skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I take issues with some elements of Metro, it's definitely a style that puts typography front and center. That, combined with some great fonts coming out from (or at least licensed by) Microsoft, shows that they have the ability to be a stylistic powerhouse - at least, when it comes to text.
I am looking forward to this book.

One of the things I would like is recommended naming conventions for the various objects in STORM. For example, what's the best way to name a StreamID? Should it include information about the spout/bolt it originates from and the bolt it is going to? I spend a lot of time fretting these names and I still feel like I'm not getting it right.
Did you check that it actually looked as it's supposed to? I almost thought it was correct until I realized that NoScript was blocking the fonts for me. Looked even better when I changed that.
I thought about it, and I realized I didn't know. This is the best discussion I found: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-3.4.6/g77/Aliasing-Assumed...

Short answer: they don't. What you wrote is an undefined behavior, just like dereferencing a null pointer in C. If the compiler can't tell statically, then it just assumes they're not aliased.

I'm basing this conclusion mainly on this statement from that piece on aliasing: Essentially, compilers are promised (by the standard and, therefore, by programmers who write code they claim to be standard-conforming) that if they cannot detect aliasing via static analysis of a single program unit's EQUIVALENCE and COMMON statements, no such aliasing exists. In such cases, compilers are free to assume that an assignment to one variable will not change the value of another variable, allowing it to avoid generating code to re-read the value of the other variable, to re-schedule reads and writes, and so on, to produce a faster executable
Types are Anti-Modular
I can confirm that the page was broken yesterday and the day before for me. Started working sometime between yesterday AM and this morning.
I've been trying to accumulate a list of practices or behaviors where there has never been any (or much) barrier to copying, and where for someone to complain would sound a little bizarre.

Never mind hair styles and couture.... your question carries weight beyond that, I think. Here's my suggested answer: Philosophers and theologians have debated for thousands of years about whether life has meaning and purpose. Arguably, modern genetics and evolutionary biology have given us a definitive answer to that question: if life can be said to have any purpose at all, that purpose is making copies.

Making copies on behalf of our genome is what we're here for. This is one of the few statements you can make about all forms of life, from viruses to blue whales. So when someone introduces an artificial means of making information uncopyable, they're going up against the oldest, strongest instinct that any creature possesses: the instinct that tells us to back up our information by spreading it far and wide.

And yes, that includes other peoples' information, considering how much of our genome has been cribbed from other species.

It's an imperfect argument and probably a bit too abstract for Congressmen to either grasp or successfully shoot down, but I like it.
Twitter’s poor API documentation practices
Is that a message from the browser, or the site?
First, I think a blog post ending with "bring on the flames" should have comments enabled, otherwise it's not really fair. It comes across as whining without wanting to listen to advice or a response.

Speaking as someone who sometimes writes controversial things and never enables comments on my posts...

I view collections of comments as discussions. Readers often form into communities, like Hacker News. If there are comments on a blog post, are you supposed to write your comment here in your community? Or there on the post? Well, a good question is, are you a member of the author’s community? Probably not! Communities have all sorts of standards for participation. What are the author’s standards? Why bother figuring them out for one comment?

Communities also have other tools like seeing a person's history of posts to get a sense of their viewpoint and biases. How do you do that on an author’s blog?

Ultimately, authors either have to get rid of comments or buy into a plug-in system like Disqus. In my own case, I usually just provide a link to HN for posts that I think are of interest to the folks here. Everyone else can use twitter, reddit, or their own blogs to continue the discussion.

That doesn’t mean I won’t read all the flames, there are no end of analytics tools for discovering what people are saying about my writing.

I don’t speak for this author, but considering he has a link to this discussion right at the top of his post, I’m guessing he’s listening to your thoughts and welcomes your feedback right here or wherever people congregate to discuss the news of the day.
Kind of disappointed, really. I wonder if the font rendering really is better in FF? I hardly open it anymore other than to browse sites that I feel to be shady (as I have FF much more hardened than Chrome).
Spain's SOPA Law: How It Works And Why It Won't
I remember an article in wikipedia about CFL's, it had effects of mercury exposure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_fluorescent_lamp#Enviro...
Ginzametrics (YC S10) Aims to Improve E-Commerce Campaigns in Real Time
Tangent: has someone done the startup to do technical books this way (serialized subscriptions to books in progress, on-demand print-and-ship at completion for the small subset of customers that want that)?

Now that giant book stores are on their way out, it seems like we should be ready to end the pretense of retail channel relationships and marketing as being worth virtually all the money in the tech book production value chain.
The number of people working in agriculture and industry has peaked
Kickstarter 2011: The Stats
Looks like an interesting talk. I'll definitely try to be there. Thanks!
As a lawyer, I would prefer to avoid your overly-long and complicated signing process and just ask for a faxed or scanned and emailed copy. Both are equally valid in court.

Heck, an email confirmation by a party to the contract is now a valid method of signing/executing a contract.

So my question is: what makes squidsign better than the old fashioned/easy way or the big-name competitors in the field (i.e., Verisign, Adobe, or the other companies named elsewhere in the comments)
Pinterest Alternative
They stole the Coda icon:

http://www.panic.com/coda/

Not very professional.

(edit: It's been since replaced with another leaf icon)
Even if you're in a rare situation where you can't make do with Helvetica or Georgia or one of the other standard fonts, the long load time that your custom font imposes is going to affect my impression of your page much more than any improvement in readability or expression that the font may provide. You only have a few seconds to make a first impression.

Of course this only applies to the copy in the body of the page. Using @font-face for logos, buttons, or even headings, isn't going to impose the performance hit (if you only include in the font file the characters that you use) that a whole page's worth of text would.
I can only hope that some day Square One will air again. That show was crucial to me as a kid.
This is an induction cooktop, so you can safely touch it with your fingers. It doesn't get hot.
Multicast and Android – A Big Headache
no, not most. but a significant percentage in the us[a].
where I live, ionising smoke alarms have been deprecated in favour of photoelectric alternatives.
Je vais me rappeler de Signsquid justement à cause de la pieuvre. J'aime l'idée et le personnage est très bien choisi. Le lien se fait automatiquement avec l'encre.

La question prend de sa pertinence en fonction de la clientèle que vous visez.

Votre style est jeune et dynamique alors j'assume que vous vous dirigez vers ce même genre de clientèle. Les start-up par exemple. Dans l'autre sens si vous souhaitez faire affaire avec le gouvernement ou des entités reconnus pour leur image complet cravate professionnel vous misez à côté de la traque à mon avis.

Faut pas oublier que votre service est vendu par le client qui l'a acheté. Alors si pour ma compagnie je dois aller voir un client sérieux (et imposant) je me sens gêné de lui présenter une grosse pieuvre gentille.

Enfin, c'est très subjectif, il n'y a pas de bonne réponse. C'est qui votre clientèle cible au fait?
My New Web Designer Portfolio: Thoughts? Feedback?
In Norway and Sweden we also have mostly wooden houses. I would imagine it's the same in Finland as well. Probably because we have lots and lots of trees here, compared to continental Europe.
Don't get a Makerbot. It's not bad but you can do much better. Assuming you are in the US, here are some recommendations:

http://www.makergear.com/

MakerGear makes great printers. Amazing customer support and they even have an IRC channel on Freenode where you can interact with the chief maker.

http://www.lulzbot.com/en/86-assembled-lulzbot-prusa-mendel-...

Lulzbot is another good option.

I recommend building it yourself. It will be much easier to fix stuff when it breaks if you go that way. You can buy a kit from the above companies, or if you want to source parts from different companies, check out Ebay and Emakershop.com.
I figure that even a small amount of detected radiation would make people worry - "oh no, a terrorist is trying to smuggle plutonium into the country but his lead-lined briefcase has a hole in it!" - so generating a lot of false positives might cloak an actual delivery.

Or it could just cause panic, akin to calling in random bomb threats. Terrorism doesn't really have to kill anyone, just has to scare them.
I make my stream ids descriptive enough so that I understand what it is in the context of that spout or bolt. For wrapper bolts (like CoordinatedBolt) that add streams in addition to the wrapped bolt, I'll prepend the stream id with the name of the wrapper class to avoid naming conflicts (essentially namespacing the stream).

In general I think of streams as not going to a particular bolt, but something that is provided that anyone can subscribe to. So in the WordCountTopology, the stream of words isn't "intended" for the word counting bolt, it's just data that can be used by anyone else in the topology. This is a consumer-focused way of looking at it (consumers know their inputs) rather than producer-focused (producers know their outputs).
>And then clueless Reddit guys take credit for successfully pressuring him.

Phew. I was afraid a thread might go by without an opportunity to make sure I feel better that I'm an HNer and not a redditor.

Paul Ryan's stance on SOPA was unknown until a candidate came along opposing him. Reddit rallied behind him because Zerban was anti-SOPA. I don't think it's crazy to assume that might have some impact on Ryan's newly announced stance.
Seems like a lot of speculation and conjecture to me.
Charles Stross predicts the next 80 years
Tabs with round out borders
HistoryCam.org - old pics geolocated
Android as we Know it Will Die in the Next two Years and what it Means for You
There's nothing preventing you from installing all these components on a single box, and using cluster sizes of 1.

Of course, this won't net you any benefit (in fact, performance will be slightly worse), except that it will be relatively easy to scale out and add servers later on.
Yes: since at least around October or so, NuGet.exe (the command line) works just fine under Mono in Linux. This is all you need to create and install NuGet packages. MonoDevelop does not yet have integration equivalent to VisualStudio's, but that's not a big deal.
> Truly advanced, and dangerously powerful, features such as implicit conversions and higher-kinded types will in the future be enabled only under a special compiler flag. The flag will come with documentation that if you enable it, you take the responsibility.

Haskell (well, the GHC compiler) has been doing this kind of things for ages. They even take the further step (which I agree with) of requiring that "dangerously powerful" features be explicitly enabled on a per-case basis. They also have a syntax for enabling features on a per-file basis, which reduces the likelihood of advanced techniques creeping into other parts of your codebase.

I think your proposition is a good idea, and heartily recommend a review of how the GHC team has adressed this problem.
Think Haus in Hamilton, ON, maybe? (OP appears to be from Ontario, judging by previous comments.)
At headline size, some of those ligatures look terrible.
Fusion Garage and Arrigton had partnered at one point to produce a tablet. Later Fusion Garage struck off on their own to build a tablet, barely sold any units (~90), got sued by Arrington, and now seem to have gone bankrupt.

I had to use wiki to catch up on internet drama the headline and blogpost seem to assume the readers follow.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JooJoo
I don't like the idea of compiler flags, its extra work that isn't needed.

If people/teams decide they don't want to use aspects of the language then they are free to do so by convention.
The vapor pressure of molten lead has got to be pretty low... and I expect the bioavailability of elemental lead isn't all that great in any event, compared to some of its salts. You're probably OK. :)
I do this. I put my chair on a riser and it works just fine.
MacGap: Desktop WebKit wrapper for HTML/CSS/JS applications
LG to launch Android phones with VMware virtualization on Verizon
Why should genes strive for an equilibrium? Even humans for most of history tried to have as many offspring as possible.
What I'm trying to say (and what I think jayzee was trying to convey) is that rbanffy's logic is flawed, and that just because pirating things is easy doesn't make it right. What we call pirating might be okay, but the idea that because something is easy to do it shouldn't be illegal is flawed. Attempting murder is arguably just as easy as downloading a pirated version of a game, but it's not okay. The only difference between the two is that it feels obvious that murder is harmful, but downloading that song instead of paying for it doesn't feel quite as bad.

That being said, I agree that copying things should be legal, but not because doing so is easy. I think that it should be legal to copy things because I don't think people should be allowed to restrict what I do just because they want more money.
This is why bills are almost never voted down. One thing that politicians hate doing is switching positions because they can then get attacked on both sides of an issue and as a flip-flopper. In fact, bills rarely get voted down once they are proposed. Congressional leaders rarely force a vote unless they know the bill will pass. The most common way for a bill to die is to just never vote on it. This allows them to not support or oppose something controversial.
But again, other languages do offer the ability to write methods that apply to all collections, without the "complexity." Sure, it's different, but in Gosu for example you can write an enhancement method on the Collection interface, or on the List interface, and now everything that implements Collection or List has that method. It's then a matter of whether or not the objects in question implement that appropriate interface or not. Your new functions apply to everything that implements those interfaces, and if you want a new thing to have all those methods then you just implement the interface and you get all 50+ functions for free.

Scala offers a particular way to solve that problem that has its own plusses and minuses, but it's not the only way for a language to let you do that, and it's certainly not the "simplest" way to accomplish that goal.
Well, its usage is different for different's sake in the context of the web, and that's what I meant. I know this style of numeral is old, but I'm saying that its age does not make it good. We also used to substitute "f" for "s" in some scenarios, but we stopped. Let's stop doing this too.

As far as it being easier to read in running text, I can't see it, but if the designer of a given work truly feels it provides that benefit, then so be it. I just would prefer for this style to not be used on the web, even though it is becoming available along with other advances in web typography. I just think it looks bad and it's hard to read.
There are versions of Ubuntu that use KDE (Kubuntu), XFCE (Xubuntu) and LXDE (Lubuntu).
There is plenty of IAP currency that is far far far from farmvilles "annoy you to death if you don't pay" idea.

For instance, look at League of Legends as an example of a far more positive type of currency:

You can unlock new characters by playing, or more quickly by by paying. You can unlock cosmetic skins purely by paying. You can temporarily enhance the speed at which you unlock players by paying.

You can never play a dollar and play at the top level of the game.

Some people certainly pay hundreds of dollars to play the game, but many pay $0. Many people who are busy pay some money and then are able to gather the characters that time rich and cash poor players then spend their time to achieve.

As to more generic DLC that isn't currency based (A la Mass Effect), I love that stuff. Video games have cost $40-60 bucks for all time. They cost that in 1981, and they cost that in 2011. By putting DLC in, they can not raise that price yet actually make more money only off the people who really like the game and wish to go deep into it.

For instance, I have bought the DLC for Oblivion, as I loved that game (it added about 20 hours of quests in another world). However, I've largely avoided the DLC in lots of other games that I've bought the other game. Therefore, I pay more for games I enjoy more, and pay less for games I enjoy less. Sounds like perfection in pricing to me.

Many people who don't like the more normal type of DLC wouldn't like the game costing $15 bucks more either. But that's the alternative really, or scaling back the base game.
A blade grinder like that won't do a terribly good job for something like an AeroPress. Grind quality is one of the most overlooked aspects of good coffee.

You really need a decent conical burr grinder to get a consistent fine grind. I like my Capresso grinder that I picked up for something like $70, but a quick googling turns up several well-reviewed burr grinders in the $30 range.
The people who do things Really Neat are first introduced by some means other than a resume.
It's not quite the same icon. If you look at the water drops, they are different. Also the shading isn't the same.

Still odd though.
This post would be even better with "remote" stats split into US-only and worldwide.
The best of Kickstarter videos from 2011
I use RightSignature:

http://rightsignature.com/

SignSquid charges $9/mo for 10 documents. RightSignature charges $14/mo for unlimited documents.

I enjoy the workflow of RightSignature. I upload the doc/PDF of the contract, or import for Google Docs. I find the fields that need to be filled in, highlight them, and designate who fills it in (me or the counterparty).

I then fill in text fields using a text entry box and the signature using my mouse. They have a good system for tracking the mouse speed to show the width of the line, and the signatures look quite good with minimal effort.

When you want a counterparty to sign, they get an email asking them to follow a link. They then can fill in the fields and sign, without registering for the site. Finally, we both get a PDF of the final contract, and they store the final PDF on their site. You cannot "delete" the contract from their site once it has been executed, which corresponds to the gut feeling that the contract is cannot be undone (without executing a contract that overrides it).

I also think their design looks serious and conveys to proper gravity to a contract signing process.
Khan Academy Internship, Summer ‘11
All sufficiently large CRUD apps either use an established ORM or re-invent them poorly.
anyway to leverage your croudsource content providers for network effects? still working on that idea, but it is your maximum point of interactivity.
Curious - on what basis is email confirmation now valid? Court precedent, a law, or something else?
From the article: "Of all the large product API’s I consume regularly, Twitter’s is the one I’ve had the worst experience with. "

Clearly he hasn't worked enough with Facebook's API and its often broken documentation. It's always fun when Facebook decides to change the API when you're in the middle of a project, but keep backwards compatibility and only "hide" the documentation for the old API so you can't find it with search, and now you're left with trying to decide if you should try to keep using the old interface or change your whole code for the new API.
What is 37signals's annual revenue?
I love my AeroPress. I got one last year for Christmas, and have enjoyed it ever since. My thoughts in a bit more detail: http://www.alittletothewright.com/index.php/2011/01/aeropres... (Disclosure: Affiliate links within, use rgarcia's link if you'd like to avoid that)
If you have big data, you're going to need lots of servers anyway, and I think there's no better way to manage that data than with the techniques I talk about in the book.

While I think these techniques can scale down, the current crop of Big Data technologies (esp. Hadoop) don't scale down very well. That is, they have a lot of overhead for small amounts of data. So while these techniques can work for "small data", it's going to be relatively more costly. For big data, the overhead is amortized. In the future, I do see scaling down as an important evolution for these technologies.
I'm sorry, but won't these two examples add the method just to arrays? The author is intentionally trying to add a single method that will work for all collections, both scala's and non-scala's, and will always return a collection of the same type as the one the method was called on. Can you show how to easily do that in a dynamic language?
Will Mobile Internet Overtake Fixed Internet?
It's kind of a cheap shot but I love the dig at PHP.
He's not saying that he "knows things in so much detail that he can't imagine wrongful analogies". He's saying that "magnetic force is different from anything you are familiar with", so you have to learn it as something new, not by analogy.

Feynman does (explain a little bit of) Quantum Mechanics by analogy (photons are spinning clocks), but goes on the say you have to learn a truly ne wmodel to understand more deeply.

See also: Dijkstra's "On the cruelty of really teaching computing science: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036...

> It is the most common way of trying to cope with novelty: by means of metaphors and analogies we try to link the new to the old, the novel to the familiar. Under sufficiently slow and gradual change, it works reasonably well; in the case of a sharp discontinuity, however, the method breaks down: though we may glorify it with the name "common sense", our past experience is no longer relevant, the analogies become too shallow, and the metaphors become more misleading than illuminating.

There are lots of gems in that essay, such as this:

> We can view the program as what turns the general-purpose computer into a special-purpose symbol manipulator, and does so without the need to change a single wire (This was an enormous improvement over machines with problem-dependent wiring panels.) I prefer to describe it the other way round: the program is an abstract symbol manipulator, which can be turned into a concrete one by supplying a computer to it. After all, it is no longer the purpose of programs to instruct our machines; these days, it is the purpose of machines to execute our programs.
Questions I'll Ask Your Startup (as an early dev hire)
To be honest, more than a "potential bias he fails to disclose" I think he thinks everyone reading his blog would know about this (it's a pretty well known drama if you're a TechCrunch reader/Arrington follower).