skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And this is why practically everyone uses Flash regardless of the problems it has: 98% of users have it installed and you can use a single encode for everyone. Even better, that single encode is the best possible encode you can get, since Flash supports practically unrestricted H.264 playback.

HTML5 is going to be a compatibility nightmare. Of course, this has nothing to do with W3C, but rather the fact that nobody involved can make any agreement on what the standardized format should be, so there just isn't any (and not enough browser vendors have the cajones to do what Google is doing and bundle ffmpeg).
Yes - I didn't see that one until I'd submitted this - if I had, I wouldn't have bothered (especially as this article is linked to in that thread).
Cool-- I had a hunch recently that some of our weekly match reports for Yumbunny (our dating site) were showing too many potential matches in the email reports we send. I envisioned some of our users getting overwhelmed by all the options.

Anyway, this article reminded me to get that rolling so instead of top 10, we're going to try top 3 and see if engagement increases. We'll see.
it seems that for most people, 5 is the most choices they can consider without getting a headache.

I think optimally you want the person to narrow it down to 3 choices, because at that point the person is a lot more likely to buy, since they are at a point where they can consider the items side by side and actually make up their mind.
I don't think that building a successful start-up is less of an intellectual achievement than doing scientific research.

I strongly disagree. I have the utmost respect for those who have built successful startups, but virtually none are a very significant intellectual achievement. It takes ambition, dedication, determination, courage, talent, skill, tact, vision, luck, and a hundred other attributes to achieve success in building a startup, but very rarely does it require an intense intellectual effort, and almost never is there any fundamental advancement of scientific thought.

Also, having spent time studying computer science, physics, and aeronautical engineering, one major difference I see is the relative maturity and depth of various fields. Computer science is so much newer than physics that there is simply much more unexplored territory at a shallower level -- which doesn't require as much studying to get to -- that it is easier to come up with new ideas there than in physics.
I've heard this too, but do the admission statistics actually confirm it? I suspect it's more along the lines of, "we only care about your recommendations, as long as you have above a 3.7 GPA." I could be wrong...
thats not choice though, that's pretty much Amazon's equivalent of a product aisle.
Apache doesn't need "fixing" - this is the job of a firewall or IDS or some other such anti-DDoS software. That doesn't mean they couldn't incorporate some protocol patch or use asynchronous I/O or some other crap, but the reliance shouldn't be on Apache to block this. If you're running a website important enough to DDoS, you should have a heavy duty firewall and IDS and possibly reverse proxy in place as well.
Phillips machine: Like water for money
This is pretty much just a poor copy of a new yorker article from last year:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/28/080728fa_fact_...
Seems like you have four options:

1. Build apps that adhere to the TOS (they didn't)
2. Break the standard TOS, but get written assurances from Apple in advance (they didn't)
3. Avoid the market (they didn't)
4. Take the big risk and hope things work out OK. (they did)

Obviously, #4 is a valid option...I just think it's a stupid one for a small company that can't afford to blow a year on something like this, but maybe they can. Regardless, how can you feel sorry for them?

Also, it may seem that Apple approved apps which violate the TOS, but does this developer know that those other app developers didn't arrange this in advance with Apple? I have a hard time believing that a company like Sega would risk so much time and money developing apps without first talking to Apple and getting some clear assurance that they'd be allowed to sell it when they were done. Why couldn't this company have done the same?
Ask HN:What is your best hack?
For me: a warm shower before going to bed, having the plants of the ted video of "grow your own air", disconnect electric appliances at night - you will be surprised at the difference of the bill, skipping dinner, the rss of the guaranteed fresh movies at rotten tomatoes and croosfit.com
Fair point, but isn't the jam example also a product aisle with 24 varieties of jam? My current frontpage recommendations include around 15 laptops and 15 books - I can't possibly buy all of them - aren't they asking me to choose? If they showed me just three from each product category, and fewer categories overall, I might actually be interested in the recommendations.
Lazy Rolling Windowed view into a collection - clojure
just some clojure code
That makes perfect sense. I didn't mean to sound harsh. "Creative director" sounds like someone who tells a bunch of people what to do but doesn't do much him/herself. Glad to hear that's not the case.
As far as maintenance of telerobots, in the extreme case it's performed by other telerobots, manned by call centers full of "certified" gamers 10 or 10,000 miles away. Maybe not even call centers. Maybe employees are just perpetually on call, forced to "goggle in" periodically throughout the day to snake a drain in Brisbane or Bangladesh or Boise. In fact, they were probably goggled in already, playing U(niverse)oS(tarcraft) XXII, so they just alt-tab over.

Sounds crazy, I know, but it does seem to follow the general historical trend of alleviating manual labor from those of lower and lower socioeconomic status, while neatly sidestepping the problem of Strong AI with an ass-ton of artificial artificial intelligence.

The romantic, manly labor the article talks about requires the direct manipulation of physical reality with one's hands. The above scenario is skilled, certainly, but by no means manual.
Did he compare XML to rape?
well at that point they really have no idea what you need, throwing up the crapload of choice is just there in the hopes that you see a good deal and click buy,

They figure that if you are looking for something specific, you'll just use the search feature
You really should test that and submit your findings to HN :).
No problem. Thanks for figuring out that I wasn't attacking you personally :)
nobody? really? some of my best friends are the shy stare-at-your-shoes types.

Boring, again, is in the eye of the beholder. Personally, I find extroverts in general to be a little irritating. Frankly, I'd rather have you try to explain to me what a fourier transform is than tell me how great your ren faire experience was.

the worst are those guys who won't shut up about contrails or jesus or organic food or the democrats or the republicans or corn syrup or whatever. I know we all believe weird shit. Hell, I do too. I don't mind hearing a little about it, but it gets boring pretty fast if that's what you are really into.
FireGPG is useful (picks up on PGP blocks embedded in webpages) and I used the gmail functionality for a while, but gave up on it (for gmail anyways) since it broke with every little update to gmail.
I disagree. Even if your admin tool worked, bad content could still make its way onto your site as long as your site was partially user-contributed. If user clients complained about bad content, you'd have to be on perpetual cleanup duty to make them happy, which sounds terribly tedious.
Read the whole thread. You will see that it was the fault of the the OP and not Erik.

I agree that Erik wrote a very violent mail, but I am sure he was not serious.

Did you read Xah Lee's mail too?
What do you feel it does for your cognitive process? My understanding was is simply allows you to stay up for days on end?
Here's an anecdote for you: I am generally religious about reducing the length of funnels, because length kills conversion like nothing else. This lead me to once let the customers make two choices with one click: whether they wanted download or CD of the software, and whether they wanted to pay by Paypal or Google Checkout. The four combinations were laid out in a 2x2 table.

This proved immensely confusing for people, so much so that adding a shopping cart on top of two bare "download" or "CD" buttons caused sales to rise substantially, despite the fact that the shopping cart was a virtual riot of distraction and required minimally an extra click to get through.
Haha, yes — I just spent 2 minutes scratching my head wondering if it was another British word which America 'simplified', as I found it in the dictionary and thought you meant 'loose' was a common misspelling of 'lose'; Only to realize, yes, lose and loose are two words. Opps!

I think it's time for some sleep...as should probably always be the case when you loose the ability to differentiate words... :D
$300 is _nothing_ if you type for a living and it can save you from chronic wrist pain. I've had my Kinesis for a year. I was suffering from a good amount of pain, especially in my pinkies. It evaporated in about two days once I started using my Kinesis. Now I only get pain if I switch back to my old keyboard (it comes back in a few hours) or if I type for 8 hours straight or with bad posture.

Highly recommended.
The linux distro that came with my Asus EEE PC was very bad and was worse than Win XP in many ways - especially for a general user. I think that might have something to do with why linux is not seen on many netbooks. (I switched to ubuntu after a couple weeks)
Long story short, nobody know when it will launch.
whoa, what makes this conversation flagging worthy ?
I guess its something to do with the ability make a decision and short term memory. Interchangable products makes decision making hard because they need to be considered at once. Products in other categories don't need to be held in your head while you choose between them.
Fine line between relevant life tips and some the trash that fills the stupid amount of these books out there.

There have been some really insightful posts from people documenting how they have adjusted there own lives to achieve a good work/life balance.
Compressive Sensing: the best bits
Read the whole thread. You will see that it was the fault of the the OP and not Erik.

I see. The OP dared to send a private email to Erik. Do you think this "fault" justifies the response "I'm overjoyed that I actually hurt your feelings. I wish I could hurt your feelings so much you would commit suicide" etc. etc.?

* I agree that Erik wrote a very violent mail, but I am sure he was not serious. *

Huh? Please cite even one sentence from his mail that was in the least bit lighthearted or joking. If you sent this email to someone today, the police would be at your doorstep within hours.

* Did you read Xah Lee's mail too? *

Yes, he sounds like a psychopath.

There's no way a sane person can read that thread and come to the conclusion that Erik was the good guy there. I don't mean to jump on the bash Erik bandwagon, since I know nothing about him other than what's been written in this forum. Whatever his contributions were to the hacker community, that thread was obviously not his finest hour.
Please flag the post and move on. We don't come to here to read rants about posts either.
the profession of salesperson exists because people want their choices narrowed for them.
An article on the same topic:

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/everything-is-un...
Am I alone in thinking this is guy is an object lesson in how not to live? Was he just a usenet snark-generation unit? Because I've read all the obituaries, and that seems to be the man's mortal summation.

As an extreme encomium, can anyone point to something he actually did?
I have friend who had something similar written on an algebra assignment because he used Zorn's Lemma when it wasn't needed.
1 million numbers is not a great deal - Level 3 charges around 3 cents per month for a US number in volumes of 1000+.

$30k a month should be noise for Google, compared to the cost of running out of numbers. I'm actually surprised they didn't buy more.
I've done it on and off for a while, but I can't say I've done it consistently enough to know for sure if it's working. It does seem to have some appetite suppressing effects when I do it consistently.
For a brief period Asus offered better Linux models than Windows ones (for example a 20gb SSD instead of an 8gb SSD, for the same price).

Now that seems to have changed, sadly.
Put yourself in Jobs's shoes; would you so blithely assume that it's OK for the public to dig into your medical history? The only reasonable obligation on Jobs is to announce that he won't be performing his duties for some period. He did that.

You should care as much about his wishes for privacy as you do for his well-being because they are one and the same. There are a multitude of reasons someone might want to keep their health challenges private, including concerns over how young children will be able to deal with scary-sounding information (especially once it gets filtered through the rumor mill). There's no morality in rumor-mongering.
I got my Kinesis on Ebay for between $100-200 a about four years ago. It's a joy to type on and probably one of the best investments I've made. The second probably being the Steelcase Leap chair I got (http://www.steelcase.com/na/leap_products.aspx?f=11852). I try to buy nice products that I spend a great deal of my time using.
No way. There are tons of people in the sciences with very interesting lives, they just don't have people knocking down their door to write popular biographies like Feynman, Erdös, or Tesla.

I say that living mathematicians like John Nash Jr., Shing-tung Yau, and Alexander Grothendieck have much more interesting lives than the examples you mentioned.
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I find that a Model M allows much softer typing than other keyboards, and much more predictable. If you're pounding the keys you're doing it wrong.

(This is precisely the point of having a resistance curve that is very easy through the part of the keypress where the actual contact is made, and then increases smoothly so that pushing the key all the way down is neither necessary nor desirable. It lets you not jam the keys down, and even gives you aural and tactile feedback to let you know when you’ve pressed the key far enough.)

(Edit: here's some images for the happy hacking keyboard; I'm sure I've seen this in English, but I'm not sure where. http://www.pfu.fujitsu.com/hhkeyboard/leaflet/keyspec.html )
Seeing the title I assumed they were talking about making a dime-sized coin with the value of a quarter. It's probably more now, given the increase in value of precious metals, but the last time I checked, about 3-4 years ago, a silver dime was worth a quarter.
How does Jobs being well-known imply that we don't have to respect his desire for privacy? I simply cannot see how our interest legitimates our prying.

And make no mistake: This is prying. You said that attention can't be turned off like a spigot, which may be true but isn't apropos. Water flows effortlessly from the spigot. Gossip like this is dug up and mongered at effort.
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I'm a longterm RSI sufferer, now largely recovered, and I while I agree that there is certainly something to the theory that stress and reduced blood flow is part of the problem, it seems to me that he's overstating his case:

"To be perfectly clear: in TMS theory, the cause of pain is not the structural abnormalities (tendon or muscle tears, tissue inflammation, herniation, degeneration, decrepit muscles, etc) or behavioral “problems” (poor posture, a bad ergonomic setup, improper typing habits) typically identified by medical practitioners. None of them are responsible for the pain – none."

My personal experience readily invalidates this. I can type for a full day on my Kinesis Advantage practically without a problem these days, but if I sit with the Macbook for a day, I can certainly feel the strain. Doing that for 2-3 days will bring back quite a lot of discomfort. Why would I all of a sudden have more unconscious stress just because I moved from working at my desk to the couch?
It's already active as of April if you had a previous account with GrandCentral. They've polished the interface some and added some features like transcription which I don't believe was available (at least not in the free version of GC). The 2 main reasons I see using it are:

1) As a one to many phone number that lets people dial your home, work, cell numbers simultaneously.

2) As a filter so you won't get unwanted calls at inconvenient times ie recruiter cold calls during work hours.

There's more, but these are the 2 ways I used it before Google basically let the service die so it could be absorbed and reworked.

In order to keep your original phone number still secret you currently have to have Google connect you and the number you want to call. I can see this being handled by a dialer app on the iPhone or seamlessly on an android phone in the future. There's no cost for US only calls.
This is the kind of site people will go to by typing the url into the browser, and if it becomes popular, they will expect to find it at the .com.
They make an identical sound however hard you type, since it's caused by the instantaneous buckling of a spring.
Nice. Also shows very well why it would be useful to trade things like credit default swaps on exchanges instead of OTC.
I was scoring at a post-highschool level on standardized tests in 8th grade, so I can say with confidence that I could have done fine (compared to public education) with 8 years, but public education is garbage. It should be easily possible to learn what most people learn by the time they finish college with 12 years of schooling. The fact that colleges offer remedial math classes that basically amount to simple algebra and that professors still have to explain the difference between adjectives and adverbs proves the point that public school is a tremendous failure.

Highschool graduates should not look confused when asked "What percent of 75 is 40?" nor when asked "If a refrigerator is running in a closed system, will the temperature decrease, increase or stay the same?", which I once overheard a group of about a half dozen college students discussing for literally almost half an hour and still coming up with the wrong answer (that it will stay the same). And this was at a private university.

Programmers should not graduate college and be unable to write FizzBuzz, but they do.

Education in the United States (and I'm fully aware many readers will not be from the US) is a joke. It is at least an order of magnitude behind where it should be.

There's a Star Trek episode where a boy about 10 years old complains about calculus homework. I sincerely believe that could be a reality if we tried hard enough.
I now have 4 Kinesis Advantage (2 old ones with AT connectors and 2 new USB ones). I use them in Dvorak mode in combination with a footswitch for shift/control to avoid having to strain with combinations, and I love them. They are totally remappable, mac<->pc switchable, qwerty<->dworak switchable, etc. If you have very short pinkies (like me) the pinky areas are less comfortable, but I've remapped the symbols on the outer rows to ctrl-number so I don't have to stretch my pinkies.

The only thing I miss is the ability to save the layout to a file on the computer like I could on my Fingerworks gesture keyboard.
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ErikNaggum

He contributed many patches to GNU Emacs from version 19.26 to 20.4. A fan of Common Lisp, he took Emacs Lisp in the direction of Common Lisp. He contributed early support for multiple character sets. He quit over the introduction of MULE to GNU Emacs and for a while maintained a “multi-byte survival kit” for Emacs 20 users who wanted Emacs 19 character set behaviour.
afaik he was not much of a contributor to the open source arena. He was however one of very few lisp programmers who had a job, programming in lisp. Someone pointed out that he wrote a billing system among other.
Not really the same thing, but makes me think of a behavior I've noticed in myself. Sometimes I'll decide to buy an item or two, and then browse around some more. Pretty soon my shopping cart is filled with stuff I want, but now instead of some minor spending I'm faced with a more significant purchase. I often decide to buy absolutely nothing.

If the store could encourage me to just purchase the one or two things I originally wanted they'd make more money off me.
"Ugh, grow up please."? Ugh, develop a sense of humor please.
""Ugh, grow up please."? Ugh, develop a sense of humor please." Ugh, stop being so judgemental.
"""Ugh, grow up please."? Ugh, develop a sense of humor please." Ugh, stop being so judgemental." Ugh, stop the mobius loop gag already. :/
Ask HN: Domain name reseller whois record
Hello.

1. Let's say startup S becomes a domain name reseller, e.g., via OpenSRS or enom.

2. Then enduser E purchases a domain name through S.

3. Does the whois record for the purchased-through-reseller domain name refer to S as the registrar, or to Tucows [for OpenSRS] or enom?

Thanks!
The origin story of robots.txt
Chopping the Numeric Keypad off a Microsoft Natural Keyboard
My school uses Catalyst for its sites, and the message boards seem to require three redirects to reach. I'm not sure if this is a problem with Catalyst or with the particular app.
Indefinitely, I hope... organisms have a limited lifespan. Why does my stuff need to last eternity?
I'm quite a bit down the long tail from Peldi, but if you're still interested, I have a quick summary post on my blog that I update from time to time.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/start-here-if-youre-new/
One Laptop Per Child: Vision vs. Reality (Communications of ACM)
I for one can't wait for Google Voice, it should help cut down on some of the robo-call spam i've been receiving lately! Not to mention the other AWESOME features it has. Honestly when I first heard visual voicemail, I assumed it used speech recognition to convert voice to text. That isn't what it turned out to be, but luckily Google had the same idea and built it. Great for people who HATE listening to voicemails (like me)
> photography was mostly a factor of how much film and equipment one can afford,

Bullshit.
That is a site-specific problem. Catalyst is just a good framework for building web apps. It imposes no such shenanigans.
That's a good point. I think it depends on the kind of segmentation that is either implied or suggested via categories. On my amazon.com home page there are 3 energy generation gadgets (solar, wind, UPS), 1 laptop, 5 harddisks, 6 gift baskets, 6 home entertainment items, 10 kitchen utensils and 6 pieces of jewellery.

Almost all categories contain 6 or fewer items. For some reason they seem to be assuming that people buying stuff for the kitchen can handle more choice. Before I fall for some stereotype I'll stop commenting on this one ;-)
A poem-proof that the Halting Problem is undecidable
Maybe they are going "small" beta.
Windows 7 Hits a New Low
When I had my serious RSI episode, about 7 years ago, I observed that simply sitting at my desk or looking at my computer from across the room would induce pain in my mousing hand.

There was a majority physical component -- actually using the mouse was much, much more painful -- but there was also a psychological component. I suspect that this was anticipatory tension or somesuch, similar to a flinch response.