skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Negative proof by counterexample. I met a girl in SF last month. Therefore, "there are no girls in San Francisco" is false. QED.
Lurking doesn't require an account.
Mmmm...never thought of HN as a job board, but hey! I just created my account 7 minutes ago. :)

thnks, didn't know he was "popular" around HN, just some random, though quite pretentious judging from his blog & linkedin, dude that somehow got squeezed to the front page,
KIO is awesome, but I'm looking for something that'll run anywhere, without too many dependencies. If I see something I really like here, I might want to port it to Python at some point.
Are CIO's really having trouble finding talent?
I keep seeing these articles, and would like to know what people really think about the so called lack of talent.
"quite probable" here is, perhaps, the biggest understatement ever presented on HN. Within every Core i7 is a Pentium M, within which is a Pentium, a 486, a 386, a 286, a 8086 and most of a 8085. The PC architecture is no better. I bet that, buried deep in the Centrino Duo notebook I use to work, there is a vestigial ISA bus that has to be primed before the text screen can be written to and the scan rate matched to an imaginary CGA monitor.
There was a comment here about TCL's VFS, which the author removed. I thought it was an excellent pointer, since TCL's system seems very cool. His link was: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-sc12.html?...
Still, accounting for the vast differences in process, I think a full 45nm Apple II could run on stray radio waves
Chris Ahearn, Thomson Reuters: Slams AP Link Policy
you ought to post that invidually, that's a really neat hack.
Zed is a really smart guy, I had the pleasure of going to his free hackers union group here in NYC.
I don't think this is going to kill flash, or at least not for a while. The speculation that Google is going to switch YouTube over to HTML5 any time soon is quite far fetched. They would be alienating a large part of their user base.

What this does provide is the possibility to have a universally supported HTML5 video codec. At the moment, there isn't a single one that is going to be supported by all browsers. Without a well supported codec, HTML5 video tags are basically useless in production. This new deal doesn't automatically kill flash, but it does somewhat level the playing field between flash and HTML5 in terms of video.
This got linked in the comments to this article:
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/01/can_narcissism_be_cur...
I guess it goes without saying what rating the "black screen that makes your phone like a mirror" app should get.
That's precisely the feeling that drove me to free software - I wanted to regain some of the understanding of how the computer worked before Windows took it away from me.

While I like to mention my much beloved Apple II, even a 8088 PC running DOS is somewhat understandable.
Most of the noSQL information I've read appears to be more focused on caching, speed, scalability, distribution, etc. To me SQL is a query language, not an RDBMS. "noSQL" is unfortunately misnamed (and rhetorically loaded) although it's much catchier than "noRDBMS".
Top open source apps for Windows, at a glance
I like to trace a distinction between advanced technology and complicated technology. A 45nm AGC would be more advanced. An AGC running WindowsCE would just be more complicated.
40hr App Build
Why Board Meetings Should be Face to Face
I think it is unfair to group Chinese English with Japanese English ability. The English ability of mainland Chinese people is terrible (even though they are enthusiastic). Talking to them, even those who are well educated (grad students/professors) is like a game of charades. The problem with China is that most young people (20-30) started learning English at age 13 at school and their parents learnt Russian as a second language.
Google Acquires Video Compression Company for $106.5 Million
I think the whole startup thing has a mythological aspect that's not at all helpful in building a business.

When someone asked me what I do when we were first starting, trying to figure out our product, get to launch, and get to revenue, I called it a startup. Now that we've released a successful product that creates enough revenue for us to operate profitably, I call it a company.

Maybe it's splitting hairs, but to me a 'startup' was always the initial step to building a business. I had no interest in being a 'startup guy', I wanted to have a profitable company.

So, do we have a plan to get to millions a year in revenue? Absolutely. Are we executing on that and expanding our product line? For sure. Are we a startup? Hell no- we're a business, and a profitable one.
Defending Against Attacks With Rails
That's a pretty small subset of all open source developers, though.
Nvidia silently introduces ION LE
As I recall ENIAC had more than one processor.
Does this means the codec-wars are back? But this time not between Apple and Microsoft but between Apple and Google maybe?
HN is a job board.
How long ago somebody made their account should not be a factor in judging their contribution. Or lack thereof...
> most important distinction is between simple web projects and startups

Only on HN, I hope. A startup is a business, a corporation, with the intent of making money. A website is, at best, a product, possibly of that start-up.
I admit, my comment was a little short-sighted in a way. However, I think someone should be an active member of a community like HN in order to make such a judgement (i.e. not appropriate for HN).

Beyond that, the guidlines say not to post such comments and I strongly agree with it. Should've just downmod it in the first place...
How about this instead: I should remain humble, always open to the possibility that I could be wrong, or my work could need improvement; use reason, logic and critical thinking to assess feedback objectively.
Well, considering bandwidth is more important to google than storage, they could take the more obvious approach and just choose the appropriate method and codec for a person's web browser.
Youtube already has specialist interfaces for smartphones, iPhones, Big screen TVs, and 6 or 7 different Flash versions based on quality/bitrate, size and codec. They can easily add another using HTML5, particularly if it provides a better experience for those using Google's Chrome browser or OS.

YouTube native on the iPhone was already a major blow to Flash (as was the whole touchscreen phone/computer paradigm). This will kill it (in conjunction with a bunch of other stuff Google is pushing under the umbrella of HTML5).

Video in Flash has always been an aberration created by dodgy patents, licensing considerations and competitive posturing of big companies, now the market can correct itself and Flash (for video and otherwise) is going to have to compete on its own merits. In brief: dead man walking.
On the other hand, it also means that if you want the database to check any structural constraints on your data, such as that any comments posted must be associated with a valid user, you're stuck writing it in PHP, Ruby, etc., rather than using functionality in a database that has likely already had man-centuries of optimization and debugging. Oh, and every check means sending the entire record (or table!) over the network, unpacking, probably instantiating objects, and iterating over it in PHP/Ruby/Python/etc., repacking it (with stored statements, if you're lucky), and then sending it back. That's a lot of extra processing that RDBMSs are already designed to handle internally.

Static typing is a good analogy, but the main purpose of static typing is expressing the semantics of data structures in a way that the system itself can reason with them. (OCaml or Haskell's type systems are much better examples of static typing's utility than Java's or C's, FWIW.) If you're still prototyping and/or the data structures are still in flux, then something completely dynamic will avoid a lot of extra work, but once things settle down, having the database itself be smarter about processing the data is worth consideration. (Of course, if your entire data set fits in a Python dictionary, then using a real database is overkill anyway.)
Hm. I read a long article about recently and it only mentioned one thing we'd recognize as a proto-ALU operating at 5 KHz. Nowhere did I get any hint of it being multi processor, do you have a reference for that ?
<pedant>Seibel.</pedant>
Still DRMd?

No thanks.
VP8 is an amazing codec. If Google makes it available under FOSS terms, it would be huge. It's more CPU friendly than H.264 while providing better quality. Wow. Maybe it's a little far-fetched to think that Google would spend $106M to open-source something, but when you think about it many companies have paid more to do the same (or for things that were already open source). Novell paid $210M for SUSE. Sun paid $1B for MySQL. And having the best video codec as a free codec does fit with Google's open strategy.

And it might even be cheaper over the long run. Remember, while H.264 is free to broadcast right now, there are fees coming in a year or two just for pushing H.264 over the web. If nothing else, Google's ownership of On2 provides a hedge against getting hit too hard by royalties.
Apart from the fact they used an existing code base to cut a lot of that time short it's a great example.

Actually the big lesson is probably that you current code base is probably reusable in lots of new ways with minimal work.

As to the site: what a brilliant idea! Risky I think - but super cool if it works out.
Yeah, it's almost like Apple is trying to advertise FOR the Android market.

I've toyed with the idea of developing iPhone apps. But after these last few weeks, I'd be much more inclined to learn the Android API. Sure, the iPhone has a larger user-base right now, but there are dozens of Android handsets scheduled to be released in 2010.
That's very wrong... you could argue that most of the kernel maintainers are employed by companies to work on the kernel, but not all the code gets written by them, and some companies do not employ people to work full-time on the kernel, otherwise do you think the Intel driver would be in the current state?

And of course Lamson is not GCC or the kernel. Those are very special cases, look at the GNOME or KDE project... or Django for you web guys, who gets paid to work on Django? not even JKM
I'd hazard a guess that most successful writers get this sort of thing from time to time.

Unfortunately, writing really bad fiction isn't illegal, or Meyer might be in worse trouble than this.
To split a document up into multiple files. But the disadvantage is that Latex only has single includes - so you can not split a document up that much.

(This is also a problem if you use images with equations such as those created by xfig (i.e. pure latex or PSTex PicTex). Usually most people would like to include an image as a separate file.
It's worth noting that it's an online presence backed by serious code, which makes Zed worth listening to (and hiring). It seems like many online presences have the attitude without supplying the code.
Still using IE6 means avoiding forced updates from MS, so, they probably were disabled security updates. It means they are the source of bootnets and hosting for trojans and viruses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC

The ENIAC was a modular computer, composed of individual panels to perform different functions. Twenty of these modules were accumulators, which could not only add and subtract but hold a ten-digit decimal number in memory. Numbers were passed between these units across a number of general-purpose buses, or trays, as they were called. In order to achieve its high speed, the panels had to send and receive numbers, compute, save the answer, and trigger the next operation — all without any moving parts. Key to its versatility was the ability to branch; it could trigger different operations that depended on the sign of a computed result.

It really has little to do with the design and evolution of the modern desktop. But, it's still a cool design IMO.

ENIAC used ten-position ring counters to store digits; each digit used 36 vacuum tubes, 10 of which were the dual triodes making up the flip-flops of the ring counter. Arithmetic was performed by "counting" pulses with the ring counters and generating carry pulses if the counter "wrapped around", the idea being to emulate in electronics the operation of the digit wheels of a mechanical adding machine. ENIAC had twenty ten-digit signed accumulators which used ten's complement representation and could perform 5,000 simple addition or subtraction operations between any of them and a source (e.g., another accumulator, or a constant transmitter) every second.
Does anybody have this as a downloadeable?
The evidence, supposedly, is that the number of edits per unit time and the number of editors active in any given month have levelled off. This, supposedly, indicates that Wikipedia might be "in decline".

In other news, it's been several years since my height increased, but I'm not planning to get fitted for a coffin just yet.

There's some less stupid commentary on the change in Wikipedia's editing patterns at http://asc-parc.blogspot.com/2009/07/part-1-slowing-growth-o... (by the same researcher whose findings prompted the fastcompany article; this is linked from the bottom of that article).
http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/download
ok I see what you mean. I read 'accumulator' to mean 'register', the fact that they can add and subtract as well gives them limited processing ability, which is where the 'accumulation' part comes in.

Sort of like the 'a' register in a 65xx series chip.

(it's named the 'a' register to stand in for accumulator).

But a binary adder is not exactly a processor!

And a cpu with multiple accumulators is not multi-core.
Have you read the guidelines for HN yet?
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
One of On2's codecs, VP6, is already supported out of the box by Flash, potentially allowing them to provide the same video encoding to both HTML5 and Flash visitors.
To Be or Not To Be - To Kindle or Not To Kindle
Can e-book readers fulfill the same needs as real books? Something feels wrong...
Google is losing the Youtube money on streaming bandwidth.
1+1=2
Telephony Developer Sandbox
==.
/ \
| 6 6 /
\ - ) I am God.
) (
The Character of Play: Part 4
Google Buys Video Company On2 for $106.5M
It's not only about royalty's. For example, Apple happily pays the H264 fees for its iPhones and iPods. Having a free alternative won't make that stop, the reason they use H264 is because there are a lot of hardware acceleration chips out there which they can use.

As long as those aren't available for this new codec (or Ogg for that matter), and they aren't in most of the iPhones / iPods currently out there, Apple won't support this codec.
I'd rather see a tweet reply to itself.
My father-in-law loves to work on cars, but he can only fix simple things on a newer model car because of all the complexity. That's why he still drives his old 1960's pickup truck.

This article isn't talking about efficiency, it's talking about joy -- the basis of all hobbies.
This is an excellent strategic move by Google and further evidence to the notion that Google is trying to marginalize the various core elements of the Internet experience (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=693861). If they open up VP8 and have it become the default built-in video codec for HTML5 browsers, it puts a lot pressure on Apple and Microsoft and even Adobe. At the price they paid, it was definitely a great deal for them.
> RISC has much more flexibility with regards to automatic optimization, pipelining, etc.

Folks designing processors haven't believed that since before the Pentium was introduced. (I went to dinner with some of the MIPS principals right after the first Pentium tech talk. Their conclusion was that everyone would finally figure out that the RISC/CISC wars were over and they'd lost.)

There are lots of things that go into designing a high performance processor. Instruction decoding and its consequences have little effect/cost compared to everything else.
Users as Direct and Internal Stakeholders in 2.0 Companies
I can no longer understand the computer I am forced to spend my days in the lonely struggle against an implacable and yet deterministic foe: another man's APIs.

Having worked as an electrical engineer creating hardware, this seems strange. Obviously the computer designer had to create an API of some sort, even if they did it in transistors. Computers aren't given to us from above -- there are people creating them too.
One hundred and six million dollars is nothing in this game.

Youtube acquisition price. 1.6 Billion http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15196982/

Youtube estimated daily losses 1.65 Million
http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=715&#...;

They could pay that shit off by Thanksgiving if they push a browser plugin out by mid September.
Quick question to my fellow Rubyists who happen to do Rails: would you really resent working with Zed? I've enjoyed Zed the few times I've met him in person and find the prospect of working with him to be a desirable thing.
Google sells radio assets, in latest sign of failed offline ad strategy
NASA restores Apollo 11 moon landing video with graphics technology
The stickiness of UK newspaper sites compared
Windows still doesn't have a coherent way of managing installed applications of various versions, and various degrees of conflict, ie, a package manager and they probably never will... Just saying...
Yes, I was suckered in by the title, but when I clicked through to their website, I have to say I'm quite impressed.

Very professional, nice and clean, a product and a service business, and brilliant branding (if it works, not so brilliant if it doesn't). The "Steve and Allan" page was great. Who wouldn't want these guys working on their stuff?

Best wishes, guys. Hope to be hearing great things about you.
Microsoft to hire 400 Yahoo employees as part of ad plan
XML flaw threatens apps built with Sun, Apache, Python and GNOME libraries
Microsoft Migrating Azure Infrastructure, Citing Tax Laws
Startup Professionals Musings: Startup: Follow the Recipe for Success
> all you get is a bunch of unmotivated downvotes (and that happens quite often) it even leaves the old hands feeling like they got beaten up for something without knowing why.

"old hands" has nothing to do with it. It's basically a couple of people who claim that they're owed something by other folks on HN.

> This is frustrating.

In almost every other community, you get NO feedback and you're here complaining that you're not getting feedback in the form that you'd like.

When someone gives you a gift that isn't exactly what you'd like, the gracious thing to do is to thank them.
You know, I was hesitant to click through, assuming TechCrunch picked up another hacker's internal docs and they were slinging secret strategy around again.

But it's actually just an extraordinary layout of their culture.
Have Google neutralised any remotely possible patent threat from On2 over Theora now? Can we finally get on with implementing <video>?
a) the whole hardware acceleration thing is 99% myth. The core elements of standard video codecs are all accelerated the same way. Apple (ironically) buying a combined hardware/software solution for its devices that it doesn't have the right or the capability to upgrade is a radically different proposition from no acceleration possible/available.

b) Apple was making those statements from a position of strength, they didn't have to be particularly convincing or true to work in that political forum. Though they're still holding a lot of cards, they're much weaker in a world with a technically acceptable, Google-backed, royalty-free codec in the wild. Previously it wasn't in Apple's interests to bother, now things might be different. It's not like Apple owned or controlled H.264 or any other Quicktime codec either.

c) one of the On2 sub-companies that Google just bought (called Hantro) builds video acceleration chips for mobile phones.
On2 is the company that originally developed the VP3 codec, on which the Ogg Theora codec is based.
So are they going to license VP8 for money or open it? Android and possibly HTML5 could stand to gain a lot from this, I guess. [VP8 was touted as better-performing than H.264, with suitability still for low power (eg ARM) platforms... though haven't seen any results yet]
But is the current state of things different than, say, a few years ago?
Note that this is now a fixed point of a function that maps a URL for a tweet onto the text of the tweet itself.
Stay thirsty my friends.
Deployment Script Spring Cleaning
not as hard because of the ability to edit comments
edit: nobody said it was
Sure, like OSAF, the "Open Source Applications Foundation", is really just a pet project of Mitch Kapor.
On2 released all the patents they had on VP3 when they gave it to Xiph. Apple and Nokia's patent concerns (if they were genuine) were to do with unknown third-party holders of submarine patents. In that respect, I don't think Google could offer any more protection.
Journalism Needs Data in 21st Century
It's definitely more convenient than writing the XML by hand. I can recall more than one occasion where I couldn't get the positioning of my UI elements quite right because of some attribute/value I was missing or had set incorrectly. I HATE wasting time trying to chase down what I did wrong just to move a button X pixels. It also seems faster and much less annoying than editing XML by hand.

The really great thing, though, is that it's not tied to Eclipse, which is fantastic for people who don't use it for Android development (i.e. me :) )
There's No There’s No "I" in a Great System Administration Team
On2 had already disclaimed all their patent rights on Theora.
Aw crap. I thought this was how the world was gonna end.

http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/global/the-second-amendm...

Now I have to worry about Skynet and La Raza?

And I was just finishing up all the Yoder's Canned Bacon I bought when Cobol was going to kill us all.
Eight New Startups Pop Out Of The LaunchBox
I found this interesting. Especially when compared with the BBC's stats. At 4.85 pageviews/user and 35.7% bounce rate they are substantially better than even the Sun.

http://alexa.com/siteinfo/bbc.co.uk
Law Enforcement needs a UI designer
14 tips for building a startup sales team
Because the one they have needs to be water-boarded.
Interestingly enough, On2 didn't develop VP3 either - they acquired it when they bought MetaVisual Creations.
> 4. Drop Off DVDs at the door - This is a bad thing, why?

Because their process is designed around 1000X as many DVDs coming in through a different entrance, probably with some "packaging" that they've optimized around.

DVDs at the door are an exception and exceptions are even more expensive in the physical world. And, that's ignoring the cost of dealing with folks who think that they can pick up new DVDs when they drop off their old ones.
>> Doesn't google show Chrome ads on google.com and youtube.com for users with IE6.

They do. I for one, wish they'd stop doing it for FF users too though. It's getting really annoying.
Card.ly provides free social media 'business card'
Hmm it doesn't really count but JBoss is open source and has paid developers. jQuery UI is maintained by a consulting group. Firefox's core developers are paid. I'm pretty sure there are paid contributors on Hadoop and Lucene.

And lets not forget Rails....
to much recursion!
My immediate first thought was also that Ogg Theora & HTML5 played a role in Google's reasoning to buy On2. Even if they've disclaimed all patent rights, Google is providing the deep pockets to keep other vendors reassured about patent trolls.