skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The icon screen sample is pretty low res. It's much easier to see on an actual retina display, but the differences are indeed subtle.

A couple of differences: The 'a' is clearly different, and you should be able to spot the difference even with an untrained eye; the 'C' and 'G' are clearly slimmer in SF.

The curves of the rounded letters have a subtly different feel to them matching the names of the fonts: Helvetica is sterner and more geometric, San Francisco more inviting and informal. You may find this hard to see is you look too closely, but see if you can feel it or learn it by attaching adjectives to the look of the words.
Better experience than a hotel or serviced apartment? Good luck with that! Hotels and serviced apartments are literally designed from the ground up for a great customer experience. Some random person's house or apartment is just not going to be able to compete on customer experience.
> "compare the writing scores of this 8-year-old child vs. when she was 7, 6 and 5 years old!"

Which would be useful to see how the scores have improved or not improved, much like how this article is demonstrating the progress of the iPhone camera.

It's 100% valid and perfectly clear to not include "the best Android phone cameras" as that is not the goal.
Um...yes? Not sure what point you're making. China's ongoing purchases of US debt are certainly significant, and the US does rely on them (among many, many others) to finance their ongoing deficit.

It's certainly true that Americans in general (and the US pension system in particular) hold a significantly larger share of US debt than, eg, China, but what of it? That makes the problem worse not better, because unlike Chinese citizens, American retirees can vote in US elections. :)

The cold reality is that 1) the US has a lot of debt relative to the size of the economy, 2) the debt continues to pile up, and 3) contrary to Cacti's argument, the US military is not a solution to this problem.
I upvoted this mainly because I think it's healthy that people consider the ethics by which they and their fellow citizens live. But generally speaking, this is a stupid reason not to kill someone.

The DA basically told this guy point-blank that if you don't want to die, take this deal. If you do want to die, don't take the deal.

He chose not to take the deal.

Is there a chance that "good sense" could have prevailed, and that by some fluke, some part of the system wouldn't work, and so he would be saved from the death penalty? Maybe. But if he had taken the deal, he would definitely not have died.

This guy chose to play russian roulette with a six-shooter with five bullets in it and lost. And this is the reason we shouldn't kill people? Because a guy who can't do the basic math of "which choice is more likely to end in my death" chose poorly?

No. The guy should have taken the deal. Much like the rest of the people on the planet who choose to take huge risks with their life, he's going to lose out on this bet. And that has nothing to do with why we should stop the state from killing people.

Our system of justice is based on laws and rules. They can't be broken arbitrarily, which is why innocent people are put to death. Not because we're mean. Not because we're stupid. We make the rules, and we have to enforce them. In this case, one of our rules is, if you do X, you die.

So, if you don't believe in killing innocent people, by all means, get rid of that rule. But don't tell me we should get rid of the rule because the rules weren't perfect.
I used to think I can communicate the architecture (including code) of an entire website using just the tables. And a good enough developer+designer could turn the schema into a website.
Thanks for the great discussion, I learned a ton of good info from this thread which cotributed to me deciding to take the plunge and preorder the basic Glowforce. I had hoped to go pro but between the poor US/CAD exchange rate and the rather high price of shipping to Canada I could just not budget for it.
If anyone who is ordering wants to save us a $100 each, order through this referal link :) http://glowforge.com/referred/?kid=H5xzt6
History of the Commodore Amiga Part 1
Concert audio doesn't need to be bad, I've seen a few bands actually record and sell their shows on CD directly, and it's really not bad... better than standing in the audience generally (depending on genre and audience of course).
I would love to see a vector based lossless format for Anime. There is no reason to pass a large 4k file for animations and if reduced to vectors, you can scale up infinitely with great resolution.
If he's innocent, he chose to not go to jail for life for a crime he didn't commit. People shouldn't have to accept unjust punishment to avoid other people's ignorance/laziness/incompetence/half-assedness.
KeyBox: Web-Based SSH Access and Key Management
1. That is blaming the victim.

2. Telling someone that I intend to kill them, means that is would be stupid to not kill them?
Exactly. Shell isn't at all worried about their reputation. They find Greenpeace amusing more than anything. Arctic oil is expensive and at current prices just isn't profitable.

Watch to see if they keep the drilling licenses or sell them off to another play with more cash like ExxonMobil.
Is there an option to mark specific parts of the image for redaction, beyond what is autodetected? I assume the system can't recognize some forms of identifiable information e.g. addressees or phone numbers
Agree.

They clearly have some real-world kerning tuning to do, but I don't know if that will happen given their "look at our perfect new font" campaign.

Let's hope the font nerds deep in the bowels of Apple will do the right thing and tune it over time.

("Doing the right thing in the bowels" reminds me of a story an old friend of mine told me years back. He was an Apple fellow by that point, one of a handful, able to work on whatever he wanted. (He was in the printing group, since he came out of Imagen, the TeX project laser printer spin-off, where we both worked.) Anyway, at some point Jobs went off on a rave at a meeting and declared that fax was dead, and they should no longer support faxing in their printer drivers. Chen and crew had no choice but to fold in public, but kept it in anyway, and Job was never the wiser.)
Programmers therefore need to understand time.
It's increasingly seems that the powers of prosecutors are deployed in arbitrary and unjust ways: either overreaching (as in the case of Aaron Swartz or Xiaoxing Xi) or non-prosecution of police brutality or corporate crime (just changing now that the statute of limitations run out on those responsible for the 2008 financial crisis)

It's not clear what can be done about it, other than occasionally writing a check to the ACLU to help limit the damage. Any ideas?
Seems like the real issue is that Oklahoma is not giving the guy a fair trial. While the finality of the death penalty makes it (or at least makes it seem) worse, it would/could be just as unfair to throw the guy in jail for life without giving him his due process.
I am curious, why do they always say the word "weird" in these ads? It's too tacky for most people to think they are "dispassionately" describing the product. One weird trick. It's almost a shibboleth now of hucksters.
Reading a lot of the comments in this thread, you guys are taking this announcement and running with it in some weird directions. Google's just playing catch-up with ad targeting features that Facebook has had for years. Nobody is targeting individual users. There are HUGE amounts of depersonalization work and legal review that go into making something like this a reality. If you think Google's engineers spent more time developing this than Google's legal team spent approving it, you're probably wrong.

Say a company wants to target ads to people that are in their email subscription list. Or a brick-and-mortar retailer wants to marry up their in-store customers with online data to target in-store shoppers with online advertising. These are features that have been supported for a while through Facebook and through third-party services like Liveramp. Google is building the infrastructure to support these natively. It's not a new technology. It's a very old one - what used to be called database marketing back in the days of direct mail and catalogs.

Granted, I make my living in marketing, so I may be biased, but I think a lot of folks are looking at this the wrong way. More targeted advertising is less annoying, not more. (A) You aren't getting spammed with things that are irrelevant to you. The ads you are shown are more likely to be related to something you actually care about or could potentially want to buy. (B) Advertisers don't have to spend as much money on targeted ads as they used to have to spend spamming the world with untargeted advertising (see also TV, radio, sponsorship & endorsement deals, etc), so their margins go up and they can afford better product development, lower prices, etc.

The risks here are that you will somehow be outed as someone that shops frequently at a particular store, not that you're going to be "spearfished" or that the NSA will send drones to your house to kill you with missiles.
>The amount of armchair condescension on HN is appalling.

The irony is strong with this one.
You imply that you no longer believe this. What changed?
Not sure who is downvoting you -- this quote is entirely appropriate.
So, if I'm innocent, I should take a plea bargain (which, let's not forget, involves me standing up before God and everyone and saying, "yes, I did it," so that I can spend the rest of my life in a maximum security penitentiary, so that I can avoid being put to death? Not sure I agree with your logic there.
Maybe we should have a hinting equivalent for physical size then (rather than pixel hinting or an entirely different font).
Or, start from the user experience.

Both are good places to start, and both should be given serious consideration early in the project.

Code is usually the worst place to start. If you do need code early on, I think it's fine to write it as quickly as possible, even ignoring edge cases and simplifying algorithms.

If you have good data structure design (and understand the invariants) and you understand the problem space well from a functional standpoint (including functional edge cases), you can get the code into shape later. The bugs you encounter will be mostly the trivial kind.

But if you misunderstand the user experience, or the data structures are a mess, then it's difficult to recover.

That's one of the reasons SQL databases are so great: they help you get the data design up and going quickly, and will enforce a lot of your invariants (through schema normalization, PK/FKs, and CHECK constraints). If anything goes wrong, rollback returns you to a known-good state.

I don't know anything equivalent at the user experience level, though.
This particular entry is quite interesting, it gets at a distinction I'm not sure I had explicitly thought about before: http://mathmistakes.org/recursive-and-relational-thinking-an...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/17/us/richard-glossip-executi... gives more details about how the case has proceeded thus far. From the description of the "evidence", this seems like a clear cut failure of the justice system.
Knotty Objects: Phones
I agree with this sentiment, would the death penalty be fine with people assuming it can be proven that somebody is 100% guilty?
> so essentially still is object nonetheless

http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?ClosuresAndObjectsAreEquivalent
Which is (a) cheaply broken by hiring a few hundred bored students, and (b) is also even possible to be broken analytically. It is actually easier to break than the highest level of the previous captcha, as now you just need a Google account with semi-normal activity and a JS runtime that pretends to be a normal browser. The semi-normal activity is simple to be possible by running it as a bot and feeding it with search queries for 8h a day, running a query every few minutes. Which, in turn, gets the account marked as active.
Plenty of micro-frameworks out there: http://microjs.com/#templating
While fracking has become more popular in the last few years, the big reason for low oil prices at the moment is the Saudis. They saw $billions in investments in the various drilling, etc efforts and decided to flood the market to kill their competition and sacrifice profits now to keep their dominance in the long run.

From a purely economic perspective, it's a good move on their part.
Keep in mind that you're survey of examples is likely biased by what makes a good story... and journalists have become very good at figuring out which cases will make a good story.

It's a problem that there is enough material to keep the stories coming, but let's not conclude that the stories we read about represent the bulk of the justice system's operations.
It's interesting that he's advocating this on games.

I've been annoyed at most OOP codebases, but conceded that games and GUIs were the canonical applications of OOP. Perhaps you could say that highly stateful apps running on a single machine can use state encapsulated in objects.

In contrast, for web UIs and their "big data" back ends, I believe you also want to use a data-oriented approach, rather than a code-oriented approach (or at least this is the style that my code has converged upon). You don't need to wrap everything up in objects all the time when you're really just passing strings through the network and doing light processing. And when you're not even using a type-safe language to begin with.

But he's advocating the same style on games, just with structs and functions rather than buffers and processes. This makes me think OOP is more of a mistake, although I will admit that I use objects as modules now (a longer conversation, but the idea is to instantiate almost all your objects at startup, and not allocate during normal program flow).

I've long thought there was this interesting historical oddity in that we came up with languages in the 90's and designed them for GUIs, but we're using them the 2010's for web and server programming. Then you get web apps that are a mess of misleading objects, when really the architecture is stateless (or stored in a database, which is not programmable using your language).
I think it's a combination of net cost, net energy, speed of development, infrastructure required to transport it efficiently to refineries, and the prohibitive cost of drilling safely. PR is a concern, but not much more than PR in any other spill. The largest problem is spill damages will cost an order of magnitude more to prevent/stop/clean because the arctic is so remote and all effort there is less efficient.

PR is not the only cost of the Deepwater Horizon. BP also paid a significant fraction of their market cap to clean up the wide-reaching effects of the spill.

There are behavioral costs. Everyone knows _which_ major oil company was to blame for letting a drunk ship captain navigate the Valdez oil tanker. I was in grade school at the time and I still remember the images of birds, fish, and other wildlife caked in oil slowly dying and the name of the oil company was forever etched into my mind next to those images.

The Arctic is some of the most inhospitable weather in the world. Everything costs more to develop, transport, and maintain there. The seasonal weather prevents ships from making the trip there without an ice breaker escort (or more than one if the ice breaker is stranded on ice). The energy required to perform much of the work (keeping machines above freezing temperatures, keeping oil/gas warm to transport in pipelines) isn't insignificant. Oil platforms may need to be re-engineered to withstand the weather and floating ice sheets.

The costs associated with drilling are high until the drillers find the largest pockets.

It's also worth noting that Royal Dutch Shell is among the only major oil companies that actively and openly admits that climate change is an issue, that people are at least partly to blame, and that the oil/energy companies have a responsibility to both factor in the risk factors as well as work on mitigating the contributions of oil/gas to climate change.[1]

[1] http://www.shell.com/global/environment-society/environment/...
That's strange. I had the opposite experience. I could no longer read. Specifically I couldn't read my notes in the Notes.app on my iPhone5S after upgrading to iOS9. The text was smaller and the lines thinner. I eventually had to go into the system settings and pick "bold" for the entire OS
> The boss comes in and says "Hey, change of plans. The player is now a car."

Stupid decision-making is why I will never work in games. With regular coding, you can iterate towards the domain and so long as you keep your wits about you and never make the same mistake twice, never be subjected to such a demand.

In the arts, everything's got to hew to some asshole's vision. The people building it can never really know what's going on in his head and the asshole never understands how much work it is to change things to fit the evolving vision. Killer features on games are rarely evident from day one, game shops seem to always wind up looking like sausage factories.
I think HashiCorp did themselves somewhat of a disservice by presenting Otto as a "successor" to Vagrant. Vagrant is a great technology that solves complex problems. Otto uses Vagrant to solve a different set of problems.

Otto is designed to automate the provisioning of local dev environments and production environments. While some use Vagrant to solve this problem, it's typically an un-standardized, home-grown solution. Otto is an attempt to standardize and automate the process.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I've been working on a project for the last year-ish that solves the exact same problems: Easily provisioning and configuring local dev environments and finding consistent parity between dev and production environments. I'm interested to really dig in and see the differences between Otto and the project I've been working on, Nanobox. Would love some outside feedback so feel free to take a look: https://nanobox.io

But I digress. I think Otto is less a "successor" to Vagrant, and more of a natural offshoot that solves a different problem. I don't ever see it replacing Vagrant, especially since it uses Vagrant behind the scenes.
I still fucking hate Medium. Why? It's bad for content creators. Why? Because url previews on HN/Reddit/etc say medium.com. Every damn medium.com link looks the same as others. No way to build your brand or identity. For the longest time the author's name wasn't even visible until the very teeny bottom.

I'm pro-author and pro-content creator. I don't believe that Medium is. They're just pro-Medium. Our interests are not aligned. Which is a shame.
Oh, I wasn't discounting the future possibility - there's definitely nothing impossible about it, and in fact I agree it's quite doable. Just that we don't have it yet.
No, it's fullfilled. The design of the average table, pencil, glass, fork, spoon, text-based book etc. is fairly standard (save for few ornamental details).

That's not because its purpose is lost for design conformity, but because those are peak designs that work best for what they need to do.

The only purpose design for government sites has is to be able to give information quickly and in a legible and accessible way. No artistic ambitions here. That can be standardized very well.
Even granting the first sentence, the second doesn't follow. Some sources of oil are cheaper or easier to get to than others; you could put a 100% enforceable ban on oil burning over some limit X, and it would still make sense to explore for oil.
What is the real contamination risk though?

Suppose some biological particle makes it to mars. Then we pick it up, discover that its very dead already, DNA sequence it and find that it matches the common flu. Write it off as contamination, rinse & repeat until we find something that is alive & looks like green men.

Or can science genuinely not distinguish earth contaminants vs alien life?
Jeff Atwood: Learning to code is Not overrated
RE: How people are and the death penalty

The other day I was driving down the road and thinking about how people are.

It was 33 years coming but here's what hit me: people do what they want, even in the face of devastating consequences.

See that long line outside any burger joint? See the stats on the amount of hard drugs guaranteed to destroy your world we consume? See that person cheating? See that DA wanting a win?

If you want a burger, a high, an orgasm or a conviction, you generally will get it at some price that's ultimately...above market.

How much more prone to excess is someone in the heat of a moment? How unlike the event does its moment by moment reconstruction during a trial appear? The mismatch has always struck me as unjust. As people judging an event whose experience they haven't had and haven't attempted to recreate. Though a jury is a good idea and the best we've got, the process they run through seems ripe for reform.

An eye for an eye has its place. If you walk into a school, start shooting and are captured alive - I think you just forfeited any claim on life or potential rehabilitation.

Any shade of grey zooming out from that seems too hard for any government system to decide well. I hear people say things in passing like "he only got 20 years". 20 years is a huge and devastating amount of time, as is one year. As we've ramped up the time on these sentences and made it an all or nothing proposition. Unfortunately, I don't think 20 years will do it if 1 year hasn't and I don't think death will do it if 20 years hasn't.

Regarding Richard Glossip. I don't know him or his case. I don't know the victim and while they won't return, there's a debt owed that I don't know how to pay. I want Richard Glossip to live. I don't think taking another life will pay the debt of the first. What I want most of all is for someone to tell me how to pay that debt.
Oh the original names where a lot better. I guess less memorable, but still more unique.
I think Medium makes incremental improvement(s) over some alternatives. I'm not sure if the sum of those improvements will mean Medium will turn a profit, grow or survive, but here are a couple of thoughts:

Medium is content-first. All blogs should arguably be content-first, very few are. Most wordpress blogs a) look like crap, b) obscures content, and c) renders slow, in order to accommodate the design that contributes to a) and b).

I'm not a writer, but from what I understand, the back-end is also content-first, writing first -- simple, elegant, no clutter.

The lack of theming is a bonus. Just as design/layout of an essay in New York Magazine is largely out of your hands, and taken care of by the publisher, so it is with Medium. Evidence suggests that the vast majority of writers are better off that way (see point above).

Ghost and many of the static site generators offer similar benefits, but with some caveats: they all need theming, and I'm not sure if any of them really come with something that in sum is as good as/better than Medium. Personally I think even Medium is a bit heavy -- but it is way better than then current mess that is Blogspot.

If your goal is to write/publish and not worry too much about design/layout you could do a lot worse than Medium. Many do.

I wouldn't be surprised if Medium differentiated/launched curated sub-sites/"magazines" that featured content from Medium. They could have some premium stuff that is authored by only paid authors, mix and match, and have a X articles/month-for-free model a la New York Times etc.

If the can get a large number of writers, and a large sub-section of good/great writers -- monetizing shouldn't be that hard. I hope. And I'm guessing that's what the investors hope too. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Medium turns out to be one of the first "native digital" publishers -- embracing the strengths of digital distribution, rather than fighting it. Eg: maybe people are willing to pay for content, and one can simply rid oneself of the dependency on advertising.

We'll see.