skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find that, while I like white-on-dark, I tend to require a larger font to comfortably read it than I do dark-on-white.

On the article's page, when I knock the browser "zoom" feature up one notch from default, it's like the entire page magically becomes this wonderful, easy-to-read document.

It may be because I'm on a 1920x1200 display on a 17" laptop screen, but at any rate, I would consider a small upward bump in font size. I wouldn't have brought it up myself, since as I noted above, I can do it myself in my browser with a quick hold of Ctrl and a flick of the mouse wheel. But since the topic came up, I thought I'd throw that in.
Chrome OS isn't a full Linux distribution, but it does use the Linux kernel with a new windowing system on top.

This is bringing Linux to the masses in the same way that Mac OS X brought Unix to the masses—by hiding it under a pretty UI.
Can I ask what startup?
New clue to anti-matter mystery
I don't believe there exists a technology company in the world that doesn't infringe on patents (mostly unintentionally). I think if most of them really looked they'd find thousands patents they are infringing.
Google Prediction API
I haven't tested this out, but I don't see why something like this wouldn't work...

<?php

header("Location: the-result.com");

header("Referer: ");

?>
I was under the impression that any codec supported by the system (Quicktime or Windows Media Player) could be embedded/played, e.g. that while Apple wouldn't support Theora by default, it would work if you had the Theora codec installed for QT. Not sure where I got that from, it could well be very wrong.

But still, if the user has to download something to support it, how is that better (or different) for the user than a plugin?
The telnet command still has some handy uses that shouldn't be abandoned
> http://mirror05.x264.nl/Dark/website/compare/vp8.png http://mirror05.x264.nl/Dark/website/compare/x264.png

If you open both of these in separate tabs or windows and switch from one to the other, it's pretty obvious that VP8's picture isn't as detailed as X264's. By a pretty wide subjective margin, IMO.

Too bad.
exactly... inflexibility to change an old process because of 1% or less of the use cases could be justified or not. If a new process makes 99% of things take 10% of the time and 1% of things take 1000% of the time, you still win. I would argue that edge cases should rarely be a reason to hold up improving a process.
Visions of Frankenstein buying 'the mummy'.

Of all takeover targets that Yahoo! could look at why AOL?

There have to be companies out there with a bit more promise. If their traffic continues to decline at the current rate in 4 years they'll be gone.
Are these free for commercial-use like fontsquirrel.com?
How To Play WebM Videos on YouTube
The Prediction API has the potential to be really cool.

Wonder how concerned the Directed Edge (YC) guys are about Google entering their space.
It can be used as a text classifier. It takes as input a collection of (output, input1, input2, ..., input_n) tuples, stored in the newly-announced Google Storage, and then uses a variety of machine learning algorithms (which I would bet includes some Bayesian stuff) to build a model which it can use to take (input1, input2, ..., input_n) tuples and predict the corresponding output.

So, that's the API. You can do a lot of the same things offline, with almost the same file format, using Weka:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weka_(machine_learning)

So if you're interested in playing around with Google's Prediction API, you should probably download Weka and fiddle with it some. It's pretty easy to get started with, and it will definitely give you an idea for the sort of thing you can do here.
In high school, my senior AP Eng. Comp class was similar. We had to write 2-3 page paper, in class, every day. The papers were all literary analysis (ugh!), but it definitely sharpened the 'writing muscle'.

I can write much faster, with more clarity, than most people I know today - all because of that one year of English.
But remember, all it takes is you infringing on one claim in a single patent.
The (probably false) assumption there is that the oldest millennials will still feel the same when the youngest start working and they've got 15-20 years of work experience.
Square launches Android API
Lyx is definitely a good editor (at least for a subset of the tasks in word).
Referer is a header the browser sends, Location is a header the server sends. Also, the Location header needs either a relative url on the local machine or a fully qualified one. In this case it would have needed a fully qualified one.

So maybe you should have tested it ;) ?
Download Weka. The file format is almost identical, and it has a nice GUI to get you started fast. Google's algorithms and infrastructure may be more sophisticated and scalable, but if you want something a lot like this for a side-project, Weka is easy to start with and it's available right now.

http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/
Microsoft (and Apple) did a similar thing back in 1996–7 with "core fonts for the web" in which they tried to push a standard pack of fonts out to everyone so that web designers could assume that end users would have certain key fonts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web

It's not some big conspiracy, it's about making the web easier to use, easier to read, and easier to design.
This is because grammar is very important when writing technical specifications, as they can easily become ambiguous or plain nonsense.

Example: "The users save the files on the server with the internet connection."

Does the users use the internet connection to save files on the server? Or does this server have an internet connection (and the other servers don't), and this is how to know which server that they should use?

Such ambiguous statements may result in the customer getting a very different system than they wanted.

Another example of "failure to communicate": I received the following bug report today: "At the moment all umlauts (ä, ö, ü) will advertised in the wrong format."

The problem? All accented letters were replaced by a question mark.

I would have had no idea what the problem was, if it was not for the screen shot.

Some companies simply cannot oursource their IT-dept as they cannot communicate in writing.
It's no better in chrome. Super aliased, looks like crap.
Plenty of billionaire hackers. Gates, Ellison, Bloomberg, Brin, Page, Allen, Bezos, Simonyi and many more...
There is a lesson in it to folks who claimed Mozilla should just swallow and go H.264.
Actually, the article mentions that there is a "mini-industry of Word alternatives for novelists", and it links to an example: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html

Presumably this is the kind of program the author is thinking of when he says that Word lacks features that assist composition.
With the New Google Latitude API, Build Latitude and Location Into Your App
The author should look into Microsoft OneNote. It's a great tool for laying out and reorganizing documents. Tags, pictures, screen captures, internal and external hyperlinks can easily be incorporated as well. Once the basic structure of the document is finished, it can easily be copied and pasted into Word. If you have a tablet PC, you can even scribble on the document using pen input.
The problem is not that the referer leaks to the sites you click through to. The referer leaks to sites as soon as the results page is displayed because there are externally hosted images embedded in the results page.
Wpromote Launches New Social Media Advertising Platform, SocialBoost
I'm looking at a few other similar services which also include legal text in the CSS file, I wonder if this might be another reason.
Google Gives Web $120 Million Gift -- InformationWeek
Google Latitude API could be as transformative as Facebook's Social Graph
Basically, he says the "word processor" is not geared to help the workflow of writing. I agree.

When I was a journalist, I would take notes in one or more files. When I was ready to write the story, I'd put the notes in one window and the story in the another and go back and forth. Only my filename conventions told me which notes went with which stories.

I imagine lots of people do similar things - students researching for papers, etc. It would be nice to have a file format that encapsulates notes and finished story/paper, and a program that easily lets you tab between notes and work things into the finished product as you go. If you needed to share the file, you could export just the finished thing.

In other ways, like making side notes and sharing and collaboratively editing, Google Docs really is doing novel things with "word processing." Which is one reason why it's putting some pressure on MS Office.
And then? What do you propose is the next logical step once you have the list of patents you infringe on? Go to Microsoft and say "please sue us now"? Because if you were going to suggest that they re-develop in order to avoid infringing any patents, you're either from another planet or a troll.
In fact, allowing corporations to donate willy-nilly to political candidates could quite possibly curtail the political speech of their employees: imagine working for a company, and finding out that by working for them you have inadvertently funded a political ideal that you are in direct opposition to.

Would you quit your job over it? In this market? Maybe a lot of folks on here would, as our skillsets are in demand.

What about a factory worker?
On Windows 7 it looks the same (ugly aliased) everywhere (Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, Explorer).

On Windows XP it's even uglier (according to BrowserShots screenshots linked upthread).

On Ubuntu, Chromium and Firefox are pretty, Opera didn't render anything.
Emacs/LaTeX for me as well, but some non-technical friends of mine have had success with Nisus Writer.

There is a small market for actually-good word processing systems out there, it's just that Word is (a) usually already there on people's machines and (b) superficially sufficient.
Does a mature Linux mean there's nothing left to explore?
Right, if a user is worried about this the onus is really on them to ensure that their browser has referrer-sending disabled.
Good catch Chrome and Android should be on that list.

AdSense,AdWords and Maps are search add-ons. Google suggest is also (a rather uninteresting, but useful) add-on to search.

Calendar is a Gmail add on.

The docs suite was essentially acquired via writely they didn't build it in house.

The point I'm really making is that just because Google enters a space doesn't mean they will dominate. They don't at a lot of the projects they attempt.
Really? Old Persian?
Directed Edge is a lot higher-level than this, and more focused on making it easy for their users to make good recommendation engines. Prediction API is focused on more general tasks, and for that reason I predict that it'll have trouble competing with Directed Edge. Unless some startup comes along and competes with Directed Edge using Prediction API as a back-end -- but we can talk about that later, if it ever happens.

Prediction API is a nice broad tool, but Directed Edge still has a big advantage in their niche.
It might be the same story as the H.264 codec.

Most Windows 7 users have it in the base Windows install - no need to download a codec. But the MediaPlayer-less versions of Windows that the EU mandated MS produced don't ship with H.264.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968211
Maybe that should be the standard privacy setting. Everyone on facebook should set their privacy setting to match Mark's.
Just from abounding laziness… If I'm running Linux on my Mac Mini, can I run Mac OS X in VirtualBox? The words say yes, but I rather doubt the executable says yes.
But a post would take care of that right ?

After all, then the referring url would just be the search page without any parameters.

So if you switch off the post then leakage would occur, with the 'post' enabled you're fine.

edit: I see what you mean now, if they switch to 'get' mode it leaks the info even to sites they don't visit. One more good reason to use that post!
No, the article headlines use it.
They'll say anything to grab some headlines away from Google today.

So predictable...
Seems reasonable. It protects users too because they can't track the cookies across these domains even if they wanted to.
Google I/O Hot Topics
Would you lower your prices if your new competitor already costs more?
I used to help organise the (very small) demo scene in South Africa many years ago and it was so much fun. I recently watched some old classic favourites of mine and dang if the bug didn't bite me again. So now I'm working on my real instrument synthesizer that must fit into 16k. Pure asm, fourier transforms, impossible tricks - this is coding at it's most fun.
Is there any specific benefit to doing this? Does it decrease the number of files loaded?
Or you can go to Coupa Cafe in PA
...except that those 1% might be incredibly critical to the business. Perhaps if you break them, the fallout will be bad enough to kill the company.

Whether or not you should try a new process is entirely a function of what kind of company you're in, not what generation the various players grew up in. If you're in a startup, you should definitely try any new process you can think of that might give you an edge. If the company is basically milking a cash-cow, be incredibly risk-averse when thinking about "making things better".
A simple solution to control Hurricanes "Salter Sink"
Almost all web servers keep a log of HTTP requests if only to weed out troublesome pests.

The worry is not that the information is sent. The headers, IP address, and search query is always sent to any search engine regardless of their privacy policy or whether it's sent as POST or GET, so the worry is not that information is being sent, but rather that the query string in GET requests is most likely kept in a log file at least for a few days.

If Duck Duck Go was upfront about how long this HTTP request log was kept, would that make the default search with GET requests acceptable? I think having search queries sent by default as POST would be irksome for a default setting.
Disappointing that the gallery doesn't render in the android browser, considering the mentions of droid fonts.
Doesn't seem to, no. The page I land on is still http://duckduckgo.com/?q=hacker+news.
I knew this was coming.
The Shocking Conditions Inside China's Brutal Foxconn Factory
Mozy is a piece of shit. Avoid it like the plague.

My favorite bit of their crap software is freaking out at odd times on my mac and sucking all IO rendering the computer unusable. And no, not at scheduled backup times. Perhaps these morons are reading the entire backup set and rehashing it instead of watching for changes? Dunno. This behavior persisted even after I told it to stop backing anything up at all.

What I do know is the client sucks ass and the web has many stories of people unable to recover their data when they needed it.
Hey Fabian! I'm an entrepreneur from Madrid, quite active hehe I also run a startup incubator (http://tetuanvalley.com) with our own Startup School. Come to the office anytime to say hi :) (Let me know in advance though as I'm not in the office all days).
Toyota iQ Font: When Driving a Car Becomes Writing
I think you might be confusing S3 with EC2? I think "offsite images" is an apt description for stuff served from Amazons web frontend to S3... DDG don't run it, they just upload the content to it.
As an MS developer this really is devastating.

Rob Conery is one of the names that any fan of ASP.NET MVC knew. He was involved in the project when he worked there (I'd call him the most high profile MS employee aside from Scott Guthrie). To have him come out and say he couldn't make a startup work with Microsoft technology really tells you all you need to know about that.

I still need to use .Net at work but I think this combines with a bunch of other factors to push me away from Microsoft on anything else I do.
App Engine for Business allows you to use SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) on your own domain for all your App Engine applications, not just on the x.appspot.com domain.

FINALLY!
Well, you are right that if you hire someone to make a sign you should at least verify yourself that there are no spelling mistakes and that it won't reflect poorly on your company. I concede.
His intro made me think of this: http://xkcd.com/435/
Yes. In fact, nearly all of the fonts are also available on fontsquirrel.com.
I would argue that giving away software does involve a cost. There's the physical cost (maintaining downloads), but the larger cost is foregone revenue, an opportunity cost. It's a theoretical point, but worth mentioning.
Adam Wheeler and the Harvard Hoax
Naturally, the most insightful comment so far is a reply to a massively-downvoted "wake up sheeple" post.
Be a Visiting Fellow at the Singularity Institute
Is wordpress.org a different code base?
They sell non-free fonts that allow font-face embedding in their licenses. Google will only offer free fonts.
You misunderstand. The images are being served from Amazons web frontend to S3. They probably log the requests, not for "spying" reasons, but simply because that's what people tend to do when serving websites; log the website requests that are made against it. Because they do that, a government could contact Amazon and ask them for the data.

Knowing that, DDG may as well log the IP+Search themselves, as it makes no difference. The data is already logged and retrievable by contacting Amazon, therefore what is the point in DDG not logging it anyway?
Portability and control over ones content is important to Relationships
One little thing that makes the web a happier and prettier place.

Thanks Google, we owe you big.
Cool read. I used to run ClarisWorks on my very first computer, a Powerbook 100 that I bought in September of 1992. I really liked it.
My first question after reading the title was "Why?"

From the article:

"JA: All the problems we had (licensing, testing, deployments) could have been overcome. We could have used workarounds, written our own deployment framework, etc. What is comes down to is that we both really enjoy working with Rails and we enjoy the Rails community and the tools and libraries available. One of the best parts about running the show is that we get to do what makes us happy."
Trouble is, you're talking about you. Who may be perfectly logical and make sound decisions in the software you use based on the quantified experience.

I've used enough Adobe software to confidently say that all of their software is not shitty. In fact, a few tools are indispensable. Photoshop, Aftereffects, Premier come to mind.

In this "Adobe vs. the world" motif, all I see is: Adobe the dirtbag, and Apple the renegade hero with faults that preclude their existence.

I, for one, am sick of it. While some of it has plenty of merit, the rest of it is tea-bagging, Republican-style fact-swaying that results in false information and a false result.

Due to the assumptions laid forth for the "greater cause", we end up with no resolve. Just a table of "how we feel about Adobe" to reference without the bother to verify any positions or information or learn any lessons going forward.

The gang mob anti-Flash movement carries with it an original truth that no longer exists in it's current form. Which is: The Flash Player platform should be open. I tend to agree.

But what we end up with is: Death to plug-in arch (a complete opposite of open-web, IMO), death to experimental UI, death to technique that exists outside of W3C. Not understanding that Flash compilers are open source. Not understanding that frameworks like Flash carry with it underestimated advantages to moving the web forward.

This comment will likely get downvoted (if anyone even reads this far before deciding I am pro adobe) and some dude with a backhanded comment goes up. Logical? Nope. Trendy. Yes.

We're not learning anything from Adobe nor is Adobe learning anything from their market. That's their problem, true.

But it's 2010 and we're getting video in our browsers...finally. And the bad guy is Adobe.

Think about that.
I spent three weeks at the SIAI house in April/early May. Feel free to Ask Me Anything about the Visiting Fellows program. It will be several hours before I check this thread again.
They basically say:

"We don't log your IP address with the search term"

As it stands, they should append this to the end:

"but the architecture of our site lets Amazon log it."
It has nothing to do with the technology - it's good stuff and we could have made it work fine. The issue is we want to stay small and not take on the associated cost.

I can see how it might come off like I'm damning the platform - that was hardly my intention. Rails has had 3+ years of Open Source contribution to build out the platform and make it do amazing things - ASP.NET MVC will (hopefully) grow in some of the same ways - but there's a somewhat stunted element to the .NET OSS ecosystem. Hopefully that will change.
Moving such stuff to "settings" is hardly a good solution for wanting to stay anonymous. After all, it probably means you'll have to be logged in.
Actually, from Rails, to ASP.NET MVC, to ASP.NET MVC again ("because it was getting too complicated"), then to Rails.

I'd also be very hesitant to use MongoDB as a main datastore as it has no durability model - the 'D' in ACID. I hope they've at least changed the setting, or don't mind losing their last 60 seconds of writes when their EC2 instance goes down.

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Durability+and+Repair#Du...

Note that Mongo compares itself to MyISAM, but that is infrequently used now because of its lack of durability amongst other things - no transaction support, etc (most apps use InnoDB).
As a long time former .NET consultant (been using it since Beta 1), once I went OSS, it was nigh impossible to return to Windows land.

Right now I'm the CTO for a largish image licensing shop (think Getty, but more boutique/high end) that is entirely .NET (I inherited it). We are now in the process of moving it off Windows onto an OSS stack. It's a miserable experience. And an expensive one.
Zuckerberg accused of securities fraud
A fun thing about the VP8 patent situation: any company which attacks VP8 with a patent lawsuit has their license to use VP8 automatically terminated. From the license:

> If You or your agent or exclusive licensee institute or order or agree to the institution of patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that this implementation of VP8 or any code incorporated within this implementation of VP8 constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, or inducement of patent infringement, then any rights granted to You under this License for this implementation of VP8 shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.
Could you share some screenshots? The browsershots link [1] posted earlier only contains Windows XP.

It's hard to tell exactly what the quality is in Windos because the browsershots images are low-res, but it looks like the edges are very noisy.

[1] http://browsershots.org/http://code.google.com/webfonts
That will never change because the surrounding ecosystem is expensive as shit.

It's also very slow moving and wildly outdated.
This isn't DuckDuckGo's fault.

People serious about privacy will be using a proxy with flash/javascript disabled and headers scrubbed.
A very important advantage is that the browser can cache the stylesheet and the font, and can reuse them across multiple websites.

So if your website uses a font that is used by another website which the user has already visited, the browser doesn't need to download the font again. It doesn't even need to check the modification date on Googles server.

As many fonts add ~100 KB to the download size for a page, this really makes a difference.