skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some random points here.
(Disclosure: I'm a professional UI designer with a strong development background. Erstwhile CS dude, but still geek to the core. I consulted with the OP on this article.)

----

You really dont know what "16px" means with respect to your OS. The DPI presented to the user is hardware dependent, not OS dependent. True, in certain tablets and phones, the OS and the hardware are bound together (iPads, etc), but not so on the desktop where screens have different DPI (as evidenced by the OP's photos of his screen setup).

This issue is pretty subtle - there's lots of places where ems are the better way to specify point size, like print-centric expereices.

Other experiences, like 10' UI on set top boxes, I could argue that pixels are as good as anything given (a) the huge range of screen sizes and distances-to-screen the interface will find itself in, and (b) pixels are, for all practical purposes, the same as expressing things in percentages (HD being a fixed size), but easier for designers to reason about.

And finally: 12 point on the screen might be some other type size when moving to mobile (probably smaller) and should almost certainly be using different layout techniques when moving to mobile. Line length, inter-line spacing and distance to screen are all in play here, so don't get suckered into the idea that you can spec the text once and expect scaling on the platform to automagically adjust it everywhere.

Related: responsive layout. Spec'ing a type size is really only useful within a known domain range. You should think through the design as you move from platform to platform.

Quite the mess. There's no Grand Unified Theory for this stuff yet. Not sure it even makes sense to go find one. Great design isn't a matter of being uniform, but through being right-for-the-purpose.

That said, the OP is dead on. IF you're in a place where specifying points is the right thing to do, then a point should be a point, not a pixel.
Which is the Best Code Editor?
/r/securityanalysis is excellent for those interested in analyzing financial securities. It's pretty narrow, but just shows that pockets of deep content do exist on a mostly frivolous site.
The Best Games at E3 2012
Reddit now literally powers the generation of news cycles across the blogerverse.

I didn't know Reddit had their own power plant.
Brilliant. A space that's 2x the width is both elegant and consistent with the existing UI paradigm.
2012 Google I/O - Is This the 2007 Facebook F8?
The capital outlay required for pretty much any hardware product is enormous (compared to software-based products). Besides needing to sustain development effort to comply with emissions/safety/etc standards dictated by the regulatory environment, you also need to fund months to years of Q/A testing to ensure your physical widget can be reliably mass-produced. And all this has be done before you have anything to sell for revenue.

Respinning a hardware prototype is generally slow and expensive (i.e. can't just recompile), with degree of slowness/cost increasing as you tread further down your development path.
Does the repeated MD5 protect it from the common MD5 attacks? (I recall there being something especially dangerous about just md5($salt . $pass), but I forget the details - Length Extension attack maybe?)
/r/askscience and /r/depthhub are pretty consistently good.
As for updating the phones, the ARM embedded platform has a bewildering array of SOCs

I thought only Qualcomm SoCs (or just a particular SoC?) was certified for running WP7? That doesn't sound like a bewildering array.

From http://www.mobiletechworld.com/2011/05/20/nokia-to-use-st-er...

As you already know Qualcomm is the only certified SoC manufacturer for Windows Phone 7
He's not saying that using Vim will make you a better hacker. You're the one who's confusing remarks on correlation for causation.

Its probably likely that there is such a correlation; those who are willing to put in the time learning vim/emacs are probably those who spend the most time coding, and thus have the most practice.
IPhoneography 101: A Free Course On How To Use Your iPhone’s Camera
That's been possible with email addresses for decades. "Free email forwarding" returns plenty of services which give you an address that forwards to your own, and which you can revoke at any time. Personally, I just use a catch-all on my domain, but that requires you to have one.

Same with credit cards: my bank offers a free service where I can set up as many virtual CCs as I want. Until recently they were single payment only, but now you can choose if it's single or multiple.

Forwarding (physical) address exist too, 'though they seem to be mainly targeted at people outside the US who want a address there, and they cost you an extra shipping fee, of course.
No. I want to be able to make slides that work on projectors. The only unit able to handle this would be "angle based on standard viewing distance", which will require markedly different "actual lengths" for different devices.
Don't underestimate the usefulness of hard real time io that's easy to implement. It's nice being able to be able to guarantee that some function will run exactly 0.2 microseconds after a voltage hits a pin, for example. Simple micro controllers where you program the bare metal will always have a place for this kind of thing. Doing that kind of thing in python on Linux is a can of worms. But, abstracting away comms between a python script on a pc to an arduino talking to sensors is definitely someone worth perusing, though one is basically there with pyserial and some glue code.
>Generally this makes them very boring and gives you very little to talk to them about. //

What I find depressing is that watching other people have lives is supposed to be interesting but trying to have a life yourself is "very boring"; I'm boring because I'm poor, socially inept and don't have time for leisure activities - not because I don't watch broadcast TV.
I guess the disappointment will hit if it turns out new WP8 apps won't run on WP7 devices.
> Independent invention.

Nobody is independently inventing the OFDM patent I linked to, at least not within the patent term. You're taking an edge case and making the debate all about that edge case. I think it's quite reasonable to have genuine independent invention as a defense to patent infringement, FWIW.

> You can write a contract for anything.

You can contract for anything, but you can't enforce the contract against anyone not in contractual privity.

> That may be true. If you have made inventions such as these, you should protect them with trade secret because chat availability status patents are far more excessively damaging than strong signal processing patents are valuable.

As I described above, trade secrets don't allow the crucial feature of being easy to transact in. And you have absolutely no basis for your claim that "chat availability" patents are more damaging than signal processing patents are valuable. You can point to the Apple litigation on one side, and I can point to ARM, Ltd. on the other, etc.
I didn't know this one: ^X ^L
Will SEO Exist in 2015?
Those stories have more diggs on them than the front page of digg today.
The sunlight labs stuff looks cool.
It's not that simple though. It is fairly well known that results from academic publications should often be taken with a grain of salt. For example, a 15% performance improvement in a simulator may mean 1% in a real system. So in many cases, the idea is what is interesting, and the results are suspect. In a startup, the idea is publicly viewable in many cases, and the result is also publicly viewable (success/failure). Obviously, these things are different, but I'm just trying to say there is a gray area here.
The periodic table of procrastination
Today marks the next stage in Digg's future.
Did you read the article?

"Security researchers at Rapid7, a security company, analyzed the dumped account information and found that it included account information not just for Yahoo users but for Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, Comcast, MSN, SBC Global, Verizon, BellSouth and Live.com users. Marcus Carey, a researcher at Rapid7, found that among the data were some 106,000 Gmail accounts, 55,000 Hotmail accounts and 25,000 AOL accounts."
Organizations That Can Teach You How to Code
I believe Visual Studio 2010 and 2012 generate code that imports MSVCRT functions that are not available on Windows 2000 or XP:

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/...

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/...
they gotta get them to sign a statement that they'll click on ads
I feel like I want these guys to succeed just because Patrick seems such a nice guy, have enjoyed reading the threads.
Ask HN: Best place to learn Python/Django?
Recently I've been learning Python, and I would like to know if any of you recommend tutorials for learning Django.
So Gittip is a recurring donation platform for Github authors ?
>or shift-minimize for ultra slow!

I never knew that existed. What possible purpose could that serve save to show off some gimmick?
Google Input Method: The New Translation Tool
Betaworks Steals Digg for $500k - big data play coming
Betaworks should be in jail for stealing Digg for $500k. What a deal for betaworks incubator in NYC which will parlay Digg into a big data platform..
Why persway.me and not persuade.me?
IQ by Intel: A New Social Publishing Model
It has been pointed out before that the CSS `px` is such a unit: http://inamidst.com/stuff/notes/csspx

(Although I seem to recall the discussion here was skeptical of the idea.)
'Stereotype Threat': Why Women Quit Science Jobs
Another way around Linux's Windows SecureBoot problem
No it doesn't.

Go to the front page of reddit right now and try to find me a piece of news.

I see 2 items out of 25 links.

One of them is a [linkbait title] story about wikileaks winning a case against VISA (in iceland).

The other is about a Canadian supreme court ruling.
Brewster, a Mobile App, Wants to Transform Your Address Book
I use ShiftIt for the same purpose, and it works very well. Though I probably spent more than $10 of my time trying to make it compile nicely with Xcode 4.3 ;)

Now that I've got it working, though, I have to say that there's something almost liberating about being able to make the window take up the whole screen, without having to dick about any more. Every time I do it, I get a slight frisson, imagining myself sticking 2 fingers up at an oncoming army full of tutting, hissing, ponytailed-and-bearded turtlenecked Apple fanboys, all crying out for my head, "Burn the Windows-loving witch!" Well, dear fanboys, screw the lot of you, and dear OS X, screw you too, and that goes for Safari and iTunes as well. Hey, Safari, I just took your window AND MADE IT TAKE UP THE WHOLE GODDAMN SCREEN... and I don't give a fuck how big you thought I needed to have it.

Considering what the Apple brand is supposed to connote, or at least what I thought it was supposed to connote, I find this kind of ironic.
Yes. But let's hope that Go thing doesn't distract them...
FWIW, I found Pligg a lot easier to configure and set up when I needed to create a quick intranet news portal last year.
Huge video game collection sold on eBay for more than $1.2 million
It's the nature of venture capital: shower founders with money, now they're burning through it and they are in your debt. Either they find a way to make it big, or the startup is driven to the ground.
His point doesn't depend on the accuracy of the percentage. Arguing whether the viewer sees 50% or 33% of whatever doesn't negate that the viewer is watching ads on the channel paid for by an advertiser "per viewer", and the cable company is paying to bring that viewer to the channel "per viewer". And arguably, you're the one paying for both of those, with your attention, and your wallet.

For every two minutes of content, you pay by watching a minute of ads. Whether you call 1 minute 50% of two minutes, or call it 33% of 3 minutes, doesn't matter to his point.

However long you enjoy actual content of the show itself, you spend half again that long watching ads, and when you watch via cable, you pay for the bundle including the fee for that channel.
I understand what it is. I understand why investors do it.

I reiterate my point: it's unseemly when founders earn millions and everyone else, particularly the employees, goes home with nothing.
I want to expand it beyond GitHub, but yes.
It's a bit harder to have a record low if, you know, your company's valuation grows post-IPO.

All pop. No star.
I don't see what is bad about having religious or cult like feelings around a tool. This sort of thing already exists for various programming languages. There wouldn't be any of the advancements we consider standard today in most high level programming languages if it weren't for LISP. If people weren't fanatics about homoiconic and functional features in their languages, we would be in a much worse place. Fortunately languages gaining popularity nowadays resemble LISP much more than they do FORTRAN. This probably wouldn't be the case if there weren't very smart people evangelizing the benefits of LISP over the past half a century.
Many of this advice echoes The Passionate Programmer[1]. However, I believe it should also echo this one[2]: Don’t waste your time in crappy startup jobs

Maybe more importantly, it should echo You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss[3].

An even more disruptive perspective actually came from Bret Victor[4]:

There are many ways to live your life. That's maybe the most important thing to realize in your life, that every aspect of your life is a choice. There are default choices. You can choose to sleepwalk through your life, and accept the path that is laid out for you. You can choose to accept the world as it is. But you don't have to. If there's something in the world that you feel is a wrong, and you have a vision for what a better world could be, you can find your guiding principle, and you can fight for a cause. So after this talk, I'd like you to take a little time, and think about what matters to you, what you believe in, and what you might fight for.

[1] http://pragprog.com/book/cfcar2/the-passionate-programmer

[2] http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/dont-waste-yo...

[3] http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html

[4] http://gumption.typepad.com/blog/2012/03/principle-centered-...
Hookup or breakup - There’s an app for that
I think he mains maintaining a mongodb installation, which is not trivial.

Same reason people use SQLite instead of MySQL or Postgres. Don't want to have to deal with keeping a database server up.
its clean and simple. the ClojureScript compiler is 2000 lines of clojure.
Scaling lessons learned at Dropbox, part 1
My Reddit frontpage has plenty of news stories, but those are the subreddits I happen to subscribe to. I'm sure the news agencies aren't subscribed to the "Advice Animals" subreddit.
The replies you'll get are "you make your own reddit, just remove the popular subreddits!" but you're right. reddit is usable for hardcore users that want to invest real time into their experience, it's atrocious for casual users (that don't care for the meme spam). There is a large hole that (new) Digg could fill.
I imagine it'll end up costing them quite a bit more than $500k when the dust settles... Digg probably has quite a bit of debt racked up by now.
I really don't want to see the Ouya fail, but then again I didn't want the Dreamcast to fail either, and it did. SEGA was sort on cash back then, and because some hackers found a way to play pirated games without a hardware mod (the PSX needed a modchip soldered in the mainboard) it was the last straw for that company, and when developers started to flee and hyped games like HalfLife:Blue Shift were cancelled the dream was over.

I know some indies say piracy is not a bid deal for them, but it might be for the Ouya: at $99 the company is either breaking even or losing money on every unit, and the only way to get that money back is through games and microtransactions, but if piracy is dead-easy then they may never recoup the money, and like it happened to SEGA they will eventually run out of funds.
I expect that security cameras record me.

I do not expect that the recordings will be posted on the internet.

Unfortunately, reality is messy and your expectations are somewhat obsolete on this one.

http://www.opentopia.com/hiddencam.php
> "Instead of filling their niches and quietly making a small number of employees very wealthy, they try to become these massive institutions that are reliant on very fickle user bases. It's a house of cards."

The problem is that Twitter, Digg, et al took a buttload of VC money, and quietly making a dozen employees rich is not an acceptable ROI.
Auto Transport Vacaville, California
"Make the following experiment: say 'It's cold in here' and mean 'It's warm in here.' Can you do it?"

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §510
Vim, really?

Some vi variant, save but for a few instances. But not necessarily vim.

Being stuck to use old-school vi a few times in the not-to-distant past made me realize how massive an improvement over it vim is.

Yes, I can GSD with vi, but I can really GSD with vim.
"Newer social news website such as Reddit Inc. also stole some of Digg's thunder. Last December, Reddit drew more visitors than Digg for the first time, according to comScore, and since then it has maintained that lead."
The only thing that could make this better would be if you were doing this as an independent contract for 16 credits.
A New Objective-C Runtime: from Research to Production
Herb Allen’s Sun Valley Day 2 – The Acid Trip » Chairman's Blog
If they're not taking on any of the employees, what are their costs? It's not clear that they're even keeping the website up or that it won't be a rather radically different product. All they've said is that it will be a 'cloud-based version of Digg' which means nothing.

It's probably a brand they're slapping onto something they already have in the works. How is it going to cost them a lot more to take it over?
You're taking an edge case and making the debate all about that edge case.

Sadly, I see this the opposite way. Quantity-wise good, innovative architecture patents are in the vast minority. If we are to deal with software patents one at a time, the combined effort dealing with bad ones far outweighs good ones.

You can contract for anything, but you can't enforce the contract against anyone not in contractual privity.

Hah, I already updated my comment based on your updated comment! HN isn't the best for these kinds of discussions.

Nobody is independently inventing the OFDM patent I linked to, at least not within the patent term.

I have been thinking for some time that we need a collection of good software patents. Not having read the OFDM or ARM patents (for which I'm not qualified anyway), I don't know if they are "good". But I do know that one day we're going to invalidate a large percentage of software patents or watch innovation happen elsewhere. When that day comes, it will be important to have a list of things that are valuable, or else we'll end up with the bar that I described (anything computable is not patentable).

Unfortunately, I don't know of enough of them to seed such a database. Maybe fast square root or some of Carmack's graphics work. And as such I'm okay with seeing them 100% invalid. If you disagree, perhaps we can chat about it (email's in my profile).
Hence the slightly raised English eyebrow when American politicians - especially a Kennedy at a St Patricks Day parade in Boston - talk about supporting terrorism.
Care to share a link to Q? I haven't heard of it before, and as you might guess, it's almost impossible to find it through search :)

Edit: forget it. Someone else mentioned it in another comment: https://github.com/kriskowal/q/
People will get into the whole verb-noun editing language, which is great, but the biggest and first real world improvement is much simpler:

You don't use your mouse to move the cursor around a document.

After a while you just look at the document and your fingers move and the cursor moves, you can get anywhere in the file in just a few jumps. It's not the same as using a mouse or a touchpad where you need visual feedback to place the cursor in a specific place and the movement is continuous. It feels like it takes less mental processing to do that and it is less distracting while you are concentrating on actual work.

It's hard to explain, and I'm one of those people who using vim, vimperator and vim keybindings in his shell. The only other times I've reached the same levels of muscle memory taking over complex behaviour (besides sports) is when playing video games or driving a car. You concentrate on what you want done and some lower level part of your brain and your hands just takes care of it.

A pointer based system just can't compete in terms of immersion.

I have a feeling I just typed a lot and didn't do any better of a job explaining it.
someone has parked a domain there
Yeah, but reddit appears to have been staffed with employees who worked all hours of the night and day for a salary; see blog posts from before reddit gold. That's not sustainable and unless you have a line on a set of really smart suckers who want to work way too much for the same money then can get elsewhere working half the hours or on call... you need more employees.
What resolution would a "Retina display" 27-inch screen be?
Betable's license number from the UK Gambling Commission http://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk is 000-023328-R-307313-003. We're audited (by GLI, incidentally) against their codes of practice.
viola-12-hot.zip looks tasty to a police officer who thinks they found illegal images but is just a keyword + title word + one-word review of a favourite play when you find the contents are Twelfth Night ... maybe?
You're conflating two things. Reddit doesn't often break news, Twitter does that more in real time with its immediacy and reach.

Just like Hacker News is/was to TechCrunch, Reddit generates a news cycle, as in right now across the world there are cadres of journalists and bloggers using Reddit to source and/or get ideas on what to write and feed into the long tail.
It's not as if Digg was a fly-by-your-pants startup. They paid their employees competitive salaries.
Problem with buying Reddit is that you would still never really own reddit.

If digg's fall has taught us anything, it's that heavily community-driven sites are owned by the community. Try to make any major/unpopular changes in direction or business, and the entire site may come crumbling down.
Livestream of me coding the next part of the Caves of Clojure
Thinking of going to a hackathon?
I'm hanging out in ##cavesofclojure on Freenode if you have questions/comments.
Agreed. I count myself fortunate to not live in that keeping up with the Jones mentality, because that is how I read it. A man must measure his worth by who he is, his character, respect given and received, and the love he gives and receives.
It exists for most directly-controllable animations. Show dashboard super slowly? Shift+12. Show desktop super slowly? Shift + F11. Show Mission Control super slowly? Shift + Mission Control Shortcut.

:/
The $15 earphones last 3-4 months and I'm tired of spending an hour every few months to pick an ear phone, as well of the "music down time" that entails. That's why I started paying more. Hopefully my $60 ear phones last longer. I would rather not have to rely on the warranty.
This is more like a development board. These are usually at least $100, or $200 like the ones from TI.

Manufacturers pay only $20 or so for the ARM SoC that goes into their devices.
Huh? I sit at a different distance from my monitor than my phone is from my face. I buy high resolution monitors, not because I want the "OMG the circle is a smoother circle" sense of a Retina display but because I want greater density. If we're nitpicking about "pt" in particular, fine. But if we're saying we should design UI elements and text specifically so that it's always the same size, count me completely out.