skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The main 'problem' is that you'll still require an MPEG licence for encoding and decoding. Once you've bought one and abide by the usual LGPL rules (don't claim ownership, make source & changes available if distributing) then there shouldn't be any more commercial issues than, say, using Linux.
Ask HN: Ranking algorithm ...
I have a question about the ranking algorithm. I thought that if two items had an equal number of points, the newer item would be higher, because the rank was points over an exponential of age.

However: http://www.penzba.co.uk/RankingQuestion.png

Here are three items on 2 points, but the ages are definitely not monotonic.

I've been having trouble trying to read the source - I'm not fluent with Lisp at all, and I don't really have the time to invest at this stage, so I was wondering if anyone had a quick definitive answer.

If not, sorry to take your time.
Always record the date of the soft delete. That way you can have a daily process to move records x days old to a historical table.

If it's something like a rapidly changing customers list then delete any customers where the soft delete date is greater than three years old.
There is a 'slippery slope' (#7) when it comes to software - unpaid maintenance can consume your resources. Charge early and often. Make it a product - price it at least more than your lifetime maintenance cost. This is from experience.
Clickable:

http://www.penzba.co.uk/RankingQuestion.png
Ask HN: What do you do while you're compiling?
Recently I've been working on a project where I have to compile the code (or run a Hadoop job, or run a test suite etc). The process takes between one and two minutes to complete.

Two minutes is a long time to sit and stare at logs scrolling by but its not long enough to really get into code for another project.

Its too easy to "waste" this time reading HN / Slashdot / Google Reader etc. I really want to redeem this time and do something useful and/or meaningful.

Any suggestions on how to use these spare minutes? What do you do during these times?
It probably is widely known. To give an example of my naïvite, I saw a banner ad for some MMORG featuring a scantily clad woman. I was sure this portented evil doings, and I was curious as to whether clicking it would lead to Windows Malware, a scam dating site, what... So I googled the name of the game and sure enough Wikipedia had an article full of innuendo about their advertising and blogspam practices.

I then read that they had been connected with a large Chinese gold farming operation, which led me to wonder whether their business model was to give the game away for free but make money on farming gold out to new players, thus an emphasis on attracting newcomers rather than retaining experienced gamers.
Ajax loading, sorting, and paginating of Displaytag tables
Can you explain what apparently obvious point you think jrockway has missed?
I thought we had moved on from Window's adaptive menus. Moving menu items around inhibits the user, you can work more quickly if you know where the item is going to be.

That said, I love the way you can search menus, this is a feature that every toolkit should support. I don't know how long I've spent searching Gimp's erratically organised menus.

I don't see how this is innovative though, he would want to have some very convincing results from his usability tests.
I just watched Part 1 on my lunch break and took the following notes. BTW, that scrolling twitter widget is really annoying, but you can just jQuery(".widget").hide() if you're using Firebug.

Enterprise software

1/20 prospects will meet all 5 characteristics & therefore are earlyvangelists

1. have a problem

2. know they have a problem

3. actively looking for a solution

4. already cobbled a solution out of piece parts

5. have or can acquire a budget

Giving away betas don't get you relationships. You need to have an Early Access Program, they pay full price, make them partners, have them help you "define features"...that you were going to build anyway

VCs fund hockey stick growth

Make sure that your goals for profitability & your investor's goals for profitability are aligned. e.g. don't want $10mm/yr when your investors want $100mm/yr

Early adopters who use product but don't pay are part of your MARKETING BUDGET but are not customers. They have not given you money.

You have no idea who on the org chart will buy until you confirm your hypothesis by trying to sell

Notes on part 2 after lunch tomorrow ;)
yes, costs much less to acquire a social gamer than consolers, but revenue per customer is higher on the console side.

i wonder how zynga's revenue is going to be hit when they stop running scammy ads... and if this IPO would even occur.
There's a comment on that page that says that Larry Wall says it was at UC Irvine. Though obviously it could still be a myth.
I think the real problem is the people that want to use this as a 'smoking gun' to prove that they were 'right all along' that Global Warming is some sort of conspiracy to harm the auto industry by a bunch of 'hippy liberals' and that 'American industry' should keep on pouring out the pollution (of any kind) as long as it's able to make money because that's the 'American Way' that we use out 'American Ingenuity.'
TED Talk : Pranav Mistry: Blending the digital and real world
This seems really, incredibly powerful, but I'm having a hard time thinking of great applications for it. Their examples are very interesting:

http://www.twilio.com/docs/howto/

- Phone menu, where Twilio handles the call and listens to DTMF tones and/or voice input, then sends the request to my web server, which then responds with text, audio clips, or prompts for further input.

- Voicemail transcription, where I initiate a call to my voicemail box through Twilio, and then use their text-to-speech conversion to transcribe my voicemails.

... and more. What would you do with an API that replaces PBX programming with XML exchanges over HTTP?

The best idea I have at the moment is for an online store, where a customer could enter the number and click to complete their order over the phone. When they submit their number, the web server records their order number and contents to pass on to a call center representative.
Fair enough. Long before he went into politics, Fortuyn, a columnist and frequent guest in talk shows, had always expressed opinions that were not politically correct. I do not remember him being ostracized for those opinions in any manner.

On the contrary, many people found him witty and refreshing. In fact he would be a prime example of a charismatic person getting away with saying things that other people would be called upon.

Naturally, many people disagreed with him. A single individual - possibly deranged - killed him. Both of these facts do not imply in any way that you cannot say certain things in the Netherlands.
The original title was 'The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology'. Even though 'SixthSense' is the perfect name to describe this new technology, I thought current title may give more details on what the talk is about.

And yes, Pranav has a strong accent, but the technology demo is simply mind blowing. Definitely worth your 14 minutes.
How about something more along the lines of, "I think that we should trust a doctor to evaluate another doctor's performance rather than <random assembly line worker without a highschool education>?"

I mean have you seen some of the arguments against things like evolution by 'lay people?' The correct course of action here is to get them to produce an explanation, then evaluate whether it's reasonable or not.

Edit: Maybe I should mention that there are plenty of things a doctor could do wrong that anyone could be able to call him/her out on, but there are many things where the subtleties may confuse.
these guys are positioned to make a lot of money.

Good slides.
YellowBird: Like Google Street View, with Video
Great news! Applicants for the 2010 class have not only the choice of location, but also some timing flexibility. I was part of the Boulder TechStars program this summer. This experience helped our startup and our new entrepreneur learning more than anything I could imagine.
Google enters into definitive agreement to acquire Teracent
Walker Twitter Highlights: November 16th - 22nd
The necessity of early stage valuations
I feel it important to clarify a few things: Zynga has already stopped running offers (scammy ads), they're too big to buy, and they don't own their userbase (yet).
They're known to be fairly accurate prior to 1960, to the best of our knowledge. This is a scientific thing

This sounds backwards. We calibrate against the instrumental record up to 1960, we know that there is increasing divergence post 1960, thus should we presume we can have greater trust for the previous eras where we have no instrumental record?

Wouldn't the onus be on explaining the divergence? I haven't seen anyone else accepting a divergence while at the same time claiming that the previous record is accurate. It seems more standard to downplay the divergence rather than to accept it.

Could you reference some sources that discuss the divergence?
jrockway bromidically responded to a throwaway joke that in itself already acknowledged the content of the response.
Exactly! This the real choice: start a company or seek VC funding. The real reason to bootstrap, if your product/market permits it (e.g. doesn't require millions in up front investment), is that it preserves your options. You can seek VC money later if your business--not just your plan or your team--can justify it, and often at more favorable terms. And bootstrapping has a much higher chance of success than the 1 in 200 seeking venture funding gives you.
Any reasonably interesting web app is going to do it's "work" on the server. A web app can run it's UI in offline mode but you've scooped it out's brains.
My elementary school was shaped like an L. And the path from the cafeteria to the playground followed the edges of the building, with a 90 degree turn at the inside corner of the L. The hypotenuse between ends of the L went through a hilly, wooded area.

Every day, at lunchtime, there were repeated admonishments to stay on the path and do not cut through the woods. And every day, immediately after lunch, someone (and oftentimes everyone) would run through the woods along the hypotenuse to get to the playground.

They tried all sorts of tricks to get us to stay on the path. They threatened instant detention for anyone caught cutting through the woods. They stationed one of the teachers aides to physically catch people who were about to stray from the path. It still didn't work, because there were so many people that broke the rules that they couldn't catch all of them.

Finally, when I returned for 3rd grade, I found that a roughly 10-foot-wide swath of the woods had been cut down, and a newly-paved asphalt path ran through it. And nobody ever took the long way around again. I think it was removed, long after I left, when the school building was enlarged.

Sometimes, it's easier to listen to your users (even if they are 5-10 year olds) than keep fighting them.
Ask HN: Information Architecture books
Hey guys,

I'm the UI designer at the company I'm working for - and we have no IA people, so naturally this is thrust upon me. Any book recommendations?
From the press release: "The new AOL brand identity is a simple, confident logotype, revealed by ever-changing images. It’s one consistent logo with countless ways to reveal."

So, it's a wordmark on top of clip art photos.
Airfoil Speakers Touch back in App Store
There's a score penalty attached to linkless posts.
I'm glad you asked this, because that comment made no sense at all to me. Here's what I heard: The old data where we couldn't verify it very well shows that it is good, but the new data where we can verify better it shows it is bad, so therefore it must be good.

I must have misunderstood something there.
I had heard this idea attributed to Christopher Alexander, from either "A Pattern Language" or "The Oregon Experiment". Possibly it originated from the University of Oregon?

Regardless of the original source, this is a great explanation of the concept..
You have money?
This guys an awesome designer and does far better than just not sucking :)
http://nateuridesigns.com

Good hunting.
Using APIs With PHP? Here Are Your Classes
New iPhone worm can act like botnet
I agree.

Too little, too late. From my experience, linkedin has lost a bit of steam over the last 6 months or so. I used to check the site regularly, update contacts, join discussions, etc. but have not done so lately.

I was initially excited by the first release of API but was disappointed after digging into it a bit. Having to apply etc. just killed it for me (I eventually got accepted but by that point had no interest). This release is more of the same and is rather limited as spif points out.
The Happy Software Company Review [video]
Seller Page
An admirable piece, as it was when it was written in 2007, but it's worth noting that in part a verdict has already been passed on the idea; Manifesto Games, which it touts as its success story, was shut down in June of this year because it wasn't profitable.

See "Shuttering Manifesto", here: http://www.manifestogames.com/node/5151

Excerpt: "...Clearly, we haven't succeeded in realizing that vision. There are a host of possible reasons why; perhaps we launched with an excess of naïve optimism, through of course a surfeit of optimism is an entrepreneurial necessity. We did not achieve the critical mass of support by independent developers that we had initially envisioned (some of whom, bizarrely, viewed us as a competitor), though we appreciate the strong and enduring support we received from some. We always knew that the essential problem we were trying to solve was a marketing one, but we never figured out how to crack the marketing nut, at least with the minimal financial resources we had available. We failed to raise substantial venture money, despite engaging with many VCs over time. And of course, the recession doesn't help."
Ah! Makes sense - thank you.
> I can't think of a single prominent CS academic researcher in systems/PL who spends a lot of time going after patents

Well.. what does "prominent" mean? A professor of mine has 10x more patents than papers. He once said, he is angry about not being prominent because of too many patents!

(no papers but patents = holding knowledge back = disturbing innovation?)
This article could be written much less offensively as, "The appcache in iPhone OS > 2.1 means web apps don't have to be second-class citizens." As it is, it makes some strong assertions but fails to actually educate developers.

That said, I agree with most of the points in this article, but I think the biggest reason why the App Store will continue to be the authority for iPhone apps is simple: it's a total pain to enter credit card payment information on your phone.

Until someone changes that, nobody will want to pay $0.99 for even a spectacularly good web app. Perhaps the solution is to use a more common payment system, like Amazon or Paypal credentials.
Smalltalk 101
Ah yes, you are probably talking about Evony, the armpit of MMORPGs :P Fine purveyors of questionability.

It's not just shady Chinese MMOs though, even Sony is now getting into the game of cheap-or-free subscription with a focus on farming virtual items out for hard cash. This seems to have been the direction that the industry has been moving in, though the phenomenon so far has been limited to MMOs of questionable quality to begin with :)

Blizzard/WoW is also in on this, but in a far less shady way - they're selling items that are largely cosmetic, the online game equivalent of vanity plates basically. The impact on gameplay and other players is fairly limited - whereas free purchase of game currency does Bad Things(tm) like drive hyperinflation.
I get tired of the "green" push when I see the "green" label on absolutely everything in the store regardless of how much pollution it may or may not create. It's become utterly meaningless.

That, and the push towards biofuels has nothing green about it. It's a terribly inefficient habitat and environment destroying idea to burn food to run cars.

Between that and the other ways the movement shoots itself in the food, it's no surprise people become jaded.
Paul Krugman and several other economists have commented on this article and basically make a good case that it's a fear mongering Wall Street fed pack of lies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/opinion/23krugman.html
http://prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=...
Hack Microsoft.com By 3 easy Steps
Would you trust an astrologer to validate another astrologer's data?
Flash Player 10.1 to Stream P2P Video to Millions, Swap Files BitTorrent-style
They have stopped. According to Zynga, offers consist of only 10% of their revenue.
Wait, what? I thought the point here was that this whole subject has now been thoroughly debunked and that we should all start buying SUVs again and setting our thermostats to 75F again. I swear I read that somewhere.
The company with the best innovation was Playfish, EA snapped them up quickly. Playfish was building quality while Zynga was burning through users.
What exactly is the driving force behind the desire to do everything in Javascript? Is it just because we have a surplus of Javascript programmers? It doesn't seem to me that this task is particularly well suited to Javascript. (I think) Something like Erlang would be more applicable.

And to me it seems that learning a new programming language (even one using a relatively obscure syntax), is a much simpler task than designing an entire project (or piece of a project), around a language that doesn’t really fit the needs of a project.

To that extent, I think that the idea of a ‘lingua franca’ language is an inherently broken metaphor. Programming languages are closer to human-computer interaction tools than they are natural languages. ‘Lingua franca’ implies that every language can communicate approximately the same thing (it is just a matter of who has influence). I think this is a mistake, as different languages allow you to think in hugely different ways about programming. Different languages have different intrinsic concepts.

It may be that this argument boils down to ‘if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,’ but even that is an oversimplification, as I don’t even use the same hammer for all types of nails (tack hammer, framing hammer, etc).

I am not saying that node.js is necessarily a bad thing to have. It may turn out that Javascript is indeed particularly well suited to this type of application. Superficially, however, nothing convinces me that this is some sort of exciting home-run-win situation (or that it is any better than any other functional-style programming language).

Could you explain the excitement and appeal to me?
Startup Heroku (YC W08) Now Hosting 40,000+ Apps
Sparkfun is a great company. I hope they see a great ROI after this giveaway.
I've certainly seen "web programming" vs "real programming" thing before. Must just be different scenes.
The Definition of Evil: Microsoft's Search Wars Hurt Us All
Just last year. Taught by the fantastic Bill Lehey.
Sounds like a classic: How to Ask Questions the Smart Way

http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
Can I talk to that William fellow?  He was so helpful.
These phone systems in the cloud are truly awesome. I wonder what kind of telecom hardware they are running on....
Also note that there is a bit of rounding going on.

So although they both read "2 hours" one might be 125 minutes and the other 175 minutes.

I'm sure in your case you already know the time order, but for others with the same question because of the rounding it can also look weird.
You still need to make sure that your comparison is apt. More often than not, comparisons to Nazis and the like are hyperbole, or at least sound like it.

It's also not silly to bring up Hitler, Stalin and Mao when somebody claims that religion is the source of all oppression. They clearly demonstrate that atheistic worldviews can be radical and dangerous, too.

True, but be careful about how you use this. I've had people claim that Nazism, Communism, et al, were forms of religion themselves, which is true, depending on how you use the term.
The formulas used to adjust TIPS principal and interest are based on official US Gov't. statistics, which means they are slightly more trustworthy than a politician's promise.

Still, if inflation is your concern then better a halfhearted adjustment than none at all.
Kepler's ellipses fit the data with an even simpler model. Newton added an underlying model which could be generalized to hypothetical bodies. In other words, you could plan something like an Apollo mission with it. I doubt you could do something like that with the Copernican, Ptolemaic, or even the Keplerian model. Newton's model gave you enough insight to hack. And not just surface hacks, but deep hacks. Everything before was merely descriptive.

Newton's model also showed convergence. The way the planets moved became connected with the way cannonballs behaved. Mechanics could also subsume models of buildings and machines. Engineering and architecture were unified by Newtonian Mechanics.

It's not just a matter fitting. It's a matter of transcending current models. (Another reason to study different programming languages/paradigms.)
I've always wondered what I might be revealing (demographics-wise) through my cookies while browsing, but I never though I might be getting shafted by them!

Wonder if Bing is revenue-sharing w/ their vendors this way somehow.
There's now a Farmville.com, so that seems like a move to slowly separate away from being completely dependent on Facebook.
I guess I'll know what site I'll be refreshing at 10:58am EST..

I bought ~$200 worth of stuff from Sparkfun earlier this year and they were a pleasure to deal with. Great company!
Either you meant "it's data", or you're doing it wrong. http://sproutcore.com http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/09/chris-anderson-couchd...
But this could just be the vendor (not that I'm defending MS). It could easily be a different price for Google, and another for Yahoo, etc. It doesn't mean MS has any knowledge of this, although they could probably police it if it's affecting their reputation.
Don't blame Bing. It is the store that is deciding to charge you a higher price.

I have seen this several times, on both newegg and Buy.com. Normally the "add to cart to see price" type items are cheaper if you don't do the bing cash back
I would think there would be another cause of different results: chrominance being encoded at lower resolution, dynamically and spatially. So converting to RGB then to gray would make it more quantised and blurrier . . . well, I haven't thought this through in detail, so I am not certain, but it seems a possible consideration . . .

(since each channel of RGB is a weighted combination of all three YUV, each of RGB must be somewhat lower resolution, and that can't be recovered, so when converted to gray, that lower resolution must remain . . . so it seems it would be a deficiency . . . )
Wow,

It seems like everyone looks stupid now. Apple for the annoying process of the app store and developers for wanting 99 cents/each for a "silly puzzle game that would have to be free on the web".

Now, what would happen if you had a big walled-garden where each user paid a fixed-fee for unlimited access to everything and each developer was paid per-use and by rating?

Sooner or later, this model (all-you can eat content for a fixed fee with some of the fee going to content developers) will replace the "free" web and app-store models. The web is close to this already but the fees aren't shunted quite enough to content developers.
That's why I referred to the monotonic principle. The specific examples I chose showed that it chouldn't be a rounding effect.

Still, good observation - thanks.

Got a disappointing return on the poll, but I guess that's HN. Very hit'n'miss as to whether things get seen.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=957715