skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Nowadays were are growing childs who just consume, they consume from Facebook, from Youtube, from Twitter: Yet they don't produce any content.

Actually more people produce content nowadays that any other period in history.

Heck, there are 600,000+ apps in the iTunes App Store. More than all the commercial titles ever written for Amiga and Atari combined.

You also forget that people with an Amiga, Commodore, Amstrad etc were a minority. And of those, those who wrote their own programs an even smaller minority. And of course, being early adopters, they were more the programmer/geek type that the average person, hence them writing programs etc more as a percentage of the THEN total. But in raw numbers, more people write stuff nowadays than ever before.
At first I was all, "oh man -- another small company trying to rip me off."

Then I was all, "oh man -- this actually seems like a pretty cool product"

I actually hate choosing compression settings, so for a piece of software to choose compression settings for me seems really nice.

Up to 4x -- so what if it is "over the top"? That's advertising. You present your best results. You pick the stuff that sounds the best. Why? Because people are usually too ignorant (not necessarily a bad thing) to know what is good for them.

Anyway. Props to you guys (drorgil) for making a good product and standing by it.
Disconnect mysql_connect
> where as C++ provides raw, unfiltered but potentially dangerous access.

Wouldn't that be assembly? Last time I heard Stroustrup, he was all raving about abstractions, not raw unfiltered access.
> Can you craft a legal system where everyone receives at least the minimal amount of legal expertise that they need inexpensively?

Yes, we have exactly that here.
They're backed by software people, because most software people think coding is awesome and want more people to do it. Also, it's really hard to find good programmers, so they want more people to start doing it, yes.... but teaching 10 year olds to code isn't going to get them any benefit for at least 12 years. I highly doubt they're thinking that far ahead.

I think it's much more likely exactly what you see - they want more people to code because they believe everyone should code, and many people will like it once exposed to it.
> alert() is almost never used to display user-visible messages

What bank do you use?
What most schools don't teach - Code.org's Video on Programming Education
Creating great content is no longer enough
In short: I hope you are right, because since 2006, Macs have been far and away the best general-purpose PCs ('trucks' in your parlance) on the market, and migrating off of the Mac and/or jailbreaking and bootlegging the OS and then running it on my own unsupported hardware, will be a major pain in the ass. Either options sucks.

But yep, Apple could do every single thing you say. Without breaking a sweat.

As for why? I think Apple would prefer that OS X not run on commodity PCs. They already take halfassed measures to control running OS X in a VM, and to prevent booting OS X on non-Apple hardware. If they could do that more reliably, they woudln't care about their slightly higher internal costs, and they definitely don't care about making life miserable for their developers (as I've witnessed being one for the past 12 years). But it's just a hard problem for them and a hard sell to existing users used to PCs being wide-open. But with every single iOS user they add, that sell gets one user easier.

I'd bet that within five years, the percentage of users running unapproved software [EDIT: somehow deleted 2nd half of this sentence:] on new Mac hardware will be about the same as it is on iOS today. It won't probably be impossible, just hard enough to not be feasible for most normal/busy people.

OK, that wasn't short, but in summary: The fact that Mac OS X has been the best power user OS for the last several years wasn't by design, it was just an accident of history and where they got their OS from. Apple doesn't give a fuck about power users, and Apple doesn't give a fuck about trucks. That market is just way too small for Apple to care about -- which is sad for those of us currently in that market.

Because if/when Apple finally abandons Intel and power users (timing that makes sense to me) it will be years before Ubuttnu or any other plausible player is anywere near as good as Mac OS X 10.7. 10.8 still has too many bugs and stability issues, but it will get there. Probably 10.9, too. But after that? I don't think anybody knows, but I am very skeptical.

(I think Microsoft will move in this direction, too, so those Surface RT users are probably right to worry.)
Sort of off topic, but I wish there was a better tool for pinboard user discovery. I love the self-selection bias of pinboard in that it's highly tech and the popular links are right up my HN/nerdy alley, but I'm starting to really enjoy the "network" view with the 6 or so people I follow. Trying to parse the list of user profiles for interesting folks at random is way too time consuming.

Anyway, I''m following you now, so there's the super tangential tieback. And nice work!
What most schools don't teach - Code.org Video on Programming Education
alternate link
It's too bad that more SaaS apps aren't held to the same level of scrutiny. Most stuff on HN is snakeoil.
Okay then, you asked for it, so here you go.

>The important thing regarding our technologies, and the main point you have missed in your analysis, is that they are used for automatic image optimization to the lowest bitrate or file size possible, and not for encoding an image or video to a specific bitrate or file size.

This is exactly what the CRF mode in x264 is for. Now, in another comment you're claiming the following:

>The decision Beamr Video makes are "smarter" than x264's CRF mode, since they are based on a perceptual quality measure we have developed.

Let's see how well that measures up to reality then, shall we? For this comparison, I used the same four clips as earlier, and ran each of them against the following command line:

x264 --crf 18.5

That's it. Completely default settings, with the exception of setting the CRF to 18.5 for everything. This shall be our vanilla x264 equivalent of your "technology that can adaptively reduce the bitrate of any clip to the minimum amount possible, while ensuring that quality of the output clip is perceptually identical to the quality of the input clip". Since we're using the same value for everything, it involves as much choosing on the user end as your service would. Now then, let's see how your "smarter than CRF" technology actually fares against x264's CRF. Here are the results:

* Clip 1 - http://check2pic.ru/compare/26755/ (CRF 18.5 encode is ~11.7% smaller)

* Clip 2 - http://check2pic.ru/compare/26756/ (CRF 18.5 encode is ~4.4% smaller)

* Clip 3 - http://check2pic.ru/compare/26757/ (CRF 18.5 encode is ~17% smaller)

* Clip 4 - http://check2pic.ru/compare/26758/ (CRF 18.5 encode is ~19.5% smaller)

( The full videos are available here: http://blisswater.info/video/beamr/set3/ )

As we can see from the comparisons, x264, at defaults setting and CRF 18.5, can produce practically identical visual results (as in you wouldn't notice any quality difference in action), while producing smaller bitrates all over the board. Looks like your supposedly "smarter than CRF" technology for choosing bitrates isn't so smart after all, eh?

In short, even if you have developed some sort of quality-based bitrate-choosing technology of your own, in practice it still seems to lose consistently to x264's CRF mode (and since x264 actually allows you to control the CRF value, it's much more versatile than your "no quality settings at all, we know best" offering). As such, given the substantial claims about the capabilities of your technology, the Snake Oil verdict shall remain.
From the help popup: "Let's see how fast your browser is at running a computationally, mathematically, and graphically intense app! Thank you WebKit SunSpider :-)"
Just as a note to everyone, you can use Mako/Jinja2, SQLAlchemy and really any other Python tool/library out there with Django.

What Django does well is provide a pre-built and (IMHO) easy to use set of default tools. This does not mean that you must use these tools, they are just there by default if you need them. You could really just use Django as an HTTP routing tool.
>Even earlier people staged their own plays at home.

No, they didn't. Theater plays were staged publicly until at least 5th century B.C.

>And when they wanted to listen to music, they played it from sheets. Instead of just tuning into the radio. That's quality of consumption for you.

Indeed it is. Was this meant ironically?

>I.e. people will always complain about earlier times being better, even and especially so in those earlier times themselves.

And people might always have had a point. Depending on what they were complaining about. That we have used to be living in a time when this doesn't exist anymore, doesn't mean that their initial complain was bogus.

Matter of fact, it takes a lot of search for find people complaining about "earlier times being better" in earlier times. There are quotes complaining of decline, from Hesiodus to Plato to latin writers etc, but fewer and far between. And there was times like the enlightenment era or the modernist period where optimism and looking into the future was the prevalent emotion.

Nowadays, every 12 year old on YouTube laments that he wasn't born 30-40 years ago.
"the soldiers fight against .... Sadaam Hussein". Before arming the next group of sociopaths nominally running the country, and leaving in disgrace from the smoking ruins of said country. Kristen, baby, I didn't ask "the soldiers" to invade Iraq, so they will get no thanks from me for that war. By the way, when's your next vacation to Baghdad?
On the "slow, slow, slow" point, I didn't realize how slow iTunes was until just now.

I recently got a couple of HD movies for my Nexus 7 from Google. I didn't really think that much about downloading them, just stuck the pin and they were downloaded reasonably quickly and painlessly in the background.

But now that I think about it, the contrast with my wife's experience downloading HD TV shows and movies from iTunes could not be more stark. The downloads take hours. She'll often check and be frustrated about how little had downloaded. She'd sometimes end up reshuffling her downloads. Until our recent wireless upgrade, she'd worry about where to place her laptop, sometimes resorting to a network cable. And probably more frustrations I'm forgetting.

To top it off, this is in a country Apple officially supports and Google doesn't. From my (admittedly limited, external perspective) I'd say Apple still has a long way to go with web services, including iTunes.
Then you're lucky. Not everyone has that opportunity. Everyone uses computers pretty much every day. Knowing a little bit about how computers work can make it 1000x easier to use computers. If you believe it's all magic, you can't properly figure out problems by yourself.
While I agree with your overarching point that it's a good thing when institutions gain legitimacy and authority, I think it's also important to appreciate the corrupting influences that exist within organizations. In the corporate world we have watchdog groups, regulatory agencies, etc. But for governments there are few checks and balances. The US Government has conducted a war on whistleblowers and watchdog groups.

In my view, the government is just the gang that drove out all the rival gangs and got rich enough to start laundering its reputation, rewriting history, etc.

Even in 2013, the atrocities committed by the US government are worse than those of nearly any criminal gang in the world. Consider rendition. Consider drone attacks on children.
"This year, about five times as many smartphones will be shipped versus PCs, and tablets will surpass PCs for the first time."

Woah, holy unreferenced claim, bat man!

The only thing my Googling gives for tablets surpassing PCs is

http://bgr.com/2012/11/26/tablet-sales-2013-notebook-pc-sale...

That's a PROJECTION that tablets will surpass laptops in 2016(!).

--- Maybe Google is just wonky and is missing all those articles reporting that this is happening now or maybe, just this discussion happening entirely "inside the echo chamber" ---

Edit: He could also mean: "tablets will surpass PCs for the first time..." (at some unknown time in the future).
While I have several tablets, pods, ereaders, etc., I create content only on my desktop. The reason is pretty simple - a full size keyboard, and the biggest display I could find for a reasonable cost.

I can touch type only on a full sized, standard keyboard.

Having a big display is a big productivity booster. I can have reference material in one window, and two other full sized windows on source code. It's a big deal. A little laptop display - no thanks.

I'd get a display twice as big if one were available. Heck, I'd like one the full size of my desk top, and actually have it be my desk top.
Yea, but what Daiz proves in the OP is that he personally can do a better job than this so-called "algorithm". I hear his next project will be proving the worthlessness of spell checkers by simply beating them, at spelling. That paper clip thing in Word is such Snake Oil! ;)

For the record I have nothing to do with this Beamr, but I do feel sorry for the those guys. The marketing speak on their website may be a little hyperbole, but there's nothing fraudulent there that I can see. I don't think they deserve this treatment.

UPDATE: LocalPCGuy, sorry for posting this as a reply to your comment. You obviously get it.
We don't have nationwide standards for curriculum in the US.. shocking, I know. Most schools do similar things, but there's a wide variety of quality and content of education.
"It sounds like lots of the interested people are more interested in preparing students for a career in software engineering"

That could be the case. Programmers are expensive because there isn't enough to meet demand. If you can get a lot more people interested and entering into the market, the cost will go down. I would imagine an employer would prefer programmer's salary to be more in line with what a typical employee's salary is. If there is an end goal, it would probably be to make programming an expected skill set in addition to a specialty, rather than a specialty in of its own.
Why is it hard to scale a database (in layman's terms)?
I'm not even part of the country.

We don't have cliques, proms, or BS high school drama where I come from. We just get along. No mass shootings either.
> I didn't work on the Policy team - I was a dev - but I seriously doubt anyone there could terminate peoples' accounts without reasonable suspicion of a violation and get away with it. The checks and balances are too tight.

As a consultant I had two clients who had their accounts disabled for no reason, and who I am absolutely positive were not breaking and rules. I've seen google steal the balance from adsense customers, without offering any recourse or even a human to talk to. Whatever those checks and balances are, they are no where near enough.
That is not the creator of this tool. The maker is quoted earlier in the thread talking about the API usage increasing the speed of the process by 200-300%, so he is definitely using the API.
Prom dress on promdresstores
prom dress&evening dress&... all you can imaging all at www.promdresstores.com
>JPEGmini adaptively encodes each JPEG file to the minimum file size possible without affecting its original quality

That is indeed what the FAQ says, but that being the case, the tool does not actually work very well, and the presentation is incredibly dishonest. The fact is that the JPEGmini versions of these images do lose noticeable quality, but Beamr is hiding this by giving a demo where the images are shown at 25% scale.

Take the dog image, for example. Using the slider, you'd think that JPEGmini nailed it; no visible artifacts whatsoever. But let's look at a section of the image at 100% scale, and see if this tool is really that impressive: http://imgur.com/z12mHnd

...holy block artifacts Batman!
They do, more or less.

http://www.atmel.com/devices/ATtiny1634.aspx
This. Even as a guy whose main interests lie in theoretical aspects of computer science, I need to learn of this stuff.
May I just say I love threads like this. VCs should read these discussions.
I hope you are right. That said, I think the points I raised are worth considering.

FWIW I'd expect many of the featured people to be thinking much further ahead than 12 years.
How to Build a Killer Sales Funnel (and close 98% of your prospects)
Think about it this way. Suppose an activist decides that he/she wants to run for office to make a difference on some issue that matters to him/her and gets elected.

The activist does not strive to get 100% of the vote, only the requisite majority to pass a law, thus forcing the minority to abide by a law it does not support. Consider pre-Brown-v-Board black students who had to follow the law and attend segregated schools. They were in the minority subjected to the will of the majority. The same goes for poor students today who are unable to obtain a school voucher b/c they are in the political minority and so must attend vastly inferior schools.

So my statement is trivially true for all efforts to create legislation that is not unanimously supported, regardless if history decides the majority view is enlightened or backward.
I thought it was a good idea to include the disclaimer. As obvious as it might seem that these are opinionated modifications to the site's intended style, it may save some grief to make your awareness of the issue clear.
I believe the commenter was referring to your tongue-in-cheek second part of your comment: "just to know who to sue in case of a leak."
He never said they were specific to Django, he was mentioning a few specific things he liked about Django.

It's great you like Pyramid, but honestly, a lot of this is just a matter of taste. I personally find the way Pyramid fits together and its documentation less appealing than Django. In my dabblings with Pyramid, I found the community less responsive and helpful. But that's all subjective and anecdotal, just like your take on Django (which is why this is a boring discussion).

The truth is, good engineers can do great things with far less than Django or Pyramid. The choice of framework is a very boring discussion, since most modern, widely used options are going to be "good enough" in the right hands. Your idea and its execution are front and center. If you're sufficiently skilled, your framework shouldn't be a huge factor in your execution.

Pick something that you like, and just get to work.
your resume has an extra page in it. I'd 86 that.
It's important to keep in mind the role of the professional guilds in controlling supply for lawyers and particularly for doctors.
You could simultaneously apply for jobs and also to an MS program at good universities. Go through the job interviews, visit with your potential professors, and then go with your gut feeling.
One possible reason for the cynicism is that an increase in programmers results in an increase in competition for lower pay.
At least three different people I know are significantly involved in that area. You probably know some of them too. I detest them for the ethics of it, and keep my distance as a result, but there's no question what they do and where the money comes from.
Kivy on Raspberry Pi
Putting a scalpel in your drawer is a simple one-step operation. Anyone can install a scalpel.

Using it effectively, and knowing the dark corners of scalpeling, is quite another thing. It would be easy to get into deep trouble with a scalpel.
And if you had one, you would understood what I wrote.

This bulling thing is cultural. It doesn't happen everywhere, the same way mass shooting doesn't happen everywhere (and no, it's not because of no guns available).

And part of it is giving it too much attention. A lot of times it's not even bulling is merely normal behaviour in any team of people.

But since kids are taught that everybody is supposedly a "unique snowflake" and they must be greeted with roses and "ohhhs", they are devastated if they are not the most popular in school or are called a nickname or don't get the girls.

Meanwhile, in the real world, kids are struggling with extreme poverty, war, lack of water and food, etc. Not nicknames and not being invited to the prom.
There already are several solutions like this that have been around for years. Check out Zimbra. But still a pain to maintain and moving over to Google Apps several years ago, I never looked back.
Thanks for the link! (And thanks to the others below for their links as well!)
Looks like they're just causing computation and JIT'ing in Chakra and V8 before moving to the next square. SunSpider is a terrible metric and they're just poking fun. Pretty funny when you think about it.
Great resource...it's definitely hard to find talent in the middle of the country!
Now we're getting to the nub.

I'm no expert on this matter, so apologies if this is a dumb question, but: has the perceptual quality measure used in CRF been subject to the same ITU BT.500 testing?

If it hasn't, then I'm afraid your case remains unproven.
Add an PDF-attachment to your mail and it becomes a big deal.
2 Reasons to Keep an Eye on GitHub
How exactly can you be "absolutely positive" they weren't breaking any rules?
Still a dick move.
How to Use Infusion Soft to Increase Business Automation
Hi!
1.) Works exactly the same :)
2.) Hey we're from Sydney too! Our severs are in us-east at the moment. We've got loads of Australian customers and for Minecraft, us-east latency is very playable. Best thing is to give it a go and see what it's like. That being said, we've designed our platform to be multi-region so more datacenters are Coming Soon.
Their plan is to transition people to cellular enabled devices rather than transitioning non-cellular devices to cellular devices.
you'd be shocked at how many ways people who don't code can get stuck when trying to learn.

Many times, they can't even form their question any better than "My code is broken. What do I do?"

Having someone human there both gives them the answer much better than they can find themselves and gives them the knowledge that someone is there to help them, so they don't give up.

Yes, some people will be able to figure things out themselves, but having someone to help the rest of the people can be invaluable.

I've taught intro CS for three years at Stanford, and even there, most students get stuck and need help to get through the intro class. The reason they have been able to (the intro CS class is the most popular class at the school. About 90% of all students take it) is that there is an extensive support network of student TAs that are there to help them.

We're replicating this online for all the "normal" kids who can't just "figure it out" themselves without any direction.
Fight between codecademy and code.org probably
Whatever the correct analogy is in terms of smartphones and PCs, it's worth pointing out that the first mass-produced car (the Model T) actually preceded the first mass-produced tractor (the Fordson Model F tractor), not the other way around.

Why? I don't know for sure, but I would imagine it was because the market for cars was and is an awful lot bigger than the market for tractors, and tractors come with special requirements for durability and versatility (towing, plowing, etc.) that were harder to satisfy at the time.

EDIT: Oops, the link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordson_tractor
Thanks! yeah, we're hoping that professional software developers will help out just to feel good and help people. The extrinsic motivation is more for the students who can either learn more by helping others or make some money as a high schooler working flexible hours from anywhere.