skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not blaming Typekit for designers who don't know how to use fonts. I'm blaming Typekit for serving fonts that look terrible on many systems that aren't running the latest and greatest browsers and operating systems (i.e., most of the machines used to browse the web). Many of them don't look that great even on those newer systems either, certainly not rendering with the quality that you would expect from a pro font displayed in a native application running locally on the machine.

For a while shortly after these font-hosting services started going live, every trendy design blog out there started to look worse than it did before, and I couldn't figure out why. For a short time, I actually assumed I'd inadvertently messed up my ClearType settings, or downloaded a dubious update from Microsoft, or found another rendering bug in Firefox, or something along those lines. Then I started to notice these little "T" badges in the corner of the pages that didn't render properly, and discovered the hard way that hardly any web fonts were properly hinted for on-screen use, which is why they all looked horrible compared to things like Verdana and Arial/Helvetica.

To be fair, a few of them are better now. Still, Typekit's own site looks pretty bad on this computer (I've just checked) and the irony is that it's their custom fonts that render like something from the Windows 95 days, while the body text in Georgia looks as clean as usual. It's not exactly a great sales pitch when the part of your site using your technology looks obviously visibly worse than the part of your site using the tried and tested workhorse you're asking us to give up.

[Edit: Here's an example:

http://i.imgur.com/cEGNL.png

Notice that even at display size, the rendering of the heading text in Proxima Nova looks awful. Meanwhile, trusty Georgia even renders with decent italics at body text size.

And it looks that way on several systems here, from Firefox on Windows XP to Chrome on Windows 7, so it's nothing to do with ClearType rendering differences, the Firefox rendering problems with HarfBuzz, or any other such excuse.]

As I've said many times, the reality is that at today's typical screen resolutions, at body text sizes, there are only so many ways you can turn on the pixels that are going to work. We have had a few brilliantly designed fonts created specifically for that usage available to us for a long time. Anything that is supposed to replace them needs to look different enough to be worth the hassle and render at least as clearly, and most/all of the hosted web fonts currently fail to meet one or both of those criteria. I'm sorry if this is some sort of downvote-worthy regressive heresy, but I go by results and the screenshot does not lie.
It looks more like they've already got something in testing. It's possible it's more than vapour.
Oportunidad de Negocio - GVO
And how exactly is this different from any other trade out there?

Plumbers are not born as such, they invest money and time to become skilled professionals; but when they fix your boiler, they don't ask for royalties every time you turn the boiler on, do they? They perform a service, you pay for the service, and everyone's happy.
For example, there is no reason why the entire process shouldn't be monetized. A lot of people would pay good money to see those recording sessions, turning a risky long-term investment into immediate profit; the musician would sell a service, like any tradesman.

But no, an "artist" should be able to struggle a couple of years, then watch the money flow in for the rest of his life (plus 70, exactly like a plumber's son... not). Why, it sounds a lot like rent-seeking, that most laudable of economic forces; should we really promote it with such draconian laws?

Btw, to go back about your point about good music being scarce: music that fits the mainstream canon developed by a certain industry in the last 50 years is indeed scarce, probably because it was developed around a model based on scarce distribution resources -- so you over-design one item and make it as marketable as possible to a wide demographic, because your distribution costs are high so you want to make them as repeatable as possible (i.e. you want to make one album and sell a million copies, not ten albums selling a hundred thousand, because you have to modify the physical production line for each album and re-do the whole marketing push through centrally-broadcasted mass-media).

In a world where such limitations are gone, music tastes will develop in different ways. The over-produced album has already been done with -- people buy single items now. Over-production of those single items will probably change as well, as people want faster and faster "updates". Changes in broadcasting are fragmenting tastes, making it very difficult to appeal to everyone, so the "waterfall model" of music production is producing increasingly diminishing returns. The industry will have to move to different models, like quick iterations (you write a song while you tour, and modify it depending on public reaction).

What's so "wrong", so unbearable about all that ? The fact that the Rolling Stones might get a reduced pension? Yeah, they really should be rewarded for ransacking the blues tradition...
Despite an abundance of excellent management tools for project tracking in lean and agile environments, nothing has ever quite matched for me the flexibility and effectiveness of good , old-fashioned cards and post-its on a wall.

With StoryWall I've tried to craft something that replicates an analogue story wall as much as possible. Essentially no business rules at all, cards and tokens (think post-its) with colour to create meaning. StoryWall: now with even fewer features!
That's actually what I find interesting about it. Propaganda film has been written about and practiced extensively, and we have a pretty good idea of various ways to make it, as well as analyses of how to use things like juxtaposition/framing/pacing/etc. for propagandistic effect. But propaganda games are a pretty weakly explored concept, and it's interesting to think of how to use game mechanics (rather than just in-game dialogue) for propagandistic purposes, especially since that overlaps pretty heavily with grayer-area things like "expression" and "persuasion" (propaganda is just sort of the limit case of persuasion with some poetic license).

I'm not sure this is the best game in the genre, but it's an interesting entry. Here's one satirizing airport security from a few years ago, which I think comes off as a bit more honest in that its clustering of events is also more frequent than would be the case IRL, but it clearly positions itself as satire that's exaggerating to make a point: http://www.shockwave.com/gamelanding/airportsecurity.jsp

This is a pretty decent book on the subject, fwiw, but I think the area of game-rhetoric, of which propaganda games are a nice highlighting case, is still pretty open (and to me at least, more interesting than stuff like gamification): http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262514885/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

Submitted separately, a 2009 blog post analyzing six ways to use game mechanics for rhetorical effect (which can of course mean propagandistic effect): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3070404
I wouldn't say that a turbocharger allows fuel to burn more completely, if that's what you meant. A turbocharger uses energy in the exhaust to spin a turbine, which is connected to an impeller, compressing air going into the engine. More air allows more fuel, and together you get a bigger bang in a smaller space - the engine behaves like it's larger than it is, burning more air and fuel then it would otherwise. A turbocharged car can still burn fuel inefficiently, and they often do run rich (injecting more fuel than will be burned) in order to avoid pre-ignition and to cool the cylinders.
I saw this on fark.com about a week ago, and decided not to cross post it here because it's far too biased. I understand what it's trying to do, but I don't think it's successful in doing so. My biggest complaint is that it attempts to show that it's not only about making poor choices - but the choices that the character has obviously taken prior to getting to the point where I control it were poor choices, and now I am trying to deal with it. My second complaint is that the simulation should have been one day longer - so you would have to pay rent again - that's when the real issues start happening.

Even with the odds against me, I was able to finish the simulation a few times with over $1200 available (thus being able to pay the rent on the following day).
Ben Horowitz for CEO of HP: five reasons why he'd be better than Meg Whitman
Well, let's look at the options:
- Run own server. Buy hardware, find colo etc. I guess the advantages of PaaS are obvious here.
- Run vps, manage yourself. Required: somebody to buy/maintain the machine, plus a lot sysadminning. Advantages of PaaS obvious, too.
- Run managed vps. Advantages of PaaS become less obvious. Maybe more supported versions, more specific functionality. Or automatic scaling (from tweaking db disk access times to network-level load-balancing); you don't get that with a managed vps.

I guess my point is that rolling out your own equivalent infrastructure is far from 'trivial'. Buying machines, worrying about mundane details like amps on the power backbone, setting up and maintaining the server software (lol at the first person - there always is one - to suggest that this can be solved with putting 'apt-get update' or equivalent in cron), or testing various versions of infrastructure software with your app because you don't know if it'll be safe to deploy that update that came out yesterday - I don't use PaaS but I see many advantages for small-time operations (and maybe bigger ones too, maybe I'd trust them more if I had more experience with them).
> The overall good? The overall good of what?

If you swallow a cost of 10, but that 11 people gets 1 from your contribution, the society as a whole wins.

> How about people just stop taking what's not theirs and treat artists with respect?

When something that used to be hard becomes totally simple, obvious and costless, there is absolutely no sense trying to stick to the previous state of the matter. When Gutenberg invented the printing press, what used to be a complex, tough and expensive endeavour (copying books by hand) instantly became worthless. Too bad, but the net gain for the society as a whole was immense.

Similarly, the net gain we could enjoy from being able to copy, transfer, duplicate, mix, rehash, transform existing digital goods is world-changing. Some will lose at some point, but they'll have to get over it. Nowadays large parts of the copyright laws are only manacles impending progress, defending soon to be dead practices and business models.

> And in regard to your last statement, it's not your right to determine whether exposure alone should be the reward of their hard work.

Did you read me? As a musician composer and arranger, I've earned a living by teaching and live performance, but a net loss on recordings; and it was back in the 90s, when CD-R was unheard of.

The hard true fact : only artists aired on radio and TV make money on recorded music. They are a minuscule minority of musicians. Same goes for actors, painters, etc.
Anonymous Twitter Alternative Created For Protesters & Revolutionaries
very useful, Gabor
Sure, and I'd expect any PaaS to have dynamic scaling. The question is, though, how many people really need a dynamic scaling PHP service? In your average web app, you're far more likely to bottleneck in the database before the application requests queue (and the DB is significantly harder to horizontally scale), and if you do need more application CPU, it's generally as easy as "put multiple VMs behind a load balancer". You can even auto-scale with AWS using existing toolkits.

Heroku made its mark because Rails deployment is (or was, anyhow) a lot of work if you don't know what you're doing, and they simplified it to as-easy-as-PHP deployment. PHP just doesn't have the same barrier to entry.
Dropbox is used by about half my coworkers. Among friends that I work on projects with, it's used by more like 90% of them. That's on par with Skype and we saw their valuation.
This was a very interesting exercise, but some of the numbers don't seem very realistic. For example, is $600 really the cheapest rent a poor person has to pay? Even in a city like London, I've lived on $300 per month, including food, when times were tough for me.
They led to an explosion of patents on genes, not to an explosion of applicable research. The research would have happened anyway, maybe a bit later or maybe not as patent directed.
About concurrency and the GIL
In that case, at least make it a chat application. If I can talk to someone near me in real-time, that's much more fun.
https://github.com/fotonauts/MongoHub-Mac

This version is based on the original MongoHub and it's supposed to be more solid. Done by one of my coworkers. He is quite active on the tools, so feel free to make feedback here.

However, no binary here, you have to build the tool...
I got as far as mod_fcgi, but I couldn't figure out how to write a mono program to integrate with it. Found some nice C examples, but nothing for mono. I still think it would be a hell of a great side project -- lots of power and expressiveness in F# that JS doesn't have.
You really don't see a problem with someone other than Microsoft selling an operating system and calling it Windows?

What about a company that does mail delivery calling itself the "United States Postal Service" ?

An airline called "Virgin"?
Amanda Knox
Its a nice project and great effort no doubt. But I am not convinced bundling an IM client into a browser is necessary or even a good idea.
First videos from Operation Anthill against patent trolls
Yeah, I'll agree with you on that. I tend to use it primarily for the math portion rather than the violent video game portion. (I do find the remarks on creating soldiers more likely to actually kill interesting though, as a completely separate issue.)
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The Achiever's Only Network | Never Mistake Activity For Productivity
For single/couple without kids you might get by. But when you are 45, still working the $9 job, with 2 kids, and a sick partner...

Luckily that doesn't describe me, but it's easy to miss what it can be like for those on the edge. I hate it when politicians (in the UK) make out that it's not a big deal that for someone to lose £50 in benefits (per month), and have no concept of what it's like to live a life where every penny does count, and where one big bill can set you back for years.

We all might be lucky with great support networks, skills and health, but not every one is.
me 2... so, to this moment, 100% of HN users are based in Spain :D
World's Most Complex Radio Telescope Snaps Stunning 1st Photo of the Cosmos
Thunderbird to Apple Mail
If you want to import Thunderbird to Apple Mail then you can use the Thunderbird to Apple Mail Conversion utility which is very HOT Conversion Tool to convert email messages from Thunderbird to Apple Mail.
30 disks = 30 floppies back then. Yes, I've installed Linux (and 386BSD) from a big stack of floppies. It's not fun.
Whats the aim?
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JNS Resources is a marketing company which offers prospect information, flyers, mailers, labels, scripts, ads and SEO services for businesses and professionals.
I'm currently teaching a college algebra class in which students learn to solve the kind of problem presented. (It would be very interesting to know where "train problems" got their start, though...)

The vast majority of my students cannot solve that sort of problem by themselves after seeing several examples of similar problems worked out. Yes, this is the last math course some of these students will have to take. No, they are not all liberal arts students.

Given how quickly unused knowledge decays, I don't think it's terribly unreasonable to assume that your average student with a bachelor's degree won't remember how to solve a train problem.
Newsgame rhetorics: the ways games make rhetorical points
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There is nothing different about the plumber and the artist. The plumber comes to your house and leaves you with a working toilet. The artist goes to the studio and leaves you with a copy of a song. In both cases, you now have something of value created by another person. Both would like to be paid for their work. Last I checked, no artists are selling MP3s to consumers on a per stream royalty basis. They're asking for the same one time payment you pay your plumber, based on you having something of value that they took time to create. You want multiple songs from them? You pay for each, just like you pay your plumber to fix a sink when he's done with the toilet.

There is a perfectly good reason why "the entire process shouldn't be monetized". It's a super big fucking distraction to have people at your recording studio when you're trying to do something that is already extremely difficult. The entire process IS monetized, because you're supposed to pay for the copy of the work you take when it's over.

And for the record, many artists do take songs on the road, try them out, and change them based on public reaction. Then, they come home, spend money and record it. You want a copy? Pay for it.
I'm not sure that anyone's actually tested what happens when a lot of complex rule sets are allowed to overlap and each have access to virtually all information in the world

I'm pretty sure that they don't all have access to all information; if anything because that would make it much harder to scale. They probably have access to internal services/APIs which give them what they need, more or less like Google App Engine works.

If even their browser, which is designed to run on a single machine by a single user, runs with a bunch of different processes which are limited by simple, well defined interfaces to each other and blocked from other IO, I'd say it's unlikely that they simply let their internal programs run 'freely'.

If you took something with a brain the size of a lobster's, say a couple million neurons or a few thousand programs competing for processing cycles, stuck a billion eyes and ears on it and fed it terabytes of information for ten to fifteen years (and gave it a perfect memory plus access to a few hundred million email passwords), are you really sure its behavior would be predictable?

Almost all software has unpredictable behavior, but to consider that a combination of email servers, web page crawlers, phone routers, speech recognizers and such will develop sentience just because they're running on the same network is frankly ridiculous. Yes, there are probably errors, strange behaviors that result from complex interactions, but to the likelihood of intelligence emerging from that is, in my opinion, rounded to zero.

It's like locking a few thousand animals of different species in a room and expecting them to turn themselves into a single thinking entity, when they're probably just going to eat each other.

This code is made to improve large portions of itself to begin with.

It is? I've never read that.
Someone needs to check their numbers. A little research suggests that 275$/month health insurance premium is really high. A good emergency coverage should be closer to 50$. 60$ for internet? I get mine, high-speed, for half that. 75$ phone bill? That's the average for -smart phones-, basic services should only cost 10$.

And I managed to finish with 1157$ anyways. Clearly low-income people need to learn to be frugal. :)
$300 including rent? I thought I was doing well (in far east London) renting a room in a student share house for £257 a month, 9 years ago. Plus bills.
I understand the benefit of PaaS; I've used Heroku on occassion, and PHPFog seems to be making in the space as well. If you just want an app online, and don't care about how it gets there, and have more money than system administration skill, PaaS is great. My question is more along the lines of "What do I get with Azure+ that I don't get with PHPFog or an existing AWS AMI or a Linode StackScript?" What's the killer feature? It's going to be more expensive (you get to buy a cloud-sized slice of a Windwos license), likely slower than a Linux platform (the benchmarks I've seen put PHP on Windows significantly behind Linux deploys), and so far, it doesn't solve the hard parts of a PHP application deployment.

I'm a Rails developer, mostly, and I have Heroku apps, apps running on Linode VMs, apps running on rented Rackspace servers, and apps running on AWS. I've got a lot of experience setting this stuff up and maintaining it, but I still really appreciate the simplicity of Heroku; a dashboard of services and extensions ready to install in a click is awesome. Heroku's killer feature isn't that you don't have to set up RVM and Passenger, it's that you don't have to write bundles of daemon managers, monitoring scripts, rake tasks to manage code deploys and reloads, git hooks, background worker management, and a bunch of otherwise-tedious stuff.

The sales pitch for Azure+ seems to be "We solved a problem that only exists on Azure", which just isn't very compelling. So far, it seems like the only target audience for this thing is people who will only deploy PHP apps on Azure and don't have any other options, period, which seems like a really small target audience.
Honest question, do you buy via physical mediums or online distribution?
This flash game (ok, flash video) is a much more awesome way to show the same thing:

http://www.popmodal.com/video/1251/BILL-COSBY--Economics-Les...
But then I am sure they are getting enough without needing to make suggestions
The message notifying stuff is all AJAX driven so it should be near real-time. It sends an email notification if you don't reply/login within 15 minutes.
When you are living on the edge, the perfect storm can come around far quicker and more often than you'd imagine.
Context you don’t usually hear on Android vs iOS
Notch even congratulated them: https://twitter.com/#!/notch/status/115752966702628864 . And people didn't believe him so he posted: https://twitter.com/#!/notch/status/115753196785381376
If Facebook, Zinga, Groupon and Wikipedia are startups (just looking at the first couple), could someone describe to me why Microsoft, Apple and Google are not startups?
Implementing WWW::LastFM with XML::Rabbit - Part 5 of 5
Slight problem, on exiting the page and reloading the changes are all gone (firefox)

No login is great for single users but I think you should persist changes across reloads.
I made it through the month with $150 to spare without sacrificing my child's education or my health. I just didn't turn down free stuff (hey, there's nothing wrong with being poor) and didn't make stupid decisions, even though the game tried to set me up (forcing me to choose between getting paid per hour or per piece without an estimate on how much per-piece would give me? I'd at least do a back-of-the-envelope calculation in real life).

EDIT: Just tried it again and went with the hourly wage. The game said my supervisor cut it in half. Nice going, game.

Also, who starts smoking when they can't afford it?
We are currently using Joel Spolsky’s Trello (http://trello.com).
Down again this morning for us, at 8AM we lost connection and (at 12:50) still haven't got it back. Routing our connection through our DR site.

Edit @ 13:50, back up, but so slow it's making doing anything impossible, still routing through DR site
Profissionais de TI qualificados e certificados
Mercurial vapor superfly
CSC sued by investors over failed NHS IT programme