skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Based on your comment, I'm guessing you've never actually implemented anything with a client-side JS framework.
Yes, strictly speaking, there's nothing inherent to client-side JS MVC frameworks that creates a better experience for end-users (over traditional server-side MVC + client-side Ajax + DOM manipulation, or whatever).

So basically you attack him only to agree with him? Nice.

>Where they do provide benefit is to developers, for whom it makes creating rich interfaces absurdly easy.

No, it does not.

It makes creating rich interfaces a hodgepodge of immature and fragile client side technologies.
Thanks for linking to the Ada Initiative reply. After reading that, I agree with you (and them) that this talk was likely to result in more sexual objectification and technology-skill-dismissing of the female attendees, in today's society.

It would be better if we lived in the society where you could talk about sex at technical conferences without making the women there feel threatened or objectified because no-one would threaten or objectify them as a result of the talk, but we aren't in that world yet.
Again, you are missing the point. Where did the CRF number of 18.5 come from? Did you test several parameters, and found what parameter gives lower bitrates than Beamr Video on this specific clip set?

Would you apply the same CRF parameter of 18.5 to any video file to reduce its bitrate? And does this parameter ensure reducing the bitrate of any video file without hurting its quality? If so, you could apply it recursively on a video clip and reduce bitrate indefinitely...

The bottom line is that there is no setting of x264 that guarantees reducing the bitrate of ANY input video file while maintaining its visual quality. And this is exactly what Beamr Video guarantees.
Why is this petty shit on the front page? Who gives a fuck?
Microsoft open sources C++ REST SDK "Casablanca"
I don't know all the background, and I don't want to end up victim blaming, but often I've found these things to be red flags:

I do remember there was some drama involving her and BoingBoing a few years back. I do not remember all the details at the moment, but I do remember feeling as if it seemed like the situation was twisted to put herself in the spotlight. So with that in mind, when I saw "I reported on corruption at Wikipedia, so be sure to read the unbiased and accurate Violet Blue bio here." little alarm bells went off.

I'm admitting I don't know the whole situation, and I'm not saying Wikipedia is an infallibly unbiased source, but the fact that the main tag on one's blog has to point seems really odd to me.

The article came off as reasonable and well written, as I feel her other blog posts were back when I do vaguely remember the BoingBoing drama, but I'm glad the other comment is on here, to get both sides of the story. It does portray the talk organizer in a negative and reactionary light that I don't know is reasonable.
"Great universities existed in the US even before the recent education bubble."

Great universities are a tiny minority, and you're right -- they'll likely be fine. Likewise the local community colleges that focus on teaching and job skills.

The Southeast Directional States, on the other hand, are in big trouble.
I'm working on a codebase that we recently ported from GAE to AWS. We ran into lots of issues with GAE, mainly around:
* Exorbitant cost
* Obtuse ORM
* Random, unannounced/poorly reported downtime

I'm happy to elaborate, but I would stay as far away as possible from GAE. Our experience was terrible. I should note as a disclaimer that we did not use the high availability version.
There are a few things to note here:

1) in some industries (like in finance) the regulatory requirements make it near impossible to use external email services. For example, there needs to be a record of every email sent out of accounts in the company that needs to be presented to regulators when they demand it.

2) People within the same company may slip up and send emails to coworkers that shouldn't be read outside the company. When you run the email servers, no other party reads them. It stays in the family, so to speak. When you use google or whatever service, they get a peek at the emails.

3) AFAICT Gmail is not HIPAA compliant, making it inappropriate for health care businesses.
You're missing his point...

But I'll bite, if your mail server goes down - and it will - you now have no email. You can't email your hosting support. You try to log in to your host control panel to do a reboot or raise a ticket but forgot your password. You can't get the reset email. Somehow you manage to login and raise a ticket but won't get any email notifications when the technician responds asking for your server id number...
I have redeemed NM7YR7NEJPH9
Actually, no. What Diaz showed is that Beamr is offering nothing that actually improves either visual quality or bitrate; every setting that their method uses actually reduces quality compared to default x264 settings.
Synchronizing Snapshots and Incrementals With Single Threading
Just tweeted to them about w3cfools.com hopefully they fix it.
Things I might have tried (w/ time & energy): a better logo, more SEO, plans start at $10/yr /monitor, 30-45-60-day trial. Text alert to pay for service near end of trial.
What is so new? It's OAuth 2.0 (see google+ docs: https://developers.google.com/+/api/oauth). OAuth 2.0 is supported for a relatively long time by Google (the old docs: https://developers.google.com/accounts/docs/OAuth2)
I'm curious what searches have you done to find such data. Companies like Netspend (just acquired this week by TSYS) and Greendot exist almost exclusively to serve this market. American Express has their own offering called Bluebird card to compete in the same market. There are lots of articles discussing these companies and the target market of the "unbanked" when looking for info on these public companies. The only reason I hesitate to post links to specifics is because I'd rather not taint your approach to finding such information, but it is pretty easy to find, if you are to search.
Well, as someone who has read some of the intermittent fasting, paleo and low-carb literature (including all of Taubes' monster tome GCBC) over the years, I continuously run into people pointing to articles (and perhaps studies?) of how all of the conclusions of these authors are incorrect and so we shouldn't believe the hype despite the dozens of pages of scientific references that some of these text propose.

I basically don't know who's right and who's wrong anymore, because everybody claims that everybody else has an agenda or is being intentionally misleading.

Having eaten paleo for several years and done low carb, keto, zig-zag and all that jazz under expert supervision, I still don't know if at the end of the day I'm killing myself. The chain of events that leads to atherosclerosis seems to be very poorly and inconsistently understood by mainstream medicine, and you hear vastly different interpretations of what your lipid panel numbers actually signify for your long-term health.

That's where my frustration is coming from.
I think it's clear in this case Violet Blue isn't a cause or direct antecedent of drama, regardless of her history.

Her post above, to me, sounds like she was basically talking to a middleman who didn't convey the message from the Ada Initiative in a manner as nuanced as they would. I really really don't think they meant to say as simplistic "is there any rape we can't have rape". But the "drama" around this started before she made the post above showing the details of her side of the situation.
I'm not on one side or the other here, but...

What would prove your claims?
Yeah, there's something weird about the URLs to do with users. I've found myself regularly removing the /u/1/ part of G+ permalinks, for instance, which indicates that the user is being tracked oddly.
> Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results

I think insanity has to do with how one perceives reality, rather than one's aptitude for inferring future results based on past ones. Wouldn't this more aptly be characterized as naivety?
Yes starting with Chrome 25 on Mac I've had at least one crash every single day.

I honestly used to go weeks or longer without any crashes.
Looks like Daiz did a similar test to the one I described below. Naturally we would need blindly randomized videos and randomized audiences, rather than just Daiz audience of one knowing exactly which videos were encoded by what. We'd also need some function converting the CRF parameter to the Beamr Perceptual Model parameter ("minimum possible" parameter), which we could obtain by knowing the Beamr parameter for a given CRF when Beamr and x264 choose the same exact bitrate.
No difference IMHO, here is the link to google+ platform API doc: https://developers.google.com/+/api/oauth
I think it's a good initiative as well, but the video over-glamourises it a bit I think. Particularly the bit about how awesome the offices are. That's not what the typical programming job is like, that's what working for Dropbox is like. Plus the wishy-washy metaphor of a blank wall and opening doors, comparing it to sport, NBA players and Will.I.Am promoting it...it downplays the technical skill requirement ("you don't need to be a genius"), and emphasizes too much the creative aspect of it.

As elitist as it sounds, there are lots of people who simply just can't program [1], and promoting programming as this lucrative, creative endeavour that doesn't require much skill might misguide people into career paths that don't suit their skill set. Not to mention introducing a bunch of terrible programmers into the workforce.

[1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/separating-programm...
>Did you test several parameters

Nope. I just picked a value and tested what I'll get with it. Also, it doesn't matter where the number comes from. As long as I'm not changing it for different videos, the bitrate selection is completely up to x264's CRF mode. And what do you know, here it produced smaller results than your technology while providing the same level of quality!

>Would you apply the same CRF parameter of 18.5 to any video file to reduce its bitrate?

That's what I did for all the test videos here, and it produced better results compared to your technology on all of them (basically identical quality, smaller filesizes).

>And does this parameter ensure reducing the bitrate of any video file without hurting its quality? If so, you could apply it recursively on a video clip and reduce bitrate indefinitely...

Constant lossy re-encoding is going to degrade video quality no matter what - nothing is going to change that. Not your technology, not x264's CRF. Why are you even bringing up something as silly as this?

>The bottom line is that there is no setting of x264 that guarantees reducing the bitrate of ANY input video file while maintaining its visual quality. And this is exactly what Beamr Video guarantees.

I have just demonstrated that encoding with x264 --crf 18.5 is a more effective solution than your technology on all your presented test cases. You have given us absolutely nothing to actually "guarantee" your claims, which is exactly why your product is Snake Oil.
My favorite quote in the video is near the end: "Coding is as close to a superpower as you can get."

I feel that.
Because every diff algorithm "reinvents rsync", right?
It's not like it's never occurred to them. In fact, Apple had a 3G MacBook Pro prototype a few years ago that someone snapped up on Craigslist: http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20099494-248/apple-wants-i...

A magnetically attached antenna is an interesting choice. I feel like I'd lose mine within a few days if it went to production like that.
I'll give you this Daiz: you have now done something that begins to resemble a fair evaluation of Beamr, and that's only 2 hours after you posted your original conclusion!

For the record: I have nothing to do with this Beamr thing, but I do feel sorry for those guys. Despite your 50 min evaluation here I'll give them the benefit of a doubt and conclude they're probably hard working honest people trying their best to build something valuable in this world, and sell it. If your analysis holds up they may have failed, but that's no crime.
Oh yeah http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/02/27/038254/pixel-picture...
I use postfix without greylisting, instead I drop the message if it is going to a non-existent user (drops about 99% of all mail), then drop it if it comes from an invalid domain (there goes another 0.5%) and then a block list (cbl.abuseat.org). The rest is valid email, which gets spam/virus scanned and delivered to my mailbox. Not very CPU intensive at all...

Then it goes through amavisd that does the spamassasin checks, as well as verify DKIM and the like, and then it gets delivered to dovecot.

Now, Dovecot as an IMAP server is fantastic. Along with dovecot-pigeonhole I can sort messages into different folders server side.

Dovecot currently handles one mailbox for me that I archive a mailing list into ... 150k messages and counting, and no issues. Uses Maildir on the backend. Although, I do think at those sizes it comes down to good file system caches, and a good file system that doesn't have a problem caching the entire directory.

It works well for me, so well in fact that I am moving all my stuff from Google Apps for Domains back to in-house. For two reasons, 1. more control, and 2. I have had issues with Google Apps in the past, and even with a paid account the support has been lackluster. I'd like to know more about my email, be able to check logs if need be to see what is going on.
I have redeemed T44LETPJ4PN3
I think it's important to note that not everyone wants or needs to choose every single component in a project. In fact, this can be a big waste of time and added complexity for some projects, particularly the more simple ones. Even for a larger project, your choice of template language is nowhere near as important as the quality and cohesiveness of your overall design (you know, the actual important stuff). With the move towards heavier API-driven client-side stuff, the choice of frameworks gets to be even more boring.

Django is easy to hire for, it's easy to get help for, it's easy to Google around for. I can plug in an intern and have him productive very quickly due to the great documentation, and the "opinionated" nature of Django (there are widely known best practices for lots of things) is great in this case. He doesn't have to wade through all of my glueing of pieces together, figure out this lesser known, lesser documented, lesser supported framework (Pyramid). He just says "Oh, this is Django, I get it."

I don't make the claim that Django is better than Pyramid, but I think it's probably foolish to do the reverse as well. They are just two different ways of doing things: minimalistic/bring your own lunch versus batteries included.
Yeah, I do agree, and I hope my first post tried to make that clear - I just have seen a trend with some dramatic bloggers in the past, so it often clouds my view when reading an unrelated/less biased post.

It is reasonable for her to be upset about it, and it does seem as if it was handled poorly, but I guess ultimately it was the conference's call.
It's great to see the Django tutorial extended to cover testing[1] and writing reusable apps[2]. These days there are quite a few Django tutorials out there covering best practices etc. (which are very good) but I would still recommend the official Poll app tutorial to any beginner because of it's simplicity.

[1]: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.5/intro/tutorial05/

[2]: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.5/intro/reusable-apps/
From the long answer above - and I'm no video expert - the tl;dr is that Beamr answers the following question and returns a video that fulfills the answer:

"Given that you are concerned with ZERO loss of quality in the output video, what is the optimal per-frame compression that minimizes output video size."
If the US were to integrate coding into the school curriculum, our K-12 schools could rise to the global ranks that our university system currently occupies. But it can't just be an addon elective, it needs to be integrated across many subjects. So much of learning that's considered to be dull or boring can be made fun with programming. Write a program to simulate a ball flying through the air and aside from giving students the building blocks to make their own games/animations, they've also learned about gravity, projectile motion, and maybe even calculus. Add some wind into the mix to learn about resistance. Write a simple program that simulates cells dividing and you've got some biology and math happening. Creating some basic tones and sounds with code is a frighteningly tiny distance away from learning about music theory.

The software platform could be open sourced. Maybe even written in the programming language that students work in so students could modify it and submit patches, but also to mess with their little minds and get them thinking about self-hosting compilers.

And how much would this cost if done correctly? It's probably a terribly small figure per student over the course of their education. It may even save some money on textbooks if it's a tablet device to double as an e-reader. Maybe even more if those textbooks were open sourced and not sold at laughable prices... It's amazing how far we are behind at present.

My fear is that people assume (good or bad) that every student will come out a programmer, which is just missing the point. EE/CS degrees would be worth even more in such a world.
Half-finished $208-million DMV technology overhaul canceled
Do whatever, just push 4G dataplans to bigger caps, I would drop cable for that.
It would be good if they could figure out a way to use our body's electricity, no idea how though.
I hope you're aware imgur compresses images that you upload to it regardless of whether they were already compressed.
> spend 5-10-30m tops to do an email installation
Hahahahahahhahahahahhahahahahhah
I don't think this will result in a flood of for-reals programmers any more than math or writing courses result in tons of mathematicians or writers. What it could/should result in is a future generation of people who even if they don't seriously pursue programming are at least able to hack together scripts to automate tasks that are important to them, just like they are now (hopefully) able to do enough math to get by or enough writing to communicate ideas in whatever field.

So I'm in support of the idea fully, though like barbs I think the video is fluff marketing bullshit that paints an inaccurate picture of most software development.
Net result: Apple gains clout with cellular carriers, end user privacy suffers.
Sure would make a great feature for a Mac OS X release named Lynx, right? Just saying.
If you could buy a MacBook with cellular service you wouldn't need to buy an iPhone.
And this is an area that Windows wins at. In Windows 8 on my tablet, it shows a Mobile Broadband connection. All the Windows Update, Outlook application, etc are aware of this - Outlook says "You may be on a metered connection" and prompts for desired behavior.

On my laptop, I can even flag a given Wireless (or indeed any) connection as metered and get the same result.
Its funny that when the word cyborg is mentioned, you immediately think about people with obvious physical enhancements, but micro machines like this would basically be invisible to other people.
Can you give examples? I've compressed thousands of files with JPEGmini and never found any banding or other loss of quality.
I have a similar goal, but would want to integrate CDSS into the fabric of the EMR.
Alice Finch builds massive Lego Hogwarts from 400,000 bricks
Does anyone know if it's normal to keep the title/content of talks TBD until that soon before the talk? That stood out as odd to me.
So I have to say I really like it so far. I would add a bit of description to the iTunes store. Also, if you get around to dropbox integration that'd be cool, I could replace grabbox fully.
Your landing pages are nicely designed. Some small suggestions: on Track My Ride, I found the "Get Protected Today" font not very readable and a bit tacky. Also, I don't understand why "Chat with us" looks like a Christmas present. On my 15" MBP, it actually overlaps with Contact Us. So it seems kind of redundant.

You charge $30 for your products, so the scale of "success" will definitely be different. If you can convince 100 true fans to love your product, you'll make enough to survive, and iterate/improve.

When I shipped my first apps, charging $0.99, I had a really hard time convincing users to download. The whole first year, I made about $1000. (And I was happy!) I would have been ecstatic if I had ever reached 100K downloads @ 99 cents. In the space of Free Apps, the scale of success is different. I wouldn't be very happy getting 100K free downloads. :-)

Now I'm not saying I am not happy with 8 million DLs. It's pretty frickin' awesome, and I had never predicted it. But it's really a psychological trick to reset my bar at 10 million downloads, or 20 million, or even 100 million, to convince myself to keep working hard. :-D

Good luck with your bank approvals!
I originally was 100% pitchfork-of-Ada-Initiative (which I in theory support; selfishly I'd really like there to be more women in technology, since that would make hiring people in technology easier by increasing the supply.)

I didn't realize her talk title/abstract hadn't been published until an hour before the event. I assumed Valerie Aurora (Henson) (who is one of the directors of Ada, and was attending the conference) chose to wait until the last minute to make the complaint, for maximal lulz, but I guess that didn't happen.

I sat through this talk (at least one which was 90% similar) at BSidesLV; it was great, and educational, and pretty focused on harm reduction.

I think a key element is that BSides isn't a "tech conference"; it's specifically a hacker conference for all the talks which are inappropriate for the main conference going on at the time (i.e. RSA, a very corporate event) -- basically the same as Defcon Skytalks. It was way more drug focused than sex focused, too, and essentially a medical/safety talk about behavior people have, how to deal with it, etc. I mean, I've never shot up heroin and had gay sex, and have zero plans to do so, but it's useful to know why (for instance) needle exchange programs are helpful, and why outreach to some of these communities should be done in different ways than to the general population.

I wouldn't consider this an appropriate talk for RSA or even for the main track at a local security con, but BSides is different.

I agree it wasn't government censorship, but it was someone using an organization with an overall mission I support (involving women in technology) to push another more personal agenda, so now I don't support that organization.

It looks like some people are forming alternative organizations to focus on the inclusive parts of what I thought was Ada Initiative's mission (dealing harassment at cons, educational outreach, etc.), so I guess I (and presumably sponsors) will shift toward those. I don't think I'd speak at an event which was as beholden to Ada Initiative as BSidesSF appears to be, though.