skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Smoothing and proper metrics were default in 9.04+ and before that accessible via a GUI interface for manual tweaking. Replacing FreeSans with a well tailored family is just finishing the job (so you don't have to.)
Why is there such massive nerd-rage when it comes to people using IDEs versus what amounts to text editors with scripting toys?

IDEs are fantastic and I am a more productive programmer for using one. I work with a pretty big codebase and just having excellent cross-file navigation and usage searches are big time-savers. Color coding allows me to establish a visual understanding of more code at a glance which is especially useful when I didn't write it. Integrating with source control directly from your editor gives you fine-grained organization when you are working on multiple changes in parallel. Task managers (ie, Mylyn or Atlassian), in conjunction with source control integration, significantly reduce the overhead time that is required to perform workflow-related management during the day. And despite my hacker pride, I love having good debugging tools around as they are wonderful at aiding in maintenance.

Code completion saves you time and accelerates learning. Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I simply cannot understand why autocomplete makes you so bad. Once your team grows to beyond 4-5 programmers, you're going to be seeing plenty of code you didn't write yourself. A knowledge of naming conventions and design patterns allow you to use autocomplete to help find the behavior you want before turning to documentation or duplicating it yourself. At the very least, it helps me type faster because I am typing less and it helps me avoid spelling mistakes. Autocomplete is a search tool and a typing assistant; it does not create a black hole in your brain that sucks away any memory of what you have seen or done in the code.

If you find a function that is useful, stop and find out what it does. Why are you calling it if you don't know what it does? If you don't remember it after the first time, you probably will have it committed to memory by the third. And who cares if you don't remember it, do we really need to know every API of every library we use? No, we used it as a tool to get the job done. We have precious few brain cells to spend them on memorizing an ever-changing dictionary; let the computers do what they do so well.

I use Textmate and occasionally vim when the situation arises. They are excellent tools for certain types of work. But when I'm working on a feature in a big codebase, there is no place like my IDE. It takes care of all of us average programmers at average companies.
> To twist a phrase from Glengarry Glen Ross: "ABL - Always Be Learnin'."

Bad memory forces you to always be learning, at least trying to learn a bit more than what it's forgotten.
"heads down, iterating and releasing the most crucial features first"

That's the key.

The "number" of technologies involved is moot. Every piece of software is build upon thousands of layers of technology. Adding one or more ingredients to the soup doesn't necessarily ruin it.

Often the simplest way to solve a problem is to duct-tape two different items from different technology stacks just well enough that it works for you. In that simplest case, you may be duct-taping 2 technologies together with a 3rd.
40+ Most Demanding Downloadable Professional Icon’s Pack
The most important aspect of designing an individual icon is that it has to be instantly recognizable, you have to know its function, and you need to know exactly what it is. If you are designing a set, the actual design becomes a lot harder, you have two challenges: each icon you design has to be individual and distinctive from the other, but at the same time they have to have similar features to show that they are related, making a complete set. Don’t forget to read license agreements before using icons in your designs – they can change from time to time.
This reminds me of a recent post on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1731459

The postdoc thought it was subtle enough to kill those cultures with ethanol, and thought everybody else wouldn't be clever enough to catch him. But the grad student was probably clever enough.
Ask HN: An Online Spreadsheet Certain People can Edit
So my wife is coaching a team, and she wants a way for the parents to all post their contact information somewhere online where only her and other parents of the team can see it.

What's the best method to accomplish this?

(I thought a google spreadsheet might work, but not everyone has a gmail account, and if I make it public I wouldn't want to take the chance of exposing everyone's contact info to the internet.)
Since when did Hitler handle 6 million appeals?
Compliance Poll Analysis Results
I suspect that you're right about the weather, this would probably be a be a place with a lot of storms.

On the other hand, if there's both sufficient water AND enough air for life as we know it on our planet's surface (excluding the extremeophiles like the flora living in Grand Prismatic Spring for the moment), the terminator wouldn't be nearly as clear as it is on Mercury, which has no atmosphere. Oceans of air and water would help to distribute heat throughout the world, much like they do here on Earth.
Totally with you. I think this single post right here has extended my horizon for bootstrap-euthanasia by two years.
Why is a native IPv4 address a "basic civil liberty"? It's a technical detail. Surely the "liberty" is "first class citizen of the Internet", right? "The ability to publish content, the ability to build applications, the ability to pass traffic"?

If IP addresses were truly and in principle a right, then surely everyone would also be entitled to an ASN and the right to publish their IP address on the provider of their choosing. But they aren't; it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to go from a standing start to default-less full peer.

Without peering, the IP address is just a totem. You think it matters, but it doesn't; you've simply been licensed to speak on the Internet by your ISP.

That doesn't really bother me, but it should bother you, if you take your principles seriously. IPv6 isn't going to solve that problem (IPv6 does not magically end BGP RIB bloat). But overlay networks, which don't care whether they're running on top of IPv4, CLNP, IPX, or IPv6, do solve it.
My key take-away from the article was this quote:

“There is a difference,” she said, “between immediate recall of facts and an ability to recall a gestalt of knowledge. We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory. The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it.”

IMO, this quote demonstrates a phenomenon I've long suspected to hold with the books that I read. The essence of a book's or an article's content is captured by a few key ideas and phrases (e.g., 'gestalt of knowledge', 'wraith of memory' in this case), but merely knowing these phrases is not enough. You need to read the entire book to have a sensation of the ideas getting fleshed out. The article on 'metrosexuals', the pamphlet on "the third estate", and the book on 'positioning' are other examples I can think of where this phenomenon plays out.

A rich 3-dimensional idea in the author's mind gets transformed into words. The words themselves are just information. You then fight with the words to reconstruct the idea with all its original potency in your mind. It is not necessary for you to recall every little detail of it unless you are an academic or specialist in the field.
I don't think it's on the front page because 10.10 is innovative. It's on the front page because it's Ubuntu, which is popular among HN linux users.
hm ... I don't have trouble remembering things in books I've read ... but that reminds me, why do we read the New York Times if it's filled with forgettable, inane rubbish? :) Seriously though, I rarely remember the jibber jabber I've read in rags.
Can I dual boot ubuntu on my mac? I am looking to get a mac to replace my netbook.
I don't know what the iPod nano should or shouldn't have been, but a remote control for the cellphone is a terrible idea. So you are going to have to carry around the phone, plus this gadget, and maybe a wireless headphone too? Madness.
As long as you can vaguely remember where you read X thing, you can always go pull the info back up. That's part of the reason I aggressively use social bookmarking services (namely, Diigo).

I also find it's helpful to have a high-level understanding of many things, especially when it relates to technical "stuff". If you have some understanding on how/when to apply an approach or technology, you can always dig up the details when it is pertinent.
On the upside, there's a tremendous amount of available energy for lifeforms to harvest.

Here on Earth, life gets its energy from soaking up solar energy, or from eating things that have been soaking up solar energy, or from eating things which have eaten things which.... you get the idea. The sole exception is at deep-sea geothermal vents, where you can pick up energy from the thermal gradient. On Gliese 581g, there's huge amounts of energy to be picked up just from the constant flow of energy from hot side to cold side, so I'd expect lifeforms to somehow be tapping into that.
Letting people see each individual device, even firewalled, is a security downside.
I don't think he means "technically" possible. I think he just mean "How can I?".
Chrome extension to do that:
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/bbkfcamiocfccgmc...

I think the whole idea behind HN is to keep it as basic as possible and even though it would be easy to do, it would go against that.
If anything, older Americans lament the reduction in the level of grocery store service over the years. While most stores (at least around Cleveland) have baggers, there is only one higher-end grocery which still loads one's bags in his car for him. The customer leaves his cart by the exit, drives his car up to the store, and some teenagers load the bags into the trunk ("boot" for those in the UK?).
I did get a bit of that vibe
Same is true for movies. I don't remember most movies I watch. Eg. there was this one movie with Morgan Freeman, he worked at a car shop, smoked cigarettes, and he was diagnosed with cancer, and there was another big name in the movie, and I don't remember much after that. [After looking it up, it was Jack Nicholson and the title is 'Bucket List']. There's probably thousands of movies like this floating around in my head.
I'd say it depends on what and how one is reading.

It's not the same case when I read a programming book with examples, in contrast to novels. I tend to remember the former better because I'll usually try out most examples from the book.
Yeah, honestly, the whole thing is just horribly pretentious.
"You'd think this would have led to a career in the military, but it didn't."

The people I know who went into the military did so because they had no discipline, and wanted to get some.
Oddly, I don't remember movies if asked to recount the exact plot/scenes, but I seem to have an uncanny ability to remember that stuff when watching it for the second time, to the point where I don't enjoy watching movies more than once.

Some people love watching movies multiple times... I wonder if this has anything to do with memory.
In part they eat bugs but I wouldn't think that would be sufficient in such a contained area. It's not like they're set up in a swamp.

Polyface Farms seems to feed their egg layers entirely on bugs, cattle droppings, and maybe a bit of greenery:

"The Eggmobile is a 12 ft. X 20 ft. portable henhouse and the laying hens free range from it, eating bugs and scratching through cattle droppings to sanitize the pasture just like birds in nature that always follow herbivores as biological cleansers."
http://www.polyfacefarms.com/products.aspx

Of course that's a much larger operation. They keep moving, so cleaned areas can recover. They've got forested areas nearby which play a part in the ecosystem. They claim higher overall productivity than conventional farms producing the same stuff, but nothing extreme.

The peril of aquaculture is sometimes everything suddenly goes haywire and dies. Eventually the kinks get worked out and it's pretty stable, but the pool people may well have surprises in store.

I do love the idea of a little self-contained ecosystem, almost like a space colony. I hope people do a lot more experiments along these lines.

One idea from Marshall Savage's Millennial Project is edible algae, like spirulina. According to him it's absurdly productive in a small space, and the numbers from the "algae for fuel" people seem to bear that out. A turnkey system for producing it safely would be pretty neat, but I haven't been able to find much information. Everybody's talking biofuel. I wouldn't exactly want to subsist on algae but it could be great as a supplement in flour or stews, as fish feed, etc. How healthy it would be to eat large quantities seems to be a little uncertain, but supposedly it has a long history as a food.
Optimizing Web UIs during Pivots
Better Data Visualization in Wordpress.com Stats
I am one of the authors of a draft that describes how to make the transition, at least for the "client" apps (like HTTP), more straightforward:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-wing-http-new-tech

Also, for the rogue RAs, there is a solution
too: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-v6ops-ra-guard

(currently shipping in some products already).

For security, there are better approaches that do not compromise the applications transparency as much as the filters do:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vyncke-advanced-ipv6-securi...

To summarize, knowing Iljitch personally, I hoped for a more sober article. v4->v6 transition is not going to be easy, sure. But the article does come through as having a slightly hysteric tone, which is unfortunate.

As for "no customers" stance that I hear every now and then: Just today I had a chat with a large-ish service provider. They have quite a lot of enterprise customers for IPv6 today. XS4ALL provides IPv6 in .nl today. free.fr has been doing it for years already.

Finally, to end on a cheerful note - some folks have found this video funny, hopefully you might as well: http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7011357/ - though I do not claim to have the best sense of humor.
automatic breaking

That's a surprisingly common feature.
Minor niggle: it was 6.06; they delayed that release by two months in preparation for their very first LTS release.
"For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read if one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost."

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/c...
Not only is the algorithm described in the article complex for the simple task, but it is also incorrect. It has a single bottleneck: the grouper. It is interesting that I've been downmodded for providing a simpler but correct algorithm.
(I don't know too much about MapReduce (almost nothing), but I like designing distributed algorithms for fun.)
Same here. If I were to watch that movie again, I'd start remembering and unless it's an action flick, it wouldn't be interesting.
Racism and the recession talk
I'm a little disappointed with the approach this article takes to it's main thesis, which is that the "majority" don't remember what they read. He writes "anecdotal evidence suggests" twice in the only part that justifies his own experience. Is this really the case? (Not that I'm going to get better than anecdotal evidence here.) There's a false dichotomy there too where either you retain everything or nothing.

For me I still remember the plot lines of books I read 20 years ago and why they were formative to my character. Is that really that unusual? Given these were mostly fiction and science fiction books, but the conceptual spaces they opened up for me are so key to who I am now it would be bizarre if I just "forgot" them. Just to cite one instance, the Dune series of books got me thinking about the intersection of politics, economics, the expansion of consciousness, ecology, the point of human existence, and other subjects. Surely other people here have had those same experiences and remember them?
Sequel to 3001: The Final Odyssey   - Top of my wishlist
Does anyone else desperately wish for a sequel to 3001: The Final Odyssey?

The book left me with so many questions and possible theories. I was particularly intrigued by Halman's statement that he had seen strange things, possible evidence of entities far more powerful than the ones who created the monoliths, and that we may have less freedom than we thought.

I wish someone - whether it is Stephen Baxter or perhaps even a fan - would attempt writing a sequel to 3001. I'm not a very good writer myself so that's out of the question.
It doesn't help you find it. What it does is widen the acceptance criteria.

Instead of needing to find a rotating planet exactly in the "Goldilocks zone", any planet whose surface is hot on one side but cool on the other, such that the range of temperatures in some part of it lies in the zone, is acceptable, because you can suppose a zone of habitability on the edge of light and shadow.

I'm guessing that's easier because if the planet is a bit too hot on average, you can shift the zone into the shadow; and if it's too cool on average, you can shift the zone into the light. If the planet rotates, you've got a bigger problem, especially if it's too hot, because you need to find / build shade.
I am just reading Lombardo translation. Google does not do well with this famous line: sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt --> "there are tears for things, and our mortal matters touch the"

It should be more like: "Tears in the nature of things, hearts touched by human transience."

http://hiddensymmetries.wordpress.com/2009/09/13/sunt-lacrim...
This type of editorializing is absolutely out of line. Ian is obviously trying to understand the other side, which is more than many developers ever try to do. As a low vision user of the web since its beginnings, I have encountered site after site designed for low vision and blind users based on advice and recommendations from people with good eyesight.

You can't understand what a person needs unless you ask them directly. That's what Mr. Hickson is doing here.

And lets not forget the more important matter - videos need transcripts so that the blind and deaf can follow along.

A few days ago I asked for feedback on how I might better explain accessibility to developers over at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1716463 - issues like this are exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for. Feel free to leave comments there if you have them.
Statistics are always misleading, especially when politics are involved.
Isn't this basically a recipe for ensuring you never get "real" funding? It looks like it would drastically complicate the due diligence and paperwork involved in setting up an "investable" C-corp.
I don't believe you. I'm willing to listen though. Do you have a link to a detailed, technical explanation of this?
That there are not many clever hacks to be made in the language is a feature, not a bug.
A market is an excellent way to manage scarcity. However, ipv6 is preferable to well managed scarcity because it effectively eliminates the scarcity. Addresses under ipv6 are practically unlimited.

A typical ipv6 allocation for an end user is a /48. This allocation consists of 65,536 subnets, each of which has 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 individual addresses. This is just for the end user! Your grandma's cellphone will have 18,446,744,073,709,551,616*65,536 address available to it. No one will ever have to worry about running out again.

The market is a great way to allocate wheat, but imagine if we could make a machine that generated unlimited wheat. Why not use it?

Look at the population of Asia and look at the current ip allocations for that region. It's insanely small! Think about the next 30 years. All of those people are going to want internet access. Demand for ips is only going to grow and the difficulty associated with any sort of fundamental change is only going to grow.

IPv6 isn't perfect but it's needed and needed soon.
Google Instant Steals 25% of Your Organic Search Results
Oh, sure. The question is how best to get those readers.

I'm one of those who do not respond well to blatant prodding for mindless promotion. I've some bookmarklets for posting things on friendfeed and HN, and use them when a site is interesting.

Maybe those buttons work well with others. But will they create the kind of audience you want? Does that even matter when you're just trying to get some initial attention?
That’s not correct. Your employer has to continue paying you for up to six weeks. (You generally need a doctor’s note after three days.) If you are sick longer than that your health insurance has to pay you some of your wage, usually 70 percent of your gross wage and at most 90 percent of your net wage.
Is Spain now cooking its books?
"They don't give sick days because the government pays for your time off."

That is not true. The employer pays the salary for six weeks of sickness. After that, the health insurance provider takes over. I believe that the american sick-day-model could never work here because of unions and other employee-interest organizations. So it is not really up to the company, they have to pay you your salary and cannot take vacation time away from you because of sickness. However, ongoing sickness can be a reason to fire an employee.
That ignores the content/presentation distinction which is essential for providing real accessibility.
Great! Thanks for the info. That's very useful.
From http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/djlsz/notchs_answ...

4. Shock-value asks- How do you like Java as a language? In what ways is it a positive and in what ways is it a negative compared to a lower level language like C/C++, especially as related to the development of Minecraft? Alphakamp asked a wonderful followup question- Do you think you will stay with java or will you ever restructure the code base with a different language?

I love java! I'm a bit worried now that Oracle owns it, and they haven't exactly shown any great interest in the client side of it. Sun used to speak to me all the time, even way back when me and Rolf made Wurm Online, but Oracle hasn't said a word to any game developer as far as I've seen. The biggest technical advantages with java is that the development speed is extremely fast with almost no compilation times and an excellent code hot-swapping in debug mode. The disadvantages is a slightly lower speed than C/C++, and less than perfect support for OpenGL. The LWJGL guys have done a great job with the binding, but java still suffers from rather large per-call overhead in JNI. Or in English; OpenGL calls are slow in java.
Beyond Arial: Using @font-face to unleash web typography (presentation video)
I assumed that the cost to the city was mostly of the startup variety, namely installation and associated tasks. This would mean that in the future, it could be a revenue generator. But it turns out that it's running at a loss, annually. From the report itself:

2008: 2.3M revenue, 3.8M costs (1.5M loss)
2009: 3.0M revenue, 4M costs (1M loss)

The bulk of the cost is "vendor contract cost" which I believe means ongoing support, and appears to be on top of the initial investment.

It appears adding more cameras would only compound the losses.

(disclaimer: I do not read reports like this for a living; interpret my analysis at your own risk)