skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an old article. I also removed AVG after seeing this ridiculous behavior, but after updating it on a different machine I realized they had seen the error of their ways and fixed this issue. They have since removed the error sign when the link checker is disable, and as far as I can see remember they now allow (at least custom) installation w/out the link follower at all (as my installation doesn't even have it!).

I do notice issues when AVG does it's weekly scan - the computer runs quite a bit slower - but besides that I've got no problems. I was upset when they released the version with the noted problems, but since they quickly released an update with fixes I'm happy enough to continue to use AVG. Everybody makes mistakes!
Sweet deal. Just signed up. Anyone else going? Will be new to the Bay Area, would be great to meet up with some HN folks.
Google Wave Begins To Swell With Developers; Wider Release This September
This is making me rethink about installing AVG on my fresh Win 7 install.
AVG has all sorts of other problems including obtrusiveness (http://www.flickr.com/photos/xdrunkagainx/3652625815/sizes/o...), insane advertising, and generally buggier and worse since its 7.5 release.
It stacks up pretty well as a project manager, but it really shines as an ecosystem manager. Bugs can be bounced around between projects and tracked at external sites.

I think it's pretty tightly coupled with Bazaar, to the point where you can clone a repository by typing "bzr branch lp:projectname", but it appears to support mirroring of other repo types.
Absolutely. Really the main benefit of a business program is the people, and spending two years with really smart people who have wildly different experiences and are passionate about business. Seth Godin had a great post about this. That said, I believe there are a few things they teach you in business school -- the basics of finance and accounting, some business strategy... -- that everyone should know. A business OCW would be a great public service project.
If you can show me a way to get to the source code of a project in less than 4 clicks, you might have a point.

I agree that there is a lot of functionality there, but it is so incredibly user hostile that I have never bothered to look through it.
Let's do some math then. Let's assume the videos are 320x240, for example. Since we have so many streams at once, we can assume perfect scaling across multiple cores and systems.

A 320x240 video encodes at about 195 FPS on my Core 2 Duo Conroe 2Ghz with one encoding thread, using x264 and preset "veryfast".

Now, if we go up to a Quad at 3Ghz and use all four cores, we're up to 1170fps.

A Penryn is about 10% faster per-clock than a Conroe on x264. We're up to 1287fps.

A Core i7 is about 40% faster per-clock than a Conroe on x264, including the effects of Hyperthreading. We're up to 1802 FPS, or 60 streams, and we haven't even left our single processor. For all 2000 streams, we'll need 33 CPUs, or maybe a few more if we allow for a bit of overhead, just in case.

Not that hard now, is it? Bonus points: you save bandwidth, since H.264 compresses a lot better than Sorenson H.263 (FLV1).

(Also, preset "ultrafast" is another factor of two faster than that, though the quality is low enough that nobody should be using it...)
No offense, but I am curious about the number of YC startups who are currently doing (or done in the past) "$500k-$2M (max) a year in revenue with 2-3 people"?
Samsung B7610 OmniaPRO Unlocked Quadband
Samsung B7610 Omnia Pro previously codenamed as Louvre is a WinMo PocketPC with a sliding hardware QWERTY keyboard, a 3.5-inch WVGA AMOLED touchscreen, 5 megapixel auto focus camera with LED flash, HSPA, Wi-Fi, GPS, FM radio, and a microSD slot ( with support for up to 32GB).
She boldly declares, "Grisoft just lost a customer, and I'm guessing it won't be the last." It seems an overstatement to call a free AV user a "customer".

Those looking for a free A/V solution should check out Avira, though you'll have to disable the annoying upgrade popup.
I've always hated those "security" questions. They're extremely insecure. I try to answer them with something crazy, for example to the question "where were you born" I would answer "a little red planet" or "an island in the pacific". Security through obscurity.
I too uninstalled it. I have a ridiculous multi-core system with more RAM than anybody really needs; I have been unable to even mildly slow it down since I built it -- until I installed AVG, which slapped ridiculous scan bottlenecks on every disk read, every download, every link click, every application launch, every thing I could do on my box.

It's almost worse than actually having a virus. At least you can uninstall it. Now my machine is back to it's usual, quick self.
Canonical releases source code for Launchpad
To be clear, the Google Web Accelerator fiasco was not related to anything Google did wrong with Web Accelerator. It was a result of other people doing things wrong.
We're doing about 1500 right now, and no, it's not trivial.

16 core machines make life a bit easier though, and the hosting provider has been good to their word of providing free machines as long as we use this much bandwidth :)

Output on a typical box is about 300-400 Mbit/sec.
Silly rabbit, everybody knows the plural is "bung".
What does MS/Bing think it is, some hip cool new startup trying to be all yuppie and exciting?

Watching this video is like watching a dead horse beat it self up.
Whoa, fix your headline there.

FTA: "Their agreement, which could go before the full Legislature within days, does not include any broad-based tax increases, relying instead on deep cuts in government services, borrowing and accounting maneuvers to wipe out the deficit."

I'll be interested to see how this pans out. Cutting services is really the only play. Increased taxes would just lead to decreased consumption, and with unemployment continuing to rise, expect to see income tax receipts to come up way short.
and an error response without an error in the body (which is not documented in the spec but probably can't be ruled out).

Yes, it's probably more or less guaranteed that if you're hitting Posterous's API through proxies (your own local proxy; your ISP's transparent proxy, if you're not in the US and/or make a bad choice of ISP; the proxy in your company's firewall; a reverse proxy deployed on Posterous's side) that proxy will sometimes generate error messages without any knowledge of what Posterous may or may not have documented.

I haven't read Posterous's spec, maybe they have some way of preventing this, like requiring SSL.
You're right - I think what he means is that env is not in /usr/bin. This was the case on very old (Red Hat Linux 5.2 back in the late 90s) systems where there was no /usr/bin/env -> /bin/env symlink.
Import MOV files into PS3 with readable format, How to import MOV files into PS3
By converting QuickTime MOV to PS3 readable format, Sothink HD movie Maker enables you easily to import MOV files into PS3. With it, any video file, including MOV could be imported to PS3 after converting to readable format.
I don't run antivirus, instead I configured a secondary account and then removed the admin privileges on my primary one. This has the added effect of preventing Skype from installing annoying browser toolbars.
Guy Kawasaki: A Dozen Don’ts for Entrepreneurs
I think 'customer' is a somewhat fair term. The fact that I use the free version of X makes it more likely that at some point I might buy the non-free version of X if I've built up a level of trust with the company, and/or that I'll recommend the product to others/at my work and they will get more users/corporate bussiness. For example I use DropBox and have almost hit the 2GB free limit. I will definitely upgrade as I really love the service, unless Dropbox do something annoying like AVG have done in this article in which case I'll find a different solution.
See, there's the problem. You're trying to wrap a custom data model around HTML. HTML should model one thing: HTML documents.

This is like saying, "See, there's the problem. You're trying to express mathematics with pencil marks. Pencils should write one thing: black marks on paper."

I don't see how "HTML documents" in any way constrains the semantic range of the thing being modeled.
Nokia trademarks "Nokia Money". Nokia and Apple attacking credit card companies?
There's probably some potential for Apple to grab a decent chunk of the low-end/mid-range camera market. Convergence is a bigger selling point than pure quality these days for portable electronics. In the future when the iPhone is $50 with contract on any carrier the Touch will have to become a more unique device to justify its existence. If Apple were to make it larger (about the size of a paper back) and give it a legitimate camera it would be a very interesting device.
Thanks for the clarification. I tried AVG some months ago, and I did notice the link checker. I found the idea useful, but it wasn't for me, so I disabled it. I didn't notice a change in the tray icon, so I guess I was using a fixed version.
Do they still hijack new tabs in Firefox so that they show some crappy search page? Because that was the deal breaker for me.
this idea, as it is, cannot possibly become a viral video. there are many reasons why, here are a few -

for starters - with the rules, this idea is already too complex for viral video greatness.
second, hardly anyone else can submit their own version, because barely anyone drives open jeeps, and even fewer people are willing to jump in them.

most important - your video has no climax in action. yes, cat videos didn't either but your video is not cute and funny. you are not doing flips. all you do is sit in the car. the mcdonalds "fire in the hole" videos are better comparison to your own concept, and show what you are missing.
I had thought that question was clearly about competitive advantage through new and unique perspectives, as part of evaluating the business/technical idea. As such I'd expect the clones to include it. I'm twice mistaken.

I now see it's also about noticing non-obvious things, as a way to evaluate the founders; and that this better fits YC's philosophy of funding people not products.
I'm setting up a similar event in Los Angeles, perhaps a barcamp-type event. Sign up for it if you're interested: http://www.meetup.com/speed-dating-for-hackers
In practice you are not going to be doing nearly as good as that. your co-workers hack notwithstanding.

Assuming 'perfect scaling' and discounting such things as networking overhead are going to upset that picture by a considerable amount.

You'll be lucky to get to 500 Mbit out per physical machine using 16 cores and streaming to about 2000 users with 75 incoming streams. So that's roughly 5 streams per core.

To just multiplex 2000 streams to 40 K viewers with adaptive frame rate you'll need roughly 30 sixteen core machines, note that that does NOT include transcoding yet.
Those looking for a free A/V solution should check out Avira,
though you'll have to disable the annoying upgrade popup.

Avira AntiVir Updates to Version 9 – Make It More Usable: http://www.tipsfor.us/2009/03/18/avira-antivir-updates-to-ve...
Not in my install, at least. I will admit the scanning is more obtrusive than I would like, but besides that there are no irregularities like that that make it an annoyance.
Baboons steal underwear 
Bosses at Knowsley Safari Park are warning motorists to beware of the baboons, after the animals learned how to open rooftop luggage and began stealing items such as underwear after helping themselves to the contents.
Misspelled my name :(
I'm skeptical of this. Here's the paragraph that concerns me.

"Democrats, who initially sought tax increases, said they had managed to ward off cuts proposed earlier by Republicans that would have been catastrophic to the state's social safety net."

Here's the problem. The only way they could both cut spending and "preserve the safety net" is to cut rates. Because the "safety net" is a series of programs and if they aren't cutting the programs they have to be cutting what they pay for the programs. Meaning they're planning to pay less to the agencies that service the children, elderly and mentally ill who survive because of the state's safety net.

But a look at any non-profit angency's books will tell you they barely get by as it is. So suddenly these agencies are on the verge of collapse which is something that simply can't happen. You can't have children, the elderly or the mentally unbalanced thrown out onto the street en masse.

So what happens? The state is forced to go over budget to keep these agencies alive. So they increase the rates, and we're back to the same problem. I'm as against tax hikes as the next guy but I suspect this resolution will be next to meaningless.
Am I the only one who thinks it was quite funny?
you cannot possibly expect to become a jorts.com when what they do is so simple and what you do is so complex. anyone can purchase and wear "jorts". not many people at all can and will want to go 'jeep diving' at their own significant peril.
She used it for years according to her blog, and doesn't mention buying a non-free version of any of their products. Becomes unhappy with the product, and doesn't mention contacting the vendor about it. Writes on her blog about how it sucks, and recommends another freeware product. I definitely wouldn't call her a customer.
Mmmm... Powells...

Powells Books and Mexican food are the only things that I truly miss about the US. I'm flying back to Seattle for a brief visit in September, and already I'm planning a drive down to Portland.
Children accused over laughter
School pupils have been accused of laughing too loudly during playtime.
Copy-on-write in concurrent programming
In your article, you listed the following scenarios in which someone would be sad they did things the wrong way:

- Changing the URIs of some resources in order to load-balance across servers, which is a lot easier if clients get those URIs via hypertext instead of from the protocol spec.

- Screwing up user authentication when you could have just used digest authentication.

- Having your service run really slowly because you can't just use Varnish to cache the cacheable parts. (Maybe you didn't actually say this.)

I can't actually find any others in your article. This discussion thread has added a couple more:

- Getting HTTP error codes from an intermediate proxy server instead of from the intended origin server, which will make you wish you had used those HTTP error codes to indicate errors in your app, so that clients would handle them correctly. (There are a lot of ways proxy servers can get involved.)

- Having random robots (Google Web Accelerator, web crawlers, etc.) trash your database by GETting URLs that have destructive side effects.

- Having people not able to explore your API with their browser.

What are the other scenarios?
You can't really blame the user for the (lack of a) businessmodel by the vendor.

If the price is 0 it does not reflect on the user at all.

Even at pricelevel '0' you can be a customer.
This is fantastic news! I wish I could say I saw how important Launchpad would be when I saw the database schema in that hotel room in Seattle so many years ago, but I was pretty dubious.
Who is underdog? Richest person on earth?
Maybe I'm going against the grain here, but I'm glad Microsoft is going to release free antivirus software. I don't want to worry about choosing one of these third-party products and having my browser hijacked or whatever.
I downvoted, but for the "I'll probably be blasted for this" - don't presuppose reaction.
I think super-easy mini payments from mobile web browser can change how business is made in web. An additional category of business models becomes much more viable for web services.
The fastest Web Server is TrustLeap G-WAN
15x faster than Apache
3.5x faster than Rock (webspec's 2008/2009 winner)
4x faster than Microsoft IIS 7.0 and ASP.NET.
400x faster than PHP, 200x faster than Python
I don't know much about this new scheme, but it sounds like Disappearing Inc. The objective of Disappearing Inc. wasn't to prevent employees from leaking internal documents on purpose; it was to prevent them from accidentally retaining documents they shouldn't have. This may be the same thing, but with a clever new implementation.

That is, the intended recipient of the message isn't the adversary. So this might be a tractable problem, unlike DRM.
Cool. Now we can do an open source moon mission.
Kinda reminds me of a Startup Weekend type event (disclaimer: current startup came outta a Startup Weekend). Pretty neat to see Google try something like this. Whoever's going will have a blast! oh and hey Phil. :-)
I used clamwin, the windows version of clamav. That is after I used AVG for a while and went through the same experience. One good thing about using open source application is that they wont ask you to upgrade to some paid version later.
Former Boeing engineer convicted of passing shuttle and Delta 4 secrets to China
The person is Ben Sittler; the tech school is New Mexico Tech, which although very good is not at the same level as MIT, CMU, or ETH.
In case "this" is the Apollo 11 source code in the submission:

Don Eyles, a 23-year-old self-described "beatnik" who had just graduated from Boston University and was set the task of programming the software for the Moon landing.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=707801

I read somewhere (can't find the link) that Dijkstra said he spoke to Eyles, and asked how he got everything correct. He replied that just a few days before launch, the software simulated the moon's gravity as repulsive, before he fixed it... "so the astronauts were lucky there". Probably apocryphal hearsay, but does chime with the "beatnik" story. EDIT Found it: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/91vki/don_eyles...
The LA Times sounds really pissed off about the cuts.

Look at how they chose to frame the story:

Tens of thousands of seniors and children would lose access to healthcare, local governments would sacrifice several billion dollars in state assistance this year and thousands of convicted criminals could serve less time in state prison. Welfare checks would go to fewer residents, state workers would be forced to continue to take unpaid days off and new drilling for oil would be permitted off the Santa Barbara coast.

"We've accomplished a lot in this budget," said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger

It's almost as if they're trying to tell us something. ;)
Gadgets & Health
We have all seen the TV commercials with all sorts of exercise gadgets that Buff body or rib-like belly with minimum effort. There are even envelopes belts that zap your midsection with electronic pulses, allowing you to lose weight without making an effort to move their own muscles.
IPhone prototype goes missing; Chinese worker investigated, commits suicide
Meh. If I'm going to carry a Touch for its amazing new camera capabilities (plus my iPhone), why bother with the iPod + Apps features? Why not just get a camera? And if it's for the convergence, why not just get an iPhone?
I like this one:

"Myth 5: YouTube is only monetizing 3-5% of the site. This oft-cited statistic is old and wrong, and continues to raise much speculation. In our view, the percentage is far less important than the total number of monetized views..."

They say it's old and wrong, but don't give the real percent, and spin in terms of "total number of monetized views". Based on this answer I'd guess the percent of monetized views isn't much higher than the "myth", otherwise they'd have a better spin.
Not sure what city you're moving to, but I live in San Francisco and I've been very disappointed in how often I can't find an open hotspot. Perhaps it's just me?
I use free A/V Avast and I love it. It is very good and I would recommend to anyone considering a free A/V.
But a look at any non-profit angency's books will tell you they barely get by as it is. So suddenly these agencies are on the verge of collapse which is something that simply can't happen. You can't have children, the elderly or the mentally unbalanced thrown out onto the street en masse.

On the surface, your argument makes sense, but why is CA in such a bad position relative to other states? Other states tax at much lower rates and have managed to avoid the kind of catastrophic collapse that you're predicting here. Why?
I've been moderated straight into the ground for this previously, but google does not nearly pay for bandwidth what you'd be quoted if you went shopping for bandwidth.

At a 5G commit you're down to $4/Mbit, over that it gets quite a bit cheaper still.

Youtube is consuming thousands of times that quantity.

(the 5Gbit/sec will serve out 10K streams @600Kbps)

Another good trick they pull is to cache videos that are requested frequently in or very near to the colocation offered by the larger ISPs.
I'm a youngun, and I just spent the afternoon devouring the site. Tons of gems there. I will be back :)
It very well may be different, since Google bought a ton of dark fiber a few years back. They may be running their own network over to whomever wants to peer with them (Read: everyone!). They can get away with free bandwidth because a lot of providers will let them connect for free if they're able to bring the bits directly to their network, not via transit with some other provider that's costing both sides money.
It IS old. I am really surprised I got this link. Sorry you can't comment on it on this site. The original post actually came from my Blogger blog. Thanks :)
For global navigation, for example, try to use a minimum of 3 and a maximum of up to 7 top-level links, excluding the logo for the home page.

Umm...they have nine.
What we can all learn from the Twitter security breach
Because we have too many government programs that pay out too much money.

To give one example, if your old car won't pass it's smog test in California you're eligible for $500 of "repair assistance" from the government. So the state is basically paying to fix these people's car. It's these types of programs that need to be cut.

That's really my point. The Legislature is so in love with all their little programs that they can't stand to cut any of them outright. So instead they're pursuing a scheme that will put vital social services in jeopardy and eventually end up forcing the state to go over budget (and hence not solve the problem)
Google offers out of this world view of moon
Agreed. This is one of those things that really should be dealt with on an os-level. They could push updates through the same channel as the os security patches.
- don't store your critical stuff on outside servers

- use secure passwords

- use different passwords for every service that you use

- change them frequently

- write your internal memos as though they're going to be public some day, for instance, don't diss your business partners in internal documents
B/c probably bus cleaners and toll collectors don't make sig figures in other states.
And pensions are not that generous. In CA, often people make in retirement about 90% of the salary of their last year of service. It is common practice to have people "promoted up" their last year of service, so they can enjoy their retirement at a higher rate.

CA has been eroded with slow but systemic erosion from the inside.
It's can be a good PR tactic though - polarize and conquer. Ask.com tried a similar approach when they rebranded, replete with guerilla marketing campaigns like this and fake graffiti. The problem is that Google's quite hard to hate....
What are the chances of them inserting V8 into IE? Is that completely unthinkable? They've been doing some crazy things lately...
Well, the legislature also doesn't have much power to tax and is obligated to continue providing programs passed by ballot measures. So it's not entirely their fault.
oh, totally :D I wasn't laying into you for it! Just my reaction.
"Hacker spaces" are giving hackers a place to gather, create and collaborate