skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to think "em" was defined as the width of the letter m (hence the name), but The Elements of Typographic Style doesn't mention that:

Type is usually measured in picas and points ... but horizontal spacing is measured in ems, and the em is a sliding measure. One em is a distance equal to the type size. In 6 point type, an em is 6 points; in 12 point it is 12 points ... Thus a one em space is proportionally the same in any size.

The book then shows a little diagram with several different sized squares.

So, as I understand it, one em is the width equal to the height of a font (which is generally, but not always, the width that the letter m is designed as). What your quote is saying, then, is all the letters fit in a box which is twice as tall as it is wide.
I write papers in LaTeX for school, but I'm not really that fluent in it that I could write a book in it... I guess. :)
I will check this out! Thanks.
Google launches Flight Search service
Google recently announced web-based tool that allows user to search and book flights. This is another wonderful service into Travel category.
Interesting; it did show me some airports and airlines I had never heard of, and I might check them out! You definitely should pick it up again!

---

For some reason "Airlinair" which is a French regional airline, redirects to "Airkenya" which is apparently the national airline of Kenya.
To validate updates using asymmetric crypto you don't need to buy a special key at all. You can generate the keypair yourself... The only thing you need is some crypto lib to check a RSA or DSA signature on the downloaded data using a public key embedded in the software.
If you download through the "Download Manager" then I believe that is a p2p system. Not sure this is available via non-MSDN means though.
What we really need is the ability to use pubkey systems like OpenPGP without hacking the script context of a page (a la FireGPG--- while good, it was fragile with respect to Gmail changes). I would love to have browsers bake in PGP support and for sites like Gmail and FB to start relying on the browser for encryption services.
Quick simple stupid
Err... what? It's easier to shoot yourself in the foot, sure. But I haven't had unicode issues since I learned how to handle things properly years ago, when I was first getting into development.
Quote From Loveless
Ultimate show off for coders. I'm there!
When is your next prime birthday?
Though this is reasonable, I wonder if it's measuring the right thing. Since money isn't involved (as far as I know), people could be entering their email just out of curiosity. It's easy to provide an email for a notification of completion, after which, make a decision to continue with participation or move on entirely.
The Shame of College Sports
I actually am landing in Villa Franca on friday, but I'll be making a bee line straight for Bassano.

As for your points, you're right. I'm out of date. To be honest, I've not checked the competition out thoroughly for a couple of years.
It could be very useful if he could convince some great hackers to submit screencasts to his website.

For example imagine looking over Alan Kay's shoulder as he creates a program. I think I'd learn lots of new things if I watched something like that.
I would disagree. All of these kids want two expensive purchases: a car and a phone. They are social status items.

It does help Android that there are a lot of low-priced models.

>Having and android phone also rhymes a little better with the pirate stance, as buying apps is not as interesting for kids as buying beer when free apps can be had online.

I'm not exactly sure about piracy. They seem more interested in streaming content, at least when it comes to music. More than any other generation they view it as being disposable.

I can guarantee you they care about buying apps. There is a reason why the most popular apps are games.
Hi jrmg, thanks for the great feedback.

I initially wanted Wallboardr to be a fairly free-form board that wasn't specific to any industry, but as it developed I thought that approach was lacking in power for my primary audience which was definitely developers.

But it's very interesting to see what Joel and the guys/girls have done because I think they are hitting a sweet spot between power, simplicity and industry-neutrality.
Amazingly enough, the meat of it is less than 1,000 lines of code -- and shows how you can integrate with Narcissus to parse JavaScript from JavaScript:

https://github.com/rstacruz/js2coffee/blob/master/lib/js2cof...
REQUIN TN NET FEMME
Bug noted and entered into my state of the art bug tracking system.... a text file on my desktop.
Hi, so people here say you have to be a very high-net-worth individual, etc. That's probably true for investing $20k in a speculative startup.
What I have is a mundane business, it is a physical shop which needs some expansion, however it is already the second shop we've opened. It makes very good use of capital, there's just very little of it (this is in a developing country); if you would like to talk about floating $3000-$5000 or so, please give me a call by first writing to this disposable e-mail for my number: 5YER414bfi5G@meltmail.com this address will "melt" in 24 hours. We can probably work out extremely good terms for you, as like I said at this small stage we are making really good use of capital. Anyway a phone call won't hurt - you can at least have a perspective on something more mundane and have an interesting story to tell.
With 4 threats against Android, Motorola Mobility forced Google to offer $12.5B
I am going to have to disagree with you on the unit test part. Everything in a game that is not graphics has no inherent limitation that prevents automated unit testing. A large part of your graphics pipe line can be unit tested as well, most of the scene graph operations, for instance, should be unit testable. Sure you could still end up with display bugs do to driver interaction, but you should still try to lock down what you can.
Sit down, do your work, drink a lot of water, walk to the bathroom.

Or maybe I just have the bladder of an 8 year old boy?
If you already know the basics you are more than halfway there! You will need to find a suitable package for novels of course, but I don't think that you will have problems using it. The requirements for writing a novel in LaTeX will IMHO not be more advanced than when you write papers.
Well, there's already http://showMeDo.com which is really great. Covers lots of programming and related functions like using IDEs like Eclipse and editors like Vim. There's also tutorial episodes on design like suggested by a commenter before. No Photoshop or the rest of the Adobe CS suite however, all F/LOSS like GIMP and Inkscape. I'm actually practicing by learning from Eric Florenzo's playlist on Django here[1]. The only problem with ShowMeDo is that lots of the material is dated (and that's not necessarily a problem always!) and there isn't much new content. The site was busy 07-09 but unfortunately seems to have been forgotten.

I hope castingcode.tv doesn't fall to this problem, as this is a really great and useful way to learn lots of computer skills.

There's the commercial solution by PeepCode[2] with excellent quality pieces by the crew there. The material there is much more up to date and consistent in quality standards. It's not as huge an offering, but it's certainly a lot. I'd also definitely recommend them to anyone who enjoys this style of learning.

The last and probably most accessible solution out there right now are the Youtube playlists and video series in this format. The quality there is a little hit and run, with some series excellent and others so-so. The target audience is almost always for the beginner, but that shouldn't dissuade those more advanced from perusing a vim tut to brush up on new tricks.

[1] http://showmedo.com/videotutorials/video?name=3360000&fr...

[2] http://peepcode.com/
Well there's an unbiased view...

In my opinion, depriving you of the freedom to live in a non-ruined environment is a much more fundamental lack of freedom than the choices you are talking about being restricted. And the wealth "creators" you talk about seem a lot more like "cost externalizers" than "wealth creators" to me.

The AGW advocates also haven't called AGW detractors "jihadists" for taking their position. And so on.

There are ideologues who don't know the science on both sides. But attempting to include the scientists who have reached a conclusion based on scientific results among them helps no one. Taking a position based on actual data is not an ideological statement, regardless if whether there are other people for whom it is.
If Microsoft supported older versions of Windows with the newer versions of IE, and pushed 8, 9, 10 etc. via Windows Update, this wouldn't be as much of an issue. However, I think that what they are trying to do is force people to either (a) take the upgrade path to Windows 7 or 8, or (b) leave behind the latest software like Office >2010 and IE >8.

The problem is, upgrading Windows (any OS, really) is so fraught with complexity (and spending) that most people and IT organizations would rather stay on a nice, stable Windows (i.e. XP) and deal with the older software. (Especially nontechnical people who just have Win XP because that's what came on their computer.) Unfortunately, that means the developers have to pay for it.
Compound complexity
Thanks, you're awesome! This was exactly what I needed. I'm switching jobs and receiving a monthly figure to buy insurance. It's very easy to use, looks clean and PDQ. Great work.
Six slides, three slides, or no slides
Generic medicines Overview
Generic medicine is defined as a substitute of a branded medicine with respect to pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic properties. A medicine can only be termed as generic if it is made up of the same chemical composition at same strength and it has to meet the same pharmacopoeial standard of preparation.
A Peek at Intentional Software's Domain Workbench [pdf]
Wow, wtff? I don't understand how people can get so up in arms about Apple fanboys so long as google has fanboys like this.

Are you serious or trolling? I would expect if someone had such an ignorant/naive opinion they would at least be smart enough to not let other people know.

Here's what I see from google:

Search - a product that helps them sell ads

Gmail - a product that helps them sell ads

Google App engine - A platform where they used the hype of MapReduce et al to get people to join and then ramped up pricing drastically after a lot of people had been on the service (a service for which switching away almost certainly means a big rewrite) for years

Android - phone OS to help them sell ads.

I'm not seeing a lot of "make the world better" in there. Unless you mean "for Google executives".
14 Days Later: What I’ve learned in the first 2 weeks of my startup
Over the last couple of years I've been having a couple of problems at work: increasing lower back pain and decreasing attention span. I had no reason to assume either had anything to do with my desk: I, too, rock the Aeron and think it's comfy as heck. I've got my keyboard and monitor at the right height. I take breaks every 30-60 minutes and go walk around. Etc.

But as the back pain kept getting worse, I finally decided to give the standing desk thing a try about 3 weeks ago. I expected my back to start feeling better, and it did -- great! But the unexpected benefit has been vastly increased focus: I somehow feel much more motivated standing than sitting. There's something that feels incredibly silly about watching YouTube or reading Hacker News while standing, and so I just don't do it. I've been more productive these last 3 weeks than I've been in a long, long time.

Perhaps it's just the novelty of a new situation; who knows. But I'm going to stick with it, for now.
I get what you are saying, but now no one has any information about what the problem might be and how to fix it, as opposed to people savvy enough to Google the STOP code (and I think you are underestimating the current population and certainly ignoring people's ability to learn to Google error messages).

Sure, there was something psychologically jarring about the old BSOD, but without giving us any clue as to what went wrong with the computer, how is anyone supposed to be able to fix it? Is it impossible to display a STOP code in a friendly manner?
Gotta be there for all new things web development!

I'll be at the hack-battle & the conference. See you there?
Critical (of) severity
I think, google is the one protecting the idea of online privacy by not having stupid restrictions on exporting your own social data and by allowing the users to decide what gets shared with whom (circles).

And stupid lawsuits are not irrelevant to the society, they hamper competition which in turn hampers technological progress. If you think Samsung Galaxy Tab and Ipad look similar, just look again at their screens side by side the difference between PLS and IPS is day and night, it is unfortunate that the court does not deem that as differentiating enough.
No. No. No no no no no. You lose syntax highlighting and error correction in basically every editor that I can think of. Trying to manage real-world application templates as multi-line javascript strings (that quickly balloon into hundreds of lines) is an absolute nightmare. Save yourself the headache and make a <script> tag with an id, and type=text/html (or x-jquery-tmpl, if you're using the templating features built-in to jQuery).

Fetch the element using whatever, grab its innerHtml, and pass that string along to the templating library of your choice. The browser doesn't render the initial template markup because it's in a script tag, and it doesn't interpret it as javascript because of the non-standard type attribute. So for all intents and purposes it completely ignores it, but it's fully accessible for your use. Win-win.
Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking
I'm stil having the same issue, on the first run it never finishes the 'checking for dinosaurs' part, after a while a warning appears telling me to check if my computer is connected to the internet.
What is Good Essay Writing? 
Writing essays is challenging even for the best of writers. A good essay requires dedicating substantial time, preparation and commitment to the task. This often can be difficult for many students
Tetris in sed? Awesome!
People still believe in a benevolent google after the App Engine scandal? Let me ask you something; what would Google have to do before you finally believe they're just a publicly traded company?
In what why is this the same strategy? Windows 8 has a completely new API. Win32, which has been around since the early 90s is gone. The new API doesn't even have the concept of overlapping windows. WinRT talks directly to the kernel. In that respect, Windows 8 is as much of a "new thing" as the iPad or Android or any other tablet OS.

The only thing they've chosen to do differently is in marketing. The other tablet OSes are marketed as completely new things and Microsoft is marketing it as an iteration on an old thing.
Your first race?Try this
This naturally leads to the idea of non-textual presentation of program code. A major benefit of this approach is that it eliminates the need for code parsing. Our solution is to have code always maintained in an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), which consists of nodes with properties, children and references, and fully describes the program code.

So.. Common Lisp? I just read the article about the stupidity in file systems. In it the author laments the old adage about history repeating itself. He coins the anecdote, there are no new engineering problems, just new engineers solving old problems.

I can imagine this MPS product being incredibly useful... but we have had this technology for nearly 40 years in some for another of Lisp. And most Lispers would agree that extending the program language and semantics to the domain is a very productive way of writing reliable and maintainable software.

I am curious though what makes MPS superior exactly? Seems more complicated than Lisp, but I'm no MPS expert. Can anyone enlighten us?
Importance of Online Pharmacies
Health is very important for every human being and therefore any bodily disorder or disease calls for immediate medical attention. Seeking medical advice from a good physician definitely helps in faster recovery but other factors such as the cost of treatment and the availability of medicines also plays a significant role. Over the years, the availability and affordability of medicines had been a major cause of concern among the patients. The community drugstore located just a few steps away from a patient's residence often does not have the prescribed brand of medicine
Has anyone used IE10's file API and can speak to its capabilities? IE has lagged behind other browsers in replacing Google Gears for accessing file contents. Has Microsoft implemented this?

Edit: Just realized that there was in fact more info on the file API on that very page. The answer seems to be yes.
Show HN: See local photos on your mobile
Glennz Tees is always awesome http://vimeo.com/channels/glennz
The problem is they still go after open-source software with patent infringement claims (look at Microsoft).
Shen (successor to Qi) - Release Date Information
My no longer maintained list of the the impact of Powerpoint is at http://sooper.org/misc/ppt/
Twin Baby Boys Laughing at Each Other
I can't think of material that is more appropriate for HN. Sed is one of the most popular text manipulation tools in the history of Unix. Peteris' ebooks are well authored, to the point, and wonderfully insightful.

I would have up voted without comment were it not for this post.
Ask HN: Why do so many startups simply depend on FB alone, for the login?
I mean, I understand that FB has half a billion users etc etc. So it makes sense to use FB's auth, but doesn't it make sense to also give the option to register with them separately? For example, I wanted to try cardflick, but I can't, as the only way to get in, is using FB, and I don't have a FB account anymore :(

It'll hardly take a couple of hours to write a simple login script, no?
Looks great and definitely fills a great need. Definitely consider a side-by-side comparison option for the plans.

BTW: Twitter Bootstrap looks like a great base template. I'm surprised I have never seen it before.
I'm a CBRNE specialist, and we use these for estimating yield of nuclear detonations based on various paramaters (flash-to-bang time, angular width of cloud top, etc.)
thanks for your input for anon+ :>
i think the purpose of these types of "launch pages" is to gauge interest... to see if there's really enough interest to spend the time and effort creating the working system. it's also a great way to create a list of potential beta users. when something is ready, the person running the site can hand out beta codes to people that have signed up, and get real feedback at that point
Internet Real Estate Bubble
They won't say how much money Dalton Maag is getting to make this really nice font without royalties, but it's assumed to be "lots and lots". Props to Shuttleworth for making free software worth professional designers' time.
>why did it pull out of China?

Do you mean "why did they make a big rant about pulling out of China and then not actually do it until they were literally cyber-attacked by the government"? Google was never all that big in China anyway. I'm sure their whole strategy around this was to get gullible people to buy into the "Don't do evil" nonsense.

>Sergey up on stage saying the same things he said in this interview and he got fiery and emotional about it.

Yea? So do politicians. Very passionate about what they're talking about until it comes time to vote. Then they follow their wallets.

>This is a guy who grew up in the Soviet Union until he was 6 and for him it is a very personal and ideological issue.

I know plenty of people who grew up in the Soviet Union. What exactly do you think goes on there that makes the "lucky few" who escape want to change the world? Maybe it did have some profound effect on him but it sounds more likely to be simple positioning. Getting people to think he really cares will cause them to defend him every time his company betrays that trust.

>This corporations-as-profit-seeking-automata meme is old and tired. At the end of the day it's people who make decisions, and just as in every aspect of life people can have complex motivations for the decisions that they make.

It may well be old and tired but it's how the world works. The only thing a CEO can get in trouble for not doing is increasing share holder value.

You've been conned.
It may have been smart, but I don't think it's working. I see more and more developers working on WebGL, and I think it will become an important standard that all browsers will adopt and promote this year, with the exception of IE. So Microsoft will be the one looking bad ultimately, because they will be once again behind in supporting standards.

Also, I want to know how other browsers can work in the tile-based interface in Windows 8, hearing how its interface is based on IE10? Will they even allow other browsers in there, or will they risk an anti-trust lawsuit over the browser, again?

For all the talk about supporting the cross-platform web, Microsoft is still trying to lock it down to their own OS.
Another possible bug: when entering a location, I only seem to be shown nearby airports within the same country. For locations near borders (or in small countries) it's easy to forget the nearest airport might be in the next country. Specific examples:

* Vienna, Austria: Bratislava airport in Slovakia is closer than Linz or Graz

* Figueres, Spain: Perpignan airport in France is closer than Barcelona's).

But yeah, very useful idea (and one I suggested to Hipmunk back when they launched but I guess they're already busy enough).
I had this same question a while back. Seems like it was something to do with a bill in India, but I never figured out exactly what. Cool hacker picture, though.
Can I choose which files to download before it puts empties on the file system?
Is it going to be the same thing they sell on the desktop? That's the goal, right? So it's PC in tablet form. Just like every time they've tried it before.
Don’t Blog Just for SEO
More Content Doesn’t Equal Better Content
Boo:

"Tablets are a different form factor and interface paradigm from the PC, so software made from the ground up for tablets is always going to be superior to software made for both."

That's bullshit. That's like saying "mediocre software made by developers spending no time in UX will be user-unfriendly" or "websites made for firefox 3.6 only will look like shit on ie6 or chrome". The point is, if a developer spends their time making a piece of software good and usable, the form factor and mode won't matter. You target what you need, not random crap with drop-downs. That's what people are learning nowdays.

"Microsoft is stuck in the classic innovator’s dilemma: it’s doubling down on the features of its offering that are getting disrupted instead of trying to disrupt the disruptors."

Again partially true. Yes disruptors are making small applications which do their nich well, but that does not mean nobody wants a really really f-ing good terminal application for power users. Also you can't develop on a tablet. Also you can't play many online games on a tablet. My wife still users her windows PC sometimes while using iPad other times. Multi-Tasking is hard to do well, and the iPad approach does not work that well for my non-tech-savvy wife. It satisfies some, but not all people. In either case, yes it's not all about feature-for-feature, but its about finally making the tablet form-factor viable for Windows which is never was.