skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your comment implies that sunscreen can cause any of several conditions whose causes are actually completely unknown. The excessive use of sunscreen can merely exacerbate those conditions by further reducing vitamin D levels.

For those of us who are healthy and drink plenty of milk, wearing sunscreen when we're out in the sun for a long time is a great way to stay healthy.
Now, What really needs to be done is to compare "Ink Efficiency" with "Legibility". I wonder if there are other factors which can be used to determine whether one font is "better" than another?

BTW, the ink efficiency is better determined using weighted average of distribution of letter frequency in language use over the alphabet and should be trivially determinable by parsing font files.

Sounds like an a valuable mini exploration project suitable for print media.

[EDIT]. Additionally, for display optimizations you need to maximize "Legibility", "Font Size" at various contrast ratios on screen. It would be interesting to be able to quantify an optimal "Font Face" and "Font Size" for various contrast ratios (screen power consumption) for mobile displays.
Actually, Google Docs is not too suitable for it either: you can add to the list, but where do you leave comments for entries you disagree with, etc etc? Would become a strange hybrid discussion split between HN and the Google Doc...

This is one of those cases where I see real use for Google Wave.
I do know that study. The problem that study found is that the price they put on being late was below the social stigma.

The solution is to make the price above the social stigma.

I think a reasonable rate would be $100 fines, to be handed out no more often than once every 10 minutes, half of which goes to the afflicted seatmate. If you are in the space of seatmates on both sides, you pay the fine once per afflicted seat mate. If you need to move to avoid continued paying of the fine, then you owe the airline for a second seat.

This is on top of the social stigma of having had people come, and explain how you're breaking the rules in front of the rest of the plane.

At that rate, a person who can't fit in a normal seat will see buying 2 seats for their cross-country flight as the cheap option. And one who isn't comfortable sitting in one may think extra hard about remaining uncomfortable rather than inconveniencing someone else.
Top 10 algorithms
It isn't just public awareness, it's about getting the law changed. The Swedish Pirate Party got 7% of the vote last June. If this can be replicated throughout the world (particularly in Europe, where the Pirate movement is strongest), there will be 2 effects:

1. in some countries, PP may hold the balance of power in parliament, and will thus be able to join whichever coalition offers the best concessions to their points of view. This may well be the outcome of the next general election in Sweden.

2. other parties, seeing how many votes PP is getting, and they are potentially losing, will tend to move their policies to what PP endorses. A historical example of this sort of process working is after the 1989 European election in the UK, where the Green Party got 15% of the vote; the main parties immediately started copying their polices, or at least giving lip service to them. When Pirate Parties start doing well in elections, we are likely to see the same effect.
From my dad: A card that says, "This card is redeemable for cash in the amount of the cost of the Feb 2010 bar exam if you pass it." He's trying to incentivize me to study since I'm such a procrastinator. I have to admit, that's pretty creative of him.

From my two younger married sisters who each have kids: a box with a stuffed baby bunny and a handwritten sign inside urging me to "MAKE BABIES!".

FYI: I'm 30, male, single, working on a law-related software startup, and considering a New Years' resolution of flying away from the bay area to other cities on weekends to meet more women. Good idea?
Analyze credit? ;-) Seriously a company as big and growing as fast as Facebook doesn't just put it's financing in the bank and dole it out as salaries - it needs to have a capital structure that manages both debt and investment over the short and long term, working capital, and generally matches types of debt to the risk of the investment.

And as companies grow bigger and faster, their need for financing becomes even greater because generally outlays precede income. Using last year's sales to finance this year's growth limits that growth unnecessarily.

And that's my regurgitation of Finance 101, which I took about a decade ago, so just a rough description.
Weird. I did a to-do list using the same technologies, Sinatra and MongoDB.
http://tasks.cfpg.me/
And when you tell that to the young people today, they don't believe you!
i like the style you use on that site - simple, connects with the idea of a newspaper, clean, distinctive.
It seems to me that calling it "ink efficiency" is framing it in a way that ignores readability and legibility. The more common term for this is "font weight", which we already knew was independent of the pitch (size). It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that the more generally readable typefaces are in the middle of the group.
Almost nobody in Japan thinks that anyone can become Japanese, yet Japan is rated more “tolerant” than America. This is absurd.

I always joke (mostly good naturedly) that when my best Japanese friend visited me at home he had people assuming he was American literally 20 feet past immigration, and when I visit him at home I get people who have known me for seven years saying "Wow, its so amazing you can use chopsticks, for an American I mean."
If you design the software correctly then array bounds checking is often a waste of resources. For a stupid example let's assume you have 3 arrays of the same size and you are doing this.

For (i = 1; i < 10000; i++)
{
a[i] = i * i;
b[i] = a[i] * i;
c[i] = b[i] * i;
}

Now that's not a lot of code but with array bounds checking you add 50,000 bounds checks that do nothing useful if the arrays are of the correct size. Clearly there are uses where those bounds checks are useful, but when you care about speed they can become fairly costly.

You might even want to rewrite it as because it really is faster:

For (i = 1; i < 10000; i++)
{
c[i] = i * (b[i] = i * (a[i] = i));
}

PS: Ugly c code often has a vary good reason for looking the way it does.
Batman cufflinks. Unfortunately they do not fire poisoned bat darts.... yet.
Oh gawd. Please don't give it to PETA. I don't have any better ideas, but I wouldn't do anything to support PETA. They're reactionary, inflammatory, and probably do more harm than good for the cause they support.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2003/mar/03/advertising.mark...

http://www.activistcash.com/organization_blackeye.cfm/oid/21

http://www.consumerfreedom.com/news_detail.cfm/h/2628-hyperb...

http://www.petakillsanimals.com/
you need to type in a whole sentence and then look at the results above the traditional search results.

for example, for "what did andrew cooke do?" - http://www.powerset.com/explore/go/what-did-andrew-cooke-do%... - the third response is "designed an algorithm" (which is what i was looking for).

it's not wonderful, by any means, but that does illustrate the semantic-ness of what they are doing (imho).
Depends. Some areas have little competition. Telcos are being pushed to extend DSL to more and more rural areas, which adds a whole lot of cost for very little ROI, simply due to low population density. That drives costs up.
I got Lego! Brilliant idea from my brother, and I must say that I enjoyed it just as much now (I'm 22) as I did ten years ago.
Those are precisely examples where even the most naive late 70s compiler can optimize out the bounds checking, as is well documented in the literature. (presuming the sizes are >= 10000, of course) All it takes is a validity range, noting that i goes from 1 to 9999 and that at each access i is within the range of the array. To trick out the compiler optimizations you need to at least start doing nontrivial mathematics on the bounds indices, which are also the ones that are the least obvious and thus in need of the bounds indices.
While I get your point in general, I disagree with the water faucets. Typically that's how they work - because they turn outwards (so to speak) from the spout in the center.
Seems to be thoroughly identical to Webby: http://webby.rubyforge.org/tutorial/

Or am I missing a trick?
This probably isn't a popular thing to say, but assuming it's legal, I'd keep it. Anything that rare and precious is worth cherishing for the rest of your life.
The Wonder Of Apple’s Tablet
> the one dollar group said they enjoyed it the most

Counterintuitive. Interesting. But not really definitive.

Here's the key quote:

> The difference between the One and Twenty Dollar conditions reaches the .08 level of significance on a two-tailed test (t = 1.79).

The sample sizes here are tiny, about 20 people per.

Without meaning any offense to you in particular, I've often observed that "interesting" social science findings like this take on disproportionate significance when verbally summarized as "enjoyed it the most" or "more effective". That only tells you a tiny bit about (respectively) ranks or the sign of the difference. Lacking detailed knowledge of the experiment (= effect sizes + confidence intervals), one doesn't know how robust those ranks or orderings are if the experiment was repeated...which is, in this case, what the citation boils down to: a tacit suggestion to repeat the experiment with compensation at your business!

Again, zero offense intended. My only point is that social science type findings like this should be handled with great skepticism, particularly if the results are counterintuitive and involve small sample sizes.

(PS: I do agree that money is often the most expensive way to motivate people. It does not motivate me. But I think some of Dan Ariely's work is more persuasive in this regard.)
Hmm,

"A Ponzi scheme that works" set off bell in my mind.

It seems like this article rolls two different questions together. One is whether immigration is good. The other is whether the US can continue to grow economically based only on "Three hundred million" niche markets.

Putting aside the former question, I'd say the answer to the latter question is no. Housing bubbles, health care and state spending have not always America's number one industries. Too many of the "hundred million niche markets" that can be touted have really been just support services for the aforementioned sustainable schemes. The US may be able to keep it's "service economy" afloat for another few years but the crisis of 2008 should have been wake-up call announcing unsustainability of this course. Naturally it wasn't, but there you are.
"They're reactionary, inflammatory..."

In what way is PETA reactionary?
I think he means the fact that we don't go around making lists of "Male founder successes," but we do for female founders is indicative of the imbalance between male and female startup founders, because of the emphasis it places on females.

Perhaps the list itself isn't indicative of anything, but the site and the list combined might be. There has to be a reason why it's a site for women, especially since we don't have sites for startups explicitly for men. That reason is probably because of our patriarchal society more than anything, but his implication that perhaps it indicates that the male to female founder ratio is a little lopsided is not invalid.

I don't think it necessarily means women are not accepted into entrepreneurial enterprises, because it could also mean that women simply are less interested.
Shards of Lost Technology, and the Need for High-Level Architectures
Pykg-config:  a pkg-config replacement
This reminds me of an article I read by Dustin Curtis.

The flimsy doorknob and the cheap receipt:

http://dustincurtis.com/two_stories.html

I highly recommend that you read it. Basically it is an article about how presentation can make a positive or negative effect. And Dustin Curtis does a phenomenal job with the presentation of his own website. It is a real joy to read and always makes me aspire to the shear elegance of his typographic layout.
Yep, based on intuition it would definitely seems like fonts with similar font weights (assuming the same font size), would offer similar legibility. The real question is, given a choice of font and the requirement of printing a novel or HN front-page on a mobile device, how do you quantify the trade-offs between them, so that one can say, this saves 'X' amount of ink or power for the same legibility?
Some sweaters and $280 in cash. I'm thinking about a ebook reader to read scientific papers on any ideas?
Can you pursue your dream job on the side, on weekends?

Also, what kind of a place interviews on Christmas day?
And Jekyll

http://github.com/mojombo/jekyll

is static site generation a big pain point for a lot of people?
For readability, you can always use... well... Readability: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability
And your atheist friend too :)
Rejection letters from several banks for a small RV loan, even with a co-signer. So my Christmas gift to myself, an RV, will have to be paid for with cash, and will be a few years older than the one I thought I was getting. I'm also wondering where my tax dollars are going, if they aren't going into consumer loans for people with great credit and reasonable income. (Note to other startup founders: Getting a loan as a startup founder is really difficult, even if you have a reasonable salary and credit score in the 700s; plan accordingly.)

A Kindle. Which allows me to get rid of all of my books, making my transition to RV living that much easier.

Cash from my parents, as contribution to my RV fund.
I received a Kindle 2 from my boyfriend and this awesome ceramic electric slow cooker. Anyone for pot roast? :)

Kindle 2 is absolutely amazing. I bought "The Business Of Software" and noticed that the graphs and tables didn't render legibly at all. So I emailed the Kindle feedback folk and within an hour I had a reply offering a refund. Best service ever, Amazon - and on Christmas Day too!
Dominion is quite fun, with or without the expansions. It's best 3-4 players; with just 2, one player tends to draw ahead and stay ahead. If you've got the original and the first expansion, there are rules for 5-6 players, but it's best with 3-4.
In Eclipse:

Alt-Shift-T for refactor. Select "Generate Hash-code and Equals".
I don't know, but I found Webby to be just fine... so I'm not sure why we need three static site generators that all seem to function more or less the same...
Static blogging is the new twitter client is the new dynamic blog as an app to implement your own version of?
It's interesting that you should mention this--I've been running bareback for (well, any time is too long) after McAfee ran out for me. So my current defenses are spybot and mse.

I'm curious what do other folks who use free security choose?
I agree there aren't as many girls here, although people on this site have argued vehemently against that conclusion (I choose to believe my own eyes, so I don't care what they say). The problem with weekend trips is that at best you end up with a distance relationship... I'd say crank on the start up, and when it's done (win or lose) move somewhere else.
I would be impressed if that worked correctly on multithreaded code or if it could survive some of the more esoteric pointer manipulations you can do in C. It's mathematically impossible to make the perfect language for all problems, so while many languages have been built that are a "safe" version of C they lose something for everything they gain.

PS: Even compiler bugs can be useful under the correct circumstances.
I had an arduino board and the books "don't make me think" http://www.amazon.com/Think-Common-Sense-Approach-Usability/... and "programming clojure" http://pragprog.com/titles/shcloj/programming-clojure
Wow that's a nice x-mas, good pickups!
From what I've heard, Palantir technologies in palo alto( who, as it happens, took over facebook's old building) goes FAR above and beyond google and facebook's luxaries.
This is also the 3rd or 4th time nytimes has written about life at facebook in the last few months.
Let's also not forget StaticMatic http://www.staticmatic.net/. It has great support for HAML and SASS.

A helpful tip with for all of these static generators - if you need PHP or other code, just put it in the static HTML and have your deploy script rename the files to .PHP before rsync'ing them.
"It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition."

Bertrand Russell
I'm relativity young to give up on my dream job just yet, but I'm having some serious doubts I'll ever get it.

That being said, if it's your "dream job", and they can provide you with some safety, I say go for it. Use your free time to work on your own business.

If you ever get to a point where keeping the two is too much work, that will be a good sign, and you can choose between the two.
Massive wooden chopping board :)
Yup I got an arduino too. Absolutely GREAT fun.

So far the best project I want to aim for is a UAV (http://www.diydrones.com) - either that or as a controller unit for a coil gun.

Any other suggestions for us?? :D
"A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week."

I haven't been in this situation before but I think what George Patton said applies.
You forgot to warn that there would be a super-loud sound auto-played on the page's load.
I wasn't asking for advice, just wondering if any HNers had been in a similar situation.

We don't have the Christmas holiday (I'm Turkish) although we have other holidays to more than make up for it.
I keep hearing good things about Dominion. I'll have to pick it up sometime. My friends and family really like Citadels and Bang!
Andrey Tarkovsky's Sculpting in Time
Milorad Pavic's Landscape Painted With Tea
A signed and framed picture by Will Cullen Hart
Herzog Zwei for my Sega Genesis
Planescape Torment for PC
Leadbelly collection
A brick of soft lead (I need this for swaging).Someone found it and thought of me :)

Just the coolest stuff this year. Enjoy your day :)
Telcos actually make out like bandits on rural DSL, often getting 300-400% subsidies from the Universal Service Funds. I have a friend who has about 400 rural broadband subscribers and he said he charges $30/month, collects $150/month per customer from the USF, and was also given a $1,000 installation fee from the USF. He has long-since covered hist cost on installing a small DSLAM and running fiber out to that area.
I live on a peninsula in the Sydney city area - we get about 5.5-6mbps here because geographically the cables have to run around the (small) bay and back to the CBD. And its plenty enough.
No. Science, like democracy, is based on the very principle of distrust. Instead, simply accept it. Accept that scientists are humans. Accept that the process if often flawed. Accept that peer-review doesn't really mean that much. Accept that most theories aren't fully supported by the data. Accept that we have such a diversity in science that experiments are rarely repeated. Accept that it's hard to tell the good science from the bad. but most of all, accept that it is the best thing we've got.

(scientist)
I was treated intolerantly and kicked out of a fat guy clothing store by a crazy catholic store clerk for not caring that the Pope fell down.
I love this game too.

There are 3 expansions, the 2nd is a self-contained game, but the 3rd requires one of the first two. The 3rd is most interesting, however, because it expands card effects across turns.
I think you missed the point. Even with immutable strings, some representations will allow you to take a substring without copying data and some will not. Length-prefixed strings do not.
Your family probably doesn't need a debugger. Get them onto Chrome.

They'll love the new UI, and it'll silently auto-update so you won't have to upgrade it again.
I would say the same about this conversation. My point being that I could pretty quickly find two previous Hacker News posts that discuss Jekyll and then quickly come around to the question: why do we need another <Webby/StaticMatic/Nanoc>?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411750

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=998411

One thing I know distinguishes Jekyll is that it uses Liquid which restrcts the templating in a way that makes it safer for some uses than giving the user access to ERB.

In answer to the more general question, I would ask how many scripting languages, text editors, email clients, etc. do we need? Programmers seem to love building things that work exactly as they want. So for all the talk about not reinventing the wheel, we get lots of overlapping toys. I don't think it's necessarily a bad things. More versions can lead to new ideas.
It's possible to be locally sane. For example, suppose you define an abstract Number class, and define subclasses for ComplexFloat and IntFraction numbers. You could define .equals() methods on each of those that only compare to the same type, and work correctly. You don't always have to deal with weird issues.
Take it, and throw yourself into it for a year. Your business was a year away anyway, so it's worth discovering if it's your dream job. If it is your dream job, and the partnership materializes, go for it.

On the other hand, you may discover that your dream job isn't what you really thought it was. Then you can move on starting your own business with greater commitment, either full time or on the side.

You should also evaluate your reasons for wanting to start your own business. Being a partner in a business that you love could actually fulfill all or most of those goals, without some of the risks and downsides of entrepreneurship.
It's cool that somebody can actually draw different fonts by hand, but wouldn't it be fairly easy to make images of fonts at a large size and count the black pixels? That way you could get numbers.
Solutions to Mexico's Drug Crisis
>I wonder if there are other factors which can be used to determine whether one font is "better" than another?

I can't find them, but a lot of studies were done on type legibility when Hoefler Frere-Jones redesigned the typeface for the US interstate signage system. They made a lot of interesting findings, such as a word with an inital cap followed by lowercase was more legible than all caps or all lowercase; or that lowercase 'L's are more easily read when they have a small hook at the bottom, as opposed to jut being a straight line.
Instantes

If I were able to live my life anew,
In the next I would try to commit more errors.
I would not try to be so perfect, I would relax more.
I would be more foolish than I've been,
In fact, I would take few things seriously.
I would be less hygienic.
I would run more risks,
take more vacations
,
contemplate more sunsets,
climb more mountains, swim more rivers.
I would go to more places where I've never been,
I would eat more ice cream and fewer beans,
I would have more real problems and less imaginary ones.

I was one of those people that lived sensibly
and prolifically each minute of his life;
Of course I had moments of happiness.
If I could go back I would try
to have only good moments.

Because if you didn't know, of that is life made:
only of moments; Don't lose the now.

I was one of those that never
went anywhere without a thermometer,
a hot-water bottle,
an umbrella, and a parachute;
If I could live again, I would travel lighter.

If I could live again,
I would begin to walk barefoot from the beginning of spring
and I would continue barefoot until autumn ends.
I would take more cart rides,
contemplate more dawns,
and play with more children,
If I had another life ahead of me.

But already you see, I am 85,
and I know that I am dying.

Jorge Luis Borges