skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I realised it must be Helvetica because of the "R". I reasoned thus: I am more familiar with Arial than Helvetica, and I'm sure I would have seen that "R" before if I were spending a lot of time with it because it's just so ugly, so since I didn't recognise it, it must be Helvetica. And I was right.

It's funny, because I universally prefer Helvetica over Arial otherwise.
Is Error establishing a database connection the golden rule of programming? :-)
I doubt the point is that "Booho things are too easy for you! :(". The point is that there's nothing interesting for a "old-school" programmer in the world we're progressing towards.
As a young programmer this article makes me angry. Sure maybe a lot of us young guys build stuff by using components/libraries/frameworks, heck I don't want to write my own nginx module when one already exists that works well. But saying we as a group don't understand the internals of what we use based off the OP's "asking one collegue" is a bunch of bull. I've read the HTTP Spec, in my free time I read the source and run debuggers on the libraries I use and I think regardless of age almost all programmers do the same. Why? Because we like knowing how things work, we like building things, that's why we're developers. The only difference is that today there's a lot more you can/need to know as opposed to 30 yrs ago where everything was low level and HTTP didn't even exist.
I found all of the correct answers slightly blurry, I got 18/20 without looking at any letters.
See also "Meetup.com kills Vim London without warning" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4698541 particularly http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4698718

> This was a mistake on our part. We're reaching out and rectifying things now. Sorry guys.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, hello Eventbrite!
That's some Jedi Master type of rule right there.
Since when is it a private business owner's responsibility to play law enforcement?

If the police knows a place to be an epicenter of criminal activities, isn't that a great opportunity to do proper police work, and keep the place under surveillance?
Now I feel like my time was wasted. And I was proud of 16/20 when I figured that out.
The most popular platforms on the NET according to Flippa.com
I answered 18 out of 20 questions correctly. American Apparel and Toyota tripped me.
Investigating statistics regarding right to carry laws
TboughtWorks "Big Data" specialist takes a second look at 'right to carry' laws.
Good idea to call the images foo-helvetica.gif & foo-arial.gif. :)
In a sense yes. People into analog electronics cried out loud when digital electronics started to reign their game. Now, people who were into dealing with low-level things out of their own interest are crying out loud because new era of abstractness is taking it's dawn and starting to take over.

It will happen to this new generation too though. New kids come to rule the courts. Just you wait! :)
Where? ... Specifying yr cpus, of course...

https://github.com/gergoerdi/brainfuck-cpu-fpga/blob/master/...
I believe SBP (aaronsw's digital executor) is planning to make sure his domain is maintained and all the content remains available. But I do think it's nice to have this stuff in non-HTML form--ePub especially is great.

Be sure to ping rememberaaronsw@gmail.com (Aaron's friends and family) and let them know.

Also, did you look into using html2text (https://github.com/aaronsw/html2text) to generate the Markdown? Might be a fitting tribute to try it. It would be helpful to include the generating scripts in the repo no matter what.
The implementation just smacks of AngularJS. In fact, implementing something like this would be just short of trivial using Angular...!

If you like the concept of "extending html" as used here then you should probably checkout AngularJS: http://angularjs.org
Another idea: people who are really annoying get double-hellbanned, and there's a checkbox that says "show very dead"!
Started with free message board forums that I'd set up on a free host and then add various extensions. This meant following a guide and going into the code and replacing certain lines with lines in the code (PHP). I never "learnt" what anything was though (e.g. for loops, if statements etc)

Then did a CS degree.
I agree- the only one I got wrong was toyota- for the other all caps, I looked for the slightly longer 'A'.
http://typewar.com/ quizzes you on letters from an increasing number of fonts, and scores you according to how many other people got a particular matchup correct. They also have "quests" that focus on a particular challenge, including Arial vs. Helvetica. http://typewar.com/quests/ I think my favorite part of the site is the statistics on how many people are confused by particular matchups.
It's the "r" that's usually the give away. However, I would have to say that the capital "S" is also a giveaway, and the I'd have to say that the letters with Helvetica are somewhat fatter...
never knew that the golden rule was a database error.
That was easy. I read this article about a year ago and once you've seen it, you can't unsee it :)

http://www.ms-studio.com/articlesarialsid.html
20/20 - a few hard ones though. Fun quiz :)
more interesting than it sounds. The challenge uses a hypothetical version of C with arbitrary big memory and integer limits.
This one is fairly easy simply because they show you a comparison. In reality, if they showed you only one type of font and if they had asked you to identify which font it was (Arial or Helvetica), then it would have been a REAL challenge :)
> the capital "O" in Helvetica is more oval than round in Arial, and more round than oval in Helvetica.

The Os in the Toyota logo have been modified and made more round, though. This is what "TOYOTA" looks like in plain Helvetica: http://myfonts.us/td-RQ1hNh

The Os in the Arial and Helvetica are practically identical.
The bad kerning gives it away on more than one occasion (American Apparel for example).
People in the first world don't appreciate what a huge diverse place is Africa. Things are getting better in some places, worse in others but there is lots of reason for optimism overall. Unfortunately, the bad news tends to get all the attention, so people here get the idea that development money doesn't do any good, period.
Unfortunately that's not always true, since Helvetica comes in many weights. http://sixrevisions.com/infographics/helvetica-font-weights-...
a better programmer I already am
Find something cool you want to do with computer. Find a way to do it. At the end you have learned a great deal of IT skills and the universe is a better place :)
When I read "sponsor content", I read "paid advertising". I don't think it's "bullshit" to say that this is clearly marked as advertising.

Perhaps I can spot this more easily than you can, I don't know.
Did you also read Rucker's 'Infinity and the Mind'? Contains a fascinating discussion of this problem.
Nothing related to the article, but I really dislike all the circle portraits on blogs and services. Really looking forward to this fad passing
You can clearly see the black brush on the almost black background in the SCOTCH logotype :D
Do you live in Spain like I do?

Why did you invented that lie?.

We are not in a good economical situation, this means problems getting a house or good car but not being able to eat...a complete different story on one of the biggest food producers in the world.

We are also not very capitalist, in fact we are socialist, more than 50% of the economy is controlled by public institutions, and the biggest source of problems.

In real capitalism bad companies burn and die. Those losses had been socialized and backed by the state, witch is called statism, not capitalism.
I used the following heuristics (some parts added afterwards):

1. Helvetica has level edges, Arial is angled (as ef4 said). Particularly important were "t", "e" and "a", "S", "G", C".

2a. For capital letters, if there is an "R", the Helvetica one is curved in the bottom right part while Arial uses a straight line.

2b. For a capital "Y", the Arial one has the same length in all directions while the Helvetica one is shorter at the bottom. (Alexx indicated a difference).

2c. The jags/gaps in the capital "M" extend further to the top for Arial. This can be used to figure out MATTEL.

3. Otherwise, the one that looks fatter is Helvetica.
For me, it's more of a "general rule" than a "golden rule".
Welp. That's an interesting golden error.

Cached version:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vyvuBLO...
Looks like I have reading material for the next few years :|

More seriously: From glancing at the recommended list (bottom of the linked page), a few books I heartily recommend: "Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture", "Logicomix", and of course: "Godel Escher Bach".

I would love a list of books that are actual Math books, but for a popular audience. I'm not talking about something like "Fermat's Last Theorem", as it does not actually teach real math.

My best example of such a book is "Journey Through Genius", which is an amazing book - a look at 10 great mathematical theorems, from explaining the basic theory behind them, on through their history, and ending with a full proof of the theory itself. This is how textbooks should be written, if our goal is for people to enjoy mathematics - explaining why mathematicians came up with the theorems they did, including the always-interesting human angle of the history. But still keeping full mathematical rigour.
Haha, fun test, got 14 of 20 right!
Swiss scientists bend Caustic Effect to their will [video]
Swiss scientists bend Caustic Effect to their will
That is a pretty dramatic response to Meetup deleting a group.

I've never created a group, but it seems the event WAS outside of the intended use of Meetup. It looks like poster was trying to use it to host a single event where Meetup wants you to create groups that meet and communicate regularly. To me, it looks like the poster was indeed using Meetup as a listing service.

I think the telling piece of information that was left out is what the questions Meetup suggested asking yourself before creating a group.

But yea, this isn't as near big a deal as the poster is making it out to be.
Server + Client-Side Validation
MEGA taking 12+ hours to upload a 2gb file, anyone else?
Started the copy yesterday and still going today and I’m on a superfast connection
I noticed that I can do pretty good just by quickly detecting which one is the most unfamiliar font, as I am and always have been on Windows.
MEGA require source code of Applications using their API
Section 1.1 of the Mega API Blurb states that:

The cryptographic integrity of MEGA's user data is important
to us. We can therefore not allow you to distribute or make
available your client application without going through us.
We will perform a code audit of your product and promote/distribute
it on our site. You will also receive a share of the revenue that
your application generates.

What do you think the reaction of your average developer would be to using the MEGA API, knowing that they'd require access to all of your applications source code?

Do you think it's feasible for EVERY application to be examined by the MEGA Staff?
I've worked on a couple of older projects recently where previous developers had implemented only server-side validation (bad for UX) or, even worse, a mix of both client and server-side where the rules had come out of sync so decided to do something about it. Some of the code isn't the most logical, but this library helps to make sure everything stays in sync. Thoughts?
The MATTEL one was hard, but I just assumed the one with crappy kerning was Arial, and sure enough...
I can't upload /anything/. Remaining Time just goes to NaN.
I would love to see a comparison between Linode, Amazon and Digital Ocean.
Python-controlled Light Graffiti
I got about 50/50 but got bored and gave up after 16 so I don't know my score. I don't stare at small details on fonts normally like people here do, so I mostly tried to pick which one looked "right".
Before computers, people had to figure out incredibly inventive ways of producing sound and video effects in music and movies. Just consider what it took to create some of the great audiovisual works of the pre-1980s! But computers came along and ruined all of that by making it easier, replacing the interface to the microphone or the camera with a computer.

This has always happened, it will always continue to happen, but the creativity will move elsewhere. It won't be too long before people are lamenting the loss of computer programming almost entirely, but by then the creative people will have moved on to, say, synthetic biology or some new system that can be 'hacked'.
To be fair, it was a giant yellow box that gave an explanation of the words "sponsor content" when you hovered over it. Also the box isn't always yellow or that big, sometimes it's light tan, small and blends into the page; so they at least attempted to make it more noticeable in this instance. Not saying they should have put the ad up, for obvious reasons, but people need to pay attention to what they're reading as well.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/files/2013/0...

Pop Up Message: "Sponsor content is created by The Atlantic’s Promotions Department in partnership with our advertisers. The Atlantic editorial team is not involved in the creation of this content. Email advertising@theatlantic.com to learn more."

http://www.poynter.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/sponsorcon...

I wonder if this would have even been an issue if it wasn't an article about Scientology, especially since this style of advertising has been happening on that site for at least the last two years and elsewhere since newspapers have been in existence.
I got 17 out of 20. I just picked the ones that looked better to me.
As a student, I shouldn't have to know about complex citations rules while writing a paper. There are a few tools that take care of this, but they are either non-free (EasyBib), non-comprehensive (other online generators) or require that you use certain software (EndNote). To my knowledge there is no free, universal citation generator.
https://commando.io/ serves up your PHPMyAdmin.

Edit: also, because of HSTS I can only visit your "secure" site and can no longer get to your marketing page to see what it is you do.
Why is this not on the front page of HN anymore? Currently has 35 points and is 3 hours old. Vs an article "Math in Fiction - over 1000 short ..." that has 22 points and is 5 hours old?
Given it has been proven that up to 4% of the DNA of all humans outside of Africa can be traced to "Neanderthal" origin, this is not as much of a stretch than it first seems.

But this scientist may be crazy to believe his particular dream would ever be realised in somewhere like Europe.
Fun test. Also if anyone's interested in Helvetica or typesetting in general just watched a pretty good documentary recently that got me more interested in the topic: http://www.helveticafilm.com/, also available on netflix: https://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Helvetica/70076125

Sorta similar to the 'Objectified' doc that was recommended by HackDesign but I actually liked this one better.
I see losethos has made a new account...
... And obsolete. Bloodshed Dev-C++ hasn't seen one whit of activity in nearly 8 years (4 years at the time of the article's writing). I can't comprehend why people keep recommending it to anyone.
I immediately got 17/20, missing only the ones where there were no lower case characters. How do you distinguish between in these 3 cases? http://imgur.com/a/NOLoI
My transfer sit for 2 hours with NaN then started to show progress. It's at 12% now after all these hours.
I hope that he shows how to do design without skeumorphics.

Worst thing Steve Jobs ever gave us.
I suppose this is more suited to when your models and schema are also defined on the client side?

Having just hit this situation (validating a form client-side), I found the best solution was to transport the form schema from the server (because I use Django, I can easily whip up a ModelForm), then push that into a simple Javascript Form object which renders the schema and adds validation. Maybe there's better ways, but that's what worked for me. Curious what others have done .. :-)
I have yet to find a dataset of the ISS's geometry on the topcoder site.

Do you only get that when registering?
This is deep. I believe the golden rule is to keep your database online.
Do upvotes have an effect on dead posts?
Never heard about that type of hell banning before on HN. I must admit I am not a fan of people getting hell banned on 1 post or submission, unless the post truly is grossly over the top. I see a lot of hell banning as a result of a single post where I often wonder what exactly was so wrong about it.

Moderation on HN is not transparent at all and very subjective, yet I still think the quality of the posts on HN beats every other site out there. Not sure if that is because of, or despite the moderation, hard to tell with such little transparency!
It's still surprising that the data was deleted instead of internally flagged.
If it's one of the best, that doesn't say much about what's out there.

Giving students the wrong information (as w3schools frequently does) is worse than giving them no information at all. To say it's "one of the best" implies that the bar is set pretty damn low.
"if it can be null, it will be null"

And here comes a repetition of Maybe Foo in haskell, and Option in Scala/Java. Hehe :-)
Meetup is quite a bad service, but I don't know any better alternatives. I was one of the organizers of one of the larger meetups, with over 4K members. Some issues:

* The tools are nowhere near adequate to handle this amount of people, and more geared towards small groups

* However, there is NO way to switch: Your data is locked in with Meetup: There is no export or even access to the data of 'your' members.

* You can't just cancel a group: If you stop paying (which I did with a smaller group), it's offered to all members. All it takes is 1 spammer to pay, to spam all members. Basically, we are forced to keep paying for our group for years.

There is a big opportunity to build a better service here, but switching from meetup will be a pain.
and they're all guys
Can't even login now, if you look at the javascript console in Chrome/FF you'll see the server giving 500 errors. Looks like they under-anticipated the demand...
Start Here if You are Looking for Angel Investors
He didn't use his random Bible verse generator in this case. That is a bit unusual.
No doubt Apple's patented everything he came up with from every possible angle and will use those patents to sue anyone that actually releases innovative UIs into the ground, too.

Is it just me or do they seem a lot like the new Microsoft?
Flat UI is not the only way forward
You haven't really told us why it is so bad. I'm curious why you don't like it?

In a team, the design would be pushed and polished by a number of other team members. This was a one man job, on a team he'd collaborate and come up with more awesome designs. He'd get feedback, where in this case he only got people sniping from the sidelines... people like yourself.
Don't worry. As these "put the blocks together" people grow in their careers, when things go wrong with the blocks they'll have to dive in and figure it out.

When they start questioning the nature of their platform's memory model, and how cache synchronization and inter-processor interrupts interact, you'll feel better. Because that stuff is not going away, and it's _hard_.

Inside every simple problem is a big problem trying to get out. :-)
All companies are screwed up in their own way. If they can reboot the good parts of the old culture (hacker oriented but where building a business and design has an equal seat at the table) at Microsoft, it has a serious chance to make a big comeback.
I presume something like this is only useful for services like Heroku where you can't set it in your webserver directly?
Just like everything in this world someone point out his bad experience and then his opinion become famous and everyone generalizes because it gets a lot of attention. And worst, the comment section attracts all the people that had a similar experience making it even more biased; so it gets a lot of more bad press than it deserves.

So despite there could being just one false-positive-not-fixed-after-human-contact every 1 million deleted meetups, in Internet that false-positive is likely to bring a lot of undeserved negative attention.
"If it can be null, it will be null"

So explicitly define what is allowed to ever be "null": http://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/null-pointers-vs-none-vs-m...
I'm not a C# coder but I understood it was possible to have non-nullable types?

Keep meaning to try C# for a project sometime. I understand it to be a more expressive, programmer friendly Java.
I don't feel this subtle difference. Take a look: http://imgur.com/CWJWvZk

Does this feel different? I can see the slanted Arial terminations but I don't "feel" the different mood.
This looks more like Bootstrap to me. There is no "extending" going on, just adding some data-attributes to the markup.

At first glance, this looks like the best validation library I have seen. It so hard to find validation libs, that don't get into your way.
Same here, I had only MATTEL and TOYOTA wrong for that reason.

All the rest I had immediately, on the very first image there was 50% chance I had it right and I did a lucky guess, from then on I knew Helvitica was horizontal, Arial slanted.
I'm a bit surprised by the workflow. While I agree that hardware description languages are terrible from a software developer point of view, to me Verilog is typically much more tolerable than VHDL. Also, in the last few years, SystemC has been getting much more popular as the high-level step before Verilog/VHDL.
When you run your business (or in this case event) on someone else's network/app/system you're subject to the whims of the owner. You're sharecropping.

FWIW 44Con[1] used Eventbrite[2] (which I'd say is better for one-off events) for the first two years. Eventbrite check-in is awesome, but it's not perfect. This year we're switching to a system we've developed internally and using Eventbrite only for check-in. It's not that Eventbrite isn't good enough, more to do with integration issues, multiple events with different needs and the fees involved to do it all in eventbrite.

I'd still recommend eventbrite for someone wanting to run a one-off event though.

[1] - http://44con.com

[2] - http://www.eventbrite.com
Was a sysadmin, started with shell scripting. Then Perl. Then C/C++
I run three meetups and know a bunch of the folks that work there. They are extremely fair minded people. Fairer than I am myself. Given what I know of the people, the service, and my experience hosting three meetups, this story doesn't feel right.

Meetup has done a lot to bolster the tech community in NYC. I have met almost all of my tech friends in NYC via meetups. Meetup employees even come to some of my meetups. I know for a fact that they care about creating positive environments where attendees are not bombarded by commercial interests. They want you to go kayaking with other kayakers, talk about programming with programmers, or find out how to cook fantastic vegan food with other vegans.

False positives sometimes occur and it's a shame. Perhaps meetup could've been more proactive before shutting the group down. I personally feel confident that meetup looked at the group and made a fair decision that it was indeed violating the terms of service.

As I mentioned above, I host three meetups so perhaps I'm biased. Here are they: http://www.meetup.com/hack-and-tell/ - http://www.meetup.com/DUMBO-Tech-Breakfast/ - http://nyc.brubeck.io/

If folks would prefer to use eventbrite, obviously do so. Eventbrite has no community building tools. It is a website for tickets. Meetup, on the other hand, cares so much about building communities that their whole site is built for this purpose. You will lose that.
19/20 Mattel was impossible!