skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Web typography app
Is there a web app out there that helps with web typography? Something similar to identifont, which would ask a few questions and return me a snippet of css?
It's 100k people with internet access that speak English. Most likely US and UK based, likely to be using broadband. They clearly have aspirations beyond the basic necessities (read more, run marathons, learn languages), suggesting they perceive a certain level of free time available to dedicate to such pursuits. Heck, Grey's Anatomy is in the top 100.

My point is that this 100k sample is likely to not be representative of the world.
wtf, 100 goals and mine isn't even there...

I want a user "shaking with excitement".

I've had lots of happy users, but I don't thing I've ever had one shaking with excitement to use my software.

I got this new goal after reading this article about patio11's Bingo Card Creator:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-mak...

Next, Mr. Taylor announces it’s time for Multiplication Bingo. As Mr. Taylor reads off a problem ("20 divided by 5"), the kids scour their boards, chips in hand, looking for 4's. One girl is literally shaking with excitement. Another has her hands clasped in a prayer position. I find myself wanting to play. You know you're in a good classroom if you have to stop yourself from raising your hand.
I'd love to learn that... maybe i should reconsider it :)
iPhone OS 4.0
I know, another article about the iPhone, but I really liked this bit (with relevance beyond the iPhone OS):

«I think it’s fair to say that most people involved in interaction design tend to agree that hierarchical file systems have largely failed their users. […] However, when we say ‹hierarchical file systems don’t work›, most of us end that sentence with ‹so we need to replace them with something better› in our heads. Apple, on the other hand, ended the sentence with ‹so we’re not going to bother with this stuff, let’s just leave this up to each individual application.›»
I was thinking about this in the other direction for books, this explains why weight loss/self improvement/etc... books sell so well.
I am dead set against the bilge spewed by that organisation (personal opinion); but I'm not sure dropping the whole problem at their doorstep is quite right.

Certainly an amount of HIV infections may come about due to Church teachings causing a lack of condom usage (for example). But that feels more like a side effect.

If your coming from the aspect of negligence in them failing to address the problem of STD infection properly in their ideals then I agree that is poor form. But crimes against humanity? Bit far perhaps.

(also, if you're talking about the misinformation spread r.e. condom failure that is certainly something we should take issue with)
The people don't deserve it, however.

And the article isn't about the leader deserving anything, it is about the culture deserving what it gets, and using the leader as an excuse to talk about it. And maybe it is a good excuse to talk about dangerous behavior and the consequences thereof, but talking about people "deserving" an epidemic like AIDS is pretty insensitive and counter productive. Whatever good message you had (behavior needs to change) is going to be drowned out by that stupid generalization (no, a third wife who got AIDS from her philandering husband did not deserve it, and vice versa).
Every sufficiently popular platform devolves into a vehicle for delivering games eventually.

The Mac never has (not saying there are no games on it - just that they are pretty insignificant, unlike the iPhone where games are significant)
No amount of message board geekery is going to get you around the fact that a core tenet of the Catholic church is that sex is appropriate only in marriage.
Currently, the cost is $100 for a good plug computer [1], and 2W for having it plugged and on all the time. That's more than enough to host your mail and web server, Tor node, file sharing clients… If only you ISP would open all ports and give you symmetric bandwidth.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_computer
"Doesn't really seem plausible, does it?"

It doesn't, but I think this is what happens in practice.
Marc Maiffret--the quick rise of a teen hacker (Q&A)
They don't mention this, but this "nearby" galaxy is 12 million light years away. To put this in perspective, imagine the Earth and the Sun being 1 inch apart.. M82 is then 12 million miles away on that scale.
E-filing as an Efficiency Winner
Yes, another repost, another classic essay:

"Why Chinese is So Damn Hard"

http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
The problem with solving problems people don't know they have is that you have to sell the problem before you sell the solution.

I was more inspired by Paul's post today and recent personal musings on the vast supply of ideas floating around the place.

My personal pet notion is doing webmail better than google, which I occasionally scribble down random ideas for.
Actually, French pops in at #24, right before Japanese at #30.

Hence #1 Spanish, #2 French, #3 Japanese, #4 Sign Language.
Britain Closes Airspace Due to Volcanic Ash
I know I shouldn't feed trolls but I also feel I should clarify some things.

I started developing software professionally about a quarter of a century ago, on Apple IIs using the built-in BASIC, 6502 machine language and assorted toolkits for graphics and animation. For a long time, I used Microsoft technologies, from Actor (a Smalltalk-like environment that ran on Windows) to Visual Basic, Visual C++ (mostly for WinCE) and assorted MS web technologies. I also did a lot of web stuff on Unix platforms at the same time. It was not until 2002 that I made my switch to Unixes complete. Unless you develop for Windows, it makes little to no sense to develop on Windows and, as far as you are comfortable with other platforms, it makes little to no sense to deploy to Windows. It's expensive, not particularly predictable and the hood comes soldered. Not a good thing on a server.

In fact, I like to develop on a platform as close as possible to the deployment platform. It makes a lot of sense.

Development stacks are tools. All I implied was some are much more refined than others.

With time you'll learn.
"After everything that we did for you and Steven..."

You know, there are any number of people in the city I live in who are quite willing and able waste a few months of my life, drain my bank balances and crush my spirit without asking me to move to another city in another country.

In the long term the introductions might be useful but they are they only upside I see in this whole situation.

Agreed with DanBlake: "Wow".
almost:
http://zokier.net/stuff/20100415_001.jpg

:)
Sad but true. A friend of mine is religious and believes in the no contraception / no sex before marriage rule. On a recent trip to Africa she returned and admitted to having sex with a local.

Her main concern was not for health problems but moral ones: she had sinned for sex outside of marriage and was repentent etc. When I asked if she'd "at least used a condom" she looked horrified "oh no! I couldn't do that"

The problem is that sex outside of marriage is a sin with reward; you get to have sex, that feels good. Condoms are not a necessary part of that act (I don't know of anyone who prefers them! :)) and so the sin is "easier to avoid". There is not necessarily a perceived reward for using contraception (at least at the time of the act). You can lose but not gain. etc.
No. Not all people will obey calls to abstinence and monogamy. Period. There has always been adultery and teenage pregnancy; there is no reason to think there ever won't be. In addition, no study of abstinence until marriage education has ever been shown to reduce teen pregnancy. However, condom use has been shown to slow the spread of std's. By spreading lies about a method which has been shown to be effective while simultaneously pushing a method which has never been shown to be effective, the church is helping to spread the epidemic. If they want to push abstinence only, fine, but actively discouraging something which can keep people safe by SPREADING LIES is unacceptable.
Seems very plausible to me. Most religions don't require that you must follow all the rules, but that you do your best to follow as many as you can and feel really bad when you fail. Given that, why is it so odd that people follow the easy rules (not using a condom) but not the hard rules (abstinence).
And if you double everyone's wages, that will result in inflation which isn't going to seriously help their purchasing power.
The relevant question is: 'Will removing the sweatshop be better for the employee?'

Yes, this is the question we are losing track of.
Art of Murder: Hunt for the Puppeteer
Apple is one of the ones that takes that accountability seriously, monitors and requires compliance from its vendors:

http://www.chinacsr.com/en/2009/07/17/5713-apple-admits-its-...

Year after year stories like this appear, headlined, "OMG, Apple's bad labor practices", ignoring that unlike Martha Stewart et al., this labor news comes from Apple's own audits and public reports.
8WayRun - View Profile: Spa_Consultant - RFI English - Yahoo Buzz
Drizzle Keynote at the MySQL User's Conference
BBC News - Congress to archive every tweet ever posted publicly
We're Not Hackers
Robot Plays Air Hockey at Embedded Systems Conference
A lot of startup founders are people who leave academia for one reason or another (graduates, ex-academics).

Also, a lot of excellent ideas (e.g. the Web) were of almost no interest to academic researchers in relevant fields at the time - they dismissed it as a toy. And perhaps from a purely academic viewpoint they were right - but that doesn't mean that it isn't of use to billions of people.
Higher-order functions in Go
"I really hope you are a Steve Jobs sockpuppet account"

Probably not. The Jobs-o-grams that I've seen are terse. Jobs probably would have written something like:

"Mark should not be hacking. We wouldn't want a Captain greasing a ship's engine."
You comments about the importance as an existence proof of the creation of this ecosystem are I think the most interesting and useful thing I've read in all these Section 3.3.1 discussions. Thanks!
Out of everything said here, this sticks out like a sore thumb:

we received nothing in return.

Isn't the whole point of these programs to enable founders to do their thing in an environment they can't find anywhere else?

If you're expected to manage a project and provide deliverables over a timeline, why not just go out and find a customer? You get to keep all their money and all your equity. And you still get to advance your product.

If, on the other hand, you want to develop a game changer, uncontrained by customer demands, you save up or take investment and go to your lab. Your are no longer a developer; you are an inventor. Sure, everyone wants to show progress, but not at the expense of pursuing the breakthroughs you will need to hit the home run desired by your investor(s).

Investors, if you want a home run from your founders, you may just have to wait a while for the baby to gestate. Expecting "something in return" in the first 2 months of a 10 month program is an unreasonable expectation IMO. Just do your share and get out of the way.
Not Everybody Loves Journalists, but Twitter and Google Do
http://xkcd.com/310/
CSS3 and Veer navigation
Memcached and Passenger connection sharing
Outing Boston's top angel investors
Things to consider before you start prototyping
It's not entirely nuts if Apple's game is to maintain its lead in the smartphone market by suppressing development on other platforms.

I think Apple is past the "novelty" stage now; the price will be paid in the longer term as certain classes of developers only develop for those other platforms (either they use cross platform tools or non-blessed tools (Scheme, Lua, whatever)). This also makes things messy for companies like Sugar for which there's no compelling reason to make a really good native app, the value they sell in more in what's behind it.

On the other hand, while Apple's approval capriciousness has been a significant issue, this hits developers closer to home in a day in, day out way. And even if they're using blessed tools today, they might aspire to use higher level stuff later. E.g. after they see how much faster it can be to develop with a REPL.
Well, "like" is really vague. Could be that they like the fact that he's committing code, or that he's still writing code, or that he's posting about it, or... whatever. You can twist "like" to look bad for almost any FB wall post.
And erroneous conclusions about the world have been made from much larger samples. You could sample 300 million americans and you'd still only end up with a very skewed perspective of what the world is like. You could use statistical sampling methods to find 1000 people through out the world and get a much more accurate picture (though admittedly, still not the greatest picture).
Mb.ideas.repository jquery mb.gallery 2.0 (show a public Flickr set)
An Account of the Tcl War
That's a little depressing. I'm visualizing most of these people keeping these "goals" at arms length, or further, until their deaths.

Most of the crap on that list I wouldn't consider as "goals." Write a book? I've done that, twice, and am currently writing another. For some reason, I don't register "book" as the goal, even though that's the outcome I expect to eventually reach, after the hundreds of tasks and the mind-bending logic that goes into completing the book.
In the US, AIDS is almost entirely confined to people that are either gay, or needle drug users.
"drink more water"

This is the most puzzling one for me. How can this even be a goal?

Are all those people chronically dehydrated? Perhaps they drink soft drinks instead of water? Is it a North American thing? Mysteries...
Arrgh ... yep, and that's another hit by Apple against good development practices and the general improvement in our ability to develop software that the Internet has brought.

Starting in 1996 when I've always had the net available while developing software my productivity has steadily increased, whether it was finding a snippet of free code for CRC calculations (the first thing I can remember) or higher level stuff.
Google started the rumor, in their PR when they bought On2 last year:

“Today video is an essential part of the web experience, and we believe high-quality video compression technology should be a part of the web platform,” said Sundar Pichai, vice president, Product Management, Google. “We are committed to innovation in video quality on the web, and we believe that On2’s team and technology will help us further that goal.”
It would be a sad day if your programming language didn't have stat.

Inotify is only present if your Linux-kernel is compiled with it turned on. If you want to use it in shell scripts there's inotify-tools (that's the Debian name anyway). Sadly GNU got their grubby fingers in and invented the stupid D-BUS.

In FreeBSD there's kqueue which does a similar job.
The book, "Code Name Ginger" is actually great. It's a complete 180 from the Steve Blank model of Customer Development and is a good reminder of how great teams can create the biggest craters.
I think it's safe to say that without extensive and widespread genetic engineering or effective mind control, a strictly monogamous culture will have many members who frequently patronize prostitutes.
"The problem with these kinds of organic ideas: startup geeks and developers are all similar."

Yes, this is my greatest problem. It is even worse: Usually most of my reasonably good ideas were some kind of developer tools. When I search for similar products, usually I find depressingly lots of them. But even if I am sure I could do it a bit better than others, almost all of them are open source free products created by passion by people who earn their money as consultants. There is no way I could sell my stuff for money if it is only slightly better then these open source free products.
I thought sleep was the cousin of death.
Tutor2u | Spa_Consultant
I would be interested in the author's opinions about the iAd platform.
Re: Factor: What time is it? Part 1
Samsung Corby TV and Metro TV arrives in India
Find here the Price, Review, Specifications of Samsung Corby TV and Samsung Metro TV mobile phones in India as they have officially launched.
Have you rode one before?

If not, I highly suggest you try it. The control system feels so natural. It's like a motorcycle on your feet.
The three big things are health, wealth, relationships

- Health

WebMD, diet sites, probably others I can't think of.

Snake oil. Oh, the internet is dripping with snake oil

- Wealth/Career

Careers at LinkedIn, The Ladders, Indeed and many more

Wealth in eBay stores, Etsy, heck even Adsense
More wealth in Motley Fool, ScottTrade, etc.

That even goes into affiliate marketing, make $$$ online scams, etc.

- Relationships

Facebook, MySpace

Match, eHarmony, etc.
For pure data visualization, Tufte is absolutely the brilliant and helps you avoid a whole raft of bad behavior that leads to sloppy, hard to understand graphics. I can't second your suggestion enough.

I would add that his one day course is a great way to get started reading his books (especially if you can get your employer to pay for it). He's a great speaker and you get all the books as part of the course. I wish all the makers of charting libraries, toolkits, and data analysis software were more familiar with his work. It would save us from some truly awful junk.

One area where I disagree with him frequently is when he strays from data visualization into user interface design. In general, I find his user interface preferences result in UI's that are too cluttered. One of his main rules is that data presentations should be very dense. However, I disagree that this approach works as well for user interfaces as it does when visualizing data. If you look at his web site (http://www.edwardtufte.com/) you can see his UI philosophy on display. I find Don Norman to be much better in this area than Tufte.
Americans love their soft drinks. They also feel really guilty about it and resolve to drink more water, which means big money for people who make water filters and bottled water.

Edit: to note this relates to the "Health" category I mentioned in another comment in this thread.
I’m not convinced that the task switcher needs to exist. Since apps in the task switcher aren’t really running, the task switcher isn’t so much a task switcher as it is a list of recently used apps

The task switcher lets you switch back and forth between apps one handed using your thumb. I think that's part of the rationale for it. Also, the Least Recently Used algorithm will dynamically make a short list of the actually used apps in a user's collection. Most users probably spend 80% of time in a small minority of their apps.
there is nothing clinical or formal about it

But do you think he's wrong? and if so, where?
okay, clear now. actually it was v simple !
It's not just close, it's the same. Gay men do have the types of sexual relationships that are more likely to lead to STD transmission than their heterosexual counterparts in the U.S. I actually often wonder why heterosexual men get condemned for promiscuity more than homosexual men. (Probably because there are no women to yell at them for it.)

Anyway, this 2006 papers looks at the effect of different network patterns in sexual relationships and STD transmission. Basically, the amount of overlap you have between sexual partners is key. The less, the better. http://www.scribd.com/full/29969122?access_key=key-19cz4fztd...
I'm a .NET dev by day and a Rails hobbyist by night, but I agree with the prior comment regarding learning Vim or Emacs. I can relate to your experience with it feeling small in comparison to VS, but there are tools out there (ViEmu, VsVim) that will let you use the Vim knowledge gained in VS and it will make VS better. I started learning Vim a couple of years back and it was the best decision I made.

If you choose Emacs, I believe VS has Emacs key-binding support built in.
Blender 3D Jumps On the Jemalloc Bandwagon Too
It is not necessarily bureaucracy or "state-heaviness"; Israel is a small country, the army may be using these frequencies, and they need to cleared out before being used by the public. It was the same with bluetooth and other wireless technologies.
Moving Taped Past to Hard Drive Future
If by "almost entirely confined" you mean approximately 70-75%[1]. This shouldn't be surprising: US culture pushes homosexuality underground, and is mostly uninterested in treating IV drug users outside of a few liberal enclaves.

[1] http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5739a2.htm
Sometimes you have to take risks to win big. If an opportunity arises you sometimes have to choose between jumping at it and risk falling or watching it slip away.

Honestly, if I where in their situation I probably would have done the same thing, not because I'm dumb or naive or unaware of the risks, but simply because, fuck it, life is too short to always do the dull and sensible thing. And who knows, it might end up being awesome.
Look at these demographics. http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/surveillance/basic.htm#exposur...
Ask HN: When did Stack Overflow become Attorney Overflow?
I recently asked a question on Stack Overflow about pulling a page from one website to another and how to work around cross-site-scripting limitations etc.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2645114/embed-external-website-inside-a-page

The first two (almost immediate) responses were to point out that what I wanted to do might be illegal, phishing or otherwise naughty.

Now I understand that we all want to help each other out by pointing out legal pitfalls that might derail some large endeavor however at this stage of my project I am simply experimenting and seeking technical programming guidance or ideas from a community of programmers; when the time comes to take this "out of the lab" I'll be seeking legal consult (and probably from lawyers, not programmers).

This is reflects a larger trend in general science where the law (and at times, morality) interfere with progress and I found it discouraging to see that this has trickled down all the way to computer science.

Is there anywhere to discuss programming in the context of programming without being interrupted by these sermons?