skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It’s worth it to use some inter-letter spacing anyway, even if the spaces can only be whole numbers of pixels, because it avoids exceptionally wide or narrow word spaces.
As opposed to Mac OS X, where many apps can't agree on which key binding to use for switching tabs to the left or right? Alt+Cmd+Left/Right in TextMate and Firefox, Alt+Left/Right in Adium and iTerm, Apple's own apps use Alt+[/]. Or Windows where there are a gazillion of widget sets that only happen to look like each other? MFC, WinForms, VCL, Fox, FLTK, Tk, WTL, etc. not to mention that almost every commercial app thinks it's cool to use custom controls that don't look or behave like the rest of the system.
And these are supposed to be serious desktop OSes?
TheStreet.com's tech "exclusives" are an utter crapshoot.
Controversial because you can’t do it in metal? Or because if you overdo it it starts to look crappy?

I’m not sure too many people especially object to adjustments of 2-3% to inter-letter space or letter widths.
The US Dept of State defined "terrorism" in its Pattern of Global Terrorism report (2004) as:

"premeditated politically motivated violence, perpetrated against non-combatant targets by sub-national groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience."

I'd say it's clear he fits the government's own definition quite clearly.
"There have been a number of auction-like marketplaces, such as Plastic Jungle and Rackup, that have popped up to allow users can buy and sell their gift cards to each other..."

"...CardPool is entering the space but with a slightly different twist to its model. Card Pool allows users to both buy and sell gift cards."

What is the twist?
This sounds great. I'd recommend glancing over some of the earlier releases of the, sadly now defunct, Perl Journal.

I thought they absolutely nailed their target demographic with a great balance of practical programming tips, history/cultural pieces, and op-eds.
That's funny, http://ycombinator.com/ turned into http://5z8.info/great_business_opportuniy_b9m8_make-millions...
Yeah their new pricing and sizes is awesome. Won't be leaving them anytime soon.
Right, so then the definition of racketeering is starting to become inadequate, is the way I see it.
Union Admits Buying Politician, Wants $ Back
Likely at that point, they'll probably just ship basic assembly off to other countries where the cost of living is still lower...
If you don't want dropbox to lose money then:

1. Don't abuse their freemium model

2. Buy a premium account
They set the buy and sell price, so there is no auction component.
Monetizing Your Online Community in Every Possible Way
My version of events:

NewCo comes up with a reasonable extension on existing technology that anyone in the field who thought for 6 months could have come up with. However they fail to take it to market.

LaterCo is never formed because its founders discover the patents. An exciting new technology never reaches the market.
Here's a page with links to a bunch of Perl Journal PDFs, for the interested:

http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=711609
Chatroulette Creator Video Interview
Curiously, I'd come to a few of these conclusions myself since I started working for my current employer. A lot of people make that sort of Knowing Face when I tell them that I work for my husband. Sure, switching from being the boss to being the bossed, during work hours, leads to some occasional friction,... :-) But because of our unique relationship, there is a measure of equity and communication that I've only ever felt from one other employer (and that only from my immediate superior).

At least one of my former employers would pat himself on the back after reading this, completely blind to the impact on moral of his constant threats to fire us. So while these things make sense when you read them, obviously some self-(awareness|respect) is necessary to understand and act on them.
There has to be a demand aspect in the price because otherwise it wouldn't at all be economic to sell aged wine. Scarcity becomes a big thing once there are only a handful of bottles of something left.

The question is though, is what is coming out of those bottles any better than the stuff you can buy cheaply? Being a predominantly beer and bourbon drinker though I can't answer that.
Are there any companies/non-profits/charities that would allow me to donate my gift cards that have a small balance on them but not enough to buy a product? Ideally I'd like to give this money to charity instead of throwing them away.
Funny thing!

When I clicked again just now, I was able to download this paper... I still don't understand what has changed.

Thank you for your time.

EDIT: And thanks to cpach!
Another clueless, technically infeasible, bound to be rejected by the EU and/or the Conseil Constitutionnel (our kind of Supreme Court) law from our beloved President who's striving to be ranked as high as GW Bush (and hopefully, it will only take one term for sarkozy to hit the same lows)
Why Piracy Works
Taking innocents down is not the way to go, but I otherwise agree. Once people realize healthcare reform is not going to happen and health insurance execs start getting knocked off over rescissions and life caps, I'll secretly be smiling. (Of course, a public option would be a better and nonviolent option.)
Plastic Jungle seem to sell them at fixed prices too, although the price is set by the seller. Why is having a third party, CardPool, set the price an advantage? Surely they are going to have to price them at the market value anyway?
Water too:

http://www.blingh2o.com/

(link is NSFW in stuck-up places and cultures)
There have been smart, disgruntled people forever. On the whole, I think they're less violent and therefore less dangerous than dumb, disgruntled people.
That has been patented within the last 24 hours by IV.
Or Posterous!
they can also have more money to buy off and strong arm irs agents.

government employees are just people.

here's a book about this:

http://www.amazon.com/Perfectly-Legal-Campaign-Rich-Everybod...
Facebook is a great example of a very risky bet that paid off bigtime. As you say, noone in their right mind would have predicted that facebook would grow this big - but the VC's that did and took a huge risk got an enormous paycheck out of it. The same Vc's probably invested in a lot of other companies that turned out to be losses.

Basically my premise is that risk x potential payout is a fixed number. Invest in a McDonalds franchise on your local highstreet and you will have a high probability of a low return. Invest in crazy stuff like facebook abd you have a low probability of a high return.

As you say, it's a simplicfication but I think it holds true in general.
How To Make Yourself (And Everyone Around You) Miserable
Wordpress serves traffic live out of three datacenters. That is the redundant system. And I can say from experience that it's really, really hard to do that. Doing so well is probably the reason they've had such a good record for the last four years. An unexpected condition on the network that keeps the datacenters from talking to each other (I'm speculating based on their report) might have cascaded into a wide-scale outage. It's also worth considering how hard it is to cold-start a large site, if the outage had any impact on their MySQL servers or caches. We can't cold-start Wikispaces anymore (nights and weekends included) and we're only doing ~10M unique visitors a month -- WP has something like 300+ million.
Next they'll be telling us they don't proofread their title submissions, un-freaking-believable ;0)

PDF link to the important paper, http://pbr.psychonomic-journals.org/content/8/3/622.full.pdf "The persistence of a misconception about vision after educational interventions" by Gregg, et al..

[Mind you Gregg's table 1 has an error too - "reference" should read "refutation" as in the first para on the right column of p.624.]

Now I've a question to ask my 4 year old in the morning!

Would be very interesting to read of results from other cultures, I couldn't see the info in the citation but assume the subjects were local to Ohio. Is extramission belief more prevalent in USA?

What about other unexpected scientific truths like where the mass of wood in trees comes from (most say nutrients in the soil apparently).
we will be adding this feature very soon!
the discussions about the IRS employees reminds me of clerks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6lzEhoXads

how innocent are people who work for evil empires?
Of course, the three points of advice in this article apply to building ventures with less than 9 zeros too:

1. Be able and willing to take calculated risks.
2. Think creatively about new revenue sources.
3. Have a supportive spouse.
By clause A someone speeding on the highway could be considered a terrorist.

By clause B a person who writes his congressman and threatens not to vote/donate in the next election cycle is a terrorist (threat/coercion).

If the key is intent, then a poet who writes an anti-government poem is a terrorist.
http://www.giftcardrescue.com/

was one of the sharktank companies, meaning they got national tv promotion as well.

The thing I can see cardpool executing on better is user-experience, but is that enough?

This reminds me of companies like ebay, godaddy, and cashforgold. It's ridiculous to see how spammy and ui-horrific these sites/models are... but they are huge companies nonetheless.
From what I read, the latter. Like you said, overdoing it quickly makes a text look bad, and it also ruins the (presumably) carefully created kerning tables that are supplied by the font. I assume you have read Hàn Thế Thành's paper on microtypographic extensions to TeX (http://www.pragma-ade.com/pdftex/thesis.pdf)?
It wouldn't work with the format it's in, as they're images, not text. I mean, they're mostly textual images, but they're images, just the same.

I've found it's actually done wonders for my Photoshop skills too, as it has taught me better use of typography, color theory, and (as I got bored with the simplistic format) more actual graphic design technique as I started incorporating backgrounds (some lifted from others, some hand-drawn) to them as well.
GDS: Legacy technology still drives all the revenue in travel
Although I don't remember creating a profile, I wouldn't rule it out, so I'll take your word for it.

This was all much less terrible than I thought. If no private data was exposed, this was mostly just an inconvenience rather than a horrible breach of privacy, which I'm glad to hear.

Thanks for clarifying!
You can dilute the founders, then vote to grant them more shares.
You can't outsource your liability.

At a certain point (a point which TC passed quite a long time ago) you simply have to own your own infrastructure. That does not make it bullet proof, but it puts it under your own control and you can respond accordingly and better control the outcome of any outage.

I know that in Web2.0 everybody wants to think that they can outsource all the messy bits of running a website to the lowest bidder, but that approach has never worked.

When you get REALLY big (like facebook and google big) you move from a self-managed server in a carrier-neutral datacenter to building and maintaining your own datacenters.

For some reason people think it's perfectly normal that facebook builds its own datacenter, and yet also perfectly normal that a large blog (Techcrunch) take no ownership of the very equipment that makes their site go.
I guess I am nitpicking. Sorry for that.

In the root post, j23tom claimed Monodevelop was the fastest way to develop desktop apps on Linux, but are they Linux apps or are they .NET apps that also run on top of Mono?
Medical Jobs
I split 75/25% client/server (Python/Pylons/Django) and find the server stuff easier. The thing about doing server development is that once it's working, it's working. On the client side, once you get it working you're only halfway there unless you're doing boring stuff.
i got better 7 words - humanity can work well with no copyrights
Among the findings of the study:

* The GDS companies powered more than $268 billion in worldwide travel revenue in 2008 through 1.1 billion transactions – or more than 2,100 transactions per minute.

* In the U.S., the GDSs processed 449 million travel transactions in 2008, representing $98.7 billion in total travel sales, or 35% of total supplier revenue (gross bookings).

* GDS bookings represented $81 billion of U.S. airline revenue in 2008, or 64% of total U.S. airline passenger revenue.

* Travel revenue powered by GDSs in the U.S. rose from $93.6 billion in 2006 to $98.2 billion in 2007 and $98.7 billion in 2008, despite the recession.

* The GDSs processed nearly three-quarters of all intermediary (online and traditional travel agency) sales in the U.S. in 2008.

* Although lower than in the U.S., GDSs also account for a significant portion of all European travel revenue, with 21% of all revenue and 47% of airline bookings in 2008.

* GDS companies power the reservations and technology infrastructure for more than 163,000 travel agency locations and nearly half a million travel agents worldwide.

* The GDSs provide access to more than 550 airlines, 90,000 hotel properties, 30,000 car rental locations, and hundreds of major tour operators and cruise lines.

* The three major GDS companies, Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport, had combined corporate revenue of $9.624 billion in 2008 and employ more
than 23,000 people.

* “If the transaction value enabled by the GDS industry went to a single company, it would rank third on the Fortune 500 list, behind only Wal-Mart and Exxon Mobil,” said Arthur Sackler, Executive Director of the Interactive Travel Services Association, which commissioned the study.

* “Transactions powered by GDS companies are the financial lifeblood for tens of thousands of travel agents, tour operators, hotels, airlines, car rental agencies, and other participants in the travel industry. We must continue to support policies that allow the GDS industry full access to travel provider data without unreasonable restrictions, so travelers can continue to get the information they need to make informed travel choices, and the travel industry can benefit from the efficiency of a GDS-based distribution system.”
I've done both and front-end work is definitelly harder. If you do RIA with a lot of ajax updates, need to keep state and handle events, it becomes even more complex.

Historically, backend work has always been a piece of cake for me: receive data, persist it, return updated data, start over. This is way simpler.

I've yet to encounter a project where the inverse will be true. End-Users are so ingenious!
great question, the techcrunch article needs to be updated. but basically, we strive to have the simplest, most hassle-free solution, at the best prices.

all our gift cards have no fees and never expire and we offer a 100-day return policy, something no one else can claim. and since we are a small and lean startup, we can afford to focus purely on the consumer while offering the best prices. all of these features are unique to our startup and are the result of listening to what they want.
Sorry for being dense, but how are student loans bad/worse than any other debt? My wife and I had maybe $15k worth of student loans. We paid them off in 7 or 8 years (the interest rates were ridiculously low, iirc) and got the monkey off our backs. It was a choice we made.

We could have taken on a lot more debt, but chose to work most of our way through college instead. Graduation took longer, we never went out to eat, and drove a crappy old car. Isn't that what "having no disposable income" is supposed to look like?
JFuncTest, small Java functional testing framework
Eventually you can sell CardPool gift cards... a universal currency for other gift cards. Then you've begun the great backdoor attack on Paypal!
Perhaps. But think of it this way, if he wastes any time figuring out how to do something using GIT or corrupts the repository, or breaks something and has to spend time fixing it, the time is on his hands. If you are using SVN like everyone else then its not your issue.

I have found in the workplace it is better to stick to what they supply and ask you to use and change it by pushing people in the right direction then to assume you know better and do your own thing.

Look at it from the employeers perspective. If you say use SVN and someone says "Pffft I will use GIT" and then they loose a days work because of it who am I going to blame?
Honestly, I haven't played it either, but from what was posted I believe the story is about violence being horrific and infectious. The game mechanics include both things that make you paranoid by limiting your perception (increasing violence and reactivity) and a variety of nasty things that do awful things to the non-player characters (the pictured flame and barrel are apparently a good example).

That's also pretty certainly what he means about the ending betraying that message, while the rest of the game supports it.
Oh, for god's sake: irony. He was being i-ron-ic. Fuck.
I find unclosed tags to be ambiguous, hard to format, and that they lead to more errors, I'd be interested to see why you prefer working with the opposite, personal preference aside.
This could work [impractically] though.

Whilst extramission of rays from the eye appears to be impossible (outside of things like cosmic ray interactions).
It's not really the impression I got from playing it, it just seemed to me like they made a sandbox game and then remembered to throw some cutscenes and missions in at the last minute to break up the driving around and getting shot at. Perhaps I'm just cynical, but that was my take on it... don't get me wrong though, I actually quite liked playing it. I just thought the story side of it was very rushed.

edit: Oops, I didn't mean to reply to your message. The game story is a bit of a jumble. You start by chasing this arms dealer (The Jackal mentioned in the article) but spend at least 2/3rds of the game running errands for two factions in a civil war (they both offer you missions and you can choose which to accept). I've tried playing it twice but never made it too the end, it gets a bit monotonous by hour 20. That's mainly because you don't care about your foes or allies in the game. Unlike the author of the article, I ascribe that to completely uncompelling and irrelevant storytelling rather than careful manipulation.
You can't discharge student loans in bankruptcy.
Formspring, but in a different context. And that's no bad thing.

(See also: http://jonathandeamer.com/2009/08/19/daily-booth-4chan-impor...)
Sony pulls plug on OLED TV in Japan
Re-litigating the Simon/Ehrlich Bet
Javascript tends to be harder to debug. It's pretty rare that it takes me more than a few minutes to figure out why a sever-side error is occurring, even if it takes longer to fix the problem.
My company uses CJ.com for our affiliate program.
100,998,219 have downloaded Thunderbird
For what it's worth, Oddly Specific didn't go down, as that's where we're testing running Wordpress on the Windows Azure platform.

-Martin from Cheezburger
You use an apostrophe for possessives (and contractions). The word 'terrorists' is a plural; it's not a possessive; it's not a contraction.

Please don't use apostrophes for plurals. It makes my eyes bleed.
But if they take back or "steal" his subdomain the how will he blog about the injustice?
if a and (b1 or b2 or b3) and c
terrorist = true
end
Like its various predecessors, you have to ask whether you truly trust this site with a (presumably) fairly sensitive piece of information.
25 Essential Android Apps for Bible Study
If you haven’t made Android your major mobile device, perhaps the following Bible study apps for may convince you to go that route.
Either that or it's secretly constructing Wordpress T-1000
Catching Cheats with the Perl Compiler
We still have the in-ground iron slop bucket in our backyard. It has been filled with dirt, but the neighbor who has worked in this neighborhood since the 1940s (he's black, so back in the day he couldn't live here, but as a kid he pulled the white ladies' groceries in his wagon for tips), said that the farmers would contract for the slop and pick it up on a regular schedule.
A complete social graph and ubiquitous tools like facebook will make lots of apps like this possible.

http://thread.com is doing some interesting things here too.

it is funny how online dating is an extremely crowded space that is also wide open for new players
I'm not sure where the right balance lies, but here are another seven words:

Copyright must reform, or face irrelevance. Soon.

We've got a generation of people who are actively contemptuous of copyright law, and backed up with capable technology. If the system doesn't become more reasonable, people will turn more and more to straight-up piracy instead of trying to obey the law.
This is by far one of the best YC ideas I've heard in a long time!

If you succeed, you're going to destroy balance sheets, move markets, and hopefully reform the gift card scam forever. But, you probably already know all this.
If you want to be that technical, writing this comment is "coding". I'm encoding into English sentences, and you, the reader, decodes into thoughts. Designing in photoshop is also coding. The designer encodes the "look" of a web site into an image, the image is then decoded by the user in that the design "makes sense".

I'd say a more logical cut off point is between presentation and business logic. Presentation includes html, css, photoshop. Business logic is server-side scripting and databasing.
I don't see how me meant to coerce civilians.
Dubai Assassination Was Mossad & Likely Sanctioned by PM Says Fmr Intel Officer
Software as we plan
did you read through what I have written?
Congrats guys! I might use my borders card this weekend :)
That definition includes almost all acts of force or violence which are not completely random.
If you could, every college graduate would go bankrupt. Then there would be no student loans.
It's a very flawed game that with tweaks could've been superb. The landscapes and settings are very good, but it should've been more like an African version of Grand Theft Auto complete with innocent bystanders going about daily life.
Yah, mon! Leaving a curious 11 year old alone with an Apple II and some manuals is worth a hundred "facile" computer courses.

Shame schools don't teach exploration and play with computers.

Squeak eToys were all about that!
I would say that is an unlawful and violent act intended to influence a government or civilian population and therefore a terrorist act.
Ditto, congrats guys! The service is looking good.
Explained here -> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1135842
It might be worse. Ponzi schemes just steal what we have. Patent trolling steals what we're going to have. It's like killing the cow to get a glass of milk.
true, but people keep a lot of sensitive information lying around the internet - you'd have to trust all those sites too, right?
Making Disqus faster
This is exactly why I prefer authoring documents in LaTeX vs WYSIWYG tools: I can concentrate on semantics and not worry about representation. Writing stuff in Word forces you to be distracted by its appearance on the page and can drive me crazy with micro-adjustments. With LaTeX, I just write the document and the computer does what computers are good at doing.
great news, I've wanted to give the 'if you don't use this the balance goes to charity' card for a while.
Which is why student loans were a dumb-assed idea in the first place.

Unlike with a car or house loan, there's nothing to guarantee the loan except for human capital. Which means that we have to choose between an inhumanity (using a person as collateral, which is effectively what the current system entails) and student loans turning into bad debt on a system-wide scale. Neither's acceptable, so let's get rid of the whole thing.
I can confirm that actually - when I opened all the links, the others stalled while Oddly Specific did load. Good to know why.
The lack of good debugging tools continually stymies me.