skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with the author on his main point, but his statement, "[w]ebsites should not come with minimum software requirements," only works in a perfect world. Unless it can be shown in ROI, there is no reason to develop for anything but a modern browser (I'm looking at you old versions of IE).
Thank you for sharing.

I'm very skeptical from everything I've read about this organisation. I can't see much evidence that this isn't just a lucrative scam preying on people during vulnerable times in their lives. I'd be interested to hear evidence to the contrary.

So far all the "positive benefits" sound as if they could be accounted for by selective attention as well as a self-selected group of very motivated people that attend these conferences (much like most self help).
I agree the article isn't great, but I downvoted and flagged for the "it" slur. There's no need to talk like this. And the FB issue really goes far beyond trans or lbtq or any such personal characteristic. The privacy concerns run deep and should be troubling to everyone.
For those playing along at home, the "MIR" referenced here is the effort to entirely overhaul the compiler middle-end to enable more reliable code transformations and trickier analysis passes, as well as laying the groundwork for goodies like incremental compilation (https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/1298).
While we're discussing problems with web fonts, let's not forget the other common ailment: setting body text in a 300-weight font. Plenty of people don't seem to think to test web fonts on other OSes, as if font rendering were consistent. But what looks good on a retina Macbook Pro is completely unreadable on Linux or Windows. That light grey that produces a pleasing level contrast on a high-end IPS is nearly invisible on a three-year-old corporate-issue HP laptop.

Really, it's just the usual cycle of exuberance, overuse, and understanding that all web platform features seem to go through, but I for one am overjoyed to be able to fix a page's text via font blocking. For the light grey stuff there's always reader mode.
The entirety of your assertion is specious, but there's little value in debating it. The simple fact is that when a user closes their account, they should, at a minimum, be offered the ability to hide their profile from display. Ideally, they would be offered the ability to delete the entirety of their profile data. Facebook, as a company, is effectively stalking every man, woman, and child on the face of this planet. That is not a feature, no matter how much twisted double-speak you employ to justify their actions.
Browser should let user choose which kind of experience they desire.

Unfortunately, both websites AND web browsers are set on taking choices from users and forcing agenda on them.
To that point, I think a lot in this community (myself included) hear a lot more about reverse proxies (nginx, etc.) than regular proxies. Is there a well-behaving proxy that could this behavior our of the box, and is easy-to-integrate and actively maintained? (For instance, something that I could set as the proxy for my entire backend process with an environment variable, and it would pass through everything except github.com requests? Configurable cache time overrides on a per-domain basis?)

I've seen Squid mentioned as a popular proxy - is this a use case it's intended to address?
I can say that I've accidentally uploaded my entire screen to imgur when I meant to only upload a portion of it. It doesn't give you confirmation that things are about to upload.
In VirtualBox without the extensions, I believe we will currently fall back to either VESA or EFI GOP modesetting, neither of which indeed have KMS support yet.

There was a patchset to support KMS for simple fb fallbacks, but it hasn't been merged yet.

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~dvdhrm/linux/log/?h=simpledrm

However, I definitely wouldn't throw out KMS just to support VESA / GOP. They don't support page flipping, so you get lots of tearing.

With the extensions, vboxdrv supplies a KMS driver.

https://www.virtualbox.org/svn/vbox/trunk/src/VBox/Additions...
Bah, you can level that kind of critique at any writing.

To Kill a Mockingbird? Just a lot of words for saying racism is bad.

Lors of the Flies? Just a lot of words for saying people suck.

The piece is about illuminating misconceptions about old age by illustrating them and then refuting them, while simultaneously examining why these stereotypes exist and are harmful.

Which is a lot of words for saying there's more to it than your pithy summation.
Traditionally meditation is said to help.
Hopefully we can find a more pleasing medium. For example, if designers used web fonts with metrics that match common built-ins the FOUT could be made much less jarring. (Yes, ligatures and such make that difficult in the general case, but it surely could be good enough for headlines.)
Your query actually doesn't make sense as you can't aggregate and then sort by something that's not returned. :)

I mean expressing this is easy and the execution is also straightforward, e.g. in Neo4j:

MATCH (lunch:Lunch)<-[:PART_OF]-(drink:Drink)
RETURN lunch, COUNT(drink)
ORDER BY lunch.delivery_date, lunch.total_price

this would be a more efficient variant:

MATCH (lunch:Lunch)
RETURN lunch, size((lunch)<-[:PART_OF]-()) as drinks
ORDER BY lunch.delivery_date, lunch.total_price

So I don't agree with the statement, that everything which is not recursive is better served by and RDBMS.

There is more than one use-case for your data most use-cases in real applications are more than mildly complex.

And GraphDBs might not be much faster on those types of queries but they are also not tremendously slower.
It's not public as in a utility or other government run or specially regulated utility or something. Their management and decisions regarding most of their features are private.

I don't think it changes the point of my comment at all.
In my view, fonts are just another case of potential conflicting interests between content creators and content consumers. I can easily imagine wanting to override the fonts chosen by content creators, for instance if a vision impaired person wants to substitute a more readable font (or even let a text-to-speech program take over).

Content blocking has been around forever. I remember when I got my first real Internet connection, and the first thing I did was to disable the automatic downloading of all images. It greatly improved my browsing experience on my 9600 baud dial-up connection.
Okay, I should have said the first significant thing that advanced the state of the art. None of the things you mention, especially the snarky bs, are anywhere near as big, IMHO.
Secondly, most companies have now realized that disruption is the way of the world, and thus most have become 'venture builders' that continuously run experiments and attempt to disrupt themselves, thus permanently remaining on top.

I'm pretty skeptical of this one, but I am curious to see how that plays out. I suspect there are some inherent, systemic rigidities that develop in large companies, that will prevent this from coming (entirely) to pass. If so, small companies / startups will continue to emerge with some technological innovation (or business model innovation) or other and "disrupt" existing models.

That said, an interesting related question would be "will be actually reach 'the end of technology' at some point?" That is, will we reach a point where we have mastered all of the technologies that can exist, given the constraints of the laws of physics? I mean, if we assume a fundamentally unchanging universe (unchanging in terms of the fundamental laws) then human / technological progress has to stop at some point, no? The question is, how far from that point are we?
This title doesn't accurately describe the content of the article. The author's argument is that web designers should be allowing default fonts while including @font-face fonts, and that Web Fonts had it coming. It also states that ad blockers are just an implementation of the idea of disabling crappy/slow web fonts.

And my opinion: Please make your website legible. Serif fonts, or sans-serif fonts with high weights and large sizes and appropriate widths. Black rather than light gray. It would be really nice if I didn't have to cURL your website or hack up its CSS in the Inspector to actually read it. The new design trends are cute, but there's nothing like actually being able to read a page.

(and if you're using Canvas or something, I've already closed the tab.)
Sorry, but the idea that the client (browser) doesn't get to choose the experience is fundamentally incompatible with the architecture of the web. I don't see how you can call that a "closed" internet; quite the opposite.

From the very beginning, almost every standard related to the web has made it very clear that ultimately clients get to choose what to display, what to retrieve, and how to display it.

Yes, that freedom comes with a price, but it's a price worth paying. For users that are visually impaired, it's particularly important to be able to override the suggestions of the content being displayed.

I don't see how there's an "agenda" involved in what any web browsers are doing today. The end user is the one choosing to use the client, choosing to use the content blocker, etc.

If Apple or Google made the choice to start blocking content using the browser itself (on their own), you might have a point, but that hasn't happened (yet).
Seems like use of fonts isn't the issue, it's the fact they have to be served. Why can't browsers embed more fonts?
I heard https://ifttt.com/wtf was good but have not used it.
Who says eating the orange is healthy? Still lots of fructose, and these days you're not going to get scurvy if you skip it.
No, I meant via comments on the site, like these:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10094201

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9848716

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9674126

If you didn't see any of those, I apologize for assuming that you did. Now that you have, though, please just post civil comments from now on. Your comments have routinely violated that rule, and it's the most important one we have.
Ancient Romans had no need for dentists, because of one food they didn’t eat
The problem with your analogy is that a traditional diet might be missing nutrients we know that we need (most people don't track very closely) and might also contain things that are actively harmful which Soylent does not contain. Lots of people eat traditional diets and have lots of nutrition problems.

To make the issue with your analogy clearer, note that you could invent any somewhat edible product and make the claim that adding it to your diet makes your diet safer, because of the possibility that it contains nutrients we need but which we don't know we need.
Have you considered that other "entrepreneurs" involved with Groovy keep hundreds of HN logins each to obfuscate their mischief here and engage in illicit surveillance of people whose comments they don't like?

Honestly? No, the thought never crossed my mind. And now that you mention it, it doesn't sound terribly likely to me. Not "hundreds* of such people anyway. Maybe two or three. Why do I say that? Simply because Groovy just doesn't come up that often to begin with. And a decent percentage of the time, when it does, I'm the one bringing it up, and know where I stand. And while "mindcrime" clearly isn't my birth name, my HN account is clearly linked to my real world identity, so no one can really claim that I'm trying to hide anything here.

One other person here to mentions Groovy / Grails occasionally is @mgkimsal, and I also know him in the Real World, and have no suspicion that he's up to anything nefarious.

That said, people never cease to surprise me and clearly some people post on HN largely for commercial gain. I don't think anyone questions that. I just don't see what you seem to see, in terms of large numbers of users here trying to manipulate the discourse around Groovy in particular.
Web browsers are becoming better at accommodating user choice, though. More and more browsers have extensions or content filtering tools, which are an extension of the user's power into their view of the web. And if there's a site that really forces its agenda on you, don't use it. If enough people agree that it's not useful enough to be worth the trouble, it'll stop existing eventually.
Together I would think they safely indicate an assumed narrow definition of "development" as "only used by the original coder in a non-moneymaking capacity." Which, realistically, is a level of use that wouldn't even come across Kx's radar - if it did, they'd much rather sell you the product than try to shut a potential client down.
You might have the ROI question upside down. The overhead of developing for IE - even older ones - is small if you ignore bells and whistles. There are a few CSS gotchas to worry about and that's about it. A webpage shouldn't require megs of JS and assets and what have you to work.

The real question is whether the time you spend on these bells and whistles contribute a positive ROI.
It's not true; you can activate your metabolism just as well by walking in a circle once an hour.

Some people, particularly women, enter starvation mode quickly and don't lose fat better through fasting, but usually it doesn't hurt.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, though. I would say it is something similar to a distinct symmetry.
I can imagine a self-driving taxi , for shared rides, that's designed for privacy , so you don't feel like riding with others, except for a bit of an extended trip.

I wonder why nobody have build such a car yet, but there's good likelihood it will happen in a huge self driving market.
I always wonder how people cope financially during their medical challenges. Life is already difficult even in normal times.
I also disagree with a closed internet. Users, like TV viewers skipping channels, recording to VHS, or leaving the TV on but mute for a house party, should be able to do what they want. A website should not be forcing an agenda for how consumers may or may not configure their browsers to request and present assets freely served by sites.

I appreciate that websites want to look good. But browser rendering has always varied between devices and user preferences, and fonts in particular have always been a prominent configuration item. User displays have had varying DPIs and widths, users can set their preferred minimum font size and preferred window size, their preferred serif and sans-serif fonts, and zoom text size with or without other page elements. Some users have to use screen-reading software! This has always been in the interest of the user's readability with their particular setup, and the openness of the web to be used with whatever setup the user has.

My only point is, your argument has nothing to do with "a closed internet". Or "it can often become hard to browse" (if you let users configure their browsers as they prefer). Right...
"Add your Date of Death to your calendar"

That's creepy.
Devices like that and/or rolling back the time decay on a post only work while the post is relatively new. Once it's past a few hours old, it looks weird to have it on the front page with only a few points.

More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10325217 if you're interested. It'd be great to find a better solution and we're open to ideas.
You may have forgotten that Helvetica licenses cost money. http://www.linotype.com/1308886/Helvetica-family.html?numLic...

Feel free to buy me one, I'm a starving designer :)

Also, it's not in the spirit of the web to package content natively with the browser, because then only certain clients are able to understand the content correctly. The thought is to make everyone able to see exactly the same thing, with nothing stored on a local machine.
What blockers/browsers should do is just tell scripts that they finished loading. Then sites would continue to work just fine. This kind of technique is gonna be needed to continue ad blocking once a lot of pages start trying to detect blockers and not display content.
>> "will be actually reach 'the end of technology'

In general ,technologies are building blocks of newer technologies.Maybe we'll run out of problems first ?
If all the 99% actually had the comforts you imagine, they wouldn't be so mad at the 1%
Please make your website legible.

I suspect a huge part of the legibility problems a lot of sites see is the gamma, DPI, and font rendering of the designer's system not matching their audience. A very thin font with gray-on-gray might look great on a calibrated 5K iMac with Safari, but be completely unreadable on Firefox for Windows on a standard 1080p screen with bad colors.
I went to Landmark intro and advanced course in 1997.

TL;DR
Focus on sense facts, as in: "I heard you say this"; less interpretation, as in: "You must be thinking that"

There were 150 people in a room, guided into recognizing how one's inner dialogue is often a chain of interpretations. The goal was to be more rigorous about the facts.

My interpretation (hah!) is that perhaps someone got a hold of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and weaved its premise into a group therapy setting. It was pretty intense. I found it both creepy and effective - in a good way. For me, it was worth it.
Web Fonts Performance
Ask HN: Idea Sunday
Whoever started it, the intent was good. We should resume Idea Sunday threads. A small HN experiment maybe. Every Sunday, a new thread will be started to share product ideas. Why? Because many people have ideas they will simply not have the time to implement, and many need product ideas to work on.

Links to some interesting Idea Sundays happened earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7541601

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7582077

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616910

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7693262

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9165278

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7654771

EDIT: Well, HN admins don't see this adds a good value to HN core. More on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7693640
You're moving the goalposts now!

To examine the equation in the "work for an existing SV tech giant" case: a hugely smaller impact on people than what the WhatsApp engineers had. And getting a job at Facebook or another similarly impactful place is still at ~ 1:100000 odds for the world's 20 million software engineers.

Only this time you'll have even less confidence that you're actually making things better and not worse. At least in the WhatsApp case they made Facebook have $19 billion less money in the end. And if they're really out to make the world a better place they can spend that in some Bill Gates-esque way. I guess we'll see about that.
Fonts cost money to license. http://www.linotype.com/1308886/Helvetica-family.html?numLic...

Also, it's not in the spirit of the web to package content natively with the browser, because then only certain clients are able to understand the content correctly. The thought is to make everyone able to see exactly the same thing, with nothing stored on a local machine.
You're missing the point: a 300lbs person who stays 300lbs is not over-eating. Over-eating isn't biologically defined against some ideal meal size, it's defined against homeostasis: consuming as many calories N as the body burns. That's what the brain's hunger feedback mechanisms are supposed to care about.

Carrying around extra fat causes N to go up.

"Getting fat people to go on diets that cause them to lose weight" is approximately as difficult, motivation-wise, as "Getting skinny people to go on diets that cause them to lose weight". It's extraordinarily difficult, because their bodies are screaming at them to go back to the refrigerator.

The novel question to answer is why overeating - consuming more calories than you burn, and thus gaining weight steadily over long time periods - is so much more prevalent now than it was in previous decades. Why people who are already fat are inclined to eat more (much more) than skinny people, is the simply metabolic reality of the body's drive for homeostasis.

There is a healthcare problem, of course, with having fat people around, but the scientific question of what is making them all have weight problems at higher rates than before, is somewhat distinct from the practical problem of how we get the existing fat demographic to lose weight. Aggressive funding of bariatric surgery seems to be the least-bad method of the latter for the moment; Almost nothing else can be shown to work effectively at the levels required, since we're effectively fighting the strongest drive the body has after breathing.
> and very poorly for the way some people use facebook

It just doesn't seem very clever to me to rant about using facebook in a way it was not intended to be used.
But how can they run windows images on top of docker?

I was looking for something like that, but didnt think it was possible.
Climate Sensitivity to CO2 Maybe Lower Than Thought
She's trans.
I don't block fonts to make my web experience faster, I block them to reduce my browser's attack surface on untrusted sites. Generally speaking, font-handling code is not exactly notorious for being well-hardened against attacker-controlled data.
Interesting - that you can actually dismiss a teacher for simply bad performance. In Finland, that does not happen. Teachers are removed only for gross misconduct. One way to do that is violence against pupils, but that is rare. Somewhat more common is repeatedly missing work or coming to work while clearly intoxicated. The first time, employer must direct the employee to get help and treatment, but being repeatedly drunk at work will get a teacher dismissed.
Rust's complexity is pretty much directly related to the problem it solves (no GC, memory safe, high perf). And even then it's sorta straightforward given those constraints.

I'd bet that if they fixed up type inference to work everywhere (like Haskell or even like an ML) that'd reduce the perceived complexity as beginners wouldn't need to figure out type annotations by hand all the time.
What does it take to earn one, two, and three Michelin stars?
CANT STOP LAUGHING
Sadly, I would say experiencing a great personal tragedy is a "good" way to cultivate it. There really is nothing like the death of a loved one to put everything, including your own place in the world, in perspective.
You can open the Imgur deletion URL for uploaded images in the history screen. However it appears that Gfycat, the default service for screencasts, doesn't support this feature.
Wendy Carlos is trans-gendered, so I'm guessing the name of the production company was a reference to that.
If you just look at the 'best' numbers for each language and treat it as a fight, it's pretty useless. But if you are evaluating a new language it can be very educational to look at all the solutions for that language and see the range of tradeoffs between speed, space and readability. The short and simple programs show you what kind of performance you can expect from straightforward, idiomatic code and the crazy optimised versions show you how far you can push the performance bracket and what you have to sacrifice to get there (performance, safety etc).
Ok, can you provide a tutorial link or something to help ease the process? Does jenkins-ci.org itself allow you to run tests on Windows?

I have seen Jenkins, but it looked so unfriendly.
Which isn't necessarily an issue for Japan.

They have an ageing population, declining birthrate and an aversion for immigration.

They actually need robots do the menial tasks in society since no human is going to be around to do it.
They can have thousand (no, really, they have thousand). But your little snowflake of a font will always be out.
This is a factually unsupported assertion.

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/miarticle.htm?id=458...
I would pay for a social network/dating app/site for the introverted.
I just do not know whether this is an oxymoron or not, but if someone figures this I would pay for it. Gladly.