skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is amusingly relevant for me. I had a number of bug reports for my November app Quick Brown Frog (http://quickbrownfrog.com) from people complaining of low speed scores, due to their two-space habit (all my source texts are formatted to use a single space, and they're displayed in fixed-width).

I considered reformatting all the text to use double-spaces, but then figured that I'd get an equal number of complaints from the single-spacers (little-endians?)

In the end I changed the code to ignore the double space if received as input. No complaints after that. :-)
its not on urban dictionary ... yet...
You should always understand the programming language your platform of choice is built upon. That means Java if you are going to use the JVM in some way, just like it means C if you are going to develop native applications on Windows or Linux.

I have always been astonished at VB6 programmers which ignored what a Variant was, when they were using such datatype all the time.
Isn't it a bit weird to quote a review from before VP8 was open sourced that has exactly two complaints, neither of which now apply (licence costs and source availability)?

The great benefit of ISO standards like VC-1 and H.264 is that anyone can go get a reference encoder or reference decoder, with the full source code, and hack on their own product.
It was a Posterous bug which was fixed after a brief email exchange.
Now I feel stupid for feeling bad about being a spelling nazi. This is just so much more sophisticated :)
But I guess it's easier to type in hungarian notation.
This is a matter of encoding. It's got nothing to do with typography. Typesetting software should do the right thing. There aren't any rules for spacing apart from what the font designer specified.

Of course, the software has to understand what it is that it is typesetting, and the font needs to define spacing in such a way that the typesetting software can do things as intended, so the specification for authors here is really defined by the software. If it wants two spaces after a period, then give it two. If it wants one, then give it one.

I suspect that most software expects one.

In a fully pedantic world, we'd have different unicode code points for "gap between word", "gap after sentence", and presumably others to cover every situation, and the font designer would then have full control.
I like VIP Art Fairs approach: no virtual shopping cart, just a nice interface for viewing art and making it easy for dealers and collectors to connect via Skype, IM, etc.

Not sure if taste profiling via Pandora will really fit the art market as is Art.sy's goal. Eclecticism tends to win over similarity and some collectors simply obsess over a single artist or period. But they have some superstar backers. Also, they are hiring ;)

This sort of leaves an opportunity somewhere in the middle I think, between Etsy and Art.sy, in the $1000-$10000 range of purchases for young professionals just getting started. Curation will be key for that demo.
LittleIpsum Approved in Mac App Store
What galls me about two-spacers isn't just their numbers. It's their certainty that they're right. Over Thanksgiving dinner last year, I asked people what they considered to be the "correct" number of spaces between sentences. The diners included doctors, computer programmers, and other highly accomplished professionals. Everyone-everyone!-said it was proper to use two spaces.

What the articles fails to clearly mention, is that many style manuals used in high schools in the 80's were steeped in the monospaced technology of the time and taught two spaces as correct.

Samantha Jacobs, a reading and journalism teacher at Norwood High School in Norwood, Col., told me that she requires her students to use two spaces after a period instead of one, even though she acknowledges that style manuals no longer favor that approach.

This is one of the few mentions in this article of this fact -- that two-spacing was once dogma. This makes me seriously doubt the objectivity of this article. (Actually, I don't think this article is attempting any degree of objectivity at all.)

HN confuses this issue, since we type our comments monospaced, but they are displayed proportional. (Which is why I also double-dash!)
> HTML ignores extra whitespace.

It's settled, then. :)
Doesn't this just reflect the dirty little secret that Google doesn't really have to get any particular details right, just mostly right most of the time?
The Search of Doom - UtestMe
At least by default -- check out the function sentence-end.
For the sake of consistency, HN should render -- as an actual dash.
Care to explain? What happened to Stack Overflow? I've not found any reference. Thanks.
Good rundown in article. We were discussing this last night in the freenode #startups IRC channel ;)

The rumor is that the $20K per year investment cap is limited only to individuals and not institutional investors and funds. Furthermore, if there is massive demand, it is expected that those caps will be raised.

What is unclear is how your yuan can be used to make investments in China itself?
Every style guide I've read (I don't have a citation handy) says that either convention is acceptable, as long as you're consistent throughout the document. This is the first article I've ever seen that said two spaces is wrong, and I am not convinced. (However, I will continue to use one space, because I think it just looks better.)
i have 19,452 messages in my inbox right now. I'm mildly OCD but my brain doesn't register this as clutter, either.

I think it's because of search. I know I can find something when I need it because everything is in one place, on one server, regularly backed up to 3 different locations.
If they had invented Facebook they would have invented Facebook.
Site Build-it, while I DON'T recommend it, is not a "scam." What they do and how they support delivers the service and product they promise. The problem is that they (1) overcharge compared to a more DIY approach, and they (2) overpromise the likelihood of success. Also known as (1) packaging and (2) marketing. (I've never used them, but I know someone who does.)
The single post page looks much better/more thought out than the front page. The front page lacks flow; there's no differentiation between the sidebar and the content and I'm not quite sure where to look first, next, etc.
tl;dr version

It's very unlikely to go down.

It's very likely to go up.

You won't miss out on a lot of interest elsewhere, as nowhere else is paying a lot of interest.

It will diversify your portfolio.

And, finally, it may offer you and your family something of a hedge against the decline of the U.S. economy.
I have worked with PHP, Javascript, Python and Java professionally while using Lua to mod my editor (first SciTe, now TextAdept)over the last four years.

I'm making a conscious effort focus on other aspects of programming now - algorithms, data structures, ai, etc... I think that studying these in addition to learning Python && Javascript && Lua indepth will be a better learning experience.
You could make electricity from the amount of eyerolling this article is going to generate here on HN.
Does HN truncate double spaces? Testing this now. Otherwise I'm only picking up one space after your sentences.

Edit: Looks like it does. Yay PG!

Edit2: Looks like I forgot some basics of HTML. My 14 year old self would be very disappointed.
Their new idea: Cameron helped to start Guestofaguest.com, a Web site that offers information about “people, places and parties” in New York, Los Angeles and the Hamptons.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/business/31twins.html?page...
Real Head scratcher.
Waiting for Matt Cutts to hop on here and explain this.
Canadian SEO by Email: Still a Winner, eh
I wouldn't say it's completely useless as it shows that Mongo is faster in a single threaded process, using the most popular ruby client of each system.

If I were writing a high-concurrency multi-threaded system to handle millions of keys at a time, Ruby would not be my first choice by far.
Charlie Rose Talks to Verizon CEO Seidenberg
My high school honors English teacher made us use two spaces, (class of 2006), and since then, nobody has bothered to tell me any differently.
Mashable has always had a pretty horribly layout. That's the main reason I never visit that site.
A better investment (for most people) would be in a mutual fund or index that is tied to the Chinese economy.
Oh yes, the management :)

I actually began writing about it, but then decided I shouldn't generalize about all of Eastern Europe from just my experience.

Management tends to be poor to atrocious, effective management is seriously lacking through all industries there. Add to that resource constraints and competitive pressure you have in outsourcing shops, and it multiplies many-fold.
If you're iPhone is jailbroken for another $3 you can buy My3G to make apps think they're on WiFi all the time. I use it to download apps > 20MB and see good quality YouTube everywhere.

You can also get higher res video by going to the YouTube site instead of using the app. But if you click a youtube link you have no choice...
This is a trend I've noticed a lot lately on articles on typography and design - they're very light on 'why' and pretty much just invoke appeals to authority - "my design school taught me to do it this way, QED."

There is a good reason to use one space, and that is that when you're typing, you're only creating text, not typesetting. Software does the typesetting now, and will automatically space out sentences in a way that looks right. You don't need to do it yourself, just like you don't need to enter manual linebreaks anymore.
Good god, what a terrible name.
How Two Shoe Enthusiasts With No Programming Experience Built An iPhone App
More accurate title:

(Mongo + Mongo Ruby Gem) Vs (Redis + Redis Ruby Gem), The Increment Battle with No Useful Statistical Analysis Included
Chernobyl: Environmental dead zone or eco-haven?
that's what happens when you design for advertising
Actually, its your browser that renders multiple spaces as a single space. If you want multiple spaces in your HTML you have to use the non-breakable space tag "&nbsp;".
I think this Social Network quote from Zuckerberg sums them up perfectly.

"They're suing me because for the first time in their lives, things didn't work out the way they were supposed to for them"

They need to let it go.
Design is the successive application of constraints until only a unique product is left.

- Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
I'm reminded of a recent statement from one of the github guys to the effect that by running a profitable business using proprietary software, they're able to contribute more to open source.
It's a super rare HTTP Response Code issue:

STEP 1: Accessing CakeCentral.com returns a 404 "Not Found" HTTP Code when requested:

1. Go to http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html and enter in http://cakecentral.com/

2. Take a look at the response codes, see the 404

STEP 2: Previously, inexplicably, _actual_ error pages on CakeCentral.com such as: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.cakecentral.com%2Fca... returned 302 redirects to Beerby.com

STEP 3: Beerby.com uses a "Soft" error page, meaning if you type in a URL like: http://www.beerby.com/adfadi you get a 302 TEMPORARY redirect to a 200 OK page.
Front Page is horrible!
The HTML rendering engine in your browser actually consolidates each block of white space into a single visible space character. If you view source, there are two spaces there. So, there's a good reason not to use two spaces, as the web will only show the one.
Maybe they are Feeling Lucky ?
>Politically, the country is under international pressure to rein in its huge trade surplus.

The government doesn't feel any of this pressure, as it's not an internal issue they don't care.

I would argue that yes the yuan is likely to rise against the dollar, but because of high inflation (very very high in China) most assets would also rise in comparison to the dollar(Oil, Gold, Silver etc.)

Actually the only good reason to invest in the yuan I would think is diversification. It's not a good idea to keep your investments as cash during a time of high inflation.

In January 2006 Gold was $525, January 2010 it was $1125

Silver, January 2006 $9, 2010 $17, most assets are climbing fast in relation to cash, much faster than 25% over 5 years.
Using LyX, you can't even type extraneous space without extra effort.
Researcher Links anonops.ru IRC with Cyber Criminals
I would have thought the value of a possible cure for prostate cancer would be far more than $1000.
Part of the problem is also the relationship between the managers and the outsourced programming team.

If you spend time in terms of vetting the team for people you are comfortable with, take the time to be as clear and detailed as possible with the requirements, have a good continuous build system so that you can see the software being developed daily, and have direct, continuous communication channels to the coders, one would have a far better experience.
That's why Adwords works wonders if you can get your ad on the top of a SERP.
Ah yes, the holy trail of investments. This one, we swear, won't go down! Really, look at all the reasons. Just like housing. It's not like their banks have billions of yuan in loans to companies or government investment vehicles which large numbers of economists question the viability if.
This was the most interesting part of the article for me:

"However the thing that we pay very close attention to is user feedback after a product is released. And not the day of, knee jerk reactions, but long term. For example, I have personally gone over Applecare call data looking for trends and patterns and reviewed warrantee return information. Even requested certain units get debugged by my team so we can correctly find field issues and put processes in place so we never see it again."

I once read that the MagSafe connector was designed because Apple noticed that the number one cause of warranty returns was from laptops that had fallen after the power cord was tripped. It's awesome to know that they do this analytical design for everything. It also explains why there's something of a 'curse' to buying a first generation apple product - because they haven't been able to do real world testing on it.
Some nice papers there, and I clearly am not up on my classic Viz papers.

NB If you want a dense, difficult, crazy even but (perhaps) ultimately rewarding paper you could try:

http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/SPT/v7n2/araya.html

The author goes right back to the idea of what it means to measure and display and view geometry within a two dimensional screen.
I guess most are probably just clicking on "I'm feeling lucky" and going there without even seeing the results.
People need to learn the basics of working with a computer. I can't imagine working for years on an important project without any backup system whatsoever. Getting your computer stolen is only one of the tens of the possible scenarios of things that could happen.
The reason is clear: because it assists readability, and costs me nothing.
I think you're on the right trail, but it's still confusing why this would take the number one ranking over the root domain? Maybe Google thought the entire domain had moved?
It's not a floating currency, it's directly controlled by politicians. Holding yaun is taking a speculative currency bet on the competency of the Chinese Communist Party to successfully manage the Chinese economy.
Photography of Vivian Maier
I didn't see that claim supported by that report. Did I miss it?
But we already have that. It's called practicing.
How fair use brought us VCRs, copiers—and nude Barbie enchiladas
The more interesting question, to me at least, is whether or not the U of Oklahoma will be taking some kind of disciplinary action against her.
Title should probably read "Comic Sans helps you learn?", unless it's a brilliant stab at irony.
Until now, you mean. Facebook is training its users to add everything they like. This counts web pages that you can share, too.
Sarah Palin’s email hacker is imprisoned, against judge’s recommendation
I have to agree with antirez here and call shenanigans. "WOW, MongoDB is almost a full 40% faster at incrementing than Redis" is simply a false statement. The correct conclusion for your post is "WOW, incrementing the same key 100k times with the mongo ruby gem in a very specific, single-threaded ruby application is 40% faster than incrementing one key 100k times with the redis ruby gem the in that same ruby application." If anyone makes a decision about a real world application based on your post, they will be making a huge mistake.
Show HN: Fun new web game/app for mixologists
I submitted this a few days ago, but it was a terrible time of day and recieved 0 feedback... sorry for the repost, but I'm really hoping for some input!

To teach myself Python and GAE, I recently made a new web game/app to help people learn how to bartend. I'm pretty happy with the results, and it was tons of fun to make. I currently can't make any changes to the app, as it is an entry in Mozilla's GameOn 2010 challenge (gaming.mozillalabs.com).

Any and all comments and suggestions would be appreciated though! www.drunkenweb.com
Apple Is About To Register Its 10 Billionth App Download
Why numbering should start at one
Time Machine. It works.
for your viewing pleasure: http://www.drunkenweb.com

Blog with some background and learnings from DrunkenWeb: http://ecaroth.posterous.com/
Yeah i bet they think that is the temporary location of the cakecentral homepage
> it shows that Mongo is faster in a single threaded process, using the most popular ruby client of each system.

No, it doesn't. You ran 100k increments on one key and divided by time ONCE and printed the result.

Plus this was on your Macbook Pro, which is probably running a mail client, Twitter client, web browser, and hundreds of other things that could have affected the times.

Graphing the response times for each increment would be a good way to start looking at what the data really shows, instead of going by a single opaque, fairly useless number.
There are definitely a bunch of options near the venue including the Westin which has a rotating restaurant (warning: expensive!) at the top so you can see the entire city in about an hour or a Holiday Inn just a block over. Keep in mind that the after-party runs to 7pm so depending on how much you drink, you'll want to choose your place to stay based on that.

Not sure if there are any places on airbnb.com that are useful. Since I live in Atlanta I haven't had to try. I have stayed at the Twelve Hotel at Atlantic Station (which is a bit far but there is a Twelve Hotel at Centennial Park which is much closer) and those rooms are really nice. You can get a 2-bedroom suite with a full kitchen and living room and then potentially have a lot more people in there especially since you'd have 2 full bathrooms.
STEP 4: Google now shows the destination page if your results contain a 302 redirect, not the source page:

> Many months ago, if you saw someresult.com/search2.php?url=mydomain.com, that would sometimes have content from mydomain. That could happen when the someresult.com url was a 302 redirect to mydomain.com and we decided to show a result from someresult.com. Since then, we’ve changed our heuristics to make showing the source url for 302 redirects much more rare. We are moving to a framework for handling redirects in which we will almost always show the destination url.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalizatio...
Multiple consecutive spaces == 1 space, in the same way 0 + 0 + 0 = 0. Put another way, 3 x 0 is not greater than 1 x 0. Even in typography or typesetting, the goal is to provide a single space, but to do it in a proportion to the surrounding letters that is appropriate for the context. This goal isn't any less important when an inflexible typesetting environment forces you to use a narrow range of discreet units.

I've edited too many documents to count, but in nearly all cases, it was a default software setting that inserted extra space after a period, before the next sentence. The author can't reliably claim to know how much space Assange chose to use, any more than he can affect how his own text will be presented after it is processed for publication. It's an implementation detail that often gets transformed (by software and/or humans) as it makes its way through various systems.
I can tell you one thing for sure, you'd be hard-pressed to find a Theora or WebM capturing equipment, if there is any at all. Most consumer grade cameras record to h264 or h262 and pro cameras generally work with proprietary uncompressed or losslessly compressed formats.
There are restrictions that foster creativity as well as those that inhibit it. The trouble is you don't know which is which until you actually try building something within them. Additionally, you only see the success stories where these constraints resulted in something special, you don't see the failures that would have been successes if only the creators were given a bit more intellectual freedom.

I'm struggling with this right now. When building web applications, there are some constraints that are interesting and useful ("the user should be able to do everything without logging in") that might result in great stuff being built, and others ("it has to use this particular technology stack or this particular algorithm") that are less obviously beneficial to the creative process.
It's not as simple as saying "deindex anything that has optimized title tags or lots of links or shows adsense"

No, it's not. But undoubtedly, SEO spammers are leaving behind the same kind of clues that email spammers do. Using techniques like Bayesian classifiers should be able to classify such pages. Just detecting all the pages that are slightly edited/SEO-optimized stackoverflow answers would be a good start for me.

you'd likely also reduce the number of useful sites in the results because you're specifically targeting and removing the sites that optimise for search engines, which is 99% of the most successful sites on the web today.

I'd be putting useful sites in the "useful" corpus.

SEO is not an inherently bad thing, it's valueless, spammy content that's bad.

Agreed, just as email marketing is not an inherently bad thing, just spammy emails.

http://xkcd.com/810/
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Was thinking the same thing. Maybe they're hoping the thief doesn't read Hacker News (or CNET) and learn that little tidbit.
I think Facebook is a great place to get people to talk about you. But it's not something that you can monetize easily. If you base your marketing campaign solely on Facebook, you might find it not effective. However, I think that facebook marketing is cheap enough that you can be seen by a lot of people and get people to talk about you while putting most of your effort and moneys on different medias.
The consumer will have to suffer through hot laptops and short battery life, and most won't know why.

I'll give you this for Safari, but I don't think IE9 will have enough of an adoption rate to make this a noticeable effect. Average people are unlikely to switch browsers, and they're also unlikely to upgrade (though I wish I had some statistics here). They're likely to be using IE6/7/8, without HMTL5 anyway, especially with IE9 not supporting XP.

From a web standpoint, I wish we had been having this discussion 3 years ago. H.264 seems to have won.

Wholeheartedly agreed.