skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It took me years of programming (and even more years of being a computer user) to realize that it's worth choosing a programming font. It honestly hadn't occurred to me.

I've been using Monaco for a while, mostly because it's the "happiest" looking font I've found. Going to be giving this font a test drive now.
Having stuck with the Amiga until '98, with an overly expanded computer - capable of playing Quake etc, it was the last real computer platform I cared for. All these useless companies that purchased it without a long term plan was exasperating. If anything, it's taught me to take a step backwards and avoid becoming tribal over any technology.
Amiga 500: Best Computer Ever.
I encourage anyone curious to take a look at the data they generated. http://github.com/macan/Pomegranate/wiki/Experiment I'd love it some other people were to give it ago, and see if they can replicate the results. I'm still setting it up.
I've been using regular Anonymous for a while now. Now when I see it, I think "That looks like my code." The "0" character being slashed the normal way and staying inside the circle is a welcome change. If he was concerned with it looking too much like a Ø character, he could have used a dotted zero I suppose although these kinds of details are capable of spurring wars.

Anyway, it looks nice in everything I switched over... except Komodo Edit which renders the line heights wrong at pts lower than 14. I'm willing to blame that on the editor though.

Highly recommend it.
Another nice choice, on the sans-serif side, is an APL font from dyalog (even if you're not an APL programmer). It has a certain old-school charm that pleases me.

http://www.dyalog.com/downloads/fonts/Apl385.ttf
MPC works wonderfully though. I hope you're not confusing it with Microsofts version.
We do many of these, however we don't focus on weekly tangible results which is a really important point and can motivate the team a lot. One of the problems that we don't do web startup which means whatever we do, it'll be generally delivered to the end user at least 2 months later, but still seeing something get done is a good way to be motivated.
I couldn't offer advice on whether or not to fire without criteria more specific than 'performance'. Presumably, you aren't hiring people to perform you're hiring them to get a job done-- and what specifically about that job has not been done that you need done?

Unclear expectations and confusing priorities can make motivation very difficult. You use the term 'performance' 5 times and I still haven't the slightest idea what these guys are supposed to be producing except that they are "technical." I understand you don't want to be identified and that's fine, but if you use this kind of imprecise language with your employees, they'll just nod and vaguely agree to get through the conversation. Five minutes later they'll realize the conversation was completely pointless.
Silly little prank app makes tons of money on release
Email _is_ realtime.

IMAP IDLE does exactly this - push email. I get email on my phone as soon as it arrives at the server. Sadly, the email app on Android doesn't do this out of the box, but the K9 email app does it perfectly well.
UberCab to disrupt the Taxi/Limo business
Because the vast majority of its readers don't care about research articles. They just want to be told something.
Re: Prolog implementation, in case you haven't already found it, the book Warren's Abstract Machine: A Tutorial Reconstruction, by Hassan Aït-Kaci, is pure gold for understanding the WAM.

http://web.archive.org/web/20030213072337/http://www.vanx.or...
SublimeVideo HTML5 player released as a service
My country doesn't have Street View yet :(
This changed with the 3GS, where Apple began issuing signatures for individual devices to authorize firmware installs. This procedure is also in play for the 3rd generation iPod Touch, iPhone 4, and iPad.

The firmware install process includes a phone-home procedure that verifies with Apple that the device is authorized to install that firmware.

Once a new firmware image is released, Apple just stops issuing signatures for the previous releases and devices can no longer install it.

The procedure is vulnerable to a replay attack, and so Cydia offers a stand-in replacement for Apple's authorization server, but users who want to downgrade have to be savvy enough to save their auth token ahead of time.
I'd add UX Bookclub, and the UX Freelancers group on LinkedIn.

I'd also look at Product Management groups as UX is a specialism within that, so ProductCamp and ProductTank for starters.
if you can point out another, I'd try it, but I found this: http://fixedsys.moviecorner.de/?p=download&l=1 and it's only in bold. Hard to imagine using it.
I use Anonymous and I'm trying out Anonymous Pro now but Consolas is a fantastic font as well. Especially on windows, as it has great cleartype hinting. It also has a two-storey "a" and the slashed 0 going the correct way.
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Actually I wasn't considering this but you and many others in here pointed out mass firing would be very bad with very good reasons. Now I changed my mind about this, even if I finalize my decision on firing it'll be worst to better in every 2 months (unless they change in the middle).
Relegation makes a big difference because it means that aiming to minimise spending is not a viable strategy; the potential to be profitably run in lower divisions is much lower. Likewise, because the debts incurred by risky spending to try and beat the top teams (all with huge global merchandising incomes or a sugar daddy) also have resulted in financial crises, you have the curious outcome of most of the division aiming to be somewhere in mid-table.
Great news for a great library. Glad to see it still active and progressing. Best SVG javascript library out there.
If there is one intelligence outlier on this planet, that's Edward Witten.
Flagged for misleading headline. As far as I can see, he hasn't changed his position on global warming.

(But also upvoted because it's an interesting article)

"Howard Friel, author of the book The Lomborg Deception, said: "If Lomborg were really looking for smart solutions, he would push for an end to perpetual and brutal war, which diverts scarce resources from nearly everything that Lomborg legitimately says needs more money.""

With enemies like that, Lomborg really doesn't have much to worry about.
> I think it would be best to have a Prolog-like language
> as a library (like Lua or SQLite), to embed it for rules
> & scripting.

You may be interested to know that there are various prolog Perl modules on CPAN, particularly AI::Prolog and Language::Prolog::Yaswi .
Change your standard for being convinced that another idea is better, and pg's heuristic would have worked in your situation.
yep if i want deeper explanation of funcations and their uses mainly, probably 20 times a day i would say if im just crusing, if im speeding 50-60 times a day,
We are tech company, we don't even have sales or marketing department. We do awesome products and people love it. That's how we do and sell.

Normally I'm not a manager just an passionate engineer however setting up your own company generally makes you an instant manager.

Can't I find 5 more people who can work without nudging instead of hiring a useless person (read: manager) to just nudge people?

Or do you think finding 5 new people who fits the bill is harder than finding one manager who can nudge people.
Dear Internet Vigilantes and Lynch Mobs
My Amiga 1000 is sitting about five feet from me. I haven't turned it on in a very long while.

Even my beloved Commodore 64 is long gone, but I haven't been able to part with the Amiga. Not saying this is a good thing. Just saying.
when i posted a link to their wiki last week nobody even noticed. harumph.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636330
I think the problem is simply in the name of the button.

I ran this by some of my less technical friends who use Facebook and they said some variation of "yes, that's what it's for isn't it? It's just got a confusing name"

Something like "Follow" would be more descriptive.

EDIT: the problem stems from Facebook trying to switch from being a "person-to-person" social network to a Twitter-esque community network.
I've had an apple developer account for a while now, but just last week finally had the time to try and write software for the iPhone.

The gender scan prank app is it. Released at 99 cents late Saturday night, it has become much more of a hit than I had hoped.
Me too. Here's a link for the unenlightened: http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html
I believe patio11 did something similar. Made an A/B testing framework to sell bingo cards. He advises doing this http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/

I think it's a brilliant idea and plan to copy it (y'know sometime...)
It's a huge invasion of privacy

Oh come on. That's stretching into silly territory.
Different countries.

I'm a bit lost though, I thought in HN many people thought that telecommuting was way to go and there are cool companies such as 37Signals rocking by telecommuting.

Am I missing something? Are those all lies, or do HNers generally love telecommuting because they can slack off as an employee? Or maybe that was only me and pretty much everyone thinks telecommuting is a bad idea.
Steve Jobs, Circa 1997, Reintroducing Apple
If personal problems are in the way, expressing priorities clearly is even more important than usual. Employees need a clear understanding of what they need to accomplish before they can stop thinking about work and start taking care of business. Make that boundary clear and when they've done what you need and are dealing with personal stuff, you ask no questions (stress about work is probably making their personal problems worse, which in turn is hurting their performance).
Yes - I have a printed copy of that, actually. It's not the end of Prolog evolution, but it's a good snapshot of common implementation techniques, and it definitely clarified things.

Here's a (rather snarky) LtU comment by Peter Van Roy pointing to other designs improving on the WAM - http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/classic/message1618.html#1108...
I don't know, but I love Consolas so much that I'd be hard pressed to try anything else. I can set a small font size, lean back in my chair and still read it clearly without squinting.
Congratulations. Care sharing how much marketing you did? Yet another data point that fun wins. Especially if you have a polished UI.

I'm convinced that most people looking in the App Store are not looking for productivity apps. They have enough of that in their day jobs with Excel and Outlook and what not. Your app hits the mark, in more ways than one.
In the options of the browser, under plugins. I have set it to prompt, best of both worlds.
From the perspective of someone who's been telecommuting for the past year-ish: if they admit that their performance problems are personal, and it's just a lack of discipline on their part, maybe they're not cut out for it.

You've got to be able to ignore sunny days and log some productive hours, and if you can't you're not cut out for telecommuting. And if you've got this culture of being lazy and not taking deadlines / goals seriously, the 3 competent guys are going to realize at some point that they have no real motivation for being competent.

I'd make an example of one of the peons, give the 3 a token raise/reward, and have a chat about what's acceptable and professional.

And if you're looking for a contract guy who can deliver, shoot me an email ;)
Firing 5 out of 8 people is an indicator that you are not good at hiring or not good at managing them.

Try these podcasts, they talk about both topics.
http://www.manager-tools.com/
Ask HN: Does it help to have dedicated domain for non-web apps?
Let say currently have url for few Mac OS X desktop and iPhone apps:

http://manysoftware.com/twitclient/
http://manysoftware.com/buttockbook/
::

Will I get more traffics and exposure to have additional dedicated domains for each such as http://twitclient.com/, http://buttockbook.com, etc? Each of these domain will host the same content as the main site.
trouble with the social graph is that it's even easier to game. Click "like" to reveal discount code offer...
The problem is that so many people understood the basic ideas about micro-niches and about placing appropriate keywords where it is possible or not - domain names, uris, tirles, headers, internal links, div names - every element you could imagine.

There are very strong competition in, say, tour agencies in a small region. Type Sikkim, or Ladakh or Nepal - hundreds of sites with almost the same content - buy our tours. And of course, first 3 got a shitload of money, while rest got nothing.

SEO is just a part of the rules of the game, and it is really big. Micro-niches, like putting misspelled keywords (no one knows how to write Kanchenjunga or Unawatuna) helps a little.

So, just accept that SEO became mainstream thing and 8 of 10 trying to take advantage of it, with the almost the same crappy content. Content of a really good quality is really costly, especially periodic one.
AutoCAD coming to iPad, iPhone, returning to Mac
Perl isn't really my thing* , but I'll take a look at how they're implemented. I was thinking a C library with a C API that will make it easy to use from Lua, Python, Ruby, etc.
Yaswi is probably just a wrapper to SWI-Prolog. There are a few of those, and I'm tempted to write one for Lua.

I think designing a Prolog-like language primarily for embedding, rather than wrapping a standalone Prolog, will have an interesting effect on the design though - Lua, for example, benefits tremendously from being able to leave certain issues to C. An embedded logic language could likewise focus on what it does best.

* Somebody is probably going to pop out of the woodwork and say that my impression of Perl is based on Perl 10 years ago. They're right, as that's roughly when I switched to Python. It'd be tough to convince me to switch back, though. I'm fine with awk for "tiny Perl script" hacks, and prefer other languages for larger stuff.
it's kind of split, but a lot of HNers think that telecommuting isn't optimal.

(Personally, I disagree ;)
OK, I stand corrected. I'm stuck with a 3G. Probably my example of downgrading from a beta to the current release is no good either - it will likely still work with the system you described, but it is not indicative of the ability to arbitrarily downgrade the OS>
Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror has some perspective:
"On Working Remotely"
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/05/on-working-remotely...

A lead-in quotation:
"I have learned a few things about what it means to work remotely -- at least when it comes to programming. Our current team encompasses 5 people, distributed all over the USA, along with the team in NYC."
> See again - where's the geek cred in a compact edition and magnifying glass?

Performance art. When some fool has questioned my mastery of the English language, and I have pummeled him into submission by reciting aloud the definition, I can then stare at him through the magnifying glass. One large eye, blinking.
They're attractive designs, but you should probably mention you're Halogy's official rep, or someone might think you're gaming yc for commercial gain.
This looks strange: In the 'all characters' tab, the Greek omega appears only with a stress, not in its regular form. Is this usual with fonts or a peculiarity of this one? I actually got excited to have a nice Greek-enabled font, but this threw me off.
If you are irritated by the fact this was only part one, part 7 - with links to the earlier parts - can be found here. http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/05/amiga-history-p...
A history of the Amiga (part 7/7)
Don't know if this is the best place to bring it up, but I don't think "bacn" is a good word for low-priority email. There are a lot of passionate email users who are even more passionate about bacon.

There could even be a backlash.
Most modern programming fonts have good typography. In fact, most older programming fonts have good typography too (except for terminal, on Windows). Since the guys who make amazing typographic marvels are the same that bring us our fixed-width fonts, I'm not surprised.
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Hrm, the images on the site look fuzzy, could not stand to look at that for long. The font is also a bit too…expressive? The round shapes are very prominent. There seems to be some disproportion to some letters which makes text look uneven to my eyes.

I use SGIscreen at 13px, no antialias.

Edit: not the best showcase but here is an old screenshot: http://files.kittensoft.org/vim_ruby.png
http://undrln.com/ exists, but it has been pretty dead lately.
I thing you should start a hiring process and make it visible and obvious to everyone. Start interviewing young guys and make it clear, that you will replace anyone when you will find a better performer.

Make it clear that you want to establish a competition, and reward only the best performers. Consider a football team as a model.

Then replace just one worst guy with a young and ambitious geek - it will be a bold and clear message to rest of your team.
I actually think dragging it out over several months would be even worse. I wouldn't fire more than 2 that way. Your good employees will be wondering if they are next and if they should be polishing their resume (which they'll do instead of work you need done)
I wish Dave would read and abide by "How to Disagree." The wisecrack about Gruber's minions takes a reasonable discussion and reduces it to Fox-Newsworthy labeling and ad hominem rhetoric.

People who agree with Gruber are cut from much the same cloth as people who want the choice of whether to run Flash.
Oracle Author Podcasts
This project seems interesting but the github repo seems to be missing the kernel part. That or the documentation and blog post are incorrect. Hopefully someone will be able to provide a little more information about using it so others can test it.
Even if Apple wanted the iPad to support flash, how could they? A working mobile flash implementation does not exist, certainly wasn't even close to existing at the time the iPad was released, and the lack of it doesn't seem to have affected sales.

How could you possibly complain that the iPad doesn't support software that doesn't exist?

Let's postpone this discussion until when Adobe can show off a flash runtime that a) exist and b) doesn't suck. Is that too much to ask?
Hacking the OpenJDK compiler
That it's coincidence, obviously. If both Apple and Digg had launched v.13 of their products, with problems, then people would be more perceptive to it. Just imparting a little bit of culture, that's all. For those that don't know (and who knows, you might find it useful some day if you launch something in China), 4 is China's 13.
Telecommuting has real problems, especially when it's a larger team (8+ is a large team in this situation) There'e a real danger of an "us versus them" mentality setting up, from everyone involved.

First, assume the team is intelligent and wants to produce.

Second, establish a backlog and have clear weekly items that need to be completed. The team gets to decide which ones they can complete -- or not.

Third, make it clear that they can screw it up for a couple of weeks, but no more. There will not be a third week of dissapointment. (But you may be dissapointed with what they say they can do for each week. Different topic) The team will be judged as a group, not individually.

Then get out of their way and let them work it out.

At the end of the day, however, you're probably best off sacking just about everybody. The ones who are not performing are in a rut, the ones who are performing probably have copped an attitude, and your ability to interact and work with a telecommuting team has probably developed some seriously bad edges.

Can't sack yourself, though. But whatever you do, heck if I'd start right back up with the telecommuting. Bring the new team in for 90 days of intense working together. Stick with the weekly goals thing. Get a development rhythm going. Learn who is good at what. Learn how different people communicate when there are problems. Get a pattern of folks helping each other out. Then slowly transition folks out to telecommuting status.

I trust the team above everything else, but you can get teams into places they don't come out from. Assuming you're writing the checks, this is serious stuff. I sure wouldn't be asking HN for advice (including asking me. Although I do this for a living, there's a tremendous amount of contextual information I do not have) If it's as bad as you say, you've got some tough choices ahead. I also wouldn't put a lot of money on your perception of the problem -- you're just as mixed up in whatever problems there are as the rest of them. [insert long discussion about the benefit of using outside eyeballs, which, unfortunately, is a conflict of interest for me to give. I apologize.]
The second best thing to do is watch for creeping featurism. If you're setting and holding them to deadlines for things that aren't of any importance, or that a client hasn't shown a need for, perhaps you should table it for later.
Posting here is the closest thing I've done to marketing. I honestly didn't expect too much interest, but my 5 and 7 year olds thought it was fun so I put it up.

I'll be really surprise if the numbers hold, but it's already a success to me. I definitely like the instant gratification aspect. I have a few websites that make money and none of them were able to give ROI as quickly as this silly thing.

I have a friend that has written a few apps and we've often jokes that the target market is 13-17 year old boys.

Seems to hold true in this case.
I have once or twice. I'll meet up for coffee anytime too if you are interested.
What pt size do people use for their Anti-Aliased programming fonts? I currently use a 10pt bitmapped font and everytime I try a font that is 'smoothed' it ends up looking like out of focus dreck at that size.

I'm curious whether I'm odd for using such a small typeface, noticing the effect of AA on such a small typeface, or caring about it. I can't decide which.