skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
tbf the topic is "Typographical Analysis"

If the author displays a weakness in a Typographical practice/understanding, it's difficult to continue believing his "analysis" has real value; it would obviously be limited to at the very least those shown weaknesses, as well as the set of weaknesses we haven't yet seen.

And when the shown fault is at the basics of typographical best practice, then it is likely not worth reading any of the analysis; any statement used is likely a misunderstanding of the real properties of it. And given that this is targeted at people not well-versed in typography, then it is probably a case of a novice teaching a novice, and thus any presented understanding is likely, at best, a poor understanding of the subject, and at worst, incorrect.

When discussing typography, I think its pretty fair to judge the presentation as well as the content, since its a metric of their authority on the subject matter.

Not fair, however, is that the grandparent's subject is typography, and afaik, your criticism is not related to typography. Particularly in that in the article is very distinctly edited to use typographical "features", and fails to use them well (imo), a result of misunderstanding the properties of the features; whereas the grandparent is very distinctly not edited, and clearly a result of typing too fast. The grandparent is not thinking about typography in his presentation; The article is. So the article can be judged (it tried and failed), whereas the grandparent can really only be criticized for a lack of caring in the first place.
The speed of the current change is unprecedented. Your article makes the standard argument that climate changes in the past and this is more of the same, but it's just not true.

Xkcd summed it up nicely: https://xkcd.com/1732/
> Habañero chile

A bit off-topic, but since you mention spelling: "habañero" is one of my favourite hyperforeignisms in the English language. Wikipedia even uses it as an example in the first paragraph here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperforeignism . Such an interesting linguistic phenomenon!
It's not what you think. It's not about Windows or Windows Phone development on Mac, it doesn't support MSVS plugins... it's basically just Xamarin for Mac, iOS and Android development on Mac using Mono/CLR.
I have kids in primary school, there are probably some lice in there somewhere.
previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10981616
I disagree. As a child, I first thought video games contained pictures of everything that could possibly be drawn on the screen. And I don't mean sprites--I mean that there must be a separate picture for every possible position the frog could be in and every possible car in every possible spot on the road.

My mother was a programmer, but she didn't make video games, so she had a hard time answering my questions about how video games worked. The only reference materials I had were manuals for the C64 and similar machines, where they talked vaguely about PEEK and POKE and sprites. The technical details of video games were impenetrable to me.

In middle school, I played DOOM for the first time. I got a shareware CD with the DOOM FAQ, which talked about editing the game. I understood intellectually what a file was and that the files contained the images, sounds, and levels for the game, but I didn't know how editing the game worked, exactly.

I told my mother that the game could be "edited" but that I didn't know how to do it. She sat down with me and showed me how to launch the only "editor" she could think of on our home PC: edit doom1.wad

Of course, the data was meaningless to me, but the possibilities made me even more determined to understand. As I learned more about how that game worked, I learned more about how all games work. As I learned more about how all games work, I learned more about...everything, really.

The thing about learning the trick is that it usually makes people appreciate magic more. Knowing that the coin only "disappears" because the magician distracted you is useful and interesting, and the "trick" of it doesn't detract from the showmanship. Games are the same. Knowing something about how an effect is achieved doesn't diminish its power if it's expressed well.

As a programmer, it frustrates me when people perceive what I do as somehow magical or impossible for them to understand. It isn't, and it doesn't help any of us to perpetuate that misconception. If I hadn't learned how something as prosaic as DOOM's demo recording & playback worked, I don't know what I'd even be like today. I certainly wouldn't be a programmer, and I imagine I wouldn't be as happy and curious. I don't care what you think is lost in explanation--what's gained is so much more important.
My letter to 25 year-old me
I'm easily in the 99th percentile for physical strength, and anger is last in my repertoire of rich emotions. I'd say a peaceful, focused calm is probably number one.
So do big parking garages at suburban train stations.
If you live by hype at some point you gotta start delivering (edit: this is overstated, but whatever).

He's delivering to the freakin' International Space Station. What have you delivered lately?
This. When Musk came up with his hyperloop idea, I found it odd. It seems to me that transportation nowadays needs two things : supersonic airliners and self-driving vehicles.

The ideal scenario to me is this:

1. wait for a self-driving car to pick you up,
2. be driven to a subway/train-station,
3. take a train to the airport
4. fly at supersonic/hypersonic speed
5. repeat previous steps in reverse
JavaScript is a deeply flawed language. It has both undefined and null. You almost never use the == operator... except as a workaround to easily check if something is either null or undefined.

That being said, modern JavaScript is actually pretty nice, once you know where the pitfalls are.

But if JavaScript wasn't allowed to run by default, it would have never reached it's current level. It'd still be a deeply flawed toy scripting language.
It's sad and hilarious because it's true. Some people are blowing 60+k/year dining out.
> If we didn't have critics we'd still have kings with divine right. This seems like an exaggeration, but it's really just to say that we need people to look at things critically.

That's an extreme straw man that trades a lot on what a "critic" is.

Martin Luther didn't criticize the papacy because he doubted the papacy's capacity to realize its ambitions. He criticized the way the papacy was then operating.

People holding forth on how something can't be done are best described not as critics but doubters (or haters). "I can't imagine a way to do X, therefore X can't be done." How many impossible things does Musk have to do before people take serious Musk's ability to realize his visions?

Hating is so easy. But today's capacity to develop technology is utterly unprecedented.

Lead. Follow. Or get out of the way.
Tumbling $100 million seems slightly painful.
This looks really cool. However, boring through rock is the most expensive way to connect 2 places. It only makes sense if the land features or purchase value require it.

Fundamentally, this is about short-circuiting the regular road network and establishing a managed packet network that can bypass congestion. Interestingly, that's also the value proposition of public transit, though it also runs into issues of cost, and too low of a population density make it unfeasible.

I still think we haven't fully leveraged the potential of busses. In most cities, they are slow because they combine the disadvantages of road traffic with the disadvantage of time tables. But what if busses operated on their own dedicated network? Bogota deployed a public transit system made with busses but with a UX of a train[1]. This is a genius idea that could work in many US cities, which have a lot more space to spare.

But back to the original idea, I think we might see in the future a "managed" road network, reserved to self-driving cars which are driven by some central management system, optimising routing for the whole network so as to prevent congestion. This won't require tunnels, just gates, dedicated roads and lots of software.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU6ImWY4IBc
Smarter than swipes
You sound like you'd enjoy Mexican chocolate drinks, if you get the chance. I once had the chance to try freshly-prepared Mexican hot chocolate -- at a museum, actually, in connection with Day of the Dead festivities -- and it's certainly very different from what one thinks of as hot chocolate most of the time. The drink's kind of like coffee; you can certainly taste the chiles (note: NOT wasabi :) ), and it feels like it could get you drunk if you drank enough of it.

Spanish and Hispanic chocolate drinks, from what I understand, are pretty close to the old Mexican style. (Even Nestle's "Abeulita" milk chocolate mix tastes pretty similar, at least to my palate.) There was a reference in Braudel (The Structures of Everyday Life) to an Indonesian Muslim prince who was intoxicated when he drank a chocolate drink that a Spanish embassy served them, and was enraged that they had treacherously given him an intoxicant to make him lose his reason; Braudel is really skeptical of the account, but trying Hispanic chocolate, especially Mexican, makes it sound a lot more plausible...
Uh... if the solar energy could be better used elsewhere, you're still wasting energy. We're not post-scarcity yet.

Actually it's the land use on roads and parking which is most wasteful. Maybe we could solve half the problem with this, even if it is boring.
> Because people use the down-vote button to express disagreement.

While that is often true, this is not the case here.

The purpose of the "downvote" is to push poor discussion to the bottom of the page.

The rhetorical questions and obviously poor comparisons add nothing to the discussion.
At Backplane we sold for way the fuck less for not a much smaller userbase. Tech's wild.
The reduction in ebook purchases may not be quite what it seems. There's no call to buy an ebook in advance of the moment you're ready to read it, unlike a paper book. Unless you might forget it entirely, of course. So once you've accumulated a fair bit of ereading, you're not going to buy anything more unless you know you're going to read it immediately.

Additionally, the fact that you can't actually turn the Amazon kindle's light off completely means I don't eread in the evenings; pity.
The perception would be so. If not the money wouldn't be spent in the first place.
I Worked at Fyre Festival. It Was Always Going to Be a Disaster
A couple friends of mine are working on something new www.LovedUp.dating They'd love to share some info and get a bit of feedback.
I own almost nothing, and have lived on less than 400$ a month for the past 4 years.

A bike, a laptop, speakers, a table and chair, a mattress, two fans, a backpack, minimal clothing, and some sports-related stuff are the only things of mine that are worth > $10.
What? The Chicago L and NYC subways (both of which carry hundreds of millions of riders per year) have many, many miles of either at-grade or above-grade track.
I agree with what he's saying, but you do have a point. Good prose is lucid; eschew obfuscation, as the saying goes.
Hi all. I'm an author of a currently competing Starcraft AI and am pretty familiar with the scene and the techniques used. Happy to answer any questions.

This article is from 2015. Some recent updates: Facebook and Alibaba recently published papers on using pure learning techniques for controlling units, showing great progress while having a ways to go before catching up to traditional techniques. Google DeepMind is collaborating with Blizzard to make these competitions possible for Starcraft 2. And Martin Rooijackers, author of 2016 SSCAIT champion LetaBot, wrote an update on more recent developments: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/521711-berkeley-overmind-20-...
People holding forth on how something can't be done are best described not as critics but doubters (or haters). "I can't imagine a way to do X, therefore X can't be done." How many impossible things does Musk have to do before people take serious Musk's ability to realize his visions?

We're talking about strawmen: nobody is saying that. Nobody is saying it can't be done. They are saying...let's wait until it is done, because right now it's just a video. Is that hating or an entirely reasonable stance to take?
A measurement, which itself would suffer from the same bias.
As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.
I choose to raise children because they are beautiful and I owe the world more people like me. I was able predict beforehand the ways that it would change me, and they were all good.

I didn't have a choice to go through puberty. That was programmed through millions of years of adaptive evolution. It's the last thing from senseless.

I kissed my first woman because millions of years of adaptive evolution have tempered me to benefit from intimacy, bonding, and community.

If could do anything to help it, my family would never die. This is a terrible thing I never chose, and wouldn't wish on anybody if it were a choice.

All of these things that change us are nothing like a strange chemical we've stumbled upon and found to scramble our brains. Next.
Recalling the history of YikYak and it's problem in dealing with anonymity reminded me of this video: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024060/Still-Logged-In-What-AR

YikYak's struggle reflects a decade's worth internet troll evolution between Facebook and YikYak. At Harvard there was no iPhone, no precedents from Twitter, no standard arsenal trouble-making tools in the hands of college students.
You just sound like someone who doesn't enjoy the heat, yet managed to come up with a righteous backsplanation for why that must be.

Peppers simply heighten the experience of eating, like having your ass slapped during sex.
>Scientists unanimously agree that DNA is responsible for all of our characteristics

Whoa there buddy. They agree no such thing. Upbringing makes a difference too, to name just one of the entire gigantic category known as "environmental factors".
Like a MOAB drizzled with chocolate sauce? :)
> I thought we already knew how to make a home on Earth.

It seems to me that this really isn't the case. Our attempt to make a home here is causing a mass extinction, extremely fast change in atmospheric makeup (compared to historical models), depletion of fresh water reserves (in some areas anyways), increased frequency of bad weather, earthquakes, etc. Under a 'business as usual' model I have trouble seeing our current ecosystem supporting us for long (e.g. another 100 years).
They do compete by proxy, like in Brazil, where Didi invested $100m in "99".
Identifying risk is one of the most valuable things startups can be doing. Ignoring that risk can be one of the most detrimental things. Good entrepreneurs treat that risk as opportunity. Bad entrepreneurs are paralyzed by it.

"Reasons why not" are indeed a dime a dozen, but that doesn't mean they are useless. It may be a bit annoying to have to filter through the feedback that identifies the wrong risks, but we shouldn't use that as an excuse to ignore critical feedback. Some of the best feedback I've ever received that got my mind churning was from people who truly understood the problems and were able to identify "reasons why not" that I hadn't thought of.
Six months after launch, the Zcash market cap reaches $100M
But they do mask the quality of other ingredients -- note the Frenchman's comment above.
> It's easy to think of reasons why something won't work. It requires an insanely small amount of effort compared to finding a way to make something work. "Reasons why not" are a dime a dozen.

I'd enhance that a little and say that it's easy to think of facile reasons it won't work. But let's say you think of a reason why a thing won't work after two minutes. If someone else has been working at the problem for two hours, or two days, or two months, or two years, what's more probable?

- They never made the initial connection to the flaw, and have failed subsequently to notice it or account for it.

- They thought of a solution to the flaw which you haven't.

Hrm. Maybe I just don't have that high of an opinion of my own faculties, but I tend to assume it's the latter. Especially if the person in question is a very intelligent person with a strong track record of outperforming expectations.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't probe, or seek clarification, or ruminate on the flaw. But if you tell someone who's been working on a tunnel boring problem for a whole quarter that "boring through rock is the most expensive way to connect 2 places (sic)" as at least one person in this thread has observed, I'd argue that that's not a useful reaction. My reaction is, "I wonder what he knows that I don't."
2017 Pulitzer Prizes
I think 'clitoridean directional' is a clear winner
They're also collecting everything inside and outside their country.
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Cha...

Page 471 has a pretty clear diagram that explains the change - increase beyond the natural ability of the carbon cycle to mitigate the change leading to steady increases in industrial area (last 150 years effectively). I don't see ice core data showing wild fluctuations over periods of 10-100k years and the ppm of atmospheric carbon is relatively stable over this period.
I attend a university where YikYak was extremely popular from 2014-2016 (new posts every minute, top posts got >400 upvotes). Getting rid of anonymity was unpopular, but what really killed the app was, right before summer 2016 they eliminated the ability to post to your Herd even when you weren't in the Herd location. People went home for the summer, couldn't post or even view the university Herd, and it died overnight. Didn't help that they also stopped sorting by top (and only by new). When people came back in the fall, everyone had already moved on (now there are only a handful of posts a day, and a couple of likes). People moved to Snap Stories, and now to Facebook Meme pages. There was no way people were going to get back on YikYak, no matter what features they reverted.
As a libertarian, I am disappointed in the appeal to ideology here.

We aren't talking about regulations in general. We are talking about one specific regulation.

To bring up an ideology as an argument against something specific is to disregard any productive conversation about the topic.

I am a libertarian, and therefore, in general, abhor regulation. I am also a realist. This regulation is necessary in the reality in which you and I preside.

I have yet to hear any actual argument (not an appeal to ideology) - for me to agree or disagree with - stated in opposition to net neutrality.
>I'm starting to believe the only difference between those who start their own companies and those who don't is that the latter convinces themselves that it is impossible, never builds anything, and from their own lack of having ever produced anything, concludes that their original supposition was indeed correct.

And not because of socio-economic factors, obviously, no, it has to be that.

The fucking pretentiousness HN can have never ceases to amaze me.
> I don't see how anyone could be atheistic--how can you prove a negative?

From this, I take it that you believe we walk around disbelieving your god. "There's no god. Oh look, a tree, that wasn't created by a god. The sky? Not created by a god."

I don't. I put no thought into religious fictions whatsoever, unless they're brought up by others. Right now, unless you're tripping on something, you don't believe there's a little man on the other side of the wall drilling into it with industrial mining equipment so he can get to you and paint your genitals purple. You weren't thinking about it until I mentioned it, you hadn't even considered it until I mentioned it.

That's religious faith to me, right there - something that does not exist until you think about it, and equally unreal as you think about it.

As a Christian, you're required to help people out selflessly to get into Heaven, but since your deeds are selfishly intended to get you into Heaven and avoid your particular god's wrath, you have a small problem.

As an atheist, when I help someone out I do so because I can, because I can make someone's life a little better (or at least less terrible). I've known plenty of Christians who go out of their way to punish people for not being Christian.

In the end, I like to think that asd I breathe my last breath, I'll be able to say "Someone's life was better because I lived."

> The modern scientific materialist creed is mighty hubristic--a religion in itself--in asserting there is
> nothing besides matter--an impossibility to prove.

Science demands verifiable and repeatable proof. If you assert that your god exists, you have to meet a minimum standard of evidence. Remove that standard of evidence, and all claims become viable, from "I have a system that will let me win whenever I gamble!" through to the little man on the other side of your wall. If he didn't exist, you wouldn't hear noise from that side of that wall, now would you?
>Scientism is the over-reliance on or over-application of the scientific method

>The scientific method is unnecessary or even ill-suited in other areas, however. Consider these questions, and what sort of approach is appropriate to answer them: What is 17 divided by 3? All else held equal, what are the effects of an increase in demand for blue jeans? Who should I invite to my party? What are the effects of expansionary monetary policy on employment, prices, incomes, production, consumption, and borrowing? How should I treat people?

Mises institute at its best.
I agree with you fully. I even started to write a book on it [1]. Unfortunately there is nothing else.

When I was a young man, I had IE as the primary target. I could chose between screwy looking Javascript that wasn't fully supported across the fledgling NS/IE browsers, or VBScript, which wasn't supported at all on NS, but did just fine on IE. Since IE was huge, I learned VBScript because it took my BASIC skills, which were basic, to the next level.

VBScript quickly fell away even though I was able to do neat demos that were cutting edge such as adding fog lamps to a car to get a quote when buying a new car (or changing the color). It fell because MS didn't make VBScript available as a common standard so Mozilla didn't implement it. By the time Chrome came along, it was a dead language like Phoenician.

All that said to bring home the point: there is nothing else. Shit is shit, but at least like shit you can generate energy with JS. You can make the page move. You can seamlessly update sections with new data. It is the only thing than brings a spirit to a page. This is what either the users or the developers want (within reason, which is different for both of those markets).

Even with WebAssembly we will probably stay on JS for years to come. Each browser has to implement support for a new language as well as stay standardize compliant with JS. I doubt will see multiple languages equally supported.

It's a huge turd. It's a huge turd that gets things done. It's essentially both the ball and the beetle. Simply screaming into the void
won't help anything [2].

1 - https://github.com/virmundi/JSIsGarbage
2 - http://screamintothevoid.com
The thing I hate most about Javascript is that if I allow it in my browser, I expose myself to Javascript vulnerabilities. The other things I hate are ads delivered by Javascript and tracking enabled by Javascript.

If it weren't for this triumvirate of evil, as a user I wouldn't have a problem with Javascript at all.