skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a shame. I absolutely love Perian and it has made it much easier to just play content without having to download VLC as well, and it just worked.

One thing I have noticed is that support for MKV/VP8/WebM has always been pretty bad. It uses a LOT of CPU time and in general was really slow. When YouTube put me in the HTML 5 beta it was unbeknownst to me sending me WebM content because I had Perian installed and it was causing HUGE spikes in CPU usage and overall lag because it was trying to decode and render WebM, whereas h264 requires almost no CPU power on my older MBP.

I hope that the community as a whole picks up the project and helps it succeed, it would be fantastic to still have it around.
I could have sworn it was the work of Vladimir Levenshtein: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Levenshtein
I would also argue that most investors see a huge premium in the non-tangible asset 'track record', where Amazon truly shines.

Looking at S3, E2 etc. it is easy to see that while Amazon has a fairly 'boring' bread a butter retail business they are also true innovators.
I imagine this would self-correct eventually. If my friends did nothing but send me referral links... well, I think I could stand having one fewer friend.
Microscopic bugs that can cause illness in humans can also create electricity
Or you could just use node.
It its entertaining to see those weekly stories about NoSQL disasters. Hopefully one or two people will learn one or two things in three process. Let's try one: don't judge technologies on their sex appeal: the SQL old lady will take better care of your data than these young siliconed dolls.
I disagree about Q&A being restricted to verticals, Here are 2 counter examples:

1. Answers.com, 108mm monthly uniques
http://www.quantcast.com/answers.com

2. Yahoo Answers, 20mm monthly uniques
http://www.quantcast.com/answers.yahoo.com

And also watch out for Branch.com - it takes Quora model of "Experts Q&A" to "Invite-only Experts talking on a roundtable". Potentially disruptive as it plays on psychology of "exclusiveness" - Evan and Biz stone are betting on it via Obvious Corp.
That process is beyond the understanding of most people. They just want to buy and click play.
wow. and to think people make money doing this.
I vehemently disagree with Zee in this case, but I upvoted his posts because I believe his position deserves to be heard. This goes double for when the other person is mis-handling the fallout. I recommend putting half-baked defenses to the top so everyone can see the person's poor character.
I occasionally drink and/or smoke. It has nothing to do with wanting to be cool. It has to do with feeling good and, to a slightly lesser extent, having something to do with friends. I don't really know anyone who actually drinks or smokes just because it's cool.
The fun thing is that Pykka works with Gevent. Now, if only it did networking too...
Did you have a particular reason for asking this question? :)
Aware Postgres is free: it's an excellent database and I've used it successfully (like most of the other tools I've mentioned.) It also has spectacular failure modes; though the only ones I've personally encountered were around vacuuming.
Great story. Reminded me of this TED talk by Aimee Mullins: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ0iMulicgg
Aimee Mullins: How my legs give me super powers
I was wondering why he posted that at "Joseph" but I saw no person before that with that name.
N Reduce opens up as alternative to ultra-elite startup incubators
When I arrived, PHP was already chosen. I think PHP was chosen because it is very similar to C and it lowers the learning curve for the students.

I know PHP sucks sometimes, but it's still a cool language to play with.
If you lack write permission on the directory, you can't delete any files in it, but you can still modify them if you have write permission on the files themselves. It's an unusual configuration, but it's possible with standard Unix permissions.
Thank you for explaining this. It was literally the first thing that I was wondering.
On The Issue Of Standardization Around AWS APIs
>To the contrary, the tools are getting progressively worse.

You have been unable to argue this point convincingly.

> Show me one feature in Powerpoint or Keynote that is specifically designed to give me actionable feedback on how to improve my presentation.

This is a tall order. But there are two features in Powerpoint that help. One is the timing mechanism. This definitely helps the presenter in real time to take specific actions to cope with the remaining time.

The other is showing the next slide on the laptop (only to the presenter).

Maybe you expect too much from a piece of software, such as PowerPoint.
Because people using Quora think very highly of themselves, and when you have all these people that all think very highly of themselves and each other concentrated in a single place, then they all think this is a very special and valuable place indeed.

This would not mean much in general, but I am willing to bet that most of those Quora investors are also Quora users so they suffer the delusion too.
It's clear from the screenshots the original author captured that you tried to deny responsibility after you changed the plagiarized content. If he didn't have the screenshots you might have gotten away with it.

Since he had the screenshots, your posts all come off as dishonest (which they obviously are).

Your attempt to bully the original author on Twitter looks bad too.

I think every comment you make is digging a deeper hole for you. Odds are you will be forced to resign over this.
that leads me to ask, are you being nice because your name is attached to comment, or in spite of it.
My major was computer science. It's still just a list of work. The math largely isn't as difficult as it is poorly explained and tedious. It's possible to obtain an intuitive understanding of most topics, and when you do, it's practically trivial to derive the underlying equations.
he's not allowed near schools...
You are raising an interesting issue here: does DRY principle apply in db dev. Not sure. Db dev its closer to configuration. Anyway I won't advocate too put all the logic in the database, so I won't get a grape wine, maybe just a fruit plateau, with some duplication but not to much.
I definitely agree. On the other hand, I do think that someone who has walked through the fire and pounded their head against hard concepts for 4 years legitimately comes out smarter in some dimensions.
The net result is that if anyone just wants to play home hobbyist I sure won't be recommending going the Apple route. Then again I suppose Apple is keen on keeping the riff raff out!

Even installing Xcode was a nightmare for me. It was a brand new Mac so there were a whole bunch of system updates. I told it to go ahead and do those. In App Store I found Xcode and said to install that. You don't get any indication of progress at all. A while later I came back to the machine to discover it wants to reboot, so I let it.

Can't find Xcode anywhere so I look back in the App Store. There is an install button but clicking it has no effect. My best guess is that it never occurred to anyone at Apple that a 1.8GB download could be interrupted by a reboot (from Apple's own system update tool) and that being able to continue would be useful. I had to do lots of Googling before figuring out I wasn't the only one and I could do a manual Xcode download from Apple's developer site. Then it took a lot of faffing around to figure out /Developer versus /Applications and how things were looking for it. I'm still not sure it is right, why I have to create symlinks but at least everything works.

For me the single most amusing thing about Macs and the legendary attention to detail is how the first thing I did was use Finder to go into Applications. Despite being on a 1920x1200 screen the default Finder window size is smaller than the Applications view so there were both horizontal and vertical scrollbars to look around the contents. Why can't the icons auto-arrange based on window width? If using a fixed area, why default to a window size smaller than the fixed area? Why default to postage stamp sized window on such a large screen?
Hey - the Basho guys were aware and reproduced it pretty quickly. They saw the same response from their new bloom filter branch they're introducing soon too.

I was monitoring with iostat and a couple of other tools. It was certainly very heavy on io, with 80% util, 20% iowait, and that increased as the currency went up.

I was using protobuf, and a w value of 1, so I was out of things to optimize.

When I was inserting objects already in Riak's cache, it ran about 3 times faster, but of course that's not possible with new objects.
Very good assessment.

It is not a bubble because I also believe that certain companies (especially in mobile space and "cloud" space) are going to be big winners.

However it is a little frothy, because some companies are getting high valuations but they are still part of old Web (web 2.0 - no mobile, etc.)
It is the present reality, and if I could do it over again, I would have tried to go to a top-tier school right out of high school and ground out a BS with honors in 2.5 years

Well, on the other hand, if you secure grants or scholarships, you can take the 4 year pace and use the extra time to pursue your own interests. This has a bad rap (Underwater basket weaving, anyone?) but nobody says you can't be spending that time in a lab with a professor, or in the library, or any number of countless opportunities to explore. For example, I still wish I had made the time to learn a little about quantum physics and general relativity (both out of the scope of my studies). I can still learn about those things now, but at a university you have classes, professors and students all at your disposal.

You might think that sounds senseless now, but you already know what interests you, and have probably already explored other territory.
This just seems like a wrapper around Viglink? Not entirely sure what the value add is here other than shortening URL's.

Viglink IMO take 25% off the commission, which means 75% is available to go to Refer.ly/User. Not sure what percentage Refer.ly is planning to take for themselves but might not leave much left for the user.

As someone who has built a platform that aggregates all the affiliate networks into one place, it's a royal pain. Viglink take away that pain, but for a price & in order to provide the best value to your users in the long run you'll probably have to become an aggegrator yourselves.
You've re-invented a chunk of project Xanadu:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

Congratulations!
Timing and picking your battles will make you or break you.

Starting a company just because everyone else seems to be doing it and because it's the hot new trend are the worst reasons. Good reasons to do a startup though, what counts as being in the right place at the right time, I think are: (a) having a great product in a strong market, (b) meeting exceptionally talented co-founders with good chemistry, and (c) being in a good position to take risk in life (minimal debt, decent finances, good confidence in being able to rebound and get a job amidst this recession, just in case the venture completely fails)
Totally. Especially since the endgame in any web-facing EC2 architecture is to have stateless nodes behind a load balancer that you can scale up and down as required.

Ideally you'd automatically recreate AMI snapshots whenever your code changes. In other words, erm, Heroku.
never used perian before. seems vlc (also built on ffmpeg of course) is the only major open source media player out there.
Graffiti & Open-Source: The tale of Banksy and the good and the bad open source
Well, if Linus had actually called someone a moron "upon receiving a pull request on GitHub" like the post claims, then I think it would be a perfectly legitimate criticism. Calling someone a moron just for trying to contribute would be completely unacceptable, especially for someone like Torvalds.

Of course, the problem is that Torvalds did not call someone a moron for submitting a pull request. He was responding to another person's comment on the request that has since been deleted. I think the lesson here is that GitHub maybe shouldn't let people delete their posts after they've been replied to.
From the perspective of All Souls, they do want exams that only a few can pass. The goal of this kind of exam is to identify original and insightful thinkers.

I presume that it is hoped that those who enter All Souls will make original and long-lasting contributions to their field of endeavor.

In the natural sciences, a similar effort is supported by the Howard Hughes Foundation at Janelia Farms, as described here: http://www.nature.com/news/research-at-janelia-life-on-the-f...
If you download the latest build this problem was fixed for me. http://nightlies.videolan.org/build/macosx-intel/?C=M;O=D
Awesome, thanks Mark.

Does the mac appstore allow you to track where your sales come from? Do you get the majority from people linking to your site or discovering the app through the store?
I agree that once you obtain an intuitive understanding of any topic, what once seemed incomprehensible is suddenly completely trivial. It's just getting to that stage that requires a lot of work. I studied computer science also and spent a ton of hours staring at equations. I figured it out eventually, and maybe I'm just slower than you, but it wasn't nearly as simple as you made it sound.

Getting back to the point: if you really weren't that challenged by your coursework, why didn't you seek more challenging material? I find it hard to believe that everything you could ever study in college would be so easy for you, or anyone for that matter. It's just a shame b/c you say how college is mostly worthless because you weren't really challenged, but it sounds like you could've gotten more out if it if you studied something that pushed your boundaries more.
Surf Incubator Already Barrelling With Numerous Startups and Entrepreneurs
The subject was AirPlay, which is a specific technology that allows users to play video on their iPhone/iPad on their TV through AppleTV. Can you rip off a video into iTunes and make AppleTV play it over wi-fi, but it's not AirPlay.
MySQL is 1 million lines of code and isn't even ACID

See ALTER.
The Oatmeal: Nikola Tesla, the greatest geek who ever lived
welcome to fox news. we'll teach you how to take things out of context, and tell you how linus has declared a war on github
Forbes: Ballmer Should Have Been Fired
All Presentation Software is Broken
I do not think Quora is better than eHow. I have learned many valuable things on eHow, such as how to poach an egg. I have learned a lot of more complex and interesting things on reddit AMA's, such as how various businesses actually work. I have yet to learn anything on Quora. Every post I have read on Quora, aside from being long and pompous, qualified and generalized everything so thoroughly that it completely failed to impart any information.
No, he really doesn't get it.

From his public "apology"[1]:

"The debate on paraphrasing, rewriting and quoting we should save for another post."

Zee: THAT'S THE PLAGIARISM PART.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1M92qqFrK2zlqCoaQV_l_wuxI...
Cheap ed hardy sunglasses
In traditional Unix you can delete a file if you have write access to the containing directory. The permission bits of the file don't matter.

On all (?) modern Unix variants, you can set the sticky bit on a directory to also require write access to the file.
Are State School Students Just (Mediocre) Sheep?
the multiprocessing module has "Managers" which can be used for IPC. I'm guessing that you could just communicate with those via Unix sockets, or TCP sockets on 127.0.0.1 and get pretty comparable results with 0mq, no?

I've been using managers over TCP for use as an image cache (the program is essentially an image resizing proxy), and in my limited benchmarks, it's fast enough. Now, this isn't some real-time trading application, so maybe 0mq would squeeze something, but TCP/Unix sockets is probably fast enough for most purposes here.
I did exactly that and can't recommend it highly enough. I finished the CS major in my first 2 years and then spent the next two years taking "independent study" courses and just generally hacking and doing research for a few different faculty members.

Protip: you can take "freshman physics/chemistry" as a senior if it's not a pre-req for anything else you need. And by then, you'll have learned to study more effectively than when you were a freshman and it'll be ~2 hours a week of work.
> Solitude.

I can remark on this. (20+ years. Not by choice, entirely.)

Your point regarding conformity is valid given the qualification that for the overwhelming majority that is a perfectly reasonable choice. This holds true even for some remarkably exceptional people. As an example, Euler somehow managed to be Euler and a family man. And then you have individuals such as Beethoven who seemed destined for solitude even though he was not happy about it at all.

> rare

The long standing mantra of "to thine own self be true" holds. This is the golden compass. For some, being true one's self may require the path of solitude. For others, it may not.

The rare thing is to follow the sage advice.
Riak loves random read/writes, spinny discs do not, try things out with a SSD sometime and watch things go from a shoddy XXX ops/sec to XXXX(X) ops/sec.

As a simple remark on this, I've gotten 1000+ ops/sec on a single machine operating as 3 nodes (equating to about 3000 ops/sec per node) when using an SSD and a measly 150 ops/sec with a spinny disc in the same setup (equating to about 450 ops/sec per node)
Exactly. People really need to get off their high horse. Regarding the github pull request interface, I actually find it reassuring that Linus has rather strict requirements for contributing to the kernel source.
I simply do not see #4 happening. Hell, at this rate I'm willing to bet that StackExchange, itself a rather niche site (or network of sites) has higher activity than Quora.

I don't know a single person outside the (somewhat incestuous) startup industry that uses Quora. In fact, I do not know a single person outside the tech industry who knows about Quora.

Claims that Quora has achieved good traction are, to be polite, overly generous, but more frankly, bullshit.
Mens Ralph Lauren U.S. Polos
Yes, Riak gives you certain flexibilities that make certain things easier. If a node dies, you generally don't have to worry about anything. Stuff Just Works. (Well, in the Riak case, this is true until you realize that you have to do some dancing around the issue that it doesn't automatically re-replicate your data to other nodes and relies instead on read repair. This puts a certain pressure on node loss situations that I find is very similar to traditional RDBMS.)

But of your list, I have done all of these things in a MySQL system and for a comparable 1000 lines of code.

1. We implemented a system that tracks which servers are part of a "role" and the weights assigned to that relationship. When we put in a new server, it would start at a small weight until it warmed up and could fully join the pool. Misbehaving machines were set to weight=0 and received no traffic.

2. Node failure is easy given the above: set weight=0. This assumes a master/slave setup with many slaves. If you lose a master, it's slightly more complicated but you can do slave promotion easily enough: it's well enough understood. (And if you use a Doozer/Zookeeper central config/locking system, all of your users get notified of the change in milliseconds. It's very reliable.)

Network partitions are hard to deal with for most applications more so than most databases. It is worth noting that in Riak, if you partition off nodes, you might not have all data available. Sure, eventual consistency means that you can still write to the nodes and be assured that eventually the data will get through, but this is a very explicit tradeoff you make. "My data may be entirely unavailable for reading, but I can still write something to somewhere." IMO it's a rare application that can continue to run without being able to read real data from the database.

3. In a master/slave MySQL environment you would be reading from the slaves anyway unless your tolerance for data freshness is such that you cannot allow yourself to read slightly stale data. I.e., payment systems for banks or things that would fit better in a master/master environment. Since the slaves are all in sync, broadly speaking, you can read from any of them. (But you should use the weighted random as mentioned in the first point.)

...

Please also note that I am not trying to knock Riak. It's neat, it's cool, it does a great job. It's just a different system with a different set of priorities and tradeoffs that may or may not work in your particular application. :)

But to say that it can do things the others can't is incorrect. Riak requires you to have lots of organizational knowledge about siblings and conflict resolution in addition to the operational knowledge you need. A similar MySQL system requires you to have a different set of knowledge -- how to design schemas, how to handle replication, load balancing, etc.

Is one inherently better than the other? I don't think so. :)
Not really. In theory, it's an advantage in that you can reuse the parser and avoid loading another, but in practice, that's only really important in the browser, not on the server, where the lib will be permanently loaded anyway.

And JSON values map 1:1 to native data structures in most languages - in fact, JSON can be parsed as Python code with the exception of the \/ escape.
The GNU version of rm does contain this check - it's in remove.c, not rm.c:

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=blob;f...
Wondering how it compares with Pyro4 (at least if such comparison actually makes sense)
Today’s Technologies Need an Off-the-Hook Option
Smartphones and social networks need the ability to be taken off the hook.
."--'v
AirPlay works with any video from the iPod/Music/Videos apps. One can import any video (including tormented TV shows) into iTunes and thus into these apps. It most certainly is AirPlay, although Apple would prefer people to just buy from their store.
Ballmer is not the type of CEO that thrive in tech companies he not innovative, yet he has the money to take risk he rarely does, and he not at all interested in how the technology works. He is a stuff shirt and while he would likely have success in something not as fast moving as technologies his lack of vision is why Microsoft will fail.
Helvetica Superheros, Seriously
You think otherwise he might not know people disagree? Voting really shouldn't be punitive to people with unpopular opinions.
It Might Not Be Your Computer That's Slow - Browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Safari
This blog post isn't about Linus, it's about being cordial in open source. This recent incident was merely being used as an example.

Apparently I misunderstood the context since the original comment was deleted, so I'll find a better example.
Yes, I'd agree with that. I think a person's capability to increase how smart they are is generally underestimated.
Cool features of the D language
This is nonsense. It's absurd for you to argue that the difficulty of writing "Hello world" on an Apple device is somehow a good thing for Apple or anyone else on the basis of a wishy-washy concept like "abstraction".
Yes you can run your own code. Otherwise development would be very difficult, because with every small tweak you would have to get the code approved by Apple.
Attack of the 'Death Star'
we will really be in a bubble when:

1. your parents or granparents call you to ask how they can invest in this Quora round

2. the mainstream media say we are not in a bubble
Or you could graduate, and do the same thing, except making $10k+ a month while you are doing it. The idea that college is now about romance and partying is part of what's skewing the prices.
Using vmdksync to migrate away from VMware with almost no downtime