skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Australia may be an extreme case but there's plenty of this desire for tight control going around. From Iran to the US, to Holland, the UK, Germany, etc.

The bottom line is, the cold war struggle between communism and capitalism is over and fascism won. Fascism briefly lost due to being on the losing side of WWII but in the long run it's clearly winning.

Everybody look at Singapore that's where we're all going. This: http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourse... is about us living in a combination of 1984 and a brave new world. We (except for Singapore) aren't quite there yet in terms of government control but that's where we're headed. And because it will never be as extreme or obvious as 1984, there's no need to go that far, nobody will be rioting to stop it.

The only difference between Iran and Singapore is, Singapore's economy is strong and they don't bother with tight social restrictions.
Initial encoding happens on different machines (obviously) but a stream multiplexer that maximizes the end user experience is a lot more complicated than just encoding to a preset selection of rates, after all every keyframe and subsequent updates have their encoding scheme determined by the throughput measured during the transmission of the keyframe(s)+updates just preceding it.

It's really not that difficult; if you have one encode going per-user, you can just reinitialize the encoder's ratecontrol, and if you don't have one per user, you can simply use a short GOP and swap the bitrate at each keyframe, in the same way that H.264 extended profile proposed using Switching Pictures (but in a way that real software actually supports). Of course this latter method requires multiple simultaneous encodes per channel, or an SVC-like system (which almost nobody supports, and for which there aren't any good software implementations anyways).

Is it really that important for Justin.TV to have less than one second latency? The vast majority of the site is completely non-latency-critical (from my cursory browsing of it). Heck, the broadcast company I worked for last summer had over 10 second latency and nobody ever complained about that--and that was live television, including sports games and so forth.

Plus, if Justin.TV is already doing a scheme like this, surely upgrading to a better, faster encoder is going to decrease, not increase, their CPU load.

Video is relatively forgiving by the way, the audio is the real kicker, a single packet delivered a little bit too late will instantly cause annoyance whereas with the video you can be a little early or late and it doesn't seem to matter too much.

It sounds as if your buffer size for audio is too small. There is no reason why video or audio should act differently in that regard; in fact, audio should be easier, as losing a video packet will result in a loss of video until the next keyframe, while in audio, every single frame is a keyframe.
To me it's a convenient filter that lets me know the likelihood of some comment being good -- though it's not always reliable because unpopular opinions (like, often, my own) that threaten people's self-interests or self-image tend to get voted down pretty aggressively.
Haven't Boeing and Lockheed been doing government stuff for almost all their launching? I could be wrong, but I don't remember hearing about their in-house rocketry.
Should we just ban the use of gadgets while driving, period?
Okay, I'm sold enough to give it a try. But I'm not a graphics professional... just a coder who doesn't have the bucks for PS.

It may work for the occasional tweaking, but are there any graphics pros out there that have tried this?
Yeah, so it would be equivalent to swap out any of the colors, which is why I stopped for a moment to think about why I automatically assumed black represented the series. It does make some sense visually, being the only of the three to occupy the diagonal, though of course mathematically, any of the three are equivalent. But the whole point was the visualization!
Right on.

Industrial subsidies in countries like China translate to a net transfer of wealth from Chinese taxpayers to taxpayers in countries buying the subsidised service.

From a standpoint of global economic utility, subsidies shouldn't be encouraged however, because they lead to sub-optimal allocation of resources. It seems to me that a good way to get rid of subsidies is to make the case to the taxpayers footing the bill. If prompted, it seems unlikely that the Chinese populace would want to pay for westerners getting artificially cheap goods and services.

(Just using China as an example here)
Unless specific instances of fraud can be proven, I see little reason to blame rating agencies for the losses investors incurred. The markets have risk. If they didn't, you couldn't make money.

If the ratings agencies are to blame for the losses becasue they overestimated the stability of certain companies, then by the same token shouldn't investors have to PAY the ratings agencies if they make money on stocks that ended up being better than the agencies predicted?
I wouldn't normally whine, but why is this comment being downmodded? It's largely a factual observation. In fact, the parent of the comment above is arguably incorrect in that countries have recently been imposing protectionist measures. Notably, the "Buy American" clause of the stimulus package has resulted in terribly protectionist measures. Countries that do trade with the U.S. have responded in kind with protectionist measures of their own. While it's true that the world was moving toward freer trade, I don't think you can say that this is the case today in the presence of so much evidence to the contrary.
Nice questions, but any startup that claims to know the answers is lying.

1. When the company knows exactly what they're going to build, I'm going to be worried the idea is somebody's "brainchild", and that any suggested changes to the product will be met with a lot of resistance. No plan is said to survive contact with the enemy. This also applies for product concepts and the first (potential) customers. The second half of the question (Can we build it?), will always be answered in the affirmative. We're hopelessly optimistic that way.

Questions 2 and 3 are questions that are very important, but what's the point of asking when you can't tell if the answer is a realistic forecast or some numbers pulled out of nowhere? A company that has absolutely no idea about market size, or the revenue model can still stumble upon a working business model.

Questions that can only be answered in hindsight won't give you the information you need before you join.
If the triangle would get the same colour-scheme, then it would be equally obvious. Of course it would be better if it was animated.
It's convenient for me when I view my own comments to see which ones have been most appreciated by other HN participants. Agreeing with the above, I know sometimes a comment can fail to gain upvotes because it is controversial (or because it is in a thread, or subthread, that has become inactive), but usually a comment with a lot of upvotes is worth a look.
Laid Off? It's Good for You and Good for the Tech Industry
You noticed a bug.

The system failed.

The fact they fixed it quickly is a seperate issue.
Ask HN: Help testing our email uploader
Hey folks, we're looking for volunteers to test/break our email photo uploader. Please email a jpg photo to hackernews@vivapixel.com and to see what you uploaded go to http://www.vivapixel.com/albums/hackernews
We're asking anyone to upload from any email client, web client, iphone, blackberry etc... anything that supports email to send us a jpg.

thanks for your help

PS: Keep the photos PG please !
It isn't ignored. While I don't use Ruby or PHP, Lua and Python both have libraries for high-precision numeric computing and rationals, and the Scheme standard requires the full numeric tower. Erlang also uses them by default. OCaml has arbitrary-precision numbers in the core language, though (somewhat characteristically) doesn't use them by default for performance reasons.
I thought the title was going to lead to a rant about the web isolating people socially, but actually this shows some of the real power of web (at least for people with hot enough connections) to enable people to share...

maybe especially cool for connecting with shut-in friends/relatives. The web is about connecting and here's another great expression of that potential.
I haven't gotten very far with this issue in Ruby, however in PHP there is also a way to get around the lack of precision by treating numbers as strings and then using additional libraries to perform the necessary calculations. The ability to do this in a clear and concise manner and be absolutely certain that everything is adding up properly is not easy.

From my perspective, the fact that these calculations do not perform correctly right out of the box using dynamic languages is the problem, and adding additional libraries is not the solution.
Can you think of the strategic value of $Bn stealthy air superiority fighters to fight guys living in caves?
Wave isn't email 2.0. That's just the marketing pitch to make it seem like it's not that new, so it can't be that scary. But it is. (new, at least)

Wave is computing 2.0. And I don't say that lightly.

It aims to do no less than gut and replace the core folder, file and application metaphors. It's a Newton-esque data object soup + internet, with the role of applications and workflow largely relegated to anthropomorphic services.

That's why the "wave = a + b + c" metaphors ring so hollow; it's a new conceptual model for computing that does not directly map to the old one.

And that is what makes its future so murky.

I think the browser and intervening decades have changed habits and expectations enough to give Wave a better chance than those who've presented such things before. But I also think the single smartest move Google did, was enable the building of seamless bridges in-to and out-of the Wave model.

Being Google will let them get their foot in the door. But allowing people to make a wave from a simple word document and save a wave off to a PDF or simple email will give them time to make their case.

But it's still an uphill battle.
Anybody that uses any website where people can 'friend' you (facebook, twitter, etc) to maximize their number of 'friends' really doesn't get it.
1. Do interesting work.

2. If 1 is not possible try as hard as you can to find ways to make your borhing work interesting, and just plain force yourself to work when you can't.

3. If 2 fails, quit.
The biggest reasons 'why not' aren't technological, they are human. The Hollywood model for submitting scripts is extremely rigid in terms of how they should be formatted, and is built around having a physical copy of the manuscript. There's no real reason online submission can't work, other than the fact that it's not how things work at the moment.
This wouldn't happen on Digg.
Although I find this fellow's blog has strings of provocative ideas, I have to throw a bit of coolish water on the significance of "cognitive dissonance." It's an old concept from social psychology - and it's just one way of looking at some behavioral phenomena.

For alternatives, study up on what social psychologists call "attribution theory."
Can you back the claim up with any hard numbers?

You may want to run Amiga (PPC) software in qemu on IA32. Thanks to some runtime binary translation, it should have suffer closer to 2-fold rather than 10-fold performance penalty, AFAIK.

On related note, that'd imply we are getting only about 10% of our IA32 processors, basically RISCs cores emulating CISCs mostly via microcode. Which is hard to believe in, given that IA64 architecture (the Itanium, not the 64bit extensions to IA32) does not outperform IA32 10 times, even
thou it doesn't have to execute legacy instructions and was created almost from scratch.
Because they are spending millions of $ on internet spying systems and it's all pointless if the terrorists can control their kangaroos with laser beams from an open wifi.

http://www.censordyne.com.au/
Because you wrote this, and I generally like the people who take the time to comment on HN, I re-read the post, carefully. I'm sorry I did.

I don't know what you see in this post.

It has a thesis, buried in the 5th? graf, which is that Fascism means "a dictatorship of corporations". Then it uses a rhetorical sleight of hand to tar all corporations with the brush of syndicalism, equating Mussolini's psuedo-nationalized sham companies with (I guess) the S&P 500, and pronouncing the WSJ Editorial Page as a bastion of fascist thought.

It concludes by suggesting that people who disagree with the author are --- well here I'll just quote: "you support dictatorship in any form, and oppose democracy, you are anti-american, a traitor, and scum. Period."

I'm a socialist-leaning liberal (and an entrepreneur), not a Mises Institute libertarian, and even I think this is over the top.

Can you either tell me how I'm misreading this, and what value this article adds, or can you flag the post too and acknowledge you did? Because I feel like right now all this post is doing is wasting people's time.
One key difference is that each individual lump of "socialism" (not the best word but it will do) is replaceable, and each of them can and will die while the larger capitalistic system will survive. Moreover, should one unit become particularly abusive, it can be punished without wrecking the whole thing.

Another is that even if most people choose hierarchy because it works, you remain free to try something else. (Within reason. I notice publicly traded companies do have some constraints on their organizational structure which do tend to force you towards hierarchy whether you like it or not.)

In a truly socialist society, there is only one unit: The government. This unit can not be replaced when it fails, because it will admit no replacements. It can not be punished, because it is the punisher. All units grow old and decrepit, the government is no exception, and when it happens, you just get stuck.

The problem is not socialism, hierarchy, or "any" centralization. It's in promoting one unit to the top (be it "government" or "corporation") and breaking all mechanisms for replacing it in the misguided impression that the system has attained and will forever keep perfection. (When the real trick to creating a sustainable government and maintaining freedom is in concentrating on how to make it easy for a certain amount of replenisment, renewal, and change to occur without the whole thing breaking.)

Following up on this and indirectly replying to some other threads, it is rather disgusting to pin "fascism" on some social conservatives at the very moment that social liberals are trying to convert our medical system to fascism, have taken a lot of steps to make our automotive industry fascist, and are generally favoring huge centralized financial systems with all the power located in companies where the line between "company" and "government" is increasingly hard to find. If the conservatives are calling for fascism of various stripes, which for the sake of argument I'll accept without question, the liberals are doing it. Right now.

Maybe it'll get undone once the crisis is past... but what are the odds?
I wasn't criticizing Github, just using it for illustration. They're apples and oranges. I use Github extensively, for things that are totally unsuited for Launchpad.

But since you asked, I do have some next step ideas for Github. When a project has a lot of forks, there's no quick way to know, especially as a user of that project, what the differences are between all the forks: which is canonical, which is most mature, etc. Also, development tends to fragment because there isn't much of a social link between forks, besides the network graph.

I'd like to see each project family have a single community hub with features similar to individual projects: wiki, bug tracker, etc. This would be used both to support users and coordinate developers. To keep it user friendly, put the wiki in front. Bonus if you can detect duplicate projects imported from other hosts and keep them in the same community.
I dont agree with the 99.9%, in the slightest

I dont dislike RDBMS because of the problems scaling them, I dislike them because of the impedance mismatch, because I dont like the sql language and because I am forced into creating a data model as the starting point of my application when I might not have a clue about what model I actually want.

I am much happier now that I have dropped mysql and using mnesia or couchdb most of the time, Its not about "needing more than mysql/postgre, its just about striving for something thats a better fit.
What am I going to do, will I have the freedom to do it or will I be working on somebody's baby, and can you pay me?
I'm definitely interested, but the tone put me off a bit. It's simply a little too conversational for my taste.

Still, that's just my $0.02, and I am grateful for others sharing their early stage stories.
I think the purpose the author shared this technique for is when you need to constantly comment/uncomment a block of code for testing.

I agree with you, though. Once you're done with your experiment, reset the commented lines to something more conventional.
Bebo founder starts a fund
Try looking at the different "layers" of squares. Start with the three big ones at top-left, bottom-left, and bottom-right. See how exactly one of the three is white (or black or gray, just pick one it doesn't matter). Now you see that one-third of this L-shaped piece is white, but what about the remaining quarter? Well, it's just the same. Look the the gray, black, and white square in the same configuration at the left & bottom of that quarter. Obviously one-third of that "L" is also white. Continue until you are convinced the one-third of every remaining part of the square is white.
I think the word 'trivial' means different things to you than it does to me :)
I'm not sure that publicising this use is the best way to keep it available...
In a truly socialist society, there is only one unit: The government. This unit can not be replaced when it fails, because it will admit no replacements. It can not be punished, because it is the punisher.

I don't want to insult your intelligence (and perhaps you're using a different definition of socialism to most people in Europe) but you do realise that socialism is not incompatible with democracy, right?

Most Western European countries have had at least one socialist government in the past few decades, which has been punished (elected out of office) when the citizens considered it to be failing.
What? Microsoft contributes drivers to Linux
'"All the tests that we have done over the past five years -- on the materials and other aspects -- do not show any signs of forgery," said Rene Larsen, rector of the School of Conservation under the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, during an interview with Reuters.'

So they failed to refute the null hypothesis.
In science, we call this "failure to find", NOT confirmation of the null hypothesis.
So, just for clarification: Jetpack currently let's you muck about with the DOM (I've watched the demo), but eventually it will let you mess around with Firefox itself? I've been thinking about writing a Firefox plugin to do something (seemingly) simple like show my HN Karma in the status bar (or anywhere in the "chrome" of Firefox, I guess). Is that the kind of thing I could do with Jetpack, or would I have to go the more traditional plugin route?
I would like Bing to be a serious competitor to google, it would only be good for us the user, they would be competing on the share they get from publishers advertisement, they would compete on providing better results and it would keep goggle focused on what it does best.
"In a truly socialist society, there is only one unit: The government. This unit can not be replaced when it fails, because it will admit no replacements. It can not be punished, because it is the punisher. All units grow old and decrepit, the government is no exception, and when it happens, you just get stuck."

I find the above a bit odd. Take the U.S. as an example. We have 50 states which can operate somewhat independently. They get to copy each other's successes and avoid each other's failures when run correctly. We get to vote to replace government leadership: that is, helping it run more correctly. So it is replaceable, including changes to constitutions.
php != dynamic languages
Wave Protocol Prototype Source Code
He wanted to make the best things he could out of the simplest ingredients.
The last project we did with money, we just treated all amounts as integers storing the number of cents. No accuracy problems w/ whole integers, so 1000 because $10.00. Easy to do math with, and keeps it's accuracy.

Might not work for hard-core financial work, since the number of decimals might be too deep for that to be efficient. (although there's nothing stopping you from saying the last 5 digits of every number is the decimal part).
> this trick will work with any language that supports both single-line and block style comments

isn't this just a horrible workaround for not having a debugger?
space - easier to expand (within reason)
The "Master's Bump" would be a step in the right direction for some municipalities (like all of New York State), where a master's isn't a way to increase your pay, it's required for your certification.
Crimes like employing you? Crimes like creating the greatest prosperity in the history of the world? Just because you don't like your job doesn't make it a "dictatorship". Living in the U.S. and complaining about "dictatorship" is ridiculous if you actually look at what it is like to live in a real dictatorship. And it minimizes what the people that actually live under it have to deal with.
Well, it certainly is a polemic, and it does try to make too many points in one post.

I'm also a left-leaning liberal -- in most areas -- but the value of the post was that it attempted to elucidate the links between the persistent corporatism of our society and the fact that the corporatists truly did intend at one time to take over the government.

I have no doubt that they would (and in many ways, already have, through direct purchase) attempt to do the same again.

All in all, the piece could use some more research and fewer ideas all jumbled together, but it rebuts pretty well the too-rosy view of corporations as beneficent angels that all too many here seem to have.

And also, I've had a problem lately as well with the attempted historical revisionism towards Nazism, and have been wondering what's responsible for this as well.

As for being intellectually interesting, I think that fits that particular criterion for HN pretty well.
To encourage people to post good comments.
Intel releases 34nm-based SSDs with 2x speed of previous drive
Ruby bundles Bignum and BigDecimal libraries which provide arbitrary-precision math primitives in the standard library. Python similarly provides the 'decimal' module. Most other "dynamic" languages provided at minimum bindings to the GMP library.

Basically, you seem to be considering only the fast, C-based math primitives most languages offer by default, and ignoring the more powerful options available to those who need them.
I've found ArgoUML to be quite hard to work with. BoUML is much better.
The change the Wave brings the enabling pull push over http, currently pull works well but push (from the server to the client)is more complicated.
Miso Font by Mårten Nettelbladt - Free to Download and Use
I think this shows the strengths of a free market. Corporations survive because (and only when) they're more efficient then average. So The market can tolerate and even encourage pockets of very different organisation - but only when this is overall benefic for the system.
It is certainly very simple in the general case (you have a video stream, you need to transcode it); it just becomes difficult when you try to do fancier things with it... which is perhaps true of all systems.