skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hold on a second: HD means a resolution of at least 1280x720. Anything lower than that is at best SD (720x480) but most probably less.
I understand we're talking about online videos where the quality and resolution is clearly lower than what's done in the broadcast industry but the terms used should still mean the same thing.

So, overall, very few video sites out there are encoding in HD and especially not YouTube.

What DarkShikari is saying is that h.264 is the codec used to encode the video. h.264 can be used for videos for mobile to HD.
HD is referring to the pixel resolution of the video. Both are completely independent.

I suppose that by "not really based in reality", you mean that most people doing HD are using h.264. That's true but that was not your question.
Bionic hand is top 50 invention
hmm, i predicted this a year ago. the universe as we know it may be in the center of a "black shell". think of it as a bubble wall of black hole mass.

the shrinking of the bubble is probably consuming galaxies on the outer reaches of the "universe" which is the source of gamma ray bursts.
Honestly, I don't think I would need that so much. That's why I didn't buy Netshare when it was available.

But I can't stand not being able to use my "unlimited" data plan the way I feel like.

And I'm afraid that AT&T would make this available for an extra fee...
Fantastic game. I actually thought Psychonauts was even better. Tim Schafer is a very rare gem.
In general you don't need to give beta testers much more than thanks, and the chance to try shiny new things. Earnest thanks tends to make them pretty happy, all by itself.

Btw, What's your startup, silencio? My email is dani.fong at gmail.
Why was this deleted?

[Posting as a reply to dangoldin's comment b/c I can't post a top-level reply.]
[ $(( $RANDOM % 6 )) == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo "You live"

That would be the correct bash syntax...though apparantly the other way works...
Funny how it's really not THAT different than computers today, right? We just have more colors and higher resolution, and slightly better text-to-speech. ;)
Looks like a lot of their customers aren't too happy: http://www.ripoffreport.com/searchresults.asp?q5=the+right+o...
Workwear
Workwear - Midwest WorkWear is the leading provider of Carhartt Outdoor Work Clothing, Flame Resistant Clothing, Flame Resistant Clothes, Shirts and Pants, and functional work clothing for any occupation.
As Silver himself wrote yesterday, Alaska's voting pattern was nothing short of bizarre, with Young, Stevens, and McCain getting votes at 12 to 14 percent each above their pre-election polls, and turnout about 14 percent below 2004 levels.

"Indeed, it seems possible that the number of "questionable" ballots could be quite high. So far, about 220 thousand votes have been processed in Alaska. This compares with 313 thousand votes cast in 2004. After adding back in the roughly 50,000 absentee and early ballots that Roll Call accounts for, that would get us to 270 thousand ballots, or about a 14 percent drop from 2004. It seems unlikely that turnout would drop by 14 percent in Alaska given the presence of both a high-profile senate race and Sarah Palin at the top of the ticket."

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/what-in-hell-happened...

Read on for more of his WTF explanation. We should all stay tuned for this one.
When I saw this, as part of a class, I was surprised that we had text-to-speech way back then. I'd always assumed that came much later.

I also love Jobs' dramatic flair. He was kinda campy when he was younger.
From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FiveThirtyEight.com):

The site compiles polling data through a unique methodology derived from Silver's experience in baseball sabermetrics to "balance out the polls with comparative demographic data"[1] and "weighting each poll based on the pollster's historical track record, sample size, and recentness of the poll."
Glad you like them! They're all made by us, yes. We're getting quite a few together now... we'll probably have to redesign the site.
Now that the "Bradley effect" has been truly buried as a meme we should start a new one: the "Stevens effect" is the unwillingness of people to admit to a pollster that they are going to vote for a crook because he occasionally brings home pork to their remote little welfare state.
I remember that article when it first came out. It's still good advice for any hacker -- learning through experimentation!
I believe, but I'm not for certain, that developing a plan includes also coming up with new and helpful ways to do community service, not just a "here, 50 hour requirement, go have fun." That's something the Bush admin would do, I sure hope an Obama admin won't.

I also don't think its necessarily the best thing to do... perhaps he should give incentives to school districts that implement such a system but make the school districts responsible for it.
Such transparency with his Agenda. I think he's already made his first big step towards change.
I ran it for our two primary sites - one returned $5.5m, the other $500k - only ~$800m short!!
I believe that 100 hours of community service also includes $4000 worth of tuition credit, but we'll see. Remember that this is his idealized plan, now he has to govern.

Obviously compulsory volunteerism won't actually be mandated. This is America.
Sounds like a great job. GIZA++ is an incredible piece of software and it sounds like they've got a great team.
This year, there was also Dean Kamens "Luke Arm":

http://gizmodo.com/5048872/dean-kamens-full-bionic-luke-arm-...
So, if your site needs a full-time programmer, it's worthless. I mean, it's worth something to you because it can be your income. However, it's not worth anything to an owner since they'd be paying all of the income to a programmer (yes, even if that's themselves since they aren't getting the site for free).

I think this is false. If the buyer is able to run the site without hiring a programmer then the site provides a valuable income for the buyer. That income is a reward that could make the buy price worth it for the buyer, since the buyer will save the salary of the employee, no?

I think when selling a web site or web application, it's important to choose a buyer that will know how to draw value from it, instead of squander its profits on employees that will do the work that the owner should be doing.
Considering the financial crisis where a lot of publicly traded companies have lost 30% of their value, losing 18% isn't all that bad.
It didn't work for Napster. The Napster now isn't the same as the one from the 90s. The Napster now legally sells music. Just like iTunes, Amazon, and Wal-Mart online.

And Youtube is still being sued for not removing copyrighted videoes. And they've yet to prove to actually make any money off of it.
imagemagick is the command line swiss army knife of image processing and conversion.
The article: two-level threading does not perform.

The fact: author failed at creating an efficient two-level threading system, made a far-fetched conclusion and called proponents of the idea names.
Getting Started in Android Game Development
The real question is: How good were the betting markets?
Facebook’s Zuckerberg: We Don’t Need More Money
Meebo Takes Advantage of Android Multitasking for IM App
To be statistically meaningful, 538 will have to be this good for several more elections.
I never played the game, but this design doc is truly fascinating. Def in my top 5 HN finds.
http://change.gov/americaserves/plan

The Obama National Service Plan
NEED CONTENT

nice.
Evaluating the effectiveness by 'how many they got right' can be pretty flawed. For example with Franken/Coleman. How 'wrong' are they when something they projected as a 48% chance happens. If you had 10 races that where similarly close you would have to expect to get about 4 or 5 of them 'wrong'. You may actually find that according to their own probabilities they were somewhat 'lucky' in having so many results tip to their most favoured result. Or perhaps they could be 'unlucky' to miss Minnesota.

A better way would be to check their results against other 'odds producing' predictive mechanisms. So if a another method has Stevens at 20% and 538 has Stevens at 30% then that actually counts as a win for 538 because they were 'less wrong'. The bigger the difference in their odds the bigger the win. In the real world this would translate to 538 winning money from the other method.

I'm sure there are better and more valid statistical techniques for doing this though. I'm hoping that someone gets around to it because I'd be keen to see the results.
Freeing UK Government Data
I can't imagine PG directing that essay either toward a business the size of facebook now nor toward someone with the intent of telling them to get to facebook's size before having profit (let alone revenue) figured out. It's one thing to have an application and not have the price points figured out. It's an entirely different thing to not have any idea at all how you'd substantially monetize your customer base. In fact you might not even consider it a customer base but just consider it an expense base.

Of course I've nothing against charities. I think I might have a problem with it if I invested with the expectation of a direct ROI. The parent to my comment seems to contend (evidently? am I being trolled?) that it's ok to be five years into a business without not only not having a notion of how you might profit, but not even having a clear source for a plausibly profitable source of revenue.

On second thought spending money without the notion of a return is not even a charity, it's consumption.
Top 25 Free iPhone Web Apps for Your Daily Life
It means incubators more in the style of Pittsburgh. In Pittsburgh, most of the seed money is supplied by the state of Pennsylvania and invested via organizations like http://www.pittsburghlifesciences.com/ and http://www.innovationworks.org/. These organizations effectively provide due diligence for the entire (small) VC community.

What we will get is more available investment money in cities that need it. It is certainly arguable whether this is good for the overall entrepreneurship environment. I take the position that it is good.
Making Money with Memorabilia
If you happen to be a movie fanatic and you collect everything from posters, key rings, hats and t-shirts then, you may not know this, but you could potentially be sitting on a goldmine. So many people would spend countless days collecting all these items for themselves, and more often than not, they would just let it all pile up in a cupboard somewhere and allow it to collect dust.
Microsoft considers adopting WebKit for Internet Explorer
I love my iPhone, but this is one of the features I miss the most from my old WM phone.
This is tricky. IMHO it's worse to flood the field with people not really interested in the subject. I'd rather first de-stigmatize compsci to keep the good ones. Also make a cultural change to eliminate the career death at 40.

Clean Room Technician: You know what they do with engineers when they turn forty?
[to Aaron, who shakes his head]
Clean Room Technician: They take them out and shoot them.
Battered, but not broken: understanding the WPA crack
It's Microsoft that you should ask not to mess up Windows 7. But I doubt that it will make a difference.
Nagpur Hotels
The good old adventure game genre, seemingly dead today except for perhaps Psychonauts, but the home of so many great games.

My favorite is Star Control II; perhaps a bit more action-oriented than a "pure" adventure game, but still in many ways true to the concept. And, like many adventure games, brilliantly hilarious at times (Zoq-Fot-Pik, anyone?)
California votes yes to high-speed rail
Microsoft rules out Yahoo acquisition (again)
What follows is a pretty harsh opinion, but I'm going to attempt to state it:

In the 80s when RICO laws were being extended to drug dealers, my strict judicial process viewpoint was that you simply cannot take away property prior to a conviction. Over the years, many courts and subsequent laws have supported this practice and now its part of our legal fabric whereby many thousands of drug dealers have seen _all_ their assets seized prior to trial (and that includes anything they put in other peoples names). A judge doles out from the seized assets to allow the accused to pay attorney fees throughout the legal process and if found guilty, the gov keeps the bounty.

As this practice has become standard and well vetted by our court system, I think its about time we start applying it to those that destroy our economic fabric and treat them in the same fashion we would treat a drug kingpin.

Ken Lay should have never had a house in Aspen to go to to die after being found guilty in Texas. He should have had no assets and been escorted straight from the courtroom to a holding cell to await sentencing.

If Paulson and many thousands of others are found guilty of fraud or gross mismanagement or collusion, we should wipe out their entire fortunes in addition to the 5 to 20 years of prison time. And God forbid we find out they illegally offshored some money...we'll need to tack on extra years for that.

I am a hard working entrepreneur. I invent real things that create sustainable jobs and tangible assets. People that only flip money around while defrauding investors should be treated the same as drug dealers.

I know many will think that those cheating the system are doing so "semi-legally" in that if there were no or few regulations, then they didn't technically violate the law. However, most states have "fraud legislation" that defines fraud as "what 12 members of a jury think it is." I think its about time we start putting some of these massively wealthy people that have fleeced the public in front of a jury of "our peers" and give them a fair trial.
Mary Meeker’s View Of The World In 50 Slides
Yes please.

Though this was apparently an off the cuff remark. I'll believe it when I see it. I also take anything reported by AppleInsider with a grain of salt.
God, I wish it was a possibility. But this headline seems specious. Ballmer's saying that for the time being Microsoft is staying the same. Them "considering" the route means nothing for current development.

If Internet Explorer become a WebKit browser I'd cry with joy.
A fair point, until you figure in this:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081106/bs_afp/usitinternetyaho...

"'To this day, I would say the best thing for Microsoft is to buy Yahoo,' Yang said"

If he wanted to sell, he should have done it then, not now.
Hi Prakash, this is Jonathan (from infoaxe).

Would it help if infoaxe tracked and made available to you all the urls you have shared with friends in the past? infoaxe offers ways to share content from your web memory (over email and to facebook) and we could archive and show this ordered by time or something similar.

Email me at jonathan@infoaxe.com if you have other suggestions/questions. Thanks for trying out the alpha!
Google and Amazon? Bad plans that happens to work?

Your music site could be monetized in hundreds of various ways. You don't know which traditional ones would work if you don't try. And if you're big enough -- here's the magical part -- you can even get to try non-traditional routes that might just click. That's the whole point of drafting up business models and financial projections and replacing it when need be.

But if you can get 110 million users in 2 years, can cover overhead for 200 top notch engineers and a legion of sales/bizdev team as well as world class infrastructure, hey, I'm not going to be calling you out for not having figured out how to make money on it.
I would really like to see more research on the relationship between metabolism and aging (not passage of time, but actual cellular aging, I think referred to as mitochondrial aging?)

I had thought that low metabolism, meaning a low pace, or clock to the body's energy consumption, would imply a slower aging action, but a cursory search on google immediately turned up some research that says it may be just the opposite: that high energy consumption (not food consumption, energy use by the body) in mice seems to lead to greater longevity...

Anyone with a more detailed understanding, please?
No, not in the woods, but i tried parkour when i was 17 and it was fun for a while, but then i hurt myself and that was the end of it. I could try orienting next spring.
There is this moral hazard precisely because the government ends up bailing out the irresponsible (following the "too big to fail" mantra).

Instead, just let the financial companies (in fact, all companies, including GM) take full responsibility for what they do.
Are you familiar with their financials? Their sales decks? Their full range of advertising products?

Are you aware of the revenue for other social networks? MySpace is going to clear $1 billion in revenue this year, a year faster than Google did. Facebook isn't doing the same numbers but they could, they limit the advertising in order to increase user experience and pursue non-traditional advertising to avoid having their site end up as a friendster. These are strategic decisions, and if it takes them 10 years to fulfill it then, great. That's on them. Maybe that sort of investment secures them 25 or 50 years of high margin profits.

There is no textbook time-line for companies to follow.
THE greatest game ever.
ugh. how big is your library? try killing your profile and just starting from scratch?
What are the advantages for Microsoft if they were to make the change to WebKit? I know developers would love it, but is it really worth giving up complete control on their end? When it comes down to it they have their own best interest in mind, not developers'.
Really great iPhone resources site. I am acutally the iPhone 3G user and found it very useful.
I'm not going to be putting words into pg's mouth but if he's not going to be ecstatic that a YC company can grow into Facebook's size in just 5 years then I don't know what could possibly excite him.

He has, however, mentioned that he doesn't like the fact that companies take buyout offers within a year or two of starting up because that decision to sell prohibits them might limit them from being big, great, companies.

Big companies that can walk into a room and just push people around because of their sheer size. Companies that can introduce and try out both traditional and non-traditional advertising methods, companies that can sign lucrative exclusivity contracts, companies that can get 250 million in the bank at insane valuations, companies that can establish connective tools with other major websites.

Considering their competitive advantage and global reach of Facebook, I'm more willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for the time being.

PS. People that disagree are trolls. Classy.
Actually, that's more or less the purpose of government.
I don't really care much about their desktop browser, but dear God I hope they do something about the mobile one. It's truly awful.

I actually like WinMo 6 for the most part, but find myself using third-party browsers, which is not nearly as seamless an experience as it is on the desktop.
Is there something inherently wrong with this?
sudo bash -c '[ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo "You live"'
They would have a faster and more compliant engine than they seem to be able to build themselves.

And "giving up complete control"? We're only talking about the rendering engine, not the rest of the browser. And WebKit is open source, they can just fork it if MS is unhappy with where it is going.
Understandable. I make my mom buy things for me.
In a transaction where you already know exactly what you want, then yes, it would most likely make sense to purchase online for the sake of price savings.
Not many calories burned, no fat loss. Simple.
But the point of a physical store is of course for the sales process to work. That interaction is pretty important, it's why sales staff have jobs. Using technology to abridge that since the first dot-com has consistently been lacking. The best shoes buying experience thing I've seen is Amazon's "experimental" endless.com.

I actually find Zappos' site (I've made two purchases from them) extremely lacking in terms of introducing products and detailing it. Here's why: Zappos isn't a shoes company, it's a logistics company. Their customer service and fulfillment efficiency is what makes them awesome, likewise with Amazon or Newegg. What they happen to focus on selling isn't important.

That said, it's why I think clothes or shoes or makeup or car shopping is so odd for people that don't quite know what they want in mind. These are products that kind of do need hands-on touching, smelling, trying, and so on. Then again, online shopping is huge business. I wonder if that would remain so without the physical stores present.
Has any body tried it? Does it work correctly?
Being a government with several data loss scandals a month this is freaking me out big time. Less than a week ago a USB stick with login data to systems with 12M taxpayers was found on a pub car park. You can't imagine how many go unreported.

I'm all for freeing publicly owned data, but how is it going to happen is the scary bit.
Well it's been over 10 years and you're still talking about Napster. I'd say it worked.
We had that since the late 50's:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGsfwhb4-bQ
In the minds of many, I guess, CTO usually relates to business.

Since this is government, though, I wonder what he will do to protect civil rights in cyberspace. Should he appoint a Chief Cyber-rights Officer, too?
Electoral-vote.com was pretty accurate, too.

http://electoral-vote.com/evp2008/Pres/Maps/Nov03.html

Chris Bowers wrote, "So much information is publicly available now that a few nerds obsessed with poll numbers are much better sources for election information than you will ever get from big media." http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=16AE5E72EE66...
Yeah, Electoral-vote's results were pretty much the same as 538's. --And I consider Tanenbaum's site to be better overall, because while it's not as pretty, he's completely open about how he arrives at his results and makes all the data he uses available.
Anatomy of a Classic - Grim Fandango
Green Tea for Weight Loss
> They would have a faster and more compliant engine than they seem to be able to build themselves.

I don't believe it's a lack of ability - Microsoft could easily produce a standard complaint browser. Adopting WebKit doesn't necessarily they would keep it compliant.

Given how important IE is to the Operating System in general, I doubt Microsoft could do this technically - not without breaking a raft of things... Given the incompatibility bumps with Vista I'll suspect they're would be seeking a more conservative path for the moment.
So multiple incompatible branches of IE and then multiple incompatible branches of WebKit? Mozilla 5.0 (Internet Explorer; Microsoft; webkIEt (like WebKit (like gecko))). No thanks.
Most Viewed Photoshop Tutorials
I don't think any of them had more than a few wagers. President, maybe overall Senate control, etc.

They all predicted Obama to win, though generally gave him a chance in the low 80s the day before, whereas 538 said 98. It's impossible to tell who was more accurate.
Sorry, this wasn't my intention. I didn't notice the #, and I think that #'s should be filtered.
I also like that it is heavy on data.

Also, I get tempted by their master's program that I don't qualify for.
You know how the [scribd] links show up with pdf documents.
Seems like a fantastic service would be one that combines a split-up article into a single article - [singlePage]

I'm sorry, maybe I'm lazy, but I'm not going to click [next] 50 times, especially when the loading time for Time is ridiculously slow (2 seconds or so). It's a shame this seems to be a common practice now. Trying to increase pageviews obviously counts more than a good user experience.
I gave up after page 7 or so. Can't be bothered.

Could just have a backend process that automatically downloads all the article pages, shoves them together and serves it up as a single article so the user can actually read it unhindered.