skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just for clarification - I completely agree with the testing that you have done here. I think you've proven that it's easier to get better results with CRF settings alone and that they're likely using x264 as the encoder behind the scenes.

I should have prefaced my commentary and noted that it was a response to the ("clarified") claims in this thread, from Beamr, about what the Beamr service actually provides.

In response to your tests, they claimed they were selling intelligent settings and "the lowest bitrate".

I just provided a means of testing this aspect as well.
This is ridiculous. If you just want to learn "Rails", you've already lost. Your goal should be learning how to build things with software, not learning one facet of building a web application. If getting Rails setup and installed is too frustrating, maybe software development isn't for you.
This just highlights the switching costs/learning curve of picking up a new stack. Plug in the name of any stack and it holds true. My approach - pick one and ship.
Maybe a better word than 'intuitive' is 'obvious', or even 'blatant'. For a user inexperienced with the application and unfamiliar with interface conventions, the most effective interface is one whose most basic features scream, "Here I am!" A skilled, experienced user needs the opposite — everything should be available at the press of a key, and he or she knows which key it is; anything that calls attention to itself and is not the work at hand is a distraction, and needs to go hide.
Say, what is refer.ly's position on the FTC's required disclosure of affiliate relationships? It looks like they want disclosure on every article.

http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus71-ftcs-revised-endorse...
I think this is a very sane response. It is cynical and perhaps a little harsh but it's just reality.
Uho. Binary protocol. The problem being, it's actually bringing financial advantages over HTTP.
HTTP has the advantage of being standard, simple, plain text and thus easy to work with.

Hopefully http2.0 will attempt solving this.. erm...
The mobile broadband and metered connection experiences are details with screenshots in this blog post:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/20/engineering-wi...
Ang Lee: A Never-Ending Dream
Yet, they produced the Macbook Air, when they were actively working on the iPad, and the world was moving towards mobile. Also your argument that Apple is not very interested in making features for OS X falls when they announced last year that they will move the yearly release cycles.
Lookup "Nourishing Traditions" online. It's a fantastic research topic for hackers.

It's because of poorly processed foods that gut issues are so common nowadays. If grains (plus legumes and nuts) are prepared traditionally, the pythic acid is greatly minimized, letting your body tolerate wheat much better.

If you miss bread, try eating sourdough bread (wheat flour, salt, water -- no yeast). The fermentation process makes it so the wheat doesn't irritate your gut. My issues were disabling, but I can eat a huge loaf of sourdough in one hour without side effects, when eating just two slices of commercial bread gives me all sorts of trouble.

Might be worth eliminating all other grains, legumes, and nuts. I speak from experience. After you get better, then look into preparing these things traditionally if you want to add them back into your diet.

Anyway, after learning all this (read the book!), I occasionally eat traditionally prepared grain products, but the vast majority of the time I chose to just eat meat and vegetables. It makes meals a lot easier! Don't need to look up recipes at all, just cook your choice of protein (meat, fish/seafood, or eggs), then cook one or two vegetables on the side! You don't need all those fancy gluten-free products, which are generally not even traditionally prepared, meaning, that they keep irrittating your gut anyway!

Plus, a succulent beef shoulder pot roast with a side of spinach creamed with lots of parmesan and butter is so much tastier than anything made with grains :) We eat like royalty at our house -- everyday. And we do so on one modest paycheck.

Our cabinets are empty and our fridge is bursting at the seams. We don't really buy anything that comes in a box.
What really surprises me is the blatant permissions required by most applications specially on Chrome OS. Many of the applications/extensions I have had opportunity to observe in past few days outright require "all data on all websites."
Has Microsoft given any indication of planning to abandon two byte strings in their future Windows C/C++ frameworks? That design seems pretty baked into their platform at this point, and would be presumably hard to change.
Longest streak on github? ~61 days and counting
This is not true unless you are on a law firm network. Most likely the paywall you are referring to is PACER, which is what Aaron Swartz was fighting against...
The only way I could think of doing it is having a profile manager which ran separately and killed or changed settings of various specific programs based on the network you're on. I remember there being such things under XP, and bundled with various PC-Card cellular adapters, but it never working very well.
Is this Windows/VisualC++ only or is it portable?
Hey, very interesting site indeed. I had a few questions about what other stacks/technologies you've made use of. Drop me a line or two on rashid.aden.omar@gmail if you could. Thanks
thanks for the gals!
It implies religion was a necessary condition for progress.
Math was supposed to do everything that you talk about. Yet it hasn't. Despite people seeing some influence of math in Physics. Except that Math hasn't and probably never will.

If I tell you I'm going to teach how to play the piano, you may love it. I can also probably teach you some boring music theory along the way. But if I teach music theory for the next 10 years, without ever making you hear the sound of a note you are likely to end up hating music. Even later if you see or hear some playing the piano you will live with a assumption that music is all about boring stuff so will never develop a liking for it.
Fireworks, pngquant, and png-nq have quantization algorithms that will dither a 32-bit PNG with alpha down to 8-bit palletized PNGs with alpha. The palette selection algorithms the free tools use (I haven't used Fireworks) sometimes drop important colors used in only a small section of an image, resulting in a blue power LED losing its blue color.
Having OS X be cellular-plan aware would still be nice, if you happen to tether your MacBook to your iPhone.
And yet where I am now has no public WiFi. It has a strong LTE signal. Guess which is more useful to me?
FTA: We currently support Windows 7, Windows 8 (Windows store and desktop applications), and Linux.
Why Setuid Is Bad and What You Can Do
To save science, try celebrating “high quality ignorance”
Officially Starbucks has free WiFi, but in my experience it's down more often than it's up. I don't do much travelling, so this is very Toronto centric, but most free WiFi just doesn't work.
I actually use an iPad mini with LTE as my only mobile device. I make phone calls on it (when needed) and everything.
I Duck Duck Go You
I thought that too.
It'd be interesting to see a comparison of the two software designs with actual difference in resource usage (cpu, io, bandwidth).

That would be really cool in fact.
> The NT4 boxes might well have insisted on being rebooted at an in-opportune moment.

Well I've been on a boat that used NT4 for stupid office tasks and HP-UX somewhere in the actual Combat Control System.

Guess which one shit the bed in the middle of our graded inspection when we were supposed to be tracking a simulated enemy in a life-or-death situation? (Hint: MS didn't write the OS).

To rephrase it a bit, there are vanishingly few pieces of gear that the Navy assumes that must work in the middle of an attack, and most of the pieces that do fall under that assumption have manual overrides/backups/inherent redundancy/etc. In our situation, we switched over to paper-based methods and managed to keep the contact situation until the system could be rebooted.

So if the Navy builds a ship that is single-point-of-failure on any commodity-OS-driven computer they deserve what they get. We've known since before WWII that survivability in combat requires redundancy.
With as small as Apple is pushing their newest MacBooks, I doubt they have the real estate on the logic board for the chip, not to mention the associated antenna in the case.

Anyone that needs cellular networking (and can't find wifi) probably can tether their iDevice or has a USB stick (I assume there are Mac compatible ones).

It would be nice though to have an API that helps differentiate network classes to stop thing like Dropbox from syncing over cellular.
Usually my phone is plugged into my Macbook for power, and my Macbook is using my phone for Internet (rooted android wifi tether). The word symbiosis always comes to mind.
FPGA Blogs: Victor Yurkovsky - A new CPU
Sure, I'm currently doing a project with SqlAlchemy in Django (I went pure SqlA in there, but there is Aldjemy if anyone wants to just occasionally extend their query capabilities on top of Django's objects). There is no doubt Django orm is easy for most web crud cases, but also you have to admit that many queries that are trivial to write in pure sql take some weird gymnastics to implement using the orm (Q, F, extra, mapping raw_sql - yuk) - that's what I meant by 'pisses you off'.
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Install the YSlow plug-in and see the bottlenecks right the way.
Wow, it's even backed up by the official creator of the Internet, Al Gore!
To start, Apple could just put cellular-connection detection and repsonsible-usage logic into iTunes and Software Update.

… and Xcode documentation downloader, and PhotoStream sharing in iPhoto, and TimeMachine if I have a VPN running, and Mail because sometimes it decides to redownload every email I've ever received on GMail…

I don't think a sloppy solution is going to cut it when you are talking hundred and thousand dollar ambush fees from the telcos.
You're analogy sort of fails little bit though. It's more like being able to use a computer and being able to browse the web is much more like being a driver in the automotive age than being a compiler writer is to a mechanic (the compiler writer seems to be more like the automotive engineer ...).
JPEGmini – the Future of Image Compression?
> I'm now glad no one ever introduced me to coding when I was a kid.

I wouldn't throw out the "learn to code" baby with the "poor rote education" bathwater. Clearly that's a bad approach and is pervasive throughout schools around the world, and we need to stop it. There are many ways to learn how to code, and we're constantly developing better ways to educate millions of kids (I hope). But asking programmers today the best way is survivor bias -- many/most of us are self-motivated and had to learn large portions of what we know on our own.

I wouldn't give up on your niece, either. Different people are motivated differently, and timing matters, too. She needs to find the right itch, and she'll soon learn to scratch it.
There's progress, but we're a very, very long way from ubiquitous WiFi. With more and more users moving towards cellular usage anyways (tablets and phones), and away from laptops, the pressure to get WiFi everywhere is slackening.

When I was visiting family in Vancouver over Xmas - a modern, large city by any measure - I had no data plan (I'm US-based), and for the first time in a long time found myself looking for WiFi everywhere I went. Let's just say that the availability of WiFi in public spaces is still very limited.
Is Marco Polo still around? That's how i used to do SSID aware settings to change all of my mail settings to use ssh tunneled SMTP while at work and switching back again at home.
Check out the unicorn-rails gem if you'd rather not fiddle with config files.
It doesn't have that connotation, "barely legal" implies "fully legal".
As long as the Win32 API continues to not support UTF-8, using wide strings will remain the least bad option on Windows.
"the templating in Django is awful compared to Mako/Jinja2, the ORM in Django is awful compared SQLAlchemy"

You can use Django with Jinja2 and SQLAlchemy.
Growing computer education you say? Also teach kids engineering — it's easy, everybody can do it, right? As easy as programming. Everybody can program. I have no idea why programmers have high salaries. And why we cannot find programmers that are not self-taught and possess at least the fucking theoretical minimum of CS disciplines and a grasp of professional culture. Yes, give the world more ignorant "I can code" folks, there is not enough of them!
I'd love to see an actual nuts and bolts implementation of the method you describe. I've seen variations of it discussed in other threads but it's all just theory. Deciding how to serve up pages based on user agent, scheduling refreshes, etcetera. It all seems extremely complicated, I'd especially like to know if the implementer viewed the ROI as worth it after the fact.
When JPEGMini came out I thought it was a hoax. I've been working with various image compression tools since 1992, and was highly skeptical about their claims, but after encoding a ton of edge cases, I was convinced it was the real deal.

Have since encoded thousands of images for various clients with JPEGMini, and have never noticed ANY difference or persistent issues. Most of all, it saves me from having to experiment with individual image optimization settings. I always use it as a last step in every development project (last step because it has the annoying 'feature' that it overwrites the originals).

I dare you... Give me the original JPEG of your PNG samples (you DID start out with a JPEG, right?) and I'll repeat your experiment with my local JPEGMini install, then upload them to IMGUR for re-post here.

As to the issue at hand (Beamr/Snake-Oil): if Beamr saves me the trouble of manually having to fiddle with all kinds of optimization parameters to get very good result, much more difficult for video than JPEG, because scenes and requirements change, then that too is worth my time and money.

To be clear: I have nothing to do with Beamr or this company. I've been lurking around on HN for a long while, check my profile. The original Diaz post and claims like yours are simply a load of crock.

PS I know you can get better compression results with JPEG2000 and various more obscure formats, but the clincher for me has always been that the end result was straight ole JPEG. Works everywhere.
It's not entirely clear what other programming experience this person had before learning Rails but Rails is definitely not the place to start learning programming. It also doesn't sound like he was following any specific tutorial. For any readers wanting to learn Rails, I would highly recommend http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book. If he didn't have a well structured tutorial to follow and no prior programming knowledge then it doesn't surprise me that he wound up confused and frustrated after 6 months.

* They tell you you don’t have to learn anything else except Rails, that this is one of the greatest advantages it has.

Every single introductory book or blog post to Rails I have read says something like "While knowing Ruby completely isn't a prerequisite to Rails, here's the minimum to get going and you should teach yourself the rest as you go".

* Oh, but you do know about MVC right? The whole Model, View Controller philosophy? Right?

Not sure why having a design pattern is such a problem. I'd say it makes things easier after learning it.

* Sure, it’s awesome, once you get the hang of how to install and maintain your gems. Is that hard?

If you're diving into rubygems and adding a bunch just to see what happens then you will probably run into trouble. I have followed the Agile Rails and railstutorial.org tutorials and never got into gem trouble there.

* Yeah, good luck, first you have to install [rbenv] it with Homebrew

Homebrew is so awesome, especially for beginners. 5 minutes Googling and half an hour should give you enough knowledge to know how to install rbenv (brew install rbenv && brew install ruby-build)

I'll skip the rest of the technology rants as it's more of the same.

I might as well get a PHD in aerospace engineering instead of learning all this shit just to create a few web pages.

I dare say that aerospace engineering involves a few more literal moving parts than a Rails application.

You can take comfort in the fact that creating a Rails app is nowhere near as bad as deploying one.

This was written on 8th May 2012. The author lists off all of the technologies Rails requires you understand but amongst all of his research had never heard of Heroku?

There are a lot of moving parts in Rails because it does a lot of things. The author is right that there is a lot to learn in Rails but it's not clear what he's comparing it against. If he wants to make websites with iWeb and work at that level of complexity then I'm happy for him. However this rant reads more like a 5 year old complaining after he tried to drive a car and hadn't learnt how to ride a bike yet.
I'm interested to see what's said for "poor cache-ability". It's an area where the assumption of "more caching is better" can be wrong. I've seen real-world A/B test results that indicate client-side caching can often be slower than re-fetching a resource from the network. Typically, this is true for small resources being loaded from the disk cache (i.e. your home page on a new browser session). It's counter intuitive, but many network connections to hot CDNs are faster than fetching from a local physical (spinning) disk.
Mailbox, I quit you
You're straining this analogy though. Using fine motor skills and hand eye coordination is different from understanding recursion and using to solve problems. Let's get serious everyone. :)

This is not to knock anyone but let's say all of us participating in this discussion are at or better than the level of coding we think the general public should be at. This coding ability still doesn't seem to make us have great, sound, logical arguments and all these other attributes that are being espoused.
I was just checking it out but I saw there were a ton of forks and a number of seemingly important issues. I was hesitant to use it after seeing that.
This is an interesting issue. Normally I'm all for privacy but I think we need some way to allow for innovation yet still ensure privacy. Actually I think banning the government and allowing others is a starting point. I think maybe a petition or license-based system would be good. I'd hate for a software startup to be disallowed from taking pictures for some new innovative idea. I think Google Maps is really just the start of a whole wave of technology we'll see.
Completely off topic, but was anyone as disoriented as I was to realize they were browsing an Apache-licensed git archive on a Microsoft site? It wasn't even awful (not github, or really even gitorious, but not bad).
Social Media Marketing Habits to Execute Every Day
Is it just me, or is this not at all the same kind of node.js-style concurrency that makes sense Heroku's new router? Using Unicorn simply means that you're firing up a few more workers, it's only slightly better than buying more dynos.
there is also https://github.com/jbalogh/jingo

Jingo serves purely as a minimalistic bridge between Django and Jinja2. Coffin attempts to reduce the differences between Jinja2 templates and Django's native templates.
I can also confirm that Raytheon is building up this capability (although less so than Northrop and Lockheed).

If you're curious what companies are actually committing to vulnerability dev you can search any cleared jobs site for "offensive"; the companies that have listings are who you'd imagine them to be (minus a couple placement firms that just put people right at the Fort).
For the studies mentioned, how do you decide what leads to economic growth and what doesn't?

Take Lasers for example. The first Laser was made at Bell Labs, a commercial research lab. It would not have been possible without the maser that came before it in academia, or the work done by Einstein, also in academia. Lasers have had an immense economic impact, but do we credit them to academic or commercial research?

The answer is both.

Academic research is less frequently the final link in the long chain to profits than commercial research is. This is only natural since commercial research labs are motivated to invent products that will make money while academics can afford to take a longer view.

Why else might nations that spend a lot on fundamental science benefit? A skilled work-force. Scientists may publish how their experiments work in broad strokes, but the nitty gritty details are often something that can only be learned by working in a lab. If your country has a lot of labs, you have a workforce that commercial enterprise can draw upon to bring products to market based on research. A country can always lure immigrants, but having a home-field advantage is more cost effective.
The Air is arguably a push in the mobile direction.
> There are many ways to learn how to code, and we're constantly developing better ways to educate millions of kids

Making it a compulsory part of education does not seem to be a "better" way to do it. Let's not push things that will be useless to most kids until they develop some interest for it, or for solving problems in general. Then you can bring programming as one tool to help solve issues, in a better/faster/cheaper fashion. Programming for the sake of programming has no meaning, just like we are being taught Math for the sake of Math. Education needs to be way more tangible and down-to-earth, at least for younger children.
damn, I think I'm being played too.
Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5283785
The Rise and Fall of the NASA Software Engineering Laboratory
But take any subject we learn in high school, whether it's math, science, history, etc. The general public is vastly uninformed about all of those subjects regardless of the fact that they are taught in high school. Why would programming make a bit of difference in that sense? It's not like programming is not taught at all in high school, anyway.
there is a separate thread going on about Beamr Video. JPEGmini is created by the same company. I am curious to learn if this product works.
I don't know where your wife is from, but wheat originated in the Fertile Crescent, and was a driving force behind urbanization and the formation of city-states. A substantial number of people and cultures in turn spun out of there. If you are not of Sub-Sahara African descent, you have ancestors from there. In Africa, there were very limited grain crops available... Mostly sourgum and millet iirc.

Just about any northern hemisphere agricultural society relied upon grains. They were (and to some extent, still are) essential to society advancing to the point that people can specialize in things other than gathering food.
I don't think I even hinted at anything that stupid... Swartz did enough to face the possibility of charges even without counting what he might have done later.

I am saying that the possibility of re-offending is one of the things a prosecutor has to consider when judging the public interest, especially in a resource-constrained environment.
bjornsing, I think you might not understand what Diaz is doing. He is not manually tuning the parameters for each video file. He is actually letting x264 automatically choose the bitrate and encoding parameters, to achieve a desired level of quality.