skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True. But I'm also sick of your giant, giant body font. Fluid layouts are especially bad at this, to the point that I need to resize my browser window every time I load a page, to make the font smaller.

The body font on - for example - this blog is way, way too big for me. My eyes hurt by reading it. I would make it 2px smaller and give it better line-height.
Yes to this article. Using small fonts on a website makes too many bad assumptions about the audience.
You're forgetting that Star Wars was itself a tribute to other shows and movies, Flash Gordon etc. Lots of them had vertical scrolling text explaining what story you were being dropped into, but Star Wars had good film stock so you could read it even as it receded into the distance. (Edit for clarity: This was done on purpose just to show off.) Most of those shows had tiny "ships" floating around on strings, so Star Wars had a giant star destroyer fill the screen. And so on.
The queue was really a genius tactic. It's addicting to check back, open the app, and see the number of people in front of you drop by hundreds or even thousands, and the total number of people behind you increase as well. Their traction is insane, seems to be somebody requests an invite every other second on average. The real-time updating of the queue was a super smart move.
Works great on my blackberry z10.
“Find Your Way to Oz” – a Chrome Experiment by Disney
I'd love to coat my toilet with this, so I never have to scrub it again. And also the insides of the plumbing pipes, so nothing gets stuck in there... :)
I did some work for Mozilla on a HTML5 browser sharer: https://github.com/JohnMcLear/browsermirror -- Not sure how well supported it nowadays, kinda old project.

Your extension brings my browser to a really slow pace.
CSS-select and translate to Yoda Speak (Need feedback)
I am creating/testing a service that translates sections of a webpage to Yoda Speak. It uses CSS selector and currently limits it to 5 items.

I'm looking for feedback/comments. Here's another example - http://ismaelc.yoda.jit.su/yoda?url=techmeme.com&selector=.L4%20a,.L3%20a,%20.L1%20a

I am using this Mashape API - https://www.mashape.com/ismaelc/yoda-speak
It's so simple but brilliant!
Making of:

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/casestudies/oz/
It is simply amazing, also the speed is quite good!
The tiny type thing doesn't seem to be such a problem as it used to be. In fact I often find the reverse problem of sites with type so big that it prevents much information fitting on the screen. The early 2000s where everyone used 8pt verdana seem to be behind us.
This is why Android reflows text on double-tap zoom. No more tiny text or zoom-and-pan. (I didn't know until recently that Mobile Safari has no comparable feature)

By the way, downvotes don't change the fact that this is a non-issue on Android and desktop because double-tap zoom puts the content at a comfortable and customizable font size effectively solving this issue and that desktop browsers have the same ability to set minimum font sizes and zoom levels.

edit: Apparently Mobile Safari now has this as well. I don't know if it also allows you to adjust the font size but it just goes to show that there are existing solutions to this subjective problem.
2. How many students aged 6-12 do you know that are willing to voluntarily spend time learning and studying? Zero?

Don't kid yourself. Just because knowledge and information is out there and accessible for free doesn't mean a child will have the ability and motivation to seek it out on their own. They're children, after all. What and how they learn will largely depend on parents and school.

3. You don't need a plane to get from New York to London. There are ships. You can even sail across the Atlantic! (there must be a fancy Latin term for this fallacy?)
Nothing beats it at what? As a tablet, it's not that useful. It's heavy, low battery life, and not even close to having many good "tablet" apps. As an ultrabook I suppose it's alright, but I wouldn't find it useful myself, as I watch movies from bed a lot with the laptop on a desk, and the angle of the Surface with its dock would make watching a movie on it like this impossible.
I think the waiting list and UX built hype, sure, but not love.

The majority of tweets in my stream since it "launched" were negative. Interestingly enough, this is impacting their App Store rating, too:

http://cl.ly/image/0Z3P412a2l1Y (Screenshot)
It's working for me, but it is really slow. Like showing up a minute later. Seems like it would be awesome and useful when not so latent.
I don't get it either. I'd like to hear from a designer on why this ever happens. I used to work with a designer who set h2 to 11px. Boggles my mind. Does tiny type look better? I honestly don't get it.
Its funny that I am currently viewing this page after pressing command + a couple times because this site is guilty of this as well.
While this is completely true and by far the more prevalent problem, I also dislike the other extreme, large fonts on a narrow layout. I don't see why you need a layout (for a desktop) that only manages to put 7 words per line.
This may be true of the greek words, but language shifts. Now the word aristocracy refers to a system by which a class of people is in charge, and in which membership of said class is almost completely dependent on parentage. It is also of note that in this class system, membership and genetics are more important than any other factors such as wealth, intelligence, "merit" (as we generally use the term: displaying high ability and accomplishment in tasks).
Clunky and verbose by comparison indeed, but at least it was to a purpose. I can remember the day/night? the ARPAnet turned off the old "NCP" protocol, and from MIT-Multics we were able to e.g. ping a machine in Norway.

What's really impressive is how it's stood the test of time, albeit with critical implementation improvements like Van Jacobson's flow control (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Jacobson). But we did have to scramble for quite a while.
They learned from Apple to artificially limit supply so they sell out quickly, thus increasing demand in the long run. Not much else to see here.
Yeah... I've also noticed some sites for some reason won't let me re-size the text. It may be just a bug in tablet's browser but it's damned annoying.
Probably equity vested over 3-5 years. Could be SARs, stock options, profit interest only stocks or other methods of equity bonuses.

Equity is great but since 90% of startups fail, choose wisely if you are taking a pay cut.
This is a very interesting exercise

CPUs are very capable today, unfortunately, to get 'every last drop of performance' is very difficult.

I'd say that CPUs are more complex than compilers can optimize the code for them.

Of course, manually optimizing for something like this is "easy" (if you have a somewhat deep knowledge of Intel's manuals)

Now for "everyday computing" this gets tougher, even though compilers do a good job (good, not great) and it's usually good enough.

So you end up going to the deeper details in time-sensitive things: games, video processing, etc

There are some tools (from Intel and AMD, even though I tested only the AMD one some time ago) that tells you 'everything' that you need to know about how good your code is. For example, IIRC, if you load a register then immediately store to it (or store then load, I don't remember), there's a stall, so you can do something else in between
It seems you're not the only person reporting that they've only had the display devices on stock. I wonder if they did that for most of the stores to say they sold out quickly. It's not easy to take Microsoft at face value these days. So I remain skeptical until we get more data.
Also the RT saw 'very high' rates of return, the pro may have similar issues. I think the most useful measure will be the number sold (after returns) after a a few months.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57566759-75/microsoft-surf...
Ammo has actually been getting more expensive for years.
I had the chance to visit last year, It was an awesome trip. I visited HackerDojo, YC (Sneaked my way in a party.. but shh :p), Sendhub and randomly attended a trivia-party full of apple/google/linkedin employes, fun time. I wish you have as much fun as I did. Make sure to take coffees a little bit everywhere and pay attention to the conversations around you.. most of the time you'll hear business pitches which is fairly normal in this area.
OWASP Chapter Revival
This is one of the best plain programming books out there. Even if you don't have a particular interest in Lua, you'll learn something.

I've heard it compared it to "The Unix Programming Environment" in terms of being a classic, and I agree.

I find myself coming back to this book again and again, even though I haven't been able to justify Lua on any projects really. Just now the treatment of coroutines really helped with using Python coroutines (not generators).
On raising capital – by first time entrepreneurs
Love the Michael Bay
I regularly have my zoom set to 150%-200%.
I'm not sure if there's anything to get me to like Apple again. I believe the best company in tech right now is Mozilla and to a certain extent, the FSF. Google is okay.

I used to think Apple really made the best products in the world, and that the walled garden was good for the masses.

But now I think, as a developer, a Thinkpad with an open GNU/Linux installed is probably a better choice than a Macbook. Apple's walled garden hurts business that both compete with them and also the developers who try to work with it (see: sandboxing issues).

Sent from my Macbook, soon to be a Lenovo *pad.
I'm curious if any other HN readers set their browser to 110% for this site because I do, I find it a lot more readable.
I don't know whether it's a good a idea or not, but my original thinking that you'd have enough water mass to diffuse the heat sufficiently fast so that the coating would not be be subject to very high temperatures at a given location.

Obviously the heat would have to transfer to the exterior environment in some way (e.g. through the floor) so this wouldn't work with smartphones.
Numbers about the oldest AppStore Push application
Course - Interactive 3D Graphics
Perf will not be great to the card though. Depends what you install or store there, or if it even can be installed there. SD cards are fine for general media storage, but anything perf intensive you don't want there.
Have you used Google recently?
Every city--and culture--has people who look flashy above their means. In Dallas, the stereotype is called called $30,000 Millionaires[1] and every car dealer can spot one from a mile off. Working for one can be a miserable experience or it can be a great way to expand your own wings. In my experience, the jet-setter likes "groupies" who appear to raise his own stature. Use this to your advantage to accompany him or her on these trips, then do your own networking either for yourself or for your company. Investing: if you don't have the resources, leverage someone else's.

1 - http://www.dallasobserver.com/2007-11-29/news/douchebags-in-...
16px is the new minimum. You START there.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/07/16-pixels-body-co...
I took 824 last Spring and the labs were often terrible because of the level of debugging necessary (but very informative and well made). In particular it was bad for those without much C++ experience like myself. I think the difficulty of testing and worrying more about small bugs rather than the concepts of distributed systems was a common complaint and it's awesome to see it being changed. This class was also taught by rtm the semester I took it.
And what's up with the growing number of websites which take deliberate pains to prevent me from using pinch-to-zoom on iOS?

Surely there's a special ring in Hell for those web anti-designers.
In Windows 9x they always were interactive - you could either reboot immediately with CTRL+ALT+DEL or press "any key" to enjoy further bluescreens, probably at the cost of slightly increased probability of filesystem corruption.

I always chose the second option. I liked watching W95 scandisk with this bullet point list of checks it's going to perform and animated progress bar. Much better than NT scandisk.
> Sometimes I’m on my computer, and Reader doesn’t work on your web app. I hit CMD + two or three times... then the layout falls apart.

In ML, in Safari, double tap a text column with two fingers. It will zoom the text to fill browser width, just like the double tap with one finger on an iPhone or iPad.

The browser will zoom into that column without changing layout, and then re-render the page to make the text full resolution. Scroll will be lightly tied to the newly zoomed column.

Double tap with two fingers again to zoom back out to full page width.

Still, agree with the premise. Designs should anticipate text size of "content" areas being changed by the user, and the layout should support reflow of arbitrary text size changes without breaking.
In general, web developers (and the designers commandeering them around) need to stop resetting font sizes on body {} or something similarily silly. The default browser font size should be the base value, and all other fonts should simply be bigger or smaller by some factor. In an ideal world, people would also start using ems instead of pxs for media queries, but alas, we probably won't see that for quite some time.
Hmm... I though it was about right.
...100K $/year, so he gets access to Watson...only 30K $/year...open source one, which has 10% less accuracy. That would be tragic.

Why is a Pareto improvement (everyone being better off than before) tragic?
Woman arrested after taking control of former employer's domain names
I can only vouch for this. Until I had to get glasses, I didn't mind; I have been zooming in ever since.

16px is a minimum, IMO.
yes, and HN is especially bad on mobile because the bad antiquated html code prevents mobile browsers from optimizing it a bit.
For sale: Trusted root SSL CA signing certificate
I consider Mac several years ago, but back then it already looked like a walled garden ...

Hell would need to freeze over comes to mind.
Can someone explain to me why these guys are still allowed to be present in, for example, the OS X trusted key store?
I'm glad I'm not the only one who generally surfs the web at 150% magnification.

I also have decent eye-sight and am 29, so I don't think it's an age related thing.

Anecdotally, I find reading large text to be a lot more comfortable. I don't have to strain my eyes to read.
Okay, I went back and dug through the old Windows 3.0 source code to answer this question. It took me about four hours to study it all, try to understand what the code was doing, and then distill the conclusions into this article. Writing up the results took another two hours. That's six hours I could've spent doing something enjoyable.

It's interesting that Raymond has the source at hand. How many people at Microsoft have general access to the Windows 3.0 source code still? I wonder what barriers remain for Microsoft to just release early Windows source to the academic community so that Raymond doesn't have to be the proxy for all these questions? Is there any evidence than any valuable Windows 3.0 code remains in Windows 7 and is therefore worth protecting?
That's a graph of the death rate from polio, not of polio incidence. I don't know this for sure, but think it likely that incidence stayed the same while death rates went down.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_poliomyelitis#Iron_l...:

"even with an iron lung the fatality rate for patients with bulbar polio exceeded 90% [...] Positive pressure ventilators reduced mortality in bulbar patients from 90% to 20%. In the Copenhagen epidemic of 1952, large numbers of patients were ventilated by hand"

That 1952 epidemic is better described at http://jap.physiology.org/content/99/2/424.full, about a 1952 epidemic in Copenhagen:

"The bold solution was to manually ventilate the patients by squeezing a rubber bag attached to a tracheostomy tube inserted through an incision just below the larynx. [...] the mortality rate is said to have dropped from ∼90% to ∼25% as a result of this heroic intervention."
Box is mainly focused on enterprises (rather than private users) that needed much more fine grained access control such uploader only, previewer only, etc.
Javascript Genetic Programming Wizard for Symbolic Regression
The interesting part is that the article ends with him and McClure traveling to China for a conference circuit. Did they have any customers in China?

As a rough proxy for the correlation between tech circuit exposure and results, it would be useful to make a scatterplot of the (number of times a company is mentioned on Techcrunch) vs. (exit value in USD). Two companies at opposite ends of the spectrum would be Foursquare ($2M revenue in 2012, mentioned frequently on TC) and Meraki (acquired for $1.2B in cash, handful of posts on TC).
pg don't you think the alumni would be biased towards startups/people they know. Or say no to those that could potentially become their competitors in the future.
Egypt blocks YouTube over anti-Islam film
No, that's not what I was saying. If the moral maxim of a government is to ensure maximum stability and health for its citizens, then of course it has the right to dictate what substances people must or must not put in their bodies and it would have the right to do so quite invasively.

If the moral maxim is individual liberty at all costs, then it doesn't.

I would imagine that most government are formed on much more complex maxims than either of those two simple ones. The US government is ostensibly founded with the purpose of the Preamble of the Constitution in mind (though of course this has no bearing on actual legal rights granted, then again, we're not really debating laws in this discussion):

> We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

That's quite a few overarching principles and I'm sure you could imagine situations in which attending to one concept would impede or cause the regression of another. Now of course, we could be talking about different governments and establishing different guiding principles for each, but I was just bringing up this one as an example.
I know how you feel. I'm partially sight-impaired. I don't necessarily try for larger text in the OS itself (I'm using OS X at the moment, and the text is "just right"), but on some websites I feel the need to constantly zoom every time I visit.

I'm using HackerNew[1] right now, which gives a larger text layout, but is also a bit more flexible when I zoom in. I hope that helps a bit.

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernew/lgoghlnd...
OK, time to inject some reality here, particularly in light of comments akin to "they sold all <something less than 10>" on this thread.

I don't own one but will buy one eventually. Surface Pro is a significant step forward in the world of tablets for a number of reasons. I won't go into all of them here --and I probably haven't recognized them all yet anyway.

1- it's a design that is far more open than iPad. You can move files in and out of it and have full control of the user directory structure. Want to move a bunch of your spreadsheets, recipes, python scripts and chess games into it. No problem. You don't have an Apple-like overlord prohibiting any of that.

2- Need to install XAMPP, Python and other dev tools? No problem?

3- Want to install VMware and boot Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on a VM for a full command-line dev environment and even virtual host a few sites? No problem.

4- and, after all that work, do you want to create a restricted user account for your 5-year-old to be able to play some games and educational apps? No problem at all.

5- How about accounts for guests and friends so that they don't accidentally mess with your stuff? Yup.

6- Need more hard drive space? How about attaching an external USB hard drive and, perhaps keeping all your dev work there for easy transport to your desktop? Yup.

7- Can you use that really cool RC Flight Simulator that comes with a custom USB interface to your JR9505 transmitter? Of course you can.

8- Or, how about that receipt or business card USB scanner?

9- That neat Logithech keyboard you use on all your PC's? Of course.

10- can you run SolidWorks, AutoCAD, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Dreamweaver, CuteFTP, Komodo, WinForth, Keil, Eclipse, Photoshop, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Fritz and a whole host of other software you might already be using for fun and work? Sure looks that way.

Yeah. Exactly. Just like an iPad.
I like massive fonts. This blog's font is about the right size.

The other thing I don't like is Helvetica Neue in a very light weight, especially if it's grey on bright white.

Readability and others fix the problem, but it's weird that some designers get this so wrong.
Yes, but Apple's find my phone isn't, and Amazon expects to continue earning money and providing services to Kindle owners long after the purchase. It is a simple case of maximizing profits over customer service. Much like PayPal and eBays foolishness from a customer perspective, but great from a bottom line.
Hmm, on Chrome 24.0.1312.69 on 64 bit Linux the depth effect is missing. When rotated, it looks like a picture of a cloud painted on an invisible wall. No problem in Firefox.
FWIW, I switched from a MacBook Air to a Thinkpad X1 Carbon. It's been entirely adequate, and runs Debian beautifully.
How to convey your mobile app idea to a developer
Yep, but don't use it in part of your product's name.
Is it really? The result is the same, either way you fail, the only difference is how you feel about yourself afterwards.
SATs are actually not particularly amenable to test prep (unless Kaplan is funding the study).

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124278685697537839.html
SplendidCRM on Firebird demo page
Been thinking the same thing for a while.

We even adjusted the accounting software to tread PayPal as if it was a bank ... The amount of accounting time on PayPal went down. Because it's well ... a bank, without the legal obligations :( and that means we are screwed.
I disagree that's a non-issue. Recently a relative's 10+ year old computer broke down. After buying a new one, until I was able to boot from an external linux usb/CD disk and be able to boot linux from the hard disk after installation, took several trips to the BIOS to change a myriad of UEFI settings, which is completely non-trivial to someone that just wants to try a live CD.
At the beginning of my current gig I was a one-person web development shop inside a larger agency. The agency has a team of quite talented print designers who would often be tasked with providing designs for web projects. Every single time I got a design from one of them it would contain impossibly small lorem ipsum. I would make it bigger during implementation, often resulting in comments of me "messing up the design", or having the type look "goofily large".

One of the primary reasons for the small type, I learned, was that they were used to seeing type set on an 8.5"x11" page. If you open up a magazine and hold it as far away from your face as a monitor would be, you'll see some pretty small type. They just wanted the web to work the same way.
The point of this website is to convince you to put your contact information in, so that you can later be asked to give money and votes.

This is, in political terms, a customer acquisition strategy. CISPA is merely the "power word" they hope will create enough emotional response that you'll fill out the form.

(This is primarily what the campaign against CISPA always was. You can tell because the Senate cyber bill was far more intrusive, but the anti-CISPA groups did not campaign against it.)
Sounds totally metal. Ghord the conqueror.