skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I prefer Menlo/Deju Vu Sans Mono. It's amazing how all these monospace fonts differ in rendering between, say, 10pt and 18pt. I often find that the best looking one at a larger size just doesn't have the right 13pt/14pt sweet spot where it's both elegant and functional. The rendering also differs between systems, and even between frameworks, so there's not even one right answer.
I don't own an iPad but I think Apple's non-support of Flash is great. It's shipping the first major web browser in the last decade that's explicitly not supporting flash.

So it's helping to make Flash more irrelevant every day, by forcing developers to finally consider that delivering their content in some executable binary blob isn't a reasonable thing to do on the web.

Thanks, Apple!
> I don't know exactly how his experiment would turn out.

I'm sure there would be correlation, but I suspect that it would be very far from perfect, possibly because of talent or inadvertently (or deliberately) discovering better and more effective ways to practice.

I'm reminded me of when I was a kid and played chess with a friend a lot. At first I could beat him and we played about the same amount but suddenly he inexplicably got far better than me. It bugged the hell out of me:)

So I think the result of Adams' "lesson" would actually be to teach people that they have strengths and weaknesses, and practice helps a lot, but it will (rather quickly) get swamped by talent in any realistic endeavor. And results might also be strongly affected by effective coaching or acquiring specific knowledge to make those hours of practice dramatically more effective.
Yep, but "out" must be "somewhere"... I assume they don't leave the legal profession altogether. Management consultants up-or-outed usually become either independent hyper-specialists (e.g. one very narrow industry vertical they they can "own" as the expert[1]) or get hired into upper-middle management by former clients (and then turn around and hire their old firms).

[1] I know one guy whose speciality is labelling. Dude knows everything you could possibly want to know about "sticking labels on stuff" on an industrial scale, and that's how he makes his living, consulting on that.
Year of Disappointing I.P.O.s Angers Investors
'Save the world' is a bit over the top but cheap cellular infrastructure is a big deal for the developing world.
The Root is amazing, you will not find a more talented group of people. A couple of us post here on HN. It's invite only but getting in is just a matter of having a connection (you do) and an impressive portfolio (do you?)

http://www.theroot42.org
interesting how similar these designs are - are these some off-the-shelf parts everybody but me knows about (leaving aside premium wordpress themes)?
why do my webapps looks so sucky ?
For SF Bay Area => http://www.baychi.org
You could always use an add-on to download the video files.

I'm a fan of Video DownloadHelper - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3006/ for firefox.

It usually works for any website that embeds media into flash.
There have been a number of occasions when I was glad to have Flash. A lot of restaurant websites are built entirely in Flash. Granted this really applies to my phone more than it does the iPad. Usually if I am looking at something on the iPad I can go grab my laptop for Flash, even if it is a pain. But having Flash on my phone has definitely come in handy.

I also ran into a problem with YouTube the other day. I couldn't find a video that I knew was there. Turns out it isn't available through the YouTube app, only on the regular website. Granted you could argue that is a complaint about YouTube, but if I had Flash on the iPad then I would just be going to the normal YouTube site and would not have experienced that frustration.

Basically I don't have a need for Flash on a regular basis. But there is still a lot of "legacy" content out there that is encoded in Flash and it would be nice to be able to access it.
Introducing Wikileakileaks: Your Source for Wikileaks-Related Leaks
Check out:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/07/how-to-install-flash-on-y...
So if we are interested in joining do we send an email to ben (at) carbonfour.com, or do we talk to you?
I really wish we had more hardware diversity. With open-source software, it shouldn't be very hard to do.

Having to choose between a Core i3, i5, Athlon, Duron, Sempron, Whateveron, or between embedded, ATI or Nvidia doesn`t really feel like having any choice...

Or, to paraphrase Henry Ford, you can choose any architecture, as long as it runs Windows.
I've noticed that too. Every time a new web app comes along, they often have the same website design. Screenshot on the right (with reflection), Tour and Signup on the left, features underneath and then some endorsements and company logos. All very similar. However there are some, like that Notebox app which do break the mould.
I've just started wearing my work boots again (sneakers are falling apart) and they give an incredible sense. The sturdiness of the boot makes every step feel perfect and reassuring; even just walking down the hallway to get a drink becomes a wonderful experience as I take in the sense of confidence and surety that having a good pair of boots gives.
I just use http://www.unsubscribe.com and it fixes my junk mail and mailing list problem once and for all.
For the less "sciency" science of Generative Linguistics, there is another arxiv.org-style repository at http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz.

People in this scientific community are quite aware of the advantages that these kind of open repositories bring to their disciplines.
oh brilliant, thanks
+ also that bi-colour thing. Either that or apple-like icons.
The taxi medalion is a little more than a price fix in some cities, such as London.

Buying from somebody wih a zero rep on ebay means you might lose out on your beanie baby. Putting your daughter in a random strangers car with no information other than them owning (or having stolen) an iphone is a little different.
Ask HN: Does any transparent note-taking overlay program exist?
I described what I'm looking for here -

http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/?p=183

--

I’ve got a spreadsheet and a web browser open and I’m doing some research. I keep having to click back and forth. It’d be a lot better if I could take notes right on top of the web page, maybe have the spreadsheet transparent on top of the site I’m looking at.

1. Does anything like this currently exist?
2. How hard would it be to do technologically?

I’d use it. A lot, actually.
We got clear visions and mottos such as "Be the best technically advanced tool in the field", that's our edge being technically better than other competitors.

But well it's a software and not like we are saving the world or ending war in Middle East, or poverty in Africa. All we do is making a cool software and making something new in the field.

What sort of shared values and clear goals we talking about? To be honest other than obvious clear goals for many startups -make great software, be fresh, be better- (I think) we don't have anything stand out.
Analysis of New Generation Facebook Worm
They may be planning to add this - but what would be very nice would be to have the same data accessible through both "traditonal" file system APIs but also allow NoSQL style access to the associated metadata.

If you could then plug in your own indexing and search engine in at the file system level and have it accessible through the same API then that would be particularly awesome.
Chartbeat gets $3m from Index, Calacanis, Conway, Clavier, Sacca
Apple-like icons? Surely not. No-one would surely dare to copy Apple right?
I honestly feel as though I missed out on something big regarding the Amiga. While a teenager, I would regularly get .info magazine, and wonder in awe at the games and media tools the platform had. However, in my neck of the country (NW Ohio), there were no stores or support for the platform. Ironically, given its marginal status at the time, it was easier to find tech service and stores selling Macs than other platforms in the late 80’s. When I got my first “modern” computer (a Mac LC) in college, one of the first things I put on it was an Amiga module tracker…
5 out of 8 bad apples? Have you considered you might have a leadership issue here ?

Regardless if your team is local or telecommuting, treat them professionally, be clear, honest and shoot straight with no politics.

Also, be sure that you are asking people to do things they can actually achieve and that the tasks are "around" their skill level (so they don't get bored to death)
UN report on glaciers melting is based on 'speculation'
Newbie here. Is there any way to vote down content-free posts?
Even the BBC, usually so good, is terrible about this. And it's not like people haven't told them, they're just terribly intransigent about it.

http://bengoldacre.posterous.com/trying-to-get-the-bbc-to-li... is Ben Goldacre writing in to the Beeb.

He later had a response ( http://bengoldacre.posterous.com/no-movement-on-the-bbcs-biz... ):

"Many thanks for your message, and interest in the site.
The issue of linking to specific research papers, rather than the journals in which they appear is something with which we have long wrestled.

Linking to the journal gives the reader the chance to look at the source of the story, understand something of the wider context and get an idea of whether the research is peer reviewed. It also gives a chance to read associated information in editorials, etc, which often may be of interest. It is also a way for us to credit the journal.

We accept that linking to the specific research paper itself is often a desirable thing to do, and it is certainly something we will try to do more of in future. However, we don't believe that it is something we can do on every occasion - for instance many papers are available on the web via subscription only, while others give only an Abstract summary. In these instances, the vast majority of our readers would not be able to read the full papers, without paying for access, even if we provided the relevant link.

In addition, we do have finite resources, and our view is that our top priority should always be to provide authoratitive, accurate and attractive reportage. We have to balance that against the desirability of providing a link on a story which is likely to be of use only to a small number of our readers.

We have sent out new guidelines to reporting staff summarising our position, and stressing that linking to individual papers is something they should consider as an option on each story."

Which he (and I) thought was a bit rubbish. So it goes.
4 million reasons why you shouldn’t pay for backlinks
This might sound like a cop-out response, but I'm reading Switch by ChipDan Heath and I think it'd help you out. It's a new perspective on getting change to stick. One idea I really liked is "focusing on the bright spots" - figuring out what's working about the people who are performing much better than the others, and figuring out how to make this happen for the underperformers. For example, maybe you could ask the overachievers exactly what they're doing to manage their time, and compare that with the others.

It sounds like the underachievers want to be good employees, but you have to figure out how to get them in that direction.
OK, so what is the metropolis/urban core of online media?
I had an Atari 512 STE. Clearly the superior choice.

(More of my school friends back then had Ataris than Amigas, so it was a no-brainer decision for me.)

I'm curious what spurred the insane die-hard mentality though. Most of us left the Amigas and Ataris for the PC in the early 90s, except for a few who swore by their Amigas and loved them to bits even though their relative performance grew more and more pathetic.

So what caused it? First love? Or was there something genuinely good about the system? I'm genuinely curious.
It'll be really interesting to how much disintermediation takes place as a result of UberCab. I expect they'd need to expand beyond iOS to get scale but that should be possible.

In the UK there are lots of regulations surrounding Private Hire vehicles and Taxis, some of those rules are regional too. I doubt I'd see something, like this here but the firms should definitely be aware.
"I also want to take exception to Thom's statement that Apple "fought hard to maintain jailbreaking as an illegal activity". It might not have been "[a] figment of our collective imagination", but without a shred of support provided in the post, it might very well have been."

What? There is a link to an article that very well summarizes the levels of FUD Apple raised to in order to maintain jailbreaking illegal ("Exposing children to age-inappropriate content", "Limitation on ability to innovate", "Cellular network impact") The only thing they missed is Hitler.
Other video sites besides YouTube aren't fully there yet. I randomly run into embedded videos on blogs that are using Flash to embed -- it's not always easy to find the HTML5 version. It's been getting better.
This may work in SFO. But does anyone know if the town car companies in NYC (Dial 7, Carmel etc etc etc) have overcapacity issues?

In the everyone is a taxi model- do you really want to get into a car without knowing how that person drives? There are people in my own family I won't drive with, let alone pay them to drive me somewhere.
Not sure what kind of grocery-getter you were looking at, but the Audi USA site let me ogle and price hot an R8 on my iPad just fine.
Having got to play with the site yesterday, I was impressed that one of MY conferences was already listed with speakers, attendees and myself listed as an editor, its a really nice interface which impressed me straight off.

The only thing I would suggest would be also having facebook connect or whatever its called this week as even though we are a web conference, only 60% of our audience has a twitter account however most of them have a facebook account (with mostly the same friends)
I worry about them getting AirBnB'ed. I'm a big fan of AirBnB and CS, and I've often thought I'd be happy to do a fare when I've got a hour or so between meetings.
a friend of a good friend of mine was brutally raped by an independent Lincoln Town Car licensed driver (in NYC). I would advise (my personal opinion) women to avoid such services and deal with the hassle of getting a cab. Getting into a stranger's car and closing the door behind you is an action that should not be taken lightly. That is why I always take a taxi or use a well-established car service (as in substantial with a fleet of cars) instead of trusting someone who is able to drive you around because he/she filled out an application and leased a fancy black car. At least there is some accountability with taxi and fleet drivers. And unless UberCab does serious due dilligence on their drivers (perhaps they do?), I would stay away from this service (again, if I were a woman).

Edit: Please note that I do not mean to imply that all car drivers are bad people. I am confident that the majority of them are good, honest people trying to make a living the best way they can.
W3GiftCards launches free merchant service
Easily provide online gift card services (via IFrame and Facebook app) to any merchant trying to offer gift cards through their website with no setup fees. Launched with W3Gifts.com to promote our merchants gift cards.
Any reason to prefer NoSql to full relational?

If not, what's the difference between your request and WinFS aka longhorn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS .
Very good point about (potential) stolen iPhones but your argument still applies to the current system. It's still a stranger in a car, they just happen to be sent under the banner of a company.

If the taxi firm itself implemented (or used a version) of this kind of service then that could be a great win for the firm.
Charles, you must be way new. A post can either be a URL or a comment. That's it. I commented immediately to give more info than I could with the link.

What would you like to know? I'll be happy to add more.
Yes, people naturally like simplicity. If you have a small enough product portfolio, it is a good idea to have a domain that points directly to that product and market that domain. It can forward to your main domain, but have a url to a targeted brochure about that product on your main site is a good way to provide clear, simple and relevant information. For example if you go to www.mac.com it forwards you directly to apples landing page for Macintosh. www.iphone.com right to the iphone page. Now that does not immediately equate to more traffic, you still have to market your site to get people to look.
Sorry, I'm not trying to say that this wasn't yet possible, just that I want to see a number of people doing it. Are the reports good? does it work very well?
Patrick,

You could probably sell out your own webinars. Like Salman Khan, you break complicated and/or mysterious concepts down well. You're a gifted teacher.
I've been working through these myself. Great lectures. The whole MIT OCW thing is a godsend if you're trying to learn any of this stuff outside of a classroom.
GMail isn't even that popular for webmail. It's just that it's insanely popular among the tech types.
Sound like a nice idea, but unfortunately taxis are a regulated industry in most major cities (e.g. NYC, Boston, Chicago). The difference between a taxi and non-taxi are usually that a taxi license or medallion is required in order to legally stop for somebody hailing down a cab on a street.

If this service became at all popular, it is very likely that cities would immediately include "mobile hailing" as also requiring a license. The entrenched interests of the taxi companies are simply too big (and they have the political clout) to let this one slide under the radar.
Looking for cool email forwards? 
Get wonderful collection of forwarded emails at coolemailforwards.com. Share these mails and explore your friendship network.
>>if you ask them it's all personal problems

I did a double take when I saw that. I have to ask:

Five of eight really say that personal problems influence work that much for so long?!

You do realize that is statistically unlikely?! (Unless they are in e.g. Pakistan, with natural and man made catastrophes.)
I think the idea is that the non-iOS Mobile Flash players are sub-par.
Ask HN: weekend project - printable PDF calendars
I created a simple web interface to pscal/PCAL. Over the years some people have asked me to create blank calendar pages for them using PCAL, because they like the look. Just blank calendars, something quick to print and write on.

So I created this really simple site. Thanks for any comments.

http://www.pdfcal.com/
what WAS i thinking.
It's not a live ATM. They didn't even have to hack the Windows PC it's running on, since they're developing for it.
what if one doesnt have any impressive portfolio or any even. Could one just join & learn??
Everything about anyone being able to join the network and become a taxi driver (from about the sixth paragraph onwards) is pure speculation; technically, there's nothing preventing it (well, aside from modifying the app to require more than hitting a button), but they haven't done so yet, and might not. Currently, they're contracted with black car services, so professional drivers who are probably at least as safe as a taxi driver (unless I'm horribly misreading this).

However, if they are considering moving in that direction (again, no proof of that), your criticism is really important to consider, and might be a pretty big limitation. I'm sure that there are ways around it, but only if the network of drivers is heavily moderated, with lots and lots of safe-guards built in. Also, not allowing children/teens to ride unless accompanied by an adult, and adding some sort of panic button to the app.
Facebook Down for Many Users
One simple improvement would be to default the starting month to the current month. Why would anyone want an expired calendar?

You could also have little shortcut links that preselect sensible options, like "next three months", "current year", "next year", etc.
Why does the font matter? This is a serious question. I use the default font on all of my editors and I've never had a problem. I can tell ohs from zeros and els from ones, etc. And I don't care about different types of serifs or other typographical nuances. Do most of the advantages come when using alphabets besides English?

Why are custom programming fonts so popular?
I agree. Also, I'm hesitant to log in from work since we block twitter here and I don't want to hit the web filter.
An excellent point - Prolog fans (usually those who never actually programmed anything) would describe it as a declarative language.

However, any "real" Prolog program that I ever saw was really using it as a slightly odd procedural language.
They've been hawking that message for a while now though and you managed to convey his point in about 40 words (including citing two examples) as opposed to a whole article.

I've long been of the opinion that 37 signals while making genuinely really good products are prone to going on about how interesting and innovative their ideas are way beyond what is actually justified by the ideas.

Mind you, if people were willing to pay $1,000 a seat to hear me bang on about things for a day there'd be no shutting me up either.
One of the first things that the FGCP did was discover that Prolog wasn't parallelizable the way they had hoped: very quickly they switched to a language called KL1 (very different from KL-ONE) that was parallelizable.

I'm amused at the general supposition that the FGCP was a failure. Yes, it failed to produce specific hardware that was commercially competitive, but the basic program of "applying parallelism to search and database tasks" behind it was the basis for Deep Blue, Google's web search and the infrastructure behind many a large scale system.
Wasn't there an article posted here last week about hackers using this same software stack to spoof towers and intercept calls with about $1500 in gear?
Wasn't able to sign in with twitter--got a 404. If you can become the largest directory of conferences, and get people to post slides and things, so they're all in one spot, I think it's a no-brainer.

Interestingly, there's also http://confindr.com which promises to be similar...
The book I've had the most luck with is Learning To Program by Chris Pine. There's a question in the book about counting the sections of land on a standard X,Y grid map. That would be a good example of a problem that blows up my brain.
I like it. Nice layout and I like the fact that you can search/browse conferences without having to log in.

Nice job.
The talent pool isn't the issue. The talent has gotten better over the years.

I meant dilution of talent caused by league expansion. There are more teams now and so, the chance of each team loading up with multiple good players becomes smaller.
(A certain South-Florida based team not withstanding)

I agree with guaranteed contracts. It's harmful to the team, especially when the team is run by numbskulls.
I used to work at a local ISP that outsourced spam filtering to Postini (before it was aquired by Google). It was a really impressive service at the time, and I imagine it's improved since then.
Beginning of series of how "Scientists can save the planet"
5 Comic Book Spinoffs (That Never Should Have Happened)
When a comic book becomes incredibly popular, the only logical thing a publisher can do is create a spin-off exploring other characters.
Gmail Priority Inbox: 5 Tips for Better Productivity
Actually I was talking about this one: http://www.fixedsysexcelsior.com/

If you call that bold, ok.
I call it: easy to read and less strain on my eyes.
Especially because there is no need for ClearType (et al), which I can't stand, as it always looks blurry to me.