skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've heard the "line identification hypothesis" mentioned a few times in regards to preferring ragged-right, but I'm pretty sure that's just a guess. It seems readers do find fully-justified text harder to read on the web sometimes, but I'd be willing to bet that it has a lot more to do with column width, leading and word/letter spacing. (Without appropriate hyphenation, word spacing can vary greatly in justified text, especially when lines are short-ish and words are long-ish.) I've found that a good screen-purposed serif typeface set with extra leading (1.2 em seems to be about right) and a line length of 35-40 ems works very well as justified text for "publications". Decent automated hyphenation ought to make things a lot better.
I am very happy that you are happy with the current sign-in solution. Unfortunately it does not work for me. I don't have Facebook or Google account, nor do I plan on getting them. The Twitter account I have, but I am not comfortable associating it with some (essentially) random website that I am merely curious about.
I put my money on the one who's not agnostic.
It's exactly this. Management loves to impose scrum (I've yet to hear being implemented from a bottom-up rather than a top-down initiative) as it's an excuse to micromanage: daily status reports, extra meetings, fixed working hours. That said, this may be a benefit for people who aren't passionate or interested in their work and want to clock out at five. That's fine, but that's not for me: my work is tied very closely to my personal identity, I put in many night and weekend hacking sessions and (voluntarily) work more than the usual 45-50 hours a week. At home, when not working, I frequently hack on personal projects and read technical books (indirectly benefiting my employer as well).

I chose to work for a place that judges me by what I produce, not by when I come in to the office. The beauty of being a software engineer in Silicon Valley (and I imagine this is the same in other technology hubs such as Seattle, Rte-128 and Austin) is that I get this choice. Here's a prediction: companies that micromanage in this fashion simply won't attract the required engineering talent. All else equal, engineers will choose a place that gives them more flexibility. The market seems to confirm this. Here's an interesting thread on hours engineers work at Facebook on Quora:

http://www.quora.com/Does-Facebook-have-fixed-working-hours

Note: I'm not opposed and frequently make use of "lower-case-A agile" i.e., unit testing, re-factoring, iterative development but they are just common-sense tools; much like editors, IDEs and programming languages they are frequently treated as objects of religious devotion, overlooking the fact they may be right for some (in some organizations, even most) projects, but inappropriate for others.
My bad. It uses @font-face to import that font. It does really look great in Inconsolata, IMHO. I just thought everyone around here would be on a browser that supports that already. But I'll consider making the CSS changes.
It still looks like crap, even with Inconsolata.

EDIT: It's a good read, though, as noted above.
It's important to note that there are also transgendered people the other way (FTM, approximately half of all transgendered people), and they don't have the same 90% tech involvement thing (which is really only true for a certain age group of transwomen in the US, not so much for other countries).
US bschools have been overly focused on banking and consulting for the last 15 years (or more). Innovation programs have tried to balance that bias, but in my experience those programs have mixed results. Someone with certificate in entrepreneurship or innovation are trying to use coursework as a proxy for being an entrepreneur. The best entrepreneurs may have gotten an MBA and maybe a certificate in entrepreneurship but those are not future indicators of entrepreneurs.
WebGL is a nice compromise. But, coming from a console game development background, I won't be happy until both Mozilla and Safari adopt NativeClient. C++ with Posix and OpenGL can do amazing things on the iPhone. On even a netbook it could be 10 years ahead of the best HTML5 demos.

For example: WebGL can run Quake2, but NaCl could easily handle Epic's "Project Sword" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2ncmwgJzqw
Nope. They are just citing studies (or anecdotes), that in the medium term you can't get more effective work out of people by overtime.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison Rips “Vindictive” HP Lawsuit
There was a journal paper about a year ago by Sapna Cheryan called Ambient Belonging: How Stereotypical Cues Impact Gender Participation in Computer Science that you can read here:

http://www.comp.dit.ie/dgordon/Courses/ILT/ILT0010/Ambientbe...

The dumbed-down version is here:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/star-trek-keeps-wo...

In short, it appears that CS has a serious grassroots marketing problem.
> Die hard Haskell programmers get the distinction of being the Ron Pauls: hip, opinionated, and doomed to an existence of never being taken seriously.

Don't you know, Haskell's motto is: "Avoid success at all costs."
Good idea, will look into it.
I like the idea. Harder to execute, uncertain results, but an interesting concept non the less :)
According to reddit admins some of the recent downtimes in the last few months were due to cassandra and they were having some bad performance and stability issues. I can look it up if anyone is interested but it will be a bit of a work, since they stated it (several times) in the comment section and perhaps once on a blog post too.
Why Everything Wireless Is 2.4 GHz
I love the names they give to things nowadays. In this case, specifically "Spooky action"
You don't have to step up your engagement at all.

But if people out there are interested in a particular topic, even if it's a small-fry topic, a website to encourage them to propose ideas and work together is an enabler -- it's asymmetric in that it can deliver value far in excess of the costs of making a relatively simple website. So it seems pretty worthwhile, especially considering the costs. This is the kind of thing that those of us who voted Obama were looking for.
If this kind of stuff interests you there is an excellent book on the physics of bicycles http://www.amazon.com/Bicycling-Science-David-Gordon-Wilson/...
Uses all kinds of cheap marketing and scare tactics? Sure.

I just see his blog as a health news digest. He learns about recent discoveries about Health and Fitness, researches them in detail, comes up with a way to make money off them (and he's right to do so), and writes articles. Some articles are good, some are ignorable. In any case, valuable presence on my subscriptions list.

Got any suggestions for an alternative Health News source that is as prolific as Dr. Mercola?
The Wilderness Downtown - HTML5 interactive music video/Google Chrome experiment
Sierra Mist Natural Lemon-Lime Soda With Real Sugar
Jeez, okay, I'm convinced. I'll make those changes as soon as I can.
What difference does that make to the price of cheese?
Acne’s conspicuous localization on the face,
and its ability to elicit reflexive disgust
and avoidance...

i think the authors meant to publish this in the journal of hurting my feelings.
I guess you can always read about Ocaml in French.
Just installed the font. Looks much better now, but blurry. Chrome 6.0.472.53 win7-x64
It sounds to me like reverse engineering would be fine. All it says is that redistribution must retain the license as-is with no attempt to change or obscure the license.
I wonder if its easier to get funding (and later position yourself to get sold out), if you show that you have quite a few people working for you.

Personally I have no idea nor do I see any reason for that many people working for digg, but my understanding is that Digg (or rather Kevin Rose) has always been about having the perception of big without actually being that big.
Just look into lazy loading. Google image search is doing it, as it Facebook now as far as I can tell. Basically all of your images on one page and you load them based on the user's scrolling and what's visible. There's a plugin available from jQuery that can help get you started:

http://www.appelsiini.net/projects/lazyload
What area of Jersey City are you guys located?
So far as we currently know, classical information (aka bits) cannot be transferred via quantum entanglement (aka spooky action at a distance.)
How does it make investors happy? Why would investors care what kind of database you use?
Thanks guys. The site is old and needs a complete overhaul.
Try some Yerba Mate. Tea is made from the roots of that plant and has enough caffeine to give you a nice kick when you need it.
I'm not the OP, but I'll give my reasoning for preferring Mercurial: its CLI has commands that each do one thing instead of commands that have options to do anything.

For example: `git checkout` can change the contents of files without changing where you are in the DAG, change where you are in the DAG, and even create a new branch. In Mercurial you'd use three separate commands for these things: `hg revert`, `hg update`, and `hg branch`.

The problem with git's approach is this: making every command very flexible through options means that you need to document the interaction of all these options in the man pages. That makes the documentation for each command harder to read, especially when you're in the middle of trying to get something done with a project and just want to do something quickly.

For a real example, look at the help for the two SCMs' commands for changing the contents of a file:

$ (hg help revert) | wc -l
47
$ (git help checkout) | wc -l
276

Some might say: "But `git checkout` can do so much more than `hg revert`!" That's absolutely true. However, every time I want to look up how to revert file contents I need to wade through hundreds of irrelevant lines in git's documentation. When I'm using Mercurial I say "Well, I know I need to use `hg revert`, let's just look at those 47 lines of help and find out what exactly I need."

When you combine the help for the equivalent Mercurial commands it's still more succinct than git's help, because splitting individual actions into different commands means you don't have to document interactions between options:

$ (hg help revert; hg help update; hg help branch) | wc -l
113
$ (git help checkout) | wc -l
276

TL;DR version: Git's decision to make its CLI's commands very flexible results in painful documentation, so I perfer Mercurial.
So, this is what appealed to me about the XP/Agile/Whatever movement. It crystallized some of the things I already saw working into a framework that had some chance of making sense to the nontechnical people who would (IME) tend to freak out at some of the ways hackers work.

As with most religions, what might start out as a good idea (love one another, take your vitamins) can turn into a dogmatic religion once the zealots take over.
The wikipedia article does a good job of summarizing why he is an unreliable source for health and nutritional advice. Having nutritional research filtered through him is not something I would find acceptable, and it's unnecessary. If you have access via, say, a university or workplace, I would recommend bookmarking and reading nutrition journals on a weekly basis. Even if not, the free abstracts/summaries will at least be less biased and often equally informative.

Also, many journals now offer free podcasts, some of which are very good. Nutrition is not my main area of interest per se, but for other medical topics these are invaluable and I suspect the same is true for nutrition.
I speculated what he meant, I didn't make the claim myself.
So what makes this "important" rather than "stupid"? Has it reached a court that can set precedent, or does someone just need validation, or do they somehow actually conceivably have a case, or ...?
Times were different back then. The article says the original control dates from 1990, and wikipedia confirms that Windows 3.0 came out in 1990 so it is plausible. The 486 had just been released in the previous year, so it was the New Hotness and not very many people had it, so you'd be looking at an install base of mostly 80386s with a substantial contingent of 80286s that your program still needed to run on with acceptable performance. Wikipedia says for the 80286 you're looking at a top-end of 12MHz, with 6 and 8 MHz in the field. Since this is a Windows 3.0 program, you had a minimum of 640KB on the system (though of course you can't use it all).

So this is a program that has to run with reasonable performance on a 12MHz 80286 with 2MB of RAM. Are you sure you wouldn't consider having your UI read and write the disk directly? Separation of concerns is a modern luxury. And remember, you're using compilers from 1990, too. Don't expect great inlining. (Besides, only profligate memory spendthrifts would inline a function.)

(Edit, later followup: In fact, "separation of concerns" is one of the major sources of the "bloat" people complain about when they examine modern OSes. Much of the "non-bloated-ness" of earlier generations of OS doesn't come from programmers caring more about their craft, it comes from programmers having to stuff programs into things that can barely hold them and building "clever things" that we would today consider monstrosities like UI widgets that read and write directly to the disk. I am unsympathetic to accusations that, say, a modern KDE desktop is "bloated".)
have you tried yerba mate?
TL;DR version: Git's decision to make its CLI's commands very flexible results in painful documentation, so I perfer Mercurial.

I guess that jibes with my own experience. I've learned how to use git not so much from intuition but memorization of what all the commands do and how they interact.

Github seems like a real juggernaut now though. So many job postings now specifically ask for github urls, although I suppose a bitbucket link would probably be ok.
Free icon design for free iPhone apps
Programmatic generation of an xkcd comic
You've touched a significant point I'd like to follow.

I guess we are very responsible for the impact of the technology we create. That's why I'm saying all this stuff here - we are not mere hackers who give people the toys or tools to work with and forget what and why we created it. With every new web application we're creating a new way people will spend their time (in the biz lingua: new business processes blah blah). It's our responsibility to make it meaningful for the people.

It's like with the mass media: some people say that making a silly tv show is what people want but my whole point is that such thinking is broken. People want to relax with what's on air and that's all -- they don't want to spend their time making superfluous choices to check what's really good for them. Everyone has such little time for entertainment in today's world. So if you're broadcasting something it's your responsibility to make it meaningful for the people, not their responsibility. I'm thinking in the same way of internet tools and applications.
To cageface (I can't seem to reply to your comment for some reason):

An alternative solution is to use BitBucket and mirror everything to GitHub: http://hgtip.com/tips/advanced/2009-11-09-create-a-git-mirro...
Archaeologists discover 3,500-year-old settlement in Egyptian desert
LEDs Dethrone Compact Fluorescents
Yep, big bang rewrites are always scary. Doing something more incremental would have been safer.

One way to "safely" do a big-bang change would have been to use both architectures in parallel and sync back and forth. That way, if the new architecture fails, you still have the old one.

Of course, that is lots of effort, and restricts new features (which may be a good thing anyway).
"No McMethodology can make crappy programmers write good code. Period."

Can't a McMethodology help crappy programmers become less crappy (and eventually write better code)?

Are there any methodologies that can help with this?

Ideally, poor developers get replaced by better developers, but realistically this (for all sorts of reasons) doesn't always happen. So, if you're a project or team leader, what can you do to elevated the level of code from sub-optimum developers?

Anything? Or maybe it's better to give them "fake" code to write so they stay busy and out of the way.
If Apple are serious about this, they are going to have to provide some better management tools for enterprise. Being able to manages devices remotely is incredibly important, and an easy way to install apps is necessary.

I sure hope Apple are reading this blog, http://speirs.org/, where the IT guy is using iPads throught a school in Scotland.
Let me get this straight:

Company A is suing company B because B modified GPLed binaries on A's hardware. Yet you hide them. Last I checked, court actions like suing are public, yet hindered by an easy court search.

And frankly, why does this matter? If it was an important case, we'd be hearing it on CNet, slashdot, digg, reddit, MSN... You name it. Just seems like a rather stuffy case of boring, but expensive, corporate law.
You should take a look at Bubbleshare and how they failed doing something very similar to what you are trying to accomplish. I'm sure you can learn a thing or two. The founder Albert might even be able to give you a few pointers.
Okay, fixed that. Hope looks okay now.
Perltidy just handles formatting. Scary basement code is often poorly formatted and reformatting is a necessary first step in fixing it, but it's a trivial first step. It doesn't address the hard part.

Perlcritic is closer to what you're thinking of; it examines the structure of the code and points out design and implementation problems. It can't fix them for you though, and it only handles common designs that it knows about. It can't judge the quality of a design that it's not already programmed to recognize. Again, a useful tool for fixing all of the common problems, but it can't address the overall design.

The refactoring tools in IDEs like Visual Studio are useful too, but they don't understand your code in a way that would help redesign it. They just automate much of the process of extracting code from one method to another method/class. Useful, but not redesigning your code for you.

Ultimately, it takes an intelligent software designer to do this kind of work. Maybe artificial intelligence will handle it some day, but that's not coming for a while.
I'm having trouble putting this all together. Let's figure 9 hours at work, 1 hour of commute, 1.5 hours eating, 1.5 hours exercising, .75 hours meditating, and 7.5 hours sleeping. That leaves less than three hours for showering, changing clothes, and a little downtime. When do you do chores around the house, run errands, visit family, and hang out with friends?
Without sufficient hydration, metabolic wastes stay around longer than they should. Most toxin removal is performed by the kidneys. Keeping your body hydrated assists the kidneys in their normal functioning and ensures that toxins acquired through food consumption are rapidly eliminated. At an optimal level of hydration, this occurs naturally; however, most people are at least somewhat dehydrated a large majority of the time. Drinking lots of water prevents this issue.
Ask HN: What is the HN technical architecture?
I would be awesome if the HN team could share how they implement and scale their Web infrastructure. HN has become pretty popular, so I'd love to see what is currently behind HN. Thanks!
New canon printers come with a app to print directly from iPad and iPhone over wireless network which is truly like magic to use even though the underlying tech is so widespread at this point.

Edit - app is called iEpp on AppStore if u r interested
Yeah originally it was Slashdot but better, more current and user powered (which was a new concept in the mid 2000's). What it turned into was a traffic generator for a small group of power users who fed the community the lowest common denominator of content.
The .NET Micro Framework - Hardware for Software People
OpenOffice is still way to wonky in handling .doc and docx files. And Word is still way easier to use.

I do nearly all my work on Linux, but I would never attempt a serious OpenOffice document; I'd use Word on a VMware instance of Vista first.
Getting out for a 10-15 minute walk can work wonders for body and mind. I try to do that in the mid-morning and mid-afternoon to break things up and re-energize.
why not http://hg-git.github.com/? hg commands on a git repo.
Let's say you are a member of X community - vintage cars, death metal, whatever - and your interest in this is completely independent of reputation or profit.

You actively pursue this interest in your free time, and find that many of the problems you encounter have already been solved, and solutions are already available on the internet.

As you develop your skills, the problems you encounter become more and more situation-specific, and you find it helpful to ask questions on forums related to what you are doing.

At some point, you get annoyed at the disorganized nature of the forum.
You end up repeatedly linking people to other threads, which are usually poorly formatted, and difficult to find. You decide enough is enough.

You set up a blog. Your only motivation is to solve common problems rapidly - any monetization merely helps offset the costs of web hosting. This is your hobby, after all.

As time passes, your blog begins to develop its own unique "voice" in your community - you have a specific set of problems related to your community that you are very good at solving, and you have built up a significant amount of reference material that others find very, very helpful when they are starting out.

When the blog reaches a certain critical mass, you end up with users who are intimidated by the amount of information on your site. Not everyone has time to browse through your entire archive, but they still want a decent "baseline" of expertise to work with.

At this point, enough people will want a printed version of your content that it wouldn't make sense not to offer it. If the demand for your skill set is great enough, you could make a career off of it.

Professional writing is paid research, more than anything. Why do you need to convince people that the research you've already done is worth reading? Why can't you help people with their own research instead?

Even if your SEO skills are garbage, a basic wordpress install gives Google more than enough information for people to find you when they need help. You shouldn't be writing anything that is already available through a Google search. Why waste your time repeating someone else's work?

If you feel a real need to replace someone else's work, because you feel it can be done better or more completely, why aren't you talking to this person, or even actively working with them? If this really is your hobby, and you really are an expert, why should they feel threatened?

Sorry for the long rant, but I really, really, really find the blogosphere completely disgusting right now.

There should not be competition among people who are genuinely interested in the same topic. Especially on the internet - there is just no excuse.
That's "licensing functionality", which is not necessarily just the license itself. Given that the original program is licensed ($49 or something), that seems pretty clear to me - particularly given that otherwise it's a BSD licence, so clauses 1-2 cover the case that you mention.

Obviously the only real test of the wording is in court, but it'd be enough to make some people steer clear of it.
Can Ping recover from such a lame initial offering, though? Will people who checked it out now and decided it was lame ever come back?
If the article is tl;dr here's the gist.

ITU states that the ISM (industrial, scientific, medical) bands are nearly-anything-goes free for all in the frequency blocks. 5.8GHz was too expensive at the time wireless caught on, but 2.4GHz was cheap enough.

ITU chose 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz because the microwave emits broad spectrum radiation and harmonics at those frequencies, so they ignored them and made them free to use and abuse.

KC9JEF