skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. He's suggesting that most people haven't realized the possibilities of it yet.

I am observing the opposite: the mainstream public (looking at my non-techie friends) have been fully exposured to it, had enough of it, and is slowly getting tired of it. We're not talking about early adopters anymore: everybody has an online identity and has learned its limitations and implications.

If anything, social networks are getting boring: outside of your real circle of friends you see the same strangers posing to be smarter, better looking and happier than they really are: people aren't that different after all, and your real social network stays where it has always been: in your cell phone's address book.

And that's where I'll be turning to for an advice about finding a doctor or a car mechanic. I don't give a rat's ass about what "people on the internet" have to say. At least half of them voted for Bush. Twice.
>Think of the extreme case: each line is half a page apart. Clearly, the eye has no problem finding the next line.

I don't see how that's a refutation at all - if anything I think it supports my case. If each line is half-a-page apart, when you reach the end of the line you have to look down to find the start of the next one because you can't see where the next line is within your natural eye-line, preventing the sentence from flowing naturally.

Whatsmore, people have no problems reading books or magazines which almost always have a relatively narrower leading than sites like A List Apart.

I think the middle-ground is optimum for readability - if it's too narrow it's easy to mix up which line you're reading, if it's too wide it's difficult for the eye to find the next line so reading doesn't flow naturally. I can't help but conclude that someone read "leading is good" somewhere and took it to its logical conclusion which is making it excessive and this meme has caught on, much like how Fitts's Law has been abused as an excuse to make things unnecessarily and annoyingly big for little gain.
the hannity/limbaugh crowd takes conservapedia VERY seriously
I would use procmail (http://www.procmail.org/). You might also check out the comments at this older post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186875
Sun’s Schwartz and his Failsafe moment
Absolutely - I'm feeling the same, like we're seeing the Apple II of a new industry.

That's why I posted this question, I'm curious to hear what kind of directions people have in mind for these machines.
>Windows being slowly replaced by .NET stack

Veryyy slowly... but I think its the same issue with it.

>100MB+ downloads

When is that ever the case? Certainly not the VM or even a "odd" toolkit like SWT.

>Startup time is more important than most developers think

Agree. Any app its more important them people think.

The bottom line is if you want maximum responsiveness, minimum size, you have to eliminate layers, not add them. And Obj-C + cocoa is a fairly productive environment.
however, it isn't necessarily small or fast to startup - have you downloaded or tried to create a cocoa app lately? 30 + meg is common for the most basic things. And they are anything but instant to start up. Sounds like you want quicksilver like performance - which means pre loading - or just use quicksilver (probably already is a del.icio.us thing in existence).
They both suck from a users point of view. Who cares what developers think - if you want your users to have the best experience, then as a developer you have to not think of your own convenience.
All the lego pieces I could never afford as a kid.
Markup only solves the shallow part of the problem anyway. Sure it can help communicate with graphic designers, but it doesn't do everything.

Lots of OSX apps (the ones which most people think of as being friendly, usable and pretty) are done mostly programmatically, even with the interface builder stuff available...
Really? Half of your social graph on facebook voted for Bush? I am guessing that isn't accurate. It is the case that half of all Americans voted for Bush twice.

But I think that makes the point: what the original post is suggesting is that your social graph could be used to limit the mechnics you want to those that are left leaning hippies (like me!) who use vegan vegetable oil in the crankcase. All because you surround yourself with people like you.

Please note that I am not advocating that this is necessarily a good thing. Just that you are making the point very well.
Apple's web
A neat casing for MintyMP3 (which then would have to be renamed, obviously).
RAM is volatile, SSDs are not. Obviously not relevant in the case of swap, though.
In his entire life, he's met his father once. As a result, you think he's a hypocrite for not breaking immigration laws to obtain residency for his aunt on his father's side. And you're smart enough to write code?
Web Development Toolbox: 120+ New Tools for Web Development
I feel a need to defend sIFR. It was actually very carefully designed in order to preserve standards, navigation, and accessibility.

sIFR is designed to a) be frosting on top of a standards compliant HTML cake and b) fail very gracefully in every combination of javascript or flash availability. When you design using sIFR you are heavily encouraged to build the design with common web fonts first and then simply overlay the sIFR to be optionally rendered when possible. It even preserves behaviors like anchoring and copy/paste.

The idea does, at first, sound extremely convoluted and toxic, but should be instead thought of as a really clever hack to make interesting typographic design possible despite constraints of font distribution online.
Plenty of database workloads involve a lot of random I/O (e.g. anything that does an index lookup is typically doing random I/O). In theory, you should be able to tell the query optimizer about the relative costs of random vs. sequential I/O on your hardware, and have it adjust the costing of query plans accordingly (e.g. PG allows this, at any rate -- it might even be possible to infer that automatically, although not easy).

Aside from the query workload, WAL is designed under the assumption that sequential writes are much cheaper than random writes, so you could imagine changing that when using SSDs...
That's because this list is incomplete. This guy appears to have just gone through crunchbase and made a list of companies, sorted by the size of their latest funding round.

I know of several startup biotech companies that have been funded recently. None of their executives blog or twitter, however.
The line height issue comes, somewhat, from the argument about textual color. If you have no leading at all, the text ends up very cramped and dark which is considered very unfavorable.

For instance, I'd bet you'd be hard pressed to find many books printed professionally which don't have at least half a line of leading.

How leading affects someone's ability to scan lines, I don't know so much about. In my experience, medium text color is more pleasing to read in general -- I feel less eye strain, less cramped -- but I don't experience much difficulty following lines regardless of leading.
"... Why not teach students a technology that could potentially make them money ..."

Because technology changes and the money follows.

This is the problem of trying to teach specifics rather than general principles. Most engineering degrees in Aus. have a 1 year 'in-industry' year before graduation. Does CS needs something like this for grads to cut their teeth in technology specifics?
Twitter/Evan Williams is hiring a "Founder Associate"
About Us

Twitter is defining a new form of communication that is touching people's lives across the world. We are small but well-funded and building a company to last. We are currently a team of 25 and looking for a few key people who will help take us to the next level.

About this Job

This is a unique opportunity for an ambitious, multi-talented individual who wants to see the inside of a fast-moving startup and work closely with the founders. The ideal candidate is a future entrepreneur or executive who is willing to work hard and do a wide variety of non-glamorous tasks for a year or two in order to get their foot in the door, learn, and make connections. You will work directly with Twitter CEO Evan Williams and co-founder Biz Stone with the simple goal of saving them time. Which means: The level of work you'll do is only limited by your capabilities. Are you capable of: Designing a presentation? Researching a market? Creating a financial model? Great, as long as you're also willing to make copies and run errands. Essentially, you should be overqualified to be an assistant, but not have a problem doing assistant-like tasks. In exchange, you'll get unique visibility into a unique company, a great learning experience, and the chance to move on to do many other things (in Twitter, or elsewhere—with a strong endorsement).

Requirements

* Excellent written communication skills

* Strong computer skills (spreadsheets, word processing, presentations, email)

* Highly organized and efficient

* People person with tact and diplomatic instincts

* Track record of trying things

* Extreme trustworthiness

* Strong interest in business and, particularly, technology startups

* Broad knowledge of the Internet industry

About working at Twitter

Twitter offers competitive salaries and full benefits, including health, dental, vacation, 401k, and stock options. We work in a bright, sunny office in San Francisco. And you'll be joining a unique group of experienced folks who are doing their best work to create something great.

The position is full-time and is based in San Francisco and will report to the CEO.
I'm guessing there are lots more self-funded startups that are started for effectively nothing.
A natural feature for this would be to wait until the user leaves your site, then register accounts at all those sites using the supplied username. Then squat on those new accounts and offer to sell them back to people.

Collecting emails would help!
Excellent referral. I'm a big fan of Bruce's work, this is a perfect style/content match.
I would make some 3D fractals, and other fun mathematical objects.
Kirubakaran,
Here is a video of Neil speaking at the Ted conference a couple years ago, he gets into some of the programmable molecule stuff. He is a true genius.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/neil_gershenfeld_on_fab_l...
You're looking for this:

http://www.smtp2web.com/

They listen for mail and hit your site with HTTP POSTs whenever they show up.
I wasn't aware of the braces, thanks for the tip, will add that link as well. I agree with you about the need for finishing of the parts, though with effort you can achieve stunning results.
Daring Fireball scoop: why Opera was rejected from the iPhone App Store
If you read my initial post I said specifically that it can't be just a flat out block. What you do is stop it and send an e-mail to the person who posted it asking them to verify they are an actual person.

That's both why it works even if you want to discuss viagra and how you can tell if you are getting too many false positives.
ASK HN: Google account disabled. Oh what to do?
On friday I woke up to find my google account had been disabled. No gmail, no adsense,adwords,webmaster tools,blog etc etc. No reason given.

I've filled out the forms, got an automated response which is totally irrelevant - ("If you have forgotten your password...") etc.
Now I'm trapped in an email conversation with what seems to be an auto-responder which is just quoting stock emails at me with more irrelevant 'answers'.

Has anyone been through this? (Looks like a big yes http://search.twitter.com/search?q=google+account+disabled) Does anyone know the best way to get it resolved, or who to contact?

Google seems to have lots of things sorted out, but surely there is a better way of dealing with this sort of issue. I would happily pay for a premium google account to have some sort of support for this eventuality (Even though I'm paying them via adwords already).

Any help gratefully appreciated...
Don't insult us.
A plan to sell cookbooks: Give away recipes online
From gold to lead
"... So far no big company has gone bust. Much mining development in Australia is funded with equity, not debt, and is consequently not as financially stressed as you might think ..."

One reason Startups are not as prevalent in Aus. as the could be. It's easier to dig holes & raise dollars than think & raise dollars.
The average initial startup investment in every industry is $25,000. Usually using the founders savings.
cute, but almost certainly won't work through proxies.
Donors choose is my tip jar
smtp2web solves the problem of getting the messages.

As far as I can tell, there are 3 ways to get access to the messages:

1) Control your mail server, use something like procmon to forward mail to a script

2) Rely on smtp2web or some other mail server to forward mail to a script

3) Poll for messages via SMTP or IMAP

I chose #3 with IMAP over Gmail (configured for my domain).

The real problem I am having is identifying and categorizing non-delivery responses / bounce mails.
I saw these guys speak at BarCamp Cork today and although they preach from much the same book as 37Signals, they do so with even more passion and enthusiasm, and a healthy dose of wit to go with it.
Just Leave Them Behind
I would be interest in what kind of applicants you get for this kind of ad, especially from your posting HN (assuming evn=twitter.com/ev). Seems like a nice chance to work with senior people, but it seems like it would be a rare hacker who doesn't mind running errands and fetching coffee.

I hope jobshare tracks referrer URLs so you can see where applicants are finding the ad.
Jobscore is having some problem. Here's the text:

About Us

Twitter is defining a new form of communication that is touching people's lives across the world. We are small but well-funded and building a company to last. We are currently a team of 25 and looking for a few key people who will help take us to the next level.

About this Job

This is a unique opportunity for an ambitious, multi-talented individual who wants to see the inside of a fast-moving startup and work closely with the founders. The ideal candidate is a future entrepreneur or executive who is willing to work hard and do a wide variety of non-glamorous tasks for a year or two in order to get their foot in the door, learn, and make connections. You will work directly with Twitter CEO Evan Williams and co-founder Biz Stone with the simple goal of saving them time. Which means: The level of work you'll do is only limited by your capabilities. Are you capable of: Designing a presentation? Researching a market? Creating a financial model? Great, as long as you're also willing to make copies and run errands. Essentially, you should be overqualified to be an assistant, but not have a problem doing assistant-like tasks. In exchange, you'll get unique visibility into a unique company, a great learning experience, and the chance to move on to do many other things (in Twitter, or elsewhere—with a strong endorsement).

Requirements

* Excellent written communication skills

* Strong computer skills (spreadsheets, word processing, presentations, email)

* Highly organized and efficient

* People person with tact and diplomatic instincts

* Track record of trying things

* Extreme trustworthiness

* Strong interest in business and, particularly, technology startups

* Broad knowledge of the Internet industry

About working at Twitter

Twitter offers competitive salaries and full benefits, including health, dental, vacation, 401k, and stock options. We work in a bright, sunny office in San Francisco. And you'll be joining a unique group of experienced folks who are doing their best work to create something great.

The position is full-time and is based in San Francisco and will report to the CEO.
There's a separate Office Manager. This isn't quite like that, and the benefits are better than doing YC. ;-)

No, I'm another Evan.
We need a dynamic friend permission system.
Unknotting Knot Theory: New techniques are beginning to unravel the mysteries of knots
Confirmed: New MacBooks Support 6GB RAM
Sorry for being dumb, but what would this be useful for?
Ten things you don’t know about black holes
I looked briefly at procmail, but it seems to only have a primitive mechanism for identify bounce messages. There does not appear to be a way to extract meta data from them.

"""
If the regular expression contains ‘^FROM_DAEMON’ it will be substituted by ‘(^(Mailing-List : |Precedence :.(junk |bulk |list) |To : Multiple recipients of |(((Resent-)?(From |Sender) |X-Envelope-From) : |>?From )([^>][^(.%@a-z0-9])?(Post(ma?(st(e?r)? |n) |office) |(send)?Mail(er)? |daemon |m(mdf |ajordomo) |n?uucp |LIST(SERV |proc) |NETSERV |o(wner |ps) |r(e(quest |sponse) |oot) |b(ounce |bs\.smtp) |echo |mirror |s(erv(ices? |er) |mtp(error)? |ystem) |A(dmin(istrator)? |MMGR |utoanswer))(([^).! :a-z0-9][-_a-z0-9])?[%@>\t ][^<)](\(.\).)?)?$([^>] |$)))’, which should catch mails coming from most daemons
"""

I still need a way to get meaningful information from the bounce messages.

For example, my system sometimes emails a file on behalf of a user. If I receive a "mailbox does not exist" bounce, all I can do is notify the user that they may have mistyped an email address. However, if I receive a "mailbox full" bounce, I want to try again without the attachment and only with a web download link.
Thesis of the book (article is a book review):

"it’s almost impossible to raise academic ability, to turn the below-average into even the slightly less below-average. It’s only “educational romanticism” that makes us think we can."

I disagree in principle, although I don't have a lot of exposure to the science/data concerned here. What is pretty clear to me is that currently, the United States as a whole is not culturally geared to hold education, science, etc as important and/or "sexy". Consider the ratio of how many people watch Reality TV compared to Mythbusters and the like.
SIGH!

Should be retitled "How to alienate Hacker news"
FREE - Thomas the Train Coloring Pages
My main interest the last half year or so has been machine learning but fabbers,self-replicating machines, 3D-printers or whatever you want to call them is some extremely cool stuff.

Coupled with nanotechnology this is seriously gamechanging stuff.
Summary of the article: it's all Clinton's fault!

Flagged.
You must check out this site, AMAZING geometric stuff: http://www.bathsheba.com/
Totally agree, I posted on the same subject: http://replicatorinc.com/blog/2008/11/10-things-3d-printers-...
Line spacing needs to be done in proportion to the page width. As you increase the line length, the line spacing must gradually increase.

For a typical web page, line spacing as large as 1.4 or 1.5 does more harm than good. First of all, it doesn't do any good (see http://blogs.msdn.com/fontblog/archive/2006/05/17/600507.asp...). Secondly, it makes the user scroll more to read the content. Scrolling is way worse for readability than tight line spacing.

A lot of people use Verdana, and Verdana is a very legible typeface. But, because it is so open, and because of its enormous x-height, it tends to look wrong without excessive line spacing. Also, its normal weight is basically semi-bold at small sizes on LCD screens with Cleartype enabled, and that also encourages excessive line height. I've not seen any evidence that says that these huge line heights actually improve reading performance; the primary benefit of huge line spacing is an improvement in the "color" of the page when using Verdana.

Microsoft's new Cleartype font collection (the C* fonts) are slightly less open, don't have such an enormous x-height, and are less bold at small sizes. Consequently, a line height of 1.2 or 1.25 is plenty when with less than 75 characters per line.
"... It isn't 1999 anymore! Open source isn't the hot new thing. Nor is this slashdot. ..."

The message is still trickling through government departments. Why for instance is MS Office products still mandated by Aus. government departments? The argument goes "but we need MS Office because all our legacy documents are MS format... it's easier to use... IT maintenance costs..." ... ad. infinitum.

These kinds of stories need to be repeated in the press ( "and maybe here to remind ourselves that our mindset is quite different from other groups who use software and computers" ) highlighting the cost savings & advantages of FOSS.
Totally agree, when you think about the profound societal changes we've seen with P2P, Web Video, Social Media, etc. then think about how that may translate into the physical world we could be living in a very different world ten years from now.
Do what ezmlm does with bounce messages: use a different envelope sender for each outgoing mail and encode the message ID in that address. If you get a mail to the envelope sender you can typically assume it's a non-delivery report of some kind.

For finer-grained information, you can search the resulting message for HCMSSCs: http://cr.yp.to/proto/hcmssc.txt

Further reading:
http://cr.yp.to/proto/verp.txt
http://support.kavi.com/khelp/kmlm/user_help/html/bounces.ht...
I assume you mean procmail, not procmon. Decent MTAs (like qmail) make it pretty easy to have mail delivered to a script.
I have the same question for checkboxs (and radioboxes): before or after the text?
The mention of making a financial model cracked me up.
Your blog gets to be whatever you want, but if you want one that is HN submission quality, one thing to consider given that you're just starting out is to have a (or a few) friends edit your writing before you post it. You'll notice that all of pg's essays have a "thanks to x,y,z" at the bottom.
For a more reality-based answer, try http://howdidthishappen.org/
If you go to jeffcroft.com, you can see that following this advice isn't enough to get legible results. Most of the text on his weblog is hard to read because of excessive use of italics, light-on-dark text, and low contrast (exasperated by my laptop screen's poor contrast). I think Jeff is a good designer and he is probably mostly right. However, many parts of this presentation will lead you down the wrong path if you are a beginner.

The 62.5% trick doesn't work as well as the designers claim, because there are a lot of people where the default font size isn't 16px tall (e.g. in high DPI mode or when the browser's font size setting is not "normal"). K.I.S.S. and keep everything font-size: 100%, except fine print which can be >= 80%, and headings which can be as large as you want. Basically, any use of "px" and "pt" for text in your stylesheet is just going to cause headaches.

It is true that sIFR works better than what a skeptical person would expect. But, I still have problems with it all the time, copying/pasting stuff into my notes. Don't use it if you can avoid it.

Finally, Jeff completely misses the point of "vertical rhythm" as mentioned in "The Elements of Typographic Style." This is probably the #1 comprehension failure amongst readers of the book. Briefly, on the web you don't need to adhere to the vertical rhythm guidelines as strictly as you need to when you are working with text PRINTED with facing pages and/or double-sided. Unless you have multiple columns of text on your page, you shouldn't be adding extra vertical padding just to maintain a vertical rhythm, because that extra padding just leads to more scrolling, which is horrible for readability.

I already commented elsewhere on the page about the problems with the leading advice.

Regarding quotes...wow, this is already getting too long. I should just write an article and submit it to ALA.
It just happens to be that teaching something can be a great way to reenforce what you previously learned.
Robosaurus