skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Internally, the Google Buzz team was known as “Team Taco Town”

So apt: http://www.hulu.com/watch/1447/saturday-night-live-taco-town — It's 15 great tastes all rolled into one!
could you try:

font-family: Helvetica,"MS sans-serif", Arial, sans-serif;
Very good article.
I am surprized Times and CNN published it, given their track record for crap.
We better get ready for the future. Go with the flow or risk being left behind with the old desintegrating structures. Same thing for our belief structures. Hehe.. this one is gonna be a biggie.
That doesn't make sense. Why not just add rel=nofollow to all links?
the way i see it, they're going to have to put up a loginwall to stop crawlers...and then we'll just crawl back in anyway...
Google indexes robots banned sites based on links. But notice that the snippet is gone. Google also won't be able to index HN posts and comments anymore.
For the record, I had absolutely nothing to do with the dot-com bomb; at that time I was working in the trenches doing sysadmin work for a company that still exists today.
Please don't ever do this. You are choosing a font that has known (major) anti-aliasing issues in Windows just to satisfy a small proportion of mac users. This is becoming increasingly commonplace and I don't think designers understand just how bad it looks on Windows.
i realise this might be too personal, but i'd be interested in knowing what you thought was useful after all that time (i've been in a relationship for around 15 years).
If you know about vim text objects and f/t motion, there isn't much that paredit mode can do that vim text objects don't. E.g f) is the equivalent to paredit-forward while ci( is 'replace contents of s-expr' and da[ would be 'delete vector'.

I use AutoClose.vim and Surround.vim to deal with most pairwise operations. The only major tweak I make is to rebind s to work as 'surround':

""s/S is pretty useless. :help text-objects
nmap s <Nop>
nmap sw viwS
nmap sW viWS
nmap ss visS
nmap sp vipS
nmap s[ vi[S
nmap s] vi]S
nmap s( vi(S
nmap s) vi)S
nmap s{ vi{S
nmap s} vi}S
nmap s< vi<S
nmap s> vi>S
nmap st vitS
nmap s' vi'S
nmap s" vi"S
nmap s` vi`S

nmap S <Nop>
nmap Sw vawS
nmap SW vaWS
nmap Ss vasS
nmap Sp vapS
nmap S[ va[S
nmap S] va]S
nmap S( va(S
nmap S) va)S
nmap S{ va{S
nmap S} va}S
nmap S< va<S
nmap S> va>S
nmap St vatS
nmap S' va'S
nmap S" va"S
nmap S` va`S

This allows you to do things like wrap the current s-expr in another using S))a.

I also rebind all the vimclojure keys because I hate the defaults (e.g. I use \e to eval, K to lookup docs, and ctrl-] to jump to definition).
I wish the author had been more clear here and cited his statistic, but he's mostly right. The report "High School Dropout and Completion Rates in the United States: 2007" (http://nces.ed.gov/pubSearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2009064) has a graph showing that the middle income dropout rate is about the same as the overall rate. The upper income students make up for the lower income ones. And according to the report at http://www.americaspromise.org/Our-Work/Dropout-Prevention/C... "Nationwide, nearly one in three U.S. high school students fails to graduate with a diploma."
He does also work for the Australian ABC and their radio network Triple J (this was probably made for JTV).
If this is an anti-spam measure, I expect it will be about as effective as "no follow" was. There's still plenty of good reasons for spammers to submit crap. RSS and Twitter syndication of links, for example.

On the other hand, if the goal is to push HN back into semi-obscurity by making it harder to find, it might work.
In my mind legitimate crawlers are large engineered programs that respect robots.txt, whereas a scraper might just be a Perl script some dude wrote to check a website for updates periodically. Technically I suppose they all should probably respect robots.txt, but in my experience something you think of as a scraper rarely does.
That was my immediate question too. In addition to searchyc, we lose every other HN mash-up present and future.

Maybe this will finally bring about an HN API.
Do you find it reasonable to burden a 5-year-old with the responsibility of maximizing the public education he is being offered? A 10-year-old?
Dominance hierarchies are a prominent feature of many primate societies, including those of our closing living relatives, chimpanzees. Maybe the human brain is naturally, and not entirely logically biased towards these types of relationships.
The Difference Between A Developer, A Programmer And A Computer Scientist
Are you also disgusted by idea of having large number bacteria living in your stomach? Because they're already there...
That's probably the main issue. HN's authority and DoFollow'd links make it a prime target for linkspam.

There's a lot of reasons I'm bummed about this, but I have to say: startups missing out on free PageRank is not one of them.
Helvetica and Helvetica Neue are different font families. And, AFAIK, Windows only ships with Helvetica, not Helvetica Neue.

And I don't really consider myself a designer (at least, not a web designer), but, you're right that I didn't realize that Windows had problems displaying Helvetica.
That's pretty disappointing. I'd love to hear an official explanation of why this choice was made.
It's been a long time, but yeah. I just checked it out again. To my eye, the output does not look nearly as good -- it's basically on par with the music authoring software I was trying to use in the late 90s...which is not really that great. Sure it gets notes on a page, but is it readable?

To be fair, TeX is not really intended for musical notation, so it's cool they managed to get that kind of output. But Lilypond is really designed to produce beautiful, readable scores.

I remember, in a previous life as a violinist, that certain scores were just really hard to read, or not beautiful, it really killed my motivation to play them. Even familiar favorites, if engraved poorly were just no fun to read off of inferior pages.
I noticed that the other day while playing around with the YQL console - YQL obeys robots.txt, so the Hacker News data table doesn't work any more.
The links are nofollow'd now.

edit: Oh wait, seems that only comment links are nofollow'd.
http://www.searchyc.com/ still exists, but it's up in the air if they will continue.
Windows doesn’t come with Helvetica Neue. (And if designers don’t test their stuff on Windows they just suck.)
In Dreamweaver the font stacks all have Arial in front of Helvetica. So there's another reason to dislike Dreamweaver.
Good reference. Thankfully a pretty small list.
Congratulazioni, notizia splendida! :-)
Helvetica is the font for the rich and wealthy; Arial is the same for the rest of us.

Quite. Microsoft did the world a great favour - flaws and all. Arial is The People's font, and one of these days someone cool and respected may even make a film about her.
Of course, zip code and birthday are a pretty huge amount of information. With the simplifying assumptions of roughly uniform distributions, knowing a birthday confers ~8.5 bits and knowing your zip code is worth ~15 bits. That's 23.8 in total.

It's not surprising that those two pieces of information can pretty easily narrow down an identity.

log2(3*10^8) = 28.2
So you're saying there are at least ~6,500 identifiable stupidities in this article? Of course you're not.

Point being: hyperbole has value, for this author and for you.
Actually some of the links are nofollowed until it hits a karma threshold. Not sure of the value but it seems that a story with >50 votes is not currently nofollowed.
Justin.TV Turns To Law Professor Eric Goldman As It Battles Live Video Piracy
I think it was also Steve Jobs who said: "PC screens look typewritten. Mac screens look typeset."
Helvetica Neue is still available on Windows, and is very common in the design and development industry as I seem to recall a free version doing the rounds. In fact we had it for a year before we even got the official Helvetica family pack. It's not just ugly, but unreadable to a degree in Firefox.
That definitely sounds better than raising the top marginal tax rate by 5%.
Ok, I don't like that word, but it's hard to replace without being just as insulting. Granted I tend to use minion. As in he is he is my minion, or I will have my minions deal with that. However, IMO it's connotation does not remove the idea that they have a fair level of autonomy just that I give them direction.
Will this break Google Reader and other RSS readers from legitimately using the RSS feed here? After all, Google Reader uses a bot to read the feed and allows us to search it from within their app.. much like their search engine does with regular pages :-) (That is, "web robots" aren't just spiders.)

Also things like http://hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com/ and http://hnsort.com/ become less legitimate due to this. If the reason is to reduce the SEO benefits of getting a link on HN, just "nofollow" everything instead..

(Update: Googling on this topic brought up a page of my own where a Google Reader engineer explained how Google Reader deals with robots.txt - http://www.petercooper.co.uk/google-reader-ignores-robottxt-... - though their definition of Web robot is far from universal)
robots.txt is really only like a note on the front door of your unlocked house that says "please only look at these items in these rooms." or "please do not look in my house" If someone wants to write a program to index the site they can still do so. Google, MSN, Bing, yahoo, et. al. will respect the robots.txt file though.
I'm interested in the justification for this, but I'm happy about it. I'm actually uncomfortable with how high Hacker News comments score on Google.
Top-ten lists have been getting more and more annoying to this programmer. They're surely somewhere in the top ten by now.
I think the critique is less the use of the technique and more the ubiquity of it. Digital lighting can easy appear curious and unreal.
This makes me sad. I often do site:news.ycombinator.com google searches for key topics.
maybe to see what firms ignore robot.txt files?
Back when this was happening, was it on Windows XP by any chance? Because ClearType isn't enabled by default on XP (although it is on Vista and 7). ClearType makes a huge difference in how fonts look on Windows.
I found this line interesting: "There are several hundred thousands lines of javascript in Gmail – one of the biggest in the world".

I'd like to see what the engineers have to say on managing that much JavaScript.
My roommate doesn't think it's crazy. He's recently been doing better but has previously been the emergency room more than 20 times for asthma-related complications including full blown pneumonia and the conversion of the lower third of one lung to complete scar tissue.

It can become bad enough.
100 engineers? What have they been up to for the last 5 years? (besides buzz)
I had to look up bookplate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookplate). I've never seen a bookplate on a non-library book. To me, the idea of marking a specific instance of a book as one's own sounds alien. The only marks I make on my own books are notes or marking important passages.

I doubt it surprises anyone when I say I don't understand what this guy is complaining about. He can still buy paper books and give them bookplates. Many people prefer paper to e-books, so it's unlikely that paper books will disappear any time soon.

He ends with, "This books belongs to . . . no one." I completely disagree. Digital media costs almost nothing to reproduce. Books are cheaper than ever before. Literacy is higher than ever before. There is more CC-licensed media than ever before. DRM aside, "This belongs to everyone." is the general sentiment of digital media.
App Watch: Seeing Success on the Palm Pre
10. Requests that begin with, "All you have to do is...".
9. Deadlines fabricated by others.
8. Single character variable names.
7. Being spoonfed requirements on a need-to-know basis.
6. SQL Selects within iterations.
5. Requests that describe how, but not what.
4. Variable names that don't describe what they are.
3. Meetings without beer.
2. Dropping everything for the emergency du jour.
1. Top 10 Lists that infer that all programmers think alike.
One Gene Lost = One Limb Regained?
I quite agree. I use Google to search HN. I just used it the other day, because I didn't remember this one guy's startup or username, but I knew it involved family websites. I was able to find it after a bit of search-fu. I am sad to see that HN won't be indexed by Google anymore. :(
surprised no-one has suggested that this is to improve performance. this place can be very slow sometimes, and blocking robots can reduce load.
Senator Kaufman: Fraud Still At The Heart Of Wall Street
Appstore Infographics
I find it ironic that this is posted here on HN, where the top color is orange. (Of course, I like teal and orange and once had a wardrobe with a lot of those two colors in it.)
The 'official' HNSearch is completely useless for anyone who would ever want to search HN. It's a Firefox Extension (!) that adds a 400px sidebar to your google search results pages showing site: searches along with an extra adsense ad. It's less useless than the 5 IE toolbars your annoying relatives live with, but just as obnoxious.

I just installed it again for a laugh, and it actually redirects to searchyc.com results when you click on its "Hacker News" header — even though pg staunchly refuses to ever link to searchyc. I made fun of him for it at his party before Startup School and he tried to laugh it off with "they're a YC company!" as if that weren't obvious on the face of it.
Oh, THAT I agree with. I know two husband-wife teams who are badass... And a few more where the wife participates in varying ways but has a day job.

I was taking issue with the "your wife IS your co-founder, whether you like it or not".

My wife has a job and has had no involvement with RescueTime other than a bit o' moral support. If that makes her a co-founder "whether I like it or not", then I have a bunch of good friends and a few family members who fit the bill, too. :-)
Seconded. And I'm perfectly comfortable using XS to bolt perl and C together.

That may be a function of my having spent enough times in the guts of the perl VM to already know exactly what I want and not want anything getting in the way while I'm implementing that, mind.
Coding standards documents written by people who can barely program.
http://www.codestyle.org/css/font-family/sampler-WindowsResu...

About 2 percent have Helvetica Neue installed. Not enough for me to care about them. Your mileage may vary.
One way to search news.ycombinator is to visit searchyc.com
I didn't see her age mentioned in the article. How old is she?
I think many people fully understand this. When people rave about, say, haskell being nearly as fast as C, what they mean is that you can write much higher level, and thus shorter and more concise, code in a way that can be automatically optimized by the compiler quickly.

In other words, he's correct but also assuming incorrectly that because other don't spell it out, they don't know.
That's not a legitimate reason to ban google. You can always (using google's webmaster tools) throttle their indexing. Or you can use search-engine specific lines in robots.txt (Bing anyone?) to ban misbehaving bots.

The only reason to do this is if you don't want your site indexed by google. Which I really can't think of a legitimate reason to do so.
Twitter announces @anywhere at SXSW
Surely there's nothing wrong with single-character variable names, used appropriately.
All the nonsense aside I think it's true that people are no longer happy with "one size fits all" kinds of policies and institutions. This is not a bad thing and is simply one of the byproducts of improving technology that empowers individuals to pick and choose what fits them best be it education, food, clothes, etc.
Oh, absolutely. To be able to play nontrivial pieces without looking ahead two-to-three measures is nigh impossible.

Reading music seems to be very interesting - after you truly know a piece, the notes seem to simply be reminders for muscle memory. It's not like reading a book - you do that when you learn the book. Sight reading is fairly difficult!

As for duration of experience, it's not necessarily the length of time.. but whether you've ever truly learned a piece.
I wouldn't say a hugely positive difference. I like my fonts crisp, not hungover.
true, but it's a busy time for yc. maybe this was just a stop-gap measure? when did it start?
An Ode to DiskWarrior, SuperDuper, and Dropbox
Unless they're obeying robots.txt, which they probably should be
You can see my suggestions about transparency above. I won't repeat them here. It provides the teeth to your disclosure requirement. I would suggest that instead of asking for line items by risk, we simply open the banks' books and get an electronic term sheet for everything listed. I don't want to know their risk numbers. They calculated them.

Your other measures are interesting. I would keep capital adequacy but seize the bank before capital went to zero. That would improve incentives a bit.

The key thing is to claw back the economic rents that bankers have been handed. Most of these rents are connected to information that bankers have and we don't. This can be changed, but not with the help of today's regulators who are still in thrall to the banking industry despite their statements to the contrary.
I guess that might have to do with load these search engines generate. Previosly in a thread we checked that comments posted in HN appear in google search after a minute of posting. That should create a good amount of load on HN. Multiply it for all the search engines in the wild, and PG probably have decided blocking those woun't do any harm. My guesss. Could be wrong, or it might be temporary or a mistake.
Yes, the way that references vanish from hn, I really need Google to find things a couple of days old. I have tried and found other search methods not worthwhile.

Grumble...
And how they do to keep a good load time for gmail, with the potential down download that much. (Though at my day job we probably rival that amount of JS, but it's an intranet app, so nobody in the wild gets to see it.)
I'm impressed you got a college to accept your application without some kind of high school equivalency certification. How'd you manage that?

A few years out of school, however, and it's become very clear to me that "I just worked on this project for 6 months where we learned XYZ, had some hard times and eventually failed/succeeded/moved on." is much more attractive to the kind of people I want to work with than "I graduated cum laude from XYZ special university."
> If the courts are not there to enforce ownership, the currencies will never take hold.

That's probably solvable.

Another problem, which I don't know how to solve, is that the US govt doesn't agree with the idea that transactions in other currencies are not taxable. If you're trading favors, the govt wants its cut.

You can argue that your expenses equal your revenues, so there's no profit, but they're pretty good at dealing with that dodge. (If you're consuming anything, they'll see its cost as profit, even if you acquired it with clams.)
I didn't hardcode any addresses. That's why it works on so many different Ruby builds.
I wonder if part of the reason is that the Arc web server doesn't send HTTP status codes properly. Every URL path, valid or not, returns a 200, even if the content is only "Unknown."

For example, check the headers sent back for:

http://news.ycombinator.com/no/way/this/is/possibly/valid

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Connection: close

If a search engine sees that, it will periodically revisit it forever.
Donating 8 hours design time to any project
I have a free day tomorrow that I would like to donate to any project. What I can do for you in 8 hours?

- Look at how your content is structured and figure out the best way to communicate your idea
- Working on the user experience and the mechanics of the idea
- Take a look at you branding (fonts, colours, logo etc)
- Make broader recommendations that might make the idea more compelling

Realistically I will be able to get one (maybe two) key pages designed. Once it's done I will deliver a PSD with all the design assets you need. If you are serious about making the UX of your idea better and are willing to implement some changes drop the URL in the comments or email me at oneintenthousand@gmail.com

Why am I doing this? Because I am also trying to get a startup rolling myself and have learned much from other people willing to donate their time. I also love design and figuring out design problems is always an interesting challenge. I will pick one project and get cracking tomorrow (Australian time). You can check out some of my previous work here: http://www.jasonstrachan.com
I don't use either. I'm interested for two reasons:

1. I use Google site: searches a LOT. I can remember reading about something I need now a long time ago on HN and I go find it.

2. One item on my "if I have time" projects list is to do "something" "fun" with HN submissions. Now I'm officially barred, regardless of what I would have thought up.
I do exactly the same thing at least once a day. I can always remember just a snippet of the post or subject I want to find and that type of query always gets me what I want. I just used it today to find the YC company who is doing the journalism stuff so I could send the link to my nephew.
start posting your comments in rot13? ;)
Well, thanks for the advice -- but everyone says, "see a doctor!"

I just want the cheap, infect-yourself-with-worms,see-what-happens,-no-drs-required method.

(Haven't found previous visits to allergy doctors to be helpful. I'm sure there are helpful doctors out there, but how do you find them?)
Hey - does anybody know if there are some free software license agreements on the web that are good? Looking for something that says basically Company X can use Product B for free for a certain period of time and won't be jerks about it.
This.

I built this because I like working on this sort of thing and because it lowers the bar for everyone else who doesn't know how to or want to rebuild their binaries.

Also, depends a lot on your infrastructure. Sometimes it's easier to distribute and maintain patched Rubies, and sometimes it's easier to just require a ruby gem. The gem is designed and built in such a way that it should be resistant to most changes made to the Ruby VM.
E-mail is the world's largest social network
The way it's done now is that all new submissions are nofollowed until they hit a certain karma threshold. A while back when I looked at this, the threhold was about 3-5 up votes.

This is actually a very neat and simple way to exercise editorial control to remove the nofollow: if enough people in the community like it, there is something useful about it and it is vetted.
The correct solution is to fix the Arc server to return correct HTTP headers, not block everything using robots.txt.
I no longer buy math books that do not have solutions to the exercises at the back of the book. None of the listed books satisfy this criterion. If you are going to learn math then reading is not enough, you need to do countless exercises to get all the subtleties of the theorems and definitions and you won't know if you're doing them right unless you have a template answer to compare to.
For all those font elitists who disliked Arial so much they removed it from their computers.