skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Recapturing Color from Black and White film
It's pretty cool how you can jump directly to a point in the video by hacking the URL.
If this was Forbes it would be "9 Scary Predictions" and it would be a 'photo slide show' and the last slide would be an ad.
I have a friend who is a lawyer who does "ethically sound" work - he primarily works with people who get treated horribly during peaceful protests.

He lives fine. He definitely doesn't make "lawyer money", but he doesn't live like a pauper either.

I don't know how software lawyers fare, or how people employed by organizations that primarily deal with software ethics (I guess that's the right term) fare, but I'd guess there's a living to be made. While I'm guessing, I'd guess that it's going to get progressively easier for people to make a living in such fields for the next year or five.
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Doesn't look like it's a generally applicable process, and the article is somewhat lacking in detail, but I still found it interesting.

"Dad's Army" was a 60s/70s sitcom made by the BBC, fondly remembered and oft repeated, but like so much of the output of that era many of the episodes were not recorded, recorded but wiped, or only recorded on "Telecine" black and white film.
Agreed, in fact the time I waste reading the article (and commenting on it) does more harm to me and my business than the predictions contained within.
I'm not sure your conclusion follows from your premise. For instance, it could be the case that global warming is caused entirely by increased sun activity, but that concerted human effort to decrease atmospheric greenhouse gasses could still cool the earth off. Combinatorily, I see 7 possibilities combining global warming (exists/doesn't), and is (entirely/partially/not at all) anthropogenic, and (can/cannot) be ameliorated by human effort.

*sponsored by the committee for strong syllogisms
Question: are there any real world AIR applications out there other than Twitter clients?
This is what we call optimism. Just as having both risk-loving and risk-averse people creates a more stable species, so does having optimists and pessimists.

Its a perfectly reasonable thing to believe--just like its opposite--and depends solely on how you're measuring. All in all, I think it depends on the reduce function. If it was reduce(lambda a,b: a+b,[ x.happiness for x in humanity ]), then maybe there is the most happy the world has ever seen. If you took that number and divided it by the population, than maybe the average happy per person has gotten lower. And so on and so on.

I think its definitely possible to believe it.
I don't really understand AIR. Isn't it just an animation engine that's had a programming language bootstrapped to it, and then flung onto the desktop? Seems a little too hacked together for me.
You just went up in my opinion by a large amount.
I've thought about this, but I decided against it for one simple reason: if google is down my site is in trouble. By serving it locally it's all or nothing, either your site works (because it's up), or it doesn't.

But if the site is up, but google is down it's will do really bad stuff.

Plus I don't really understand the multiple connections issue - what about HTTP/1.1 and keep alive? Doesn't it download everything all in one go, but only if it's all one server?

And finally about the caching issue - sure the first time might not be cached, but most sites rely on people visiting more than once, or at least clicking on more than one page, so it'll be cached the rest of the time after that.

So none of the arguments are really holding with me.
Such main stream articles are a bit like main stream articles talking about huge profits made from iPhone apps, namely, they encourage Joe Sixpack to think that he too can make big money on YouTube(iPhone, etc.). Truth is that for most people, if they only do it for making money, they will fail miserably. Even if they sincerely enjoy what they are doing, the chances of achieving meaningful profits are slim.
From what I heard it's kinda like running Flash apps on your desktop.
What? How are you supposed to monitor and verify that google is up from the point of view of the client?

If you do it locally it's either fully working, or fully down, and you don't have javascript errors when parts work and parts don't.
Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners and other tech predictions that failed
I might trade living in the 90's for right now but there is not other time in the history of the US which I would prefer than right now. There are plenty of country's which are worse off now than they where 5 years ago but in the US with some minor variations the further back you go the worse things get.
> If it was reduce(lambda a,b: a+b,[ x.happiness for x in humanity ])

Well, when you put it that way, Batman...

I'm very optimistic for my own life and for things that I can manage. I'm not optimistic for humanity as a whole at any given time, nor am I pessimistic. History is history, and we are all victims of human nature. Good will happen, bad will happen, the lot of some will improve as the lot of others worsens.
Congrats David, prove them wrong!
I’m amazed that this story don’t get much traction on HN.
Yeah, the comments indicate he spoke at the Le Web conference. Are there any videos or was that banned like everything else?
Companies expect the good developers to come out of the woodwork for a 35-40k junior dev position and wonder why they come up with dregs

It's not that they expect good devs at that price, it's that they can't tell who the good devs are. For grads, all they have to go off of are grades and maybe an intership. Otherwise, it's just a resume. Without an effective way to recognize good devs and with no portfolios, it's just a crapshoot. It's the same information asymmetry that makes it hard to buy a good used car. As pg (?) said, the only way to recognize a good dev is to work with them for a while, and most companies and job seekers are unwilling to do that.
Where Is the Expedia of Local News?
> Spread the joy!

Spread the joy, indeed.
Have you also noticed that a majority of the famous classical music composers had extremely screwed up lives? I thought this was particularly fascinating when I took a music history class.
The Intern's Top Tech Stories: December 11th
I don't use Analytics, for the same reason. It is also protecting the privacy of my users.
I have no idea what this means, but it's got to be like heroin to number theorists.
Please rephrase:

"Java is Dead; Long Live the JVM."
Few lay people understand what the merck manuals says. Understanding statistics is one of many basic requirements for understanding science and medicine that most people lack. Another is a basic understanding of logic etc.
there are no reasons deeper than inertia and lack of imagination that this money and power isn't put to better use.

I'm not familiar with the industry, but I would guess the reason behind the inertia and lack of imagination is the social stigma which means that porn producers are very much self-selected.
He shared his vision of turning YouPorn into a "very cool brand, perhaps the Virgin of adult entertainment."

Did anyone else find this use of words a little amusingly oxymoronic?
It's a word, just an obsolete one:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pedantism
Title makes it sound like this is an official announcement from Apple, but this is just another copy-paste hack, albeit a clever one.
Seems like Steve Jobs is so strongly drawn to simplicity and control, it can become a weakness. His strong desires for simplicity and control are also sources of his success, but they can also drive him to make decisions that infuriate customers (one button mouse, no iPhone cut & paste, no MacBook Firewire).

Perhaps this will prove to be Apple's Achilles' Heel.
I don't think it's constantly ascending. I think that over any lengthy period of time, things are getting better. Every century we understand more about the universe and about ourselves than we did just a little while ago. That's a good sign.

I know humanity is capable of ridiculous evils. At the same time, though, it's capable of breathtaking goods. When I think about the future, those goods are what I focus on. Yes, the evils will happen - but why bother worrying about them too much? They'll pass.
I'd take a good look at it. You can also build HTML and Ajax apps for instance. I also think you have some preconceptions about the Flash platform that aren't particularly valid; it's quite a mature platform and certainly not hacked together. The fact that Flash has it's roots in animation has little to do with its current capabilities, either on the web or on the desktop.
Why not? It seems PC notebook manufacturers are doing netbooks because they need a novel product to excite people. Apple doesn't need that, the quality of their entire product line (generally speaking) is enough.
If you're worried about Google's reliability, you could always test for typeof(jQuery) !== 'undefined' before assuming it had loaded. Then, you can inject a script element referencing a copy of jQuery on your server if it hadn't.

In practice, I would think the chances of Google's entire CDN going down are the very least of your worries though.
Depression leads to amazing creativity. Just look as Eliot, who wrote his masterpiece "The Wasteland" while in a middle of an extremely turbulent time with his family and friends.
It would be even cooler if this were done by comparing a hash of the library's remote and local copy, so it could be on any server and not bound to the same domain.
Here's the demo on Google video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8734787622017763097...
Very much so. This is a particularly insidious problem, because it starts out small and for reasons that nobody would question - indeed, that everyone praises. A few years go by and then poof, ten years go by, by which time what's really keeping you down is the power of habit, much more so than other people. As Gene Clark sang, The longer you're in one place, The harder it gets to leave.

Since you say "which I think I am on the verge of experiencing", I'll mention a couple of things I found helpful in struggling with this. One is Jerry Weinberg's profound statement, "Never mistake the end of an illusion for the start of a crisis." That's important because those two things call for different kinds of action. The other is that relationships can shift. If you make changes, the system that has been in place can adjust and rebalance, even though it's hard and "it" doesn't want to because "it" always wants to stay the same.
Old:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22called+a+confrence+with+th...
Used MP3 site prepares to launch Second Hand digital music marketplace
The pros lose not just because amateur is a free substitute, but because it is better.

The pros follow the exact formula you described: too fast to be fun -> zoom in way too close -> finish while not even touching each other. FAIL.

Amateurs may not do it perfectly, and may forget to change position 5 times, but at least they are having a good time.
Unless I'm misreading you, it looks like you're addressing a different problem. The parent comment was about how sacrificing your deeper needs (presumably in service of family, or a concept of family) can backfire and end up harming the thing it was intended to preserve.
A list of 1 way to get rich in the construction industry
You're besieged by idiots on all side. What else is there to do but drink?
HTTP 1.1 helps streamline multiple downloads in sequence, but doesn't help with the issue of concurrent download limits imposed by the browser. Loading a few complex pages while watching something like Firebug's Net panel helps make that clear.

You'd be surprised about how many users hit your site with less cached than you'd hope: http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/01/04/performance-research-part...
Exercise suppresses appetite by affecting appetite hormones
Doesn't really have to do with startups, but GC Leipzig is a big gaming conference, sort of like Euro E3.
Cloud Hype, An Amazon Web Services Post-Mortem
He mentions the also interesting Ulam spiral; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulam_spiral

If you like this kind of stuff, you might try to understand the following pattern (F_n is Fibonacci, F_0 = 0, F_1 = 1).

F_n%2==0 whenever n%3==0.

F_n%3==0 whenever n%4==0.

F_n%4==0 whenever n%6==0.

F_n%5==0 whenever n%5==0, etc.
> Pretty sure Mark meant China's manufacturing/industrial sectors has the potential to put the Western ones out of business.

So what? I could care less. For me it does not matter if I buy my wares from the guy down the street or from somebody across the globe. Why should I prefer one over the other? Why discriminate?
Thanks for the spoiler, I couldn't find the arrow at all. It's very subtle.
Looking this over, I want to clarify: when I said "characters like this", I meant, "characters of the type we're talking about". I'm not making any point about the individual named in the thread, whom I don't know and haven't observed, and for all I know may be unfairly put in this category.
It very strongly depends on what kind of product you're developing, and who your target market is. For a Web2.0 social app, skip the salespeople.

For an app that capitalizes on your MS in material sciences and love of python, and targets big manufacturing companies, an experienced sales team is worth quite a lot. Viral won't cut it.
I downvoted after reading the first sentence.

Sorry, you'll have to excuse that I'm not immediately a huge fan of corporations who give small amounts of money for significant amounts of research that ultimately go back to benefit the corporation.

While the statement that followed was at least reasonable, that line struck me as really obnoxious.
A strategy that produces safe losses is as good as one that produces straight wins. (Abstracting transaction costs.)

Just short that strategy.
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/961379
Balsamiq Mockups has been getting a lot of good press lately:
http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups
Videos from LeWeb
I don't know, we haven't had much experience with actually qualified people holding positions of power near the highest office of the country. I see this as a minor triumph for meritocracy.

Smart people tend to be quick and adaptable learners, so the biggest problem I can see is him burning out because he has to work with the US bureaucracy.
My sister once told me "James, you're a nerd, and not normal. But you can fake it pretty well."
The First New Foreign Crisis
I have been using Google App Engine as a CDN to serve up images and some core js, as well as using Google Ajax Library to serve up MooTools for about 5 or 6 months now. It has worked out really really well. In our case, we needed to serve our clients with our in house servers running ESRI's ArcGIS server. Splitting the load between Google and our Arc servers cut the load time in half for some cases.
Wait, there's such a thing as an SD card with built in wi-fi that can automatically upload to the web? O_o

That's totally awesome.

I love living in the future.
This looks awesome. Transparent, coherent caching based on a very fast backend (Memcache). The main point to remember is coherence: it automatically takes care of data mutation for you, unlike classical Memcache. This is not trivial to implement (I tried).

I wonder (I hope) if this could erase the perceived Rails "can't scale" problem from the public discourse.

Also, does anybody know about a PHP equivalent ? Yeah, I'm doing PHP at my day job and I badly need it.
I was browsing the image bookmarking site, weheartit.com and noticed that a lot of people are using Tumblr for redistribution of porn. I'm not passing judgement on that but if they start to do bizdev deals, they're going to have to find a way to curb it IMHO. Some of it is really, really graphic. That aside, they should be proud of their trajectory.
Thanks for hosting, this was a ton of fun!
Our drunken bouts are all the result of good hard-working private industry. The government will get our rye whiskey when they pump it from our cold dead stomachs!
Hardly. The two services you're mentioning aren't ones that huge droves of people care about. MacBooks still sell without FireWire. iPhones still sell without copy & paste.

It's only a weakness if somebody else DOES implement c&p while retaining the beauty and simplicity of the iPhone. That's the only case in which Apple has a chance of losing. If that scenario does come up, though, then Apple can take whatever that innovative solution is and use it for its own.

We've seen bulky computers with FireWire, and complex phones with copy and paste. The fact that Apple's gaining ground despite not having those specific things is a sign that Apple's vision is more important than those specifics.
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Smarter people will stop before it has a chance to ruin their lives.

I remember Feynman mentioning that once, when walking past a bar, he realized that he had considered going in and drinking (he was alone, it was in the middle of the afternoon), so he decided it would probably be better to quit entirely.
Ask YC: Distributing Affiliate Payments
We're looking for an economical way to distribute regular payments to 100-1000 affiliates monthly/biweekly by check. Anyone have any leads on how to best set this up? Is this something that should be done through the bank or other third-party processor (i.e. we hand them a spreadsheet of names, address and payments) or something we should tackle in-house by laser printing checks and envelopes (seems like a big hassle).
There's a google analytics port
Tumblr is pretty open and let people do nearly anything they want to. And they're still making money, so I don't think that the bizdevs are staying away. Considering their eventual plan for profit is selling Pro accounts, I think they can get away with that without killing their business model.
Thanks for the article. I liked it. I thought that everyone here knew what 'slime' stands for. Anyway, you can submit your post again appending some dummy query string to the url.
HN isn't a big pro-Tumblr site. I know the Tumblr founders are pretty separate from YCombinator (I read Marco's blog, and the only time he's ever mentioned a HN company was when he dismissed Posterous out-of-hand a few months ago), and perhaps it's just disinterest in a company that's so distant from the seed funding mentality that we find here.

Oh, well. Tumblr's an excellent service and this is great news for them.
This is definitely true for me. The only times I've been able to control my appetite are when I regularly do aerobic exercise. When I'm not regularly exercising I have no power whatsoever over my appetite. When I am, I lose my taste for unhealthy food and naturally get portion control.
Why do people use SlideShare? It's such an incredibly ugly site. Just browsing slides on it makes me shudder.

Nobody uses Google Presentations? Nobody? Or 280Slides? Sites that don't feel like absolute crud?
Typically, distance between multiple samples of stuff uses the minimize-the-sum-of-squares technique, maybe it applies here too?
I actually have, but I agree its rare. It's marketed as "porn for women" because it has a story and isn't filled with cum shots. The producer is a lady named Erika Lust (http://erikalust.blogspot.com/) and the only film of hers I've seen is called "the good girl" and it's actually won awards. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Girl_(pornography)

I hope the porn industry either learns or gets out of the way. =)
I'm amazed they were able to get this far in the process, and get covered by the bbc.
Is a used song going to sell for 10cents? and if so, are you going to risk the RIAA coming after you for buying stolen goods rather than either pay the 99cents to buy the track legally, or go whole hog and just download it free?

Who came up with this business model?
I hope they didn't spend a bunch of money getting this going.
Adobe AIR is a runtime. Great tool for those fluent in XHTML/CSS/Javascript/Actionscript to deliver apps for desktop.

If you are a web developer and want to leverage on your existing knowledge to target desktop market, AIR is the way to go.

You dont need Flash/Flex to build AIR apps. The Air SDK is available cost free at adobe.com/products/air/tools/sdk/
Or you can use aptana.com/air

A comparable open source tool:
titaniumapp.com
It is exactly that, though AIR also provides desktop-level capabilities like local file and device access.

AIR is another attempt at the age-old "write once, run anywhere" concept. One reason I left HTML/Javascript web design and got into Flash was that I wanted the incredible luxury of writing for a single platform with a single set of implementation quirks; AIR is an attempt to extend that luxury to the desktop.

It's got quite a few steps left to take; the runtime install is seamless and only happens once, but the app install screens are needlessly scary, as we've discussed before. Still, for many situations AIR is not an unreasonable choice.
Ecofont: a font that saves ink (and money)
AIR is popular in the digital signage industry
Those are easily understood if you consider F_n mod k.

Ex. F_n mod 2:

1, 1, 0 (as 1+ 1 = 2 == 0 in mod 2), 1, 1, 0, ...

So on and so forth.
You can implement the local transformations for short cut deforestation with CL macros. Then you can easily reuse the technique everywhere. Look up Andy Gill's paper from 1993.
http://www.adobe.com/products/air/showcase/
Sure, if JQuery's the only JavaScript file on the page. But if you use multiple plugins that depend upon JQuery, you're usually better off concatenating them all into one file, minifying that, and GZipping the content. You'll get slightly better compression than if you serve them separately, and don't need to worry about multiple HTTP requests.
YUI has been doing the same thing (hosting their JS professionally), and it does really make sense.

We've been doing this for years at fluther.com and it's worked out great. We have a switch for using a local copy when we're offline (on an airplane), but in general it adds speed and saves bandwidth.

This was always a nice benefit of YUI, and I'm glad to see there's an option with JQuery, too. (I'm planning to switch at some point--we went with YUI in the first place because it had the only stable autocomplete plugin but that's long since changed.)
The Boomerang Founder
Brit and you say "humor"? I doubt it old chap.
I don't believe this. An hour after running a half-marathon or greater I am basically inhaling food. Every other running I know is the same.

Plus I don't know what kinds of weights they were lifting for 90 minutes. 20-30 minutes is more like it for a real workout (see Mike Mentzer, Stuart McRobert, Dorian Yates etc for references).
I hope it is a cryptographically secure hash that STAYS cryptographically secure. Otherwise ten years down the road someone will figure out a way to force collisions and then, bam, you'll be running l33tcrew.ru's copy of Prototype with the access privileges of bankofamerica.com .

No problem fixing that one, all you have to do is roll out a patch to every standards-compliant browser in the world, oh, yesterday would have been good.
I'm actually working on a twitter app that needs passwords that's soon to launch (http://tweetlinkmonster.com/ if you want to see. You can signup if you want, it works and is secure. I just want to polish before really launching.)

For now I take people's passwords (I don't have much choice. I need to get someone's friends timeline.)

I'll proably go ahead with that for now, but I'd love to do OAuth when Twitter releases it.
But I'll probably go ahead with the current plan for now.

The issue is that there are many Twitter apps (mine, twitpic) that have no choice but to take passwords.

Twitpay can get away with it, but anything that needs to tweet for the user or get the user's tweets has no option until Twitter adds OAuth.
On Procrastination