skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The reality is not like you describe it.

The debian package maintainer of ffmpeg was/is one of the libav guys and decided to replace ffmpeg with libav.
Judging by several frustrated comments in this thread, it has obviously been a hurtful decision.

There are a few writeups of the situation on the web, here's one:
http://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html
It is a pity that your grandpa didn't write this article. No offence to the author however there is no substitute for industry experience.

My father sold tooling for making cans and there were many small but important innovations that came along. It wasn't as if someone sat down and designed the finished thing, innovations came along and the likes of your grandpa and my father made things happen. Sometimes it would be a slither of steel that would be saved per can, other times it would be innovations that would go nowhere - anyone remember transparent pet-plastic cans? No...!

In introducing a change, an incremental change there is no way that the whole production line is going to be upgraded/altered, as in everything else connected to a conveyor belt.

The modern ring-pull tops were obviously a huge part of this story of innovation, as was being able to extrude the base and sides of a can out of a disk. However, the real innovation behind these processes is to have some type of press and tooling that can make these wonderful and intricate shapes in as few steps as possible. That is when you have a business case, and that technology - real technology - is a long way from the 'easy' stuff presented in this article.

Related to alcohol beverages is the story of the Guinness widget:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widget_(beer)

The Wikipedia article just explains a little bit, however the small bit of plastic in beer cans took decades to get right and the investment level was considerable, even for a brewer the size of Guinness. Combined with the technology that goes into the can, a beer can is quite a technical wonder.
The government doesn't pay damn well enough to get competent people and they in turn have all the power in choosing how to spend our tax dollars which then goes to private contractors who are adept at gaming the system.

As a society, it absolutely baffles me why we choose to de-incentivize working public sector jobs and encourage things like lowest bidder wins contract mandates which basically encourages the worst possible companies to win because they are cutting corners to get the bid down.
> If I tell you your social security number is now accidentally written in your HTML file (probably because you copied and pasted the wrong thing), and now I tell the world "hey come look at sneak's SSN" instead of waiting for you to resolve is wrong.

No, sharing links to published data on the public, unauthenticated web is not wrong.
Does photo quality really matter that much? I have never found that the quality of the photo makes a difference in how attractive I find the person. It can be a cheap cameraphone or a DSLR, but it makes no difference, at least to me.

If it does to other people, then I should put more effort into my photographs...
Nice article! Have fun in Berlin, it's a great city.
We've been exploring Flux pretty heavily here at Yahoo and the idea of utilizing React + Flux stores on the server-side as well. The Yahoo flux-example you linked to is using our own dispatcher (https://github.com/yahoo/dispatchr) that does away with the singleton pattern all of the other Flux documentation and examples have used, making it safe to use on the server.
thanks! i made an exploratory repo where you can try out a generator-ish subset of underscore here: https://github.com/aaronj1335/gunderscore

it works in the current FF nightly.
Drink Mixing robot using AngularJS
Thanks! These are most of the apps that have saved my neck over the years :) Agreed on South, will remove it once Django 1.7 comes out.
I think if you read the entire thread it should be clear that the topic of conversation was in fact "the lack of kindness in Mr Torvalds' public persona". It is in fact your attempt to focus on whether Linus was actually "trying to be altruistic" or not which is in fact incongruous (i.e., discontinuous) with the rest of the conversation. One can "try to be altruistic" all they want but if they cannot package it in nice words, then they are merely going to be [rightly] ridiculed for the "attempt". Also, as I pointed out before, the mere fact that Mr Torvalds can get it right in one context but not in another shows that he in fact knows the difference between right and wrong.
YoForMe - Yo anyone from any User
Is this phenomenon the same as the "goosebumps" you often get when listening to a favourite song or thinking about a happy memory?
I'm talking about how mobile platforms are completely locked down and gated, with app stores taking ~30% of your app revenue and no ability to install what you want.

That sort of thing would never have been tolerated in the PC world, yet in the mobile work nobody seems to care.
The best gems for Rails beginners
Keep in mind that for lead there is no minimum safe exposure limit.
If you embarrass powerful people, they will bring all of their power down on you like a ton of bricks if they can.

I just hope the pranksters don't end up in jail.
wasn't wigle very unfree? I'd love to contribute to an open cell collection project where I can download everything.
Are you saying that a picture is worth at least a thousand words? That's good to know in future.
This kind of issue is why the food safety and modernization act (or some version thereof in US) is a necessary evil.

http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/FSMA/

People on the internet (including HN) often consider this act a conspiracy by Monsanto and friends to seize control of the worlds food supply, but the simple fact is that people are regularly endangered by food they eat and there haven't been proper controls in place to address many easily preventable hazards. Just like restaurants, there needs to be some regulation and inspection of food production.

No, before you can even think it.... I'm not a paid Monsanto shill (was accused of this multiple times last time this came up here on HN) nor am I fan of big centralized seed/chemical companies. I am however a fan of safety and good sense. Just because a small producer does it doesn't mean it is necessarily better or more natural.
Wow, the estimated 1st derivative of cases by country does not make this anything like under control.
> while sparking terror fears in the process

That's just pathetic. You have to have a pretty addled mind in order to find an obvious prank such as this "terrifying."

But that's what our society is now, everything is measured by the lowest-common-denominator, and fear is a commodity sold to you every evening on the news.
If you click on a property name, it actually gives a pretty decent explanation. I agree a link to additional overall context could be useful, but I think you're overstating the gap.
Over 90% of the human genome is able to mutate and still be viable. Much better than the reasoning I was expecting (We don't know what it does therefore it is junk), but still seems like a bit of a stretch.
Provisioning and configuration management seem out of scope for Terraform, it calls other tools to perform them. What I was wondering is if Saltstack's infrastructure management capabilities were comparable to Terraform's.
If that's the motivation then this is the worst possible response. A ridiculous overreaction with a significant risk that after all this DNA/surveillance/facial recognition/manpower hubbub they don't catch them.
More than 60% of voted to outlaw same-sex marriage after a blitz of awful, fearmongering homophobic ads that portrayed gays as pedophiles and gay marriage as leading to kids being raped - ads that Eich helped to fund, if only a little.
The biggest problem with Beacons is that the range is unpredictable.

Without a better handle on proximity, many of the use cases I can immediately think of are of no greater benefit than GPS or WiFi nodes.

It's a shame, because there are some amazing things you can do once you are able to start exchanging data based on passing a node by (< 3 meters)
UPDATE: Demo on first page + change password functionality
Welcome to the world of AdSense where you get banned everytime you have a big payment coming.
Off-topic: it is interesting to me how different companies seem to dominate a space for a few years, and then recede. It's a common pattern. I can remember in 2009 when it seemed like RightScale www.rightscale.com was the dominant force creating tools to take advantage of AWS, but nowadays I never hear of them, never see anything interesting come from them. All the interesting stuff is happening elsewhere.
Amazon 3D Printing Store – Get your items printed and shipped
Nice doc, I didn't knew this sad story. I've engineered with ffmpeg and was impressed with it, it's a technical open-source feat to me, the pied piper fictional hacker comes to mind. How bad we lack a single lead for the API, I now wonder if this explains that no more modernization hadn't gone to the interface.
If it's taking you hours to come up with a short personalized first message, you're probably doing it wrong.
npm Enterprise Beta
If you were doing templating and dumping in data as I assume most server rendered pages are, it'd probably reduce server side load as you have fewer characters per template
Can you comment in general on when you consider a seed round to be overpriced, and what exactly goes into that determination?

I see several seed rounds (~$1-2m rounds - not sure if this is also the size you're referring to) on crowdfunding sites priced at $10m or so pre-money, with revenues just starting to approach ~$100k per month, and so far haven't invested in any because they all struck me as overpriced. They would definitely have been way cheaper a few years back in that same situation.
A Tentacled, Flexible Breakthrough
I don't think the decision was as obvious from the beginning as you're suggesting. Today, it seems rather obvious that ffmpeg has a much higher development rate. When the fork first happened, libav got a pile of development that made it appear much more active than ffmpeg.

With 20/20 hindsight, sure, Debian should have gone with ffmpeg. But that was not obvious at the time. From the outside, the ffmpeg/libav split looked a lot like the XFree86/Xorg split, where the people doing the work and the people with commit access were too disjoint.

It's also not at all obvious why the libav developers would choose to ignore the work on ffmpeg, while the ffmpeg developers have pulled in changes from libav. From the outside, that decision seems crazy.
Tyler - thanks for that really detailed account. Aside from the financials, I'm curious how you manage working alone? Did you ever consider finding a business partner? Do you work at home alone, or do you find some kind of shared space?
I know from a brief period working on my own thing at home that it starts to feel like an echo chamber.
It's highly symbolic from a police perspective. We may see it as some kids who watched too many documentaries playing a harmless prank. But let me rephrase that to put that in the frame of mind of the investigators. "Unknown individuals infiltrated a heavily guarded and highly visible piece of crucial infrastructure undetected. Once present, they defaced the public property by removing two American flags, and replacing them with white flags, a typical signal of surrender. The suspects remain at large."

It's about the symbolism, not the act. If NYC, for all its counterterrorism efforts, can't catch these pranksters, it makes the public safety officials look impotent in the face of real threats.
I've been developing Scala full time since 2.7. I have not had a release yet that didn't involve changing code to recompile to each new version.

I also have Java projects that were written in pre 1.0 releases that have updated to 1.7 without a single code change.

This is due to a different set of priorities. Each of those priorities has different costs and benefits but to act like Scala's lack of backwards compatibility doesn't have a cost is unfair.
I don't know that I'm asking questions here, but I don't really understand an "open source spec" -- public specs are public, there isn't really source to a spec.

You're asking for a community RFC on a spec, but have not specified how the good ideas will come forward, who will be voting on them, etc. If it's just your company as the "voting party," it's not very open either.

This just leaves the Radius Networks spec for beacons.
Because there's only so many icons on your home screen and everyone wants as many of those as they can get.
Even my non-developer friends think this is awesome.

Because it is.
I don't think big projects are intrinsically bad because they are big, but it's probably true that something of this scale would have drastic, wide-ranging effects on climate, geological characteristics, rainfall, and many other aspects that might adversely affect millions of people. Due diligence would require us to study and characterize these effects before spending trillions of dollars on such a project.
Fully agree, can safely assume I probably won't hear another ever again
It's too easy in scala to create a giant mudball codebase where every file depends on half the project. Managing the compile graph is almost impossible when you have 20 hackers on the same codebase.

Sometimes I wish that scala had some compiler-flag that signals these problems, maybe a restricted mode or something with annotations.
Amazon offers 3D printing to customize earrings, bobble head toys
There are ways to catch overfitting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-validation_%28statistics...
How the hell is this a minecraft clone? Because it uses tiles and low-resolution textures?
I've tried to use Troposphere, but found it a redundant layer on top of the Python dicts. I ended up building my own Macro language that compiles to raw CloudFormation JSON. What's funny is that I wanted to call this Macro language exactly Terraform. I'll definitely look into Terraform, it looks to have a lot of the features that I implement although most of mine were tailored exactly toward CFN and it may not be practical to switch. Maybe I'll finally convince my employer to open-source it.
I just wrapped up the initial version of a medium-size app using React. It was my first use of the library in production.

I had originally used Backbone.Model and Backbone.Collection in conjunction with React. But after reading about Flux on the React blog and watching the video explanation back in May, it only took me a week to replace all of my Backbone models and collections with Flux singleton-stores. Coupled with Andrey Popp's react-router-component[0] (now replaced by rrouter[1], I think?), I was able to remove Backbone from the project entirely.

I think that Flux is more flexible than Backbone. I really like the ability for a store to take on characteristics of both models and collections. It is also easy to combine many different external resources to compose the "one true source" of a particular type of data for many different components. I don't feel any particular need to bring back a Backbone dependency in future React projects.

[0] https://github.com/andreypopp/react-router-component

[1] https://github.com/andreypopp/rrouter
> If you want to have a good time, lots of interesting pubs, cool clubs, great restaurants, frequent and varied meet ups, and a constant stream of level 7 hipsters with some questionably placed facial tatoos walking by, then you should try these neighbourhoods.

Any recommendations for neighborhoods that don't have "level 7 hipsters"? ;)
A good way to increase your chances of finding one is to do a lot of small projects with different people who complement your skills. You have to work with someone first to know if you are a good fit for something bigger (think of it as dating before marriage). This is easier when you are on a campus environment (which is why facebook and google started on campuses), and harder once you're out of school.

We created http://www.doerhub.com as a free tool to fix that. People from different disciplines (from surgery, to hacking, AI, business, law, 3d printing and human rights ) post what they are working on/passionate about and anyone who likes their project can contribute by joining, advising, becoming a beta user, doing a task etc. They collaborate right on the site or outside of it. You can share areas you are advanced in and learning in so you can discover complementary people easily http://peoplesearch-doerhub.herokuapp.com/viz/ and do private or public projects.

Other than individual SV doers, UChicago was first full organization in our beta http://www.doerhub.com/at/uchicago (1/3rd of the finalists and both winners of their New Venture Challenge and Social New Venture Challenge were using the site). And now we are opening it for free to other universities, hackathons, hack clubs and organizations who want people to get stuff done with others, instead of just talking about it.

When I (a hacker) posted this drone project http://www.doerhub.com/for/personaldrone a pilot with military experience and a VC I didn't know ended up joining me. Here are some other doerhub-powered teams:

http://www.doerhub.com/for/kikisauceco

http://www.doerhub.com/for/whichvc

http://www.doerhub.com/for/bluetooth-sensor

http://www.doerhub.com/for/robopaint

http://www.doerhub.com/for/qcare

http://www.doerhub.com/for/surgery-boards-app
1. Not true: the customer is rarely right and that is why they hire us the experts. We are more like doctors and less like chefs: not a matter of pleasing taste but rather solving problems. You do no tell your doctor what you have and how to cure it. In fact, the more you let your clients know they have the wrong assumptions the more they will trust you and the higher chances to complete a successful project.
11. Use the right tool for the job: not all sites/apps are bound to become a billion dollar/pageviews success. Most projects will do fine with WP+plugins.
Design Patterns in AngularJS
I tried messenger and hated it, I don't want to see bubble's popping up ontop of everything. Might quit using facebook all together on mobile if this gets more intrusive. I already hate the pop up requests to download messenger.
AppleCare Service Source removed from AppleCare Technician Training
Dude, it's totally fucked. Like removing the sea from seaside towns. i'm sure if you're a mediterranean fisherman you would not be happy having the sea forcibly moved away from your home... The environmental impact is probably immeasurable.
I do it all the time, so yes.
I realize it's hard to imagine someone with such prejudices treating everyone fairly nonetheless. But I read everything I could find on the Eich controversy, and I found no evidence that Eich had brought his politics into the workplace. One thing is for sure -- had he remained CEO, he would have had a lot of eyes watching to make sure he did not do so.

I stand by my original statement.

EDITED to add: after all, if you're right that he would have been unable to keep his prejudice out of the office, you wouldn't have had to wait very long before he screwed up in some way, and then he could have been fired with real cause.
The pattern lock actually tells you its insecure... so I dont see the gripe?

I use it to keep my toddler from messing up my phone while letting him play with it (and hes happy just playing with the pattern)

You can crack it most of the time by just looking at teh screen smudges...
> Or is just the capital availability pushing down the yield price on seed rounds?

This is almost certainly the case - I recall valuations in 2009 / 2010 vs now, and the gap is absolutely crazy. A lot of that has to do with the deluge of angel money floating around partially as an offshoot of the big-name IPO's like Facebook, but more broadly, we are in a financial world that is desperately chasing yield anyway it can get it - and a seed round is the lowest level commitment of it (that and the high end rounds). The rub, as it lies, is the middle tier.
Surely the simplest explanation would be that angels investors in the valley have been making money, and are therefore investing more.
So, clone-a-willy?
Keep in mind Stripe's original name was /dev/payments. If you do some research you'll see they were in a pretty bad spot right until they opened publicly as Stripe.
One of the reasons I added this support was so we could use the parser on our client-side handlebars templates to identify glyph usages and build the smallest possible custom fonts.
Show HN: Spam-me: Follow all members of a GitHub Org
Dell, BlackBerry downplay threat from Apple-IBM alliance
Show HN: iPad point of sale built in Ember.js
If you were on the open web, his app would be a page with youtube's embed code for each video.

I doubt you would use a DMCA takedown request for this. You'd just disable embedding of your videos in your youtube options. Youtube probably already knows when a video isn't requested from either youtube's website or the official youtube app.
I guess I would point out that if it wasn't clear before it is clear now that iOS spps in a mature market behave much more like content than applications when it comes to getting news users, retaining them, and all the other pirate metrics, me hearties. Think music or ringtone store rather then desktop apps. The mobile experience is just not that sticky in most cases, and Apple has absolutely no interest in helping you build a long-term relationship with them.
That's what I tought as well. Terror terror terror. Fear fear fear. It's getting ridiculous.
I've got 2 modestly successful Mac apps, Mi-Fi Monitor[1], and Codepoints[2].

Mi-Fi Monitor for Mac (there's an older iOS version[3]) alone has been much more successful than I ever imagined, despite being a simple little utility, doing no advertising, and having an automatically limited market of potential users (people who own a Novatel Mi-Fi).

At the time the original iOS version was written, it was just something I myself needed, not something I intended to publish anywhere. But as I discovered after putting it up for sale, a lot of other people needed it too. Novatel's own executives were using it, I talked to one of them on the phone for quite a while, 2 others emailed me about it, I reported some API bugs to them, etc. Very satisfying experience for me.

And then when I put up Mi-Fi Monitor for Mac on the MAS, it got featured on TUAW[4], which caused sales to skyrocket far beyond the iOS version and far beyond what I expected from something that was originally a "scratch my own itch" thing.

I'd love to build something larger for Mac and go down the indie path, but I'm primarily working as a consultant now on both platforms. I do absolutely love when Mac projects come my way though, I like building for that platform a lot more than iOS.

[1] http://infincia.com/apps/mi-fi-monitor-mac

[2] http://infincia.com/apps/codepoints

[3] http://infincia.com/apps/mi-fi-monitor-ios

[4] http://www.tuaw.com/2011/12/13/daily-mac-app-mi-fi-monitor/