something but i thought that can happen any time later as well.

Joerg Hansmann (the leading hacker behind this hardware design) was simply awesome and very helpful with sharing his knowledge about the circuit design. (This was late 2001). It was actually the first time i realized the true worth of open source communities, and their role in sharing of knowledge and information.

Thanks geius for posting this, i ought to contribute back to this community for sure, in one way or the other.
White House Loses Email Case
Valleywag occasionally had some interesting stuff... key word: "occasionally".

Most of the time they were just picking really petty things to complain about, trying to turn it into a controversy.

Maybe now that it's just a column on Gawker the signal-noise ratio will increase (hopefully they'll offer a Valleywag-only RSS feed... I don't care much for the rest of Gawker)
Source of 75% of sent spam forced offline
Damn, now how am I going to find out what Kevin Rose is up to?
Your suggestion is open to:

a) echo chamber: you'd get a lot more lisp/arc startups funded than you should

b) gaming: I'll get all my friends to join so they can vote to give me money

I haven't reread "Wisdom of the Crowds" recently, but this answer just rings false to me. For example, I don't invest based on comments on Google finance.
You can get the same input via the auditory channel. All you need is webcam and software, or a Series 60 mobile phone:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3171226.stm

http://www.seeingwithsound.com/
Träffa tjejer
En sida med tips om hur man ska göra föra att träffa svenska tjejer för dejting på Internet. För killar och tjejer som är över 35 år, har nätdejting blivit det vanligaste sättet att träffa en livskamrat i Sverige.
Any book that's worth reading will be scanned, run through OCR, and distributed for free. Google IS the catalogue. End of story.
Welcome to DeepDyve
I don't get this.

Quote:
To better understand the results I was getting I built a little tool that runs a number of tests: Running an empty function, looping 10,000 times, querying and looping over a couple thousand divs, and finally looping over and modifying those divs. I ran all of these tests back-t0-back and constructed a histogram of the results.

What's the point of doing this? It's a microbenchmark, and it's pretty unclear what you're measuring. Why put so much effort in writing a blog post with graphs and the whole shebang just for this?

Even if you _did_ get constant results the results would be uninteresting. The results are either uninteresting and unreliable, or uninteresting and reliable. Shortcircuit logic keeps me from worrying about reliability.

And that the Windows GetTickCount/GetTime functions have a bad precision is common knowledge. No test is needed to establish that.

I'm pretty sure Resig is a smart guy, so I'm probably missing the point here. But I really don't understand what he's trying to accomplish here, or why the results are worth blogging about.
I play with EEG hacking in my spare time. I was shocked to find out that one of the commercial ones has NO protection circuitry in theirs, and after discussing with their engineer they simply recommended to me that I should unplug the laptop from the socket!

I brought this up with one of my engineers, and he said I was getting my knickers in a twist; the likelihood of dying from this truly would be a series of unfortunate events.

So: beware, even with the commercial units. Dissect them to be sure!
Ashtanga Yoga: Jump Through Video Title
Ashtanga yoga jumpbacks explained in details... never seen ashtanga jump backs explained like this. On the site, there is FREE e-course on 7 Secrets of Nutrition & Flexibility. Worth seeing!
Worse Than Random
Looks very interesting and promising. I'm not sure if I have much use for it just yet but I think I would be easily convinced after seeing more examples of useful apps. I also like the domain name and applaud you both on the immense amount of work I'm sure it took to make the product.
So what the deal with "founder" vs "co-founder"? English is not my first language, and I am not sure I understand the difference correctly.

Founder / founders came up with the original idea? There can be many, right?

Co-founder is the next person/persons that came in at a really early stage?

Only semantics? Or a big deal?
Crap! I liked Valleywag. :(
You are looking at things backwards. If you try to describe a raindrop by mapping the position of every single atom or molecule, you are creating information. But the raindrop itself does not contain any information, because it is completely random. It has no memory, and so cannot store information.

There is a very small amount of information in a raindrop, no matter how complex it is from the molecular structure.

The entire argument is flawed. It's based on a completely wrong premise - information is not the same thing as structure.

I can't explain this any better, you will need a leap of intuition to understand what I mean, but when you get it, it will be obvious.
Ask HN: How to get Ads fit the Content?
I use Google AdSense to display ads on my web-app (dezidr.com). Unfortunately, the ads don't really fit the contents. Take this as an example: http://dezidr.com/en/home/show_option/295.

Do you know how to get better ads? Is there a way to optimize AdSense? Are there ad-services with better targeting?
Thanks for any idea!
> The question is, are they worth 30 dollars? I doubt each of them brings in that much revenue in advertisements.

Facebook's per-user revenue is negative, as has been very well discussed on Techcrunch. Which is sad - they know a lot more about their users than Google does. They should be stealing ad revenue from television.
What's the technical underpinnings of the stateful stuff? Is it more than multithreading? Ruby specific? Seems neat, but hard to tell if it will really be useful (in possibly the same vein as javascript-based "OS in a browser"s). Can you come up with a killer app? Or reproduce a well known mashup with very few lines of your own code?

On the backend, you'll definitely need sophisticated monitoring/resource allocation stuff once you have users, right?
Friends and family..
Internet Encourages Delusions of Persecution, Schizophrenia
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22the...

as soon as the article asserted this wouldn't work, i tried googling, and it worked fine. i stopped reading after that.

edit: for whatever reason, if you follow the link directly, the search results are wrong. you might have to submit the query again after the page loads to get the right results. weird! maybe he was onto something (nope)
I like it, it's cool :)
Although I can't currently think of a use for it for myself.
No it won't. You see all music/movies on p2p sites, because it is so unbelievably easy to share your music/movies even against wishes of copyright holders. For everything else - books, software, academic papers etc. - you only see the popular ones, not the long tail, and the long tail is where the real value is.
We've been using Pivotal Tracker at Hashrocket for over six months and it's an integral part of our success. It's an opinionated tool in the way that it codifies a successful Agile workflow between developers and their project stakeholders. We couldn't live without it at this point.
Very nice, but can you skip the first step? You have to send "ping" first?

If I use a service multiple times, I would already know what input the app needed. For example, "Weather NY".
"It's a platform for creating widgets for the mobile web". Platforms don't make money. A platform is not a business.

"We don't really know what widgets are." Following on the point above, you're creating a platform (a non-specific, generic "thingy") for creating widgets (non-specific, generic "thingies") for the mobile web (something that's not even really defined properly yet. Non-specific businesses are almost without exception failures. Only huge businesses like Sun and Microsoft and Amazon can afford to release "platforms" without going broke.

Here's the most valuable advice you can get at this point if you want to build a start-up (that's a business, meaning it needs a path to making money) is:

Find one or two specific customers who have a need that this fills, and fill it, and get them to pay for it. Specific wins the day.

Since you've built a platform, you may well have to go one step closer to customers before you can help them. Design an application that people will be willing to pay for, using your (admittedly very cool) platform. Then, once you have your app and you have profits, over time you might want to open up the platform to other people.

Repeat once more: a business is an entity that makes money. A platform is not a business.
The article headline is correct, but the explanation given in the article is incorrect. Our frame of reference for the successor to the iPod won't be the iPod itself because, like the Walkman, it will be completely different from its predecessor.
And I guess it would also be nice to have just 1 single bot in jabber.

everything@mybot.im .. instead of having 10 bots for 10 different things.. (would clutter things up pretty fast)

Just send an identifier to the bot when you first ping it to tell it what app you want to access.
I see your point... I really liked this story though. What I'm doing right now is building the pre and post-sales engineering/support groups for a hardware-based startup. We're bringing a new and interesting product to market, and several of us are out in the streets everyday saying "Hey! Want to buy a hot dog?". Tradeshows, marketing events, pretty much all the standard stuff. And, like the hot dog man, we're doing very very well with it so far.

Every day, though, I must hear about how the industry we're in and the world in general is cutting back spending, slowing down their purchases and so on. It would be very easy to listen to this news, and scale back our efforts and go off to cower somewhere. If we did this, we'd surely sell much less hotdogs than we do now.

A big part of my job is keeping folks in the sales team motivated, focused and ready to spot hot-dog selling opportunities. This story was deeply parallel to things encountered at our startup every week. It was a bit inspiring to me, and I thought it might also be a bit inspiring to people who are in the same position.
From his website:

"I'll probably keep working on topological quantum field theory and other wimpy subjects"

I would be careful what you tell him to go read...
That said let me add that this does look extremely cool and promising, and developers will inevitably be all over this. But also remember that developers are unlikely to make you any money because a) they don't like to spend money, b) they are insanely creative about ways to "do it themselves" to avoid having to pay you money.
I realize now that we didn't show a stateful app, but basically an application is run in steps, and the boundaries between steps are the calls for user input because the app must pause to wait for input. So we store the last instruction executed and halt the app. Then when input is provided, the app is restored at the proper point and continues running. It is not ruby specific, but it is _much_ easier to build this with interpreted languages.

I don't think we have the killer app yet, but we implemented a mobile interface to google calendar with ~5 lines of code which I've been using for a little while, and its surprisingly useful. When all is said and done, I think we might want to simply pitch this as a platform for adding mobile features to your existing app, so it becomes more of a developer tool than a consumer facing product.

As for monitoring, yes, it becomes a tricky task to achieve high availability (and scalability), but its a really fun problem to tackle :)
POPFile has stopwords because people in the community insisted on it. My commercial email filtering software does not because it turned out that in my tests that the accuracy difference they made was so small as to be in the noise. And they were costly in terms of time to check, and to maintain across different languages.
If your first line of code is 'x = prompt', there is no ping needed to invoke the application. I should have touched on that in the video because it ends up being a very bad user experience if it requires a ping to start your app.
You've made a kind of Automator software (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automator_(software)) for the web. This is pretty nifty! With more integration with services it could actually be pretty useful.

Don't know how you can make money though :(
Looks pretty sweet, I could probably think of some way to use it :)
There were some mobile features that I wanted to implement on an orthogonal project that I'm toying with, and I noticed that there were no good APIs for IM-enabling your app, and I wasn't truly satisfied with the existing SMS solutions, so we built this. However, to your point, we need a killer app to really show the potential of the platform. Arguably though, it might make the most sense to simply target my original use case, and build the platform for developers who want to add mobile features to their products but don't want to spend huge amounts of time figuring out exactly how to do so in a scalable and highly-available way.
I second the notion. Read crossing the chasm. What swombat is saying is "find a beachhead, dominate it, then open the platform". Think about facebook and how they dominated one niche then opened it up to everyone else; this model has been used many times successfully for platform companies. The hardest part about this is maintaining focus on the beachhead when you get popular, and saying no to other segments. until you are ready.
time to put the site as a "hidden service" http://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en
Definitely agree. And its really easy to do so because you control the code. I actually have a bot that just executes whatever function name I give it, and I have a bot that runs arbitrary system commands on my server, which is kind of like having an IM terminal (_not_ recommended for security purposes :))
Zappos is awesome. This was a truly inspiring speech. Here is a nice interview done on Zappos by Nightline.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFyW5s_7ZWc
I now realize the asterisk symbol doesn't work the way I thought it did.
The danger of having stupid uneducated diffident family members or very close friends
> Water: how wet is it?

That depends on the contact angle with the surface the water is touching.