skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
https://mediacru.sh/ was on the front page a day or so ago, it grabs GIFs and re-encodes them into video (MP4 and OGGv). The results are much smaller and, in my local experimentation, are much, much faster to render than the original files.

There's some technical details at https://mediacru.sh/demo .

Draw your own conclusions, but that's how I have experienced it.
If you google for it you mostly get "popular science" nonsense and linkbait and "common sense" junk.

For example the Egyptians put south "up" not because of interior decorating but because even the dumbest sailor understands water flows "down" and the nile more or less goes from S to N, so make them match, so the nile flows down on the world and on the map.

As for the compass stuff, northern hemisphere astronomers figured out the whole "north star" thing a long time before compasses, and a set of star maps for each season (or month, or whatever) more or less has the same circumpolar stars on every map (although a different orientation), so I guess to smear the ink the least you draw the circumpolar stars first, why not at the top. Or rephrased the natural way to figure out a star map is to pattern match the circumpolar stars, hold up your star map matching the circumpolar stars on the map with the world, and you "naturally" end up with the north side up, more or less, so you can read the star names with the "boring" circumpolar stars matched up and the zenith at the center of the page. Or rephrased something like the boring circumpolar stars are always "naturally" going to be one corner of the circle of your map so you'd tend to write the seasonal star names right side up across the map, sorta. Well it's hard to describe but makes sense if you physically act it out.

Rephrased, in the northern hemisphere you've always got a north star to find and face towards. Then hold up your map (star map or geographic) until N points to that star, which happens to be the way you're facing. Coincidentally that means the N always ends up at the top of the page. I suppose just to be a PITA you could find Polaris, face it, and "About Face" just to be difficult, then match up your map with "N aka toward Polaris" to the bottom, but its likely not happening.
Nope. F-16 and F-18 are of comparable class, F-18 being built for Navy requirements and F-16 for Air Force. IIRC they even evolved from a common program at one point. They separated as Navy and AF do not mix well, as is demonstrated by the JSF program.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_Fighter_program
Show HN: Stereoten - A social music player for iPhone
Hi HN,

We've been working in Rwanda for the past three years building interactive SMS systems for NGOs. This is our take on how to build a platform instead of custom systems to handle a lot of the needs here. We think it probably has some uses in the west as well.

Happy to answer any questions and respond to comments, curious to hear everybody's feedback. (please be gentle, not in the face!)
The original link just displayed a blank white page for me.

Anything with underwater cables is very interesting to me (for some weird reason) so I had to go find the article.

Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?safe=off&sclien...

Page 2: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?safe=off&sclien...
explain in neuroscientific terms

Isn't that putting the cart before the horse? The article draws attention to a phenomenon that isn't predicted by current theory. Before a predictive theory has been developed, there is even some censorship or bias risk in using neuroscientific terms.
Just cut out the common parts.
Bullshit. Macroeconomically, it is impossible to "spend more than you have" because money is just a fiction used to manage asset and labor allocation.
This is actually in the latest stable Firefox release already (Firefox 23).
that's cool idea!
Nothing in particular, it is just that when you find an easter egg it sometimes pays off to see if it contains more than you see at first.

At least with 5 minutes of checking all the controls/dials nothing interactive popped up, that's not to say it isn't there.
How to build standards-compliant responsive design using viewport 
One of the key concepts in any responsive design is the change of viewport size. That’s because mobile viewports vary greatly from desktop viewports. To control the viewport size we traditionally use the viewport meta tag. However, the viewport meta tag, like all the worst browser developments of the last forever, isn’t W3C valid. It was originally introduced by Apple in Safari and has since been adopted by other browsers. This results in an inconsistent implementation.<!–more>. Happily, the W3C have ridden to our rescue once again by introducing the @viewport CSS rule.
This doesn't work in the new Google Maps, only the classic.
Err, why is this here? Also, the NickServ and ChanServ commands are going to differ across networks and IRCd's...If you want a truly private IRC you should probably roll your own server. If that isn't an option, at least set a key for your channel so that messages are encrypted
A company profits (or intends to) from what it does, even if they don't directly charge for it. At the least, it adds value to their brand.

Of course it's even better here: Street View is part of maps which is a real business for Google, and they even added ads to map searches recently. It's also part of the Android maps offering.

Plus they get to keep the data anyway, so they'll eventually use those for AR, Google Glasses, and what have you. Oh, and the GPS data recorded by the Street View equipment also add data to regular maps and fix mapping inconsistencies.
Thanks for the recommendation! I've not read that one yet, bit it sounds intriguing.
semi-CSB that may be related:

I often travel with electronic prototypes and/or custom parts, which can be really annoying if you have to cross an international border and go through customs.

I found that the best way to get through it speedily is to also carry one of my Antbots, and go into sales pitch mode when asked to explain it. People will automatically want to get rid of a traveling salesman and the fastest way to do so is to let you through.

Got me out of a ticket once, too.
200 million USD per strike fighter vs. under 17 million per Reaper.

No wonder we are broke.
Congrats Jaana on the launch and the transparency you're showing here!

I agree about the last lesson indeed (not having enough authority). Also, something that was discussed on the 30x500 alumni list, was that the trust you have to inspire to your followers in order to sell a product at $300 is much higher than if you sell a $20 ebook. Hence, all other things being equal, it's better to start with a lower priced first product.

That's also something explained very well in the Book Yourself Solid book (http://www.amazon.com/Book-Yourself-Solid-Reliable-Marketing...).

You first need to build trust with free stuff, then cheap education products, then more and more expensive products or services (in the case of the book's author, 1-to-1 coaching). Very few people are going to buy something expensive from you if they don't know you. Most often they'll consume the free stuff first, then move on to your cheap product, etc.
>Ahh. Psychologists. Expectations calibrated.

A, a positivist reductionist. Expectations on intellectual sophistication and ability to comprehend the world beyond simplistic models calibrated.
Hi-Response for Wordpress
Product sense is everything. Learn it as quickly as you can. Being good at engineering has nothing to do with being good at product management.

How do you know if you have it? How do you learn it or improve it?
This should actually already work if you are on Firefox 23. Please file a bug if it doesn't.
> About six months ago I wrote an OS X app (and browser extension) that tracked all my computer usage. It never grew past a prototype, but I'm thinking of starting work on it again.

It's ObjC and not python, but you might be interested in this -- https://github.com/andrewschleifer/Slife
Reset business yearly - Curtis McHale
What mercury being liquid at room temperature has to do with relativity
This is a nice Gem for sure. Using the Twitter and G+ widgets are ok, but 1) they aren't always accurate and 2) Who cares about them? Seeing activity on HN and Reddit is great.

What are the performance implications of having this gem running on a page?
his point is that these studies never seem to get to that point. they never even seem get to the point of forming a predictive theory.

'seem' is the operative word here.
> you dare question a website with 'scientific' in the URL? I like your moxie.

Yep, I had a lot of nerve doing that. :)

A while ago, in an article I noted that Wikipedia defined neuroscience as "the scientific study of the brain and nervous system", while psychology was defined as "the study of the mind, partly through the study of behavior." Within hours of my article's appearance someone inserted the word "scientific" into psychology's definition. Solved that problem.

> I recall reading something posted recently about how the way the grants in social sciences is set up ensures that you get a whole lot of papers that have a catchy 'truthy' hook to them, which will then get disseminated by the mainstream media and quickly forgotten.

Yes, even to the extent that two studies arrive at opposite conclusions but don't notice each other (and no one points out the contradiction). My favorite example of overlooked contradictions are two current, well-regarded psychological theories -- Grit and Asperger Syndrome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grit_(personality_trait) : "Grit in psychology is a positive, non-cognitive trait, based on an individual’s passion for a particular long-term goal or endstate coupled with a powerful motivation to achieve their respective objective."

So according to the Grit contingent, focusing on a few activities, or just one, is a "good thing", and typical of successful people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome : "Asperger syndrome (AS), also known as Asperger's syndrome or Asperger disorder, is an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that is characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction, alongside restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests."

So according to the Asperger contingent, focusing on a few activities, or just one, is a mental illness.

How can this happen? The answer is that there's no central defining theory in psychology, so people are free to draw conclusions that don't need to be compared to tested, defining principles like relativity or evolution.

> It basically turned the fields into little more than generators of soundbites.

Well put. :)
Navigators had stellar nav a long time before compasses.

If you live in the N hemisphere theres a really convenient star nearly perfectly (by olden standards) north. Polaris.

If you live in the N hemisphere you could never see a "south star" if one existed, which it doesn't (although there are some close ones).

If you live on a rotating planet, there's no such thing as a permanently "East" star or permanently "West" star.

So you inherently end up navigating off the north star. And in another post I tried to explain there's some built in human-user-interface issues that you tend to hold the map upward pointing to the one feature you're sure of, and with ancient-style celestial nav thats always going to be north because of the north star aka Polaris... so once you have literate map users, map makers are inevitably going to write place names right side up with top pointing to Polaris aka the north star aka "North"
Study Finds Craigslist Took $5 Billion From Newspapers
7 SEO tips for blogging
FSF polo shirts have arrived at the shop
>Well, yes, if someone expects you to know the answer it seems pretty straight forward that you would be more inclined to make a guess rather than saying "I don't know."

And what makes you think that they didn't account for the "I don't knows"?

It generally surprises me how, from reading an 100 high mile description of an article, some commenters always assume (without any evidence) that the results are due to some extremely naive methodological mistake.
The Falcon 9 is the cheapest Medium sized launch vehicle it's more expencive to LEO per LB than a heavy launch system or retrofitting old ICBM's. However, we are considering US construction costs and SpaceX spent far less on R&D and spends less on construction than any US equivalents.
In my Psych course in college we were told on how playing on gender roles can affect performance. Boys and girls were given a math test. On average they performed equally. However when they were given the test and told that the test was also to evaluate how girls do as compared to boys the results were interesting. Girls did worse then average on being told this and boys did better than average.
This article seems to reinforce this point, as the expectation that boys would do better actually caused them to perform better than average.
It also points out how corrosive stereotypes can be, as just the expectation that girls would not do well in math caused a drop in their performance.
I don't have references for these studies unfortunately.
This is a real thing. There appear to be intimate connections between the mind and the body, in both directions. Levels higher up the hierarchy of dynamical systems within an organism appear to direct the function of lower systems. It's feedback loops all the way down.
I've used CodeCollaborator (the SmartBear software plugged at the end of the post) and found it to be a good tool for doing multi-site code reviews. It's straightforward to use; web based; the default diff tool is reasonable; you can specify suggestions or bugs i.e. "I think you should change this line" versus "This line needs to be changed".

IBM stuff, however... well, I've mentioned my feelings on their software on HN before. They're still selling Lotus Notes and Clearcase - I'd be very careful before taking anything they've built/bought.
Compared to the F-111, the F-16 is very light (well, almost everything is lighter than an F-111...). He fought against the F-16 being certified in the nuclear role and lost.

I hadn't heard he was opposed to a radar in the F-16 -- depending on ground control doesn't make sense for an offensive unit. He probably didn't anticipate how lightweight modern electronics have become.
Guantánamo Bay: the US was dead wrong, but no one can admit it
HN,

Interactive SMS systems fill a much needed niche that has been largely neglected in favor of "smart apps". It's great to see that someone has developed a platform for building custom applications. Great job.
Right...and you have the benefits of npm with node. AFAIK, there is nothing comparable with Go... and frankly, even the Go code in that terse example takes more lines and isn't as readable (IMHO) as the Node server...
> What the paper shows is that often it is assumed that words drawn from an IID distribution of letters can be treated as if the distribution of words is uniform

Is this assumption really that common? It seems like a strange assumption to make, since even biased coin flips with P(Head) = 0.99 would be independent and identically distributed.
Your protestations about “literally” are literally wrong
Fair enough; Unix certainly gives you enough ways to shoot yourself and your customers in the foot. I probably should've added the qualifier "wrt. succinctness" (that's e.g. the reason I move from awk to Python when I need more complex data structures than awk's arrays, which can often do the job, but not without looking ugly).

By the way, your "ls * .foo" does not even do the same as "find -name '*.foo'" due to a superfluous space ;-)

But the fact that most people don't know about xargs -P (or gnu parallel), or spawn too many processes, or use ugly hacks like pidfiles/start-stop-daemon, is not a reason to throw out all the good stuff shell scripting has to offer.
They were trying to make a point of sports vs academics with a bit of north-south, but the hidden truth is all 50 of them were in the public-higher-education-industrial-complex.
Nice! I've signed up for the beta!
I have a commute that's 50 miles each way. And I have 3-4 hours at the destination with possible access to a wall plug.

I've been wondering for a while if the Leaf would be feasible for this? It seems just a tad out of its stated range. But it would save a ton of gas money!

Does anyone have any advice?
A couple medical device companies and a hospital are evaluating our system right now. :-)

We're actively working on supporting smaller / shorter-range sensors as well. You probably already know that in addition to the Kinect, a lot more depth cameras are on the market now: PrimeSense's Capri, SoftKinetic, PMD, Inuitive Tec, etc. All of these companies have introduced gum-stick sized sensors that can be embedded in a laptop or monitor.
It seems pretty obvious to me that some variant on the vacuum maglev train is the long-term solution to travel on Earth. It's the only way, really, to get past the air problem. I doubt we'll ever see mass supersonic transport - a far riskier and more inefficient game of fluid dynamics russian roulette.

It's not going to happen overnight, though. We're waiting on a few technological breakthroughs before it becomes viable. Fully automated robotic tunnelling and construction, for one. Automated manufacturing of those robots. Much improved materials science, probably nanotech-enabled. But when these technologies come, it's inevitable that we build such a network.

The time isn't right for vactrains but it will be eventually. The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed - and this particular future has been creeping forward for literally centuries. Give it a few more decades and we'll see the real hyperloop!
My understanding is that many people try Go and decide they don't like it, as you did; at the same time, many have experiences that are similar to mine and they embrace it. To each his own.

The word "rigged" in your original comment implied dishonesty on my part. I just wanted to clarify that the JS code used in the microbench was Ryan Dahl's, and mine was just a port to Go. I was merely giving Go the same task that he did.
The Struggles of Juggling Multiple Projects
The Freelancer’s Guide to Long-Term Contracts
Why wouldn't I feel discriminated? It's not my fault that I was born male.

And I have only once gone to an expensive conference. I offered to help with organization and running it and therefore got in for free (paid own travel expenses).
Invisibility cloak made from simple mirrors can stop time indefinitely
Here is a helpful table http://mandarin.about.com/od/vocabulary/a/europe.htm

You can see that some name are purely phonetic (finland, bielarus).

A few however, ends with 国, which is the character for country. These names are actually significant (for instance, china is 中国, middle country (middle kingdom) and germany actually is brave country)
Perhaps true. But if it is, iOS will continue to be the platform where the money is made.

If this theory makes you feel better about your choice of platform, then bully for you. Just be aware of its implications.
True, but disruption is extremely rare in mechanical and civil engineering. It's more common in SW and theoretical fields.
Craigslist saved the buyers of classified ads $5 billion from 2000 to 2007. They didn't "take" it from the newspapers.
Fedex/UPS/etc international shipping rates tend to be in the $50 range.
A Mach 7+ train sounded indeed a bit preposterous.
Ahhh, that reminds me of the wonderful success that was OS/2. Makes perfect sense now, thanks.
Definitely agree with how hard it is. Hopefully there is light at the end of the tunnel.
The benefits of code review
Ko.ninja slice and dice some knockout apps
Hey, you forgot to mention Oberon! :-)
Nice try, but no, I'm not offended by his advice; I think some of it is highly opinionated.

It's reasonable for you to question my "credentials" for critiquing startup advice if it's accompanied by an analysis of my critique. Then it's relevant and valid. However, alone the comment becomes reduced to an ad hominem dismissal of my point without any real weight beyond it.

I'm not going to engage in the trolling further with you.
Not so much wrong as my impression was you didn't understand it. If that is not the case I apologize.

For example you said: GOMAXPROCS left default. I don't know how you set your environment vars, are they unset so default = 1? You didn't mention in your post that GOMAXPROCS=1/single node worker test cases are really toy test cases (useful only for benchmarking). So if you know everything below, then great! Maybe other people can learn:

GOMAXPROC is the number of OS level threads that the Go runtime is multiplexing Go tasks (goroutines) over.

So if GOMAXPROCS = 1, When one goroutine blocks, another will run, BUT, you will never use more than one OS thread and thus you will never use more than one logical core.

Setting GOMAXPROCS correctly is per application. For example GOMAXPROCS=1 might be right for a commandline tool or a program that was designed to have multiple instances started on the same machine. That being said, a vast majority of the time any high load application I have written is best with GOMAXPROCS=<# of logical CPU cores>. So Go always has concurrency, but GOMAXPROCS gives it parallelism. GOMAXPROCS > 1 also will allow the garbage collector to have more parallelism too.

So if we are talking about a benchmark like this, ideally we want to process requests made in parallel in a parallel fashion. A clear sign is that if you use Node.js worker cluster you should probably test with Go at the same number.

All this being said, depending on your CPUs implementation details, you would sometimes be better off setting both your
node worker count and GOMAXPROC to the number of physical rather than logical cores. Sometimes simultaneous multi-threading (SMT, aka hyperthreading) actually creates more overhead than any concurrency gains it offers.

In short when testing something like this I would always test.
1. n = 1 (with a disclaimer note)
2. n = physical CPU count
3. n = logical CPU count
Where n is the number of GOMAXPROCS/node worker threads.
not groundbreaking at all.
By the way,

> "cat myfile | grep foo | awk '...'" […] indeed this is one of the most frequent performance sinks in shell scripts

Is it really? I would've thought loops were a more common performance sink. I can't imagine how that useless use of cat has _that_ much of an effect, unless you're running a whole bunch of copies of this script. It looks ugly in the process table and it does not let the real command (here: grep) move back and forth in the file, but I've never noticed performance improvements from removing uuoc's.
Oh for heavens sake. Gladwell wasn't talking about physical sports - he was talking skills at complex tasks, like playing the cello or programming a computer. Surely its obvious that training your body is a different issue entirely.
Doesn't Kelly Johnson give Ben Rich the advice to never work with the navy?
Neither has had many posts on HN. Nothing compared to Go or Node or RoR back in the day, anyway.
Thanks! You are SO right!

I had some extra challenges on authority all along since I didn't pick an audience that I'd belong in myself. I just couldn't see myself writing technical tutorials for Java developers - and I didn't want to pick accountants either.

And I did a huge amount of little mistakes! I consider myself lucky in that I eventually reached the launch goal at all.
> Perhaps his tone was a little confrontational

Sorry, that was not intended.

>but his intentions were good. :)

They really were...
What this analysis didn't include was SV vs. other global hubs; as NYC is the only legit challenger domestically in the medium term, I heard the same about Tel Aviv internationally. It would also be interesting to see how SV's funding proportion holds up over time internationally.

edit for sentence clarity.