skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google Profiles Finally Have A (Big) Purpose: Appearing In Google Search Queries
I'm sorry, it wasn't my intention to refer to your summary as vapid; and I certainly see now how you read it that way. I would ammend my post to add "makes it to be" to the end of the last sentence. I meant that your summary represents the "finding" as completely vapid.

I do trust that the detail from the article you point out, that "the survey used deliberately avoided wording that suggested 'illegal' downloading", is true. (Though, I'd still be grateful if you wanted to provide a link to the original.) What I find to be off base is the logic of your interpretation ("In other words..."), which makes their finding out to be a mere tautology. If what you say in the first paragraph is true (which I believe it to be), I don't think what you said in the second paragraph follows from that for the reason I gave above.
That's a good point. I don't know what I was thinking.
At this stage - building the first version of the product is more important than writing a business plan. You don't want to change priorities because of some contest. Successful start up is more important than wining a beauty contest.

If you can build something that a few people find valuable then you can start thinking about business plan to scale it further... Without the basic product, there is no business and there is no need for a plan.

Of course, all this is based on the assumption that the first version can be built very fast without incurring any significant cost.
You're way outside the debate here. Commercial typeface vendors are going to get compensated one way or the other. There's no DRM on a JPG from Getty or Corbis, but you'd be made of stupid to steal a commercial stock photo for your promotional material.
Origins of Python's "Functional" Features
The case is not about clickwrap agreements. Footnote 8 reads:

> In light of our "fair use" analysis, we decline to address the question of whether the terms of the Clickwrap Agreement created an enforceable contract between plaintiffs and iParadigms.

In other words: the court ignored the clickwrap agreement issue, because the fair use analysis was decisive.
First, how do you take a bitmap from a web page, pull it into a vector program, and resize it without redrawing the entire font?

Second, I think you'd be surprised by how good trained designers are at spotting typefaces. "Stretch out" Helvetica a bit, and a trained eye is going to know you just mutilated Helvetica.
Gill Sans italic isn't an oblique. It's a genuine italic. Look at the 'a'.
It's doubly tricky with fonts because typefaces have a complicated legal status. Typeface designs cannot be copyrighted, though individual implementations (i.e. ttf files) can be. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typeface#Legal_aspects
Beautifully done. Simple, elegant, and highly useful website.
No, the whole thing we're talking about here is embedding the font files in the webpage so that we can finally use whatever font we want as a typeface.
I wonder if this site is made specifically as a machine learning tool, but it sure beats cyc as a source.
No, sorry that's just nonsense.

We're less sensitive to blue light because there is less blue light.

The black body spectrum of the sun peaks at green (which is why plants are green) and tails of into red. Blue light is not only a proportionately small section of the energy output but blue photons have more energy per particle and so there are even fewer photons necessary to make up that section.

That said while I've heard the women have better red resolution that doesn't necessarily mean they're more sensitive to the color number one. and number two explanations like "so they could gather berries" tend to come from a desire to see women barefoot and pregnant rather than solid science.
Yeah I agree with you about the nature of the discipline. I have no idea about its practitioners, but the craft can be very technichal.

Metamagical Themas (by Douglas Hofstadter) has several interesting problems concerning font and typography. For example, scale can be a problem. It would be relatively easy to design a good letter in a large font size. It gets more difficult when you are trying to scale that letter down to the tiny font sizes.
Ask HN: Programming language power and 10 years to mastery
I've been thinking about the intersection between the variability in programming language power and expressivity (as discussed by PG in http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html) and the 10 year (or 10,000 hours) road to expertise.

I’m around year eight of hacking away professionally and bumped against the dramatic power differential in programming languages when I primarily became a database developer. I started "thinking in sets" and found that I was much more effective. SQL got more work done in fewer lines of code in a simple way than hooking up my J2EE java junk via JDBC in more traditional programming. But it took the direct use of SQL for a couple of years before the experience pushed my coding to the next level. Much of this benefit was due to the fact that the apps I worked on were really data driven and "fit" the relational data model well, coupled with the fact that I was in a role that allowed me to do architecture design and low level implementation. And tear the design and implementation apart to do it again after finding all the nuances in the app and data.

The switch from imperative programming languages to a declarative programming language to take advantage of SQL has made me curious about Lisp and functional programming. I have an idea for a web app and I’ll use it as a vehicle to test out Lisp. Worst case, I pick up a language that purports to have almost mystical powers (all hail the mighty macro). Best case, a nice startup could grow out of the project. But the real point is to get real hands-on experience with a more powerful language than the standard C, Java, Perl, and SQL stuff I’ve already done. Plus, I’d hate to miss out on some key part of a hacker’s personal growth over that 10 year march . . .

That’s a lot of background to get to two simple questions.

Do any of the HN readers have any tips or advice on speeding up the transition to "thinking in Lisp"? I’ll probably be hacking away using Practical Common Lisp and On Lisp as my guides (SICP is probably somewhere in the mix). Have any of you followed a similar path as you head towards a decade of hacking and did the Lisp (or other fp language) dance grow your skills in a big way (ie, now I’m a faster developer in general or better algorithm designer or communicator of code ideas)? It would be great to hear specifics.

Thanks.
There is a flip side to that coin: preserving, let alone growing at the rate of 10%, $400,000 is a lot harder than most people realize.
1. Operating Systems take a long time to develop. The process can take years.

2. Operating Systems have a value. If they didn't people would be content just using punch cards.

3. People that do this work should be compensated.

4. Trying to figure out a solution to this problem, both from a customers and creators view is more beneficial than the "fuck this, fuck that" rhetoric among linux nerds.

I apologize for the snark. My point is that there's a striking similarity here. There are some arguments that Windows is superior to Linux, and once upon a time, those arguments might've been valid. They're not any more. It's crazy these days to plunk down $300 for Vista when Ubuntu is better, and free in every way.

Quantity leads to quality—even if the average free font is much worse than the average proprietary font, a few of them will be very good, and will gain a lot of usage.

There may still be a place for proprietary fonts. But the web will embrace the more open option. If the foundries want a piece of that action, they're going to have to change the way they do things.
Search for "me" on Google (Google Profiles now in search results)
"We are terribly sorry but it appears your graphics card is not able to run o3d. We are working on a solution."

:-(
Netbooks are notebooks. Period. Which puts Microsoft in a tough spot.
"innovate new, standards-based methods of using a designer-chosen font without sacrificing the usage rights of said font."

Innovation can only do what is possible. If the font foundries want it to be physically impossible to "steal" the font, there is simply no way to square that with making the font available over the web for the purpose of rendering it, without sacrificing too much usability to make it worth doing. Maybe IE can do it (although even then only dangerously, if you want it to be really secure), but there's no way to make it possible for Firefox, KHTML, and other open source browsers to use the font, but impossible to download it. They're just too open for that. And any solution based on leaving them out in the cold is rapidly becoming infeasible as IE may still have market share, but is very nearly the last closed-source browser of any significant still standing.

Leave the handwaving of "innovative" solutions to impossible problems to the government.
Fonts are very different from stock images. They provide texture, not content: nobody goes to a web page to read 'Lorem Ipsum' written in an attractive font. I'd say a font is similar to the film stock on which a photo is shot. There are lots of cool and distinctive film stocks out there...but Kodak doesn't collect any royalties on the tasty silver halide look of an Ansel Adams photo.
the $75K average is skewed by a handful of outlier successes, but the great majority of bloggers who get 100,000 uniques/month earn more like $22,000. Here, the median is far more relevant than the average

Absolutely true
I don't know what you were just reading, but I'll bet it has little to do with what Gandhi actually thought, said, or did.

Googling the quote yields no citation, just reams of quotespam of the sort that surrounds this kind of bogus attribution. It's an old trick: put the best lines into the mouths of the most famous guys and people will more likely repeat them. A Russian once told me that the funniest jokes were all attributed to Pushkin.

The most common claim is that the line comes from a speech Gandhi gave in South Africa in 1890. Hmm: in 1890 Gandhi was a 20-year old law student in England. He took a job in South Africa in 1893. Maybe the date was rounded down? But any speeches that survive from that period would surely be from the anti-racist campaign that made him infamous, not pep talks to local businessmen.

The real problem, though, is with the language of the quote. How likely was an Indian lawyer in his early 20s in South Africa to dash off homilies about customer service that sound just like inspirational American business literature of several generations later? Amusingly, the internet can't seem to make up its mind whether Gandhi said it or L.L. Bean did.

If anyone can dig up a real reference, though, I'm happy to be proven wrong.
I was just looking at the CSS, which specifies oblique as opposed to italic.
Google Labs O3D
Google Labs' open source 3D rendering browser plugin.
Erdos is a good example of stupidity working. Being unwilling to even show that he could cut a grapefruit or wash his clothes meant he could focus solely on his obsession, math.

I am sure his hosts were extremely appreciated of having him as a guest, but I am also sure they would rather not have done everything that Erdos decided was a waste of time.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,990598,00.h...
They already seem to have embraced interpreting correlation as causation. Now they seem to want to add confirmation bias to their issues:

"We went through a couple of different questions just to see look at the UI and get a feel for things. Then, I did the "pick a college" thread. I answered all of the questions and the top result was the actual school that I attended - Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. Unreal. Then my friend did it and the two schools that she chose between showed up as #2 and #4 respectively, UC Davis, and Texas. Amazing."
> The black body spectrum of the sun peaks at green (which is why plants are green)

Plants are green because they reflect green light, i.e. they do not absorb it and use it to facilitate photosynthesis. Chlorophylls tend to have absorption peaks in the red and blue, which are (in the grand scheme of the electromagnetic spectrum) near the sun's blackbody peak but do not coincide with it.
Definitely agree, hope you continue expanding on this... overtime it would be cool to have a section based on stats and performance, perhaps associated to a few metrics like link-backs in google, press on blogs, tweets, etc.
My pham Oriflame - Vox
Ask HN: How are GoDaddy SSL certificate's so cheap?
Does anyone know how/why this is the case? Also, does anyone have one of these guys? If so, can you comment either way on your experience with it?
In the contest between Windows and Ubuntu, almost everybody chooses Windows (a small minority chooses Windows non-free competitor OS X). This fact is inconvenient to your argument.
Objects as a language feature aren't going anywhere, nor should they. Like functions, they are simple, fundamental, versatile and work well with nearly every other language feature.

Object Oriented Programming, as an all-encompassing paradigm that will solve all your problems if you faithfully and blindly devote yourself to applying it, and only it, anywhere and everywhere that you possibly can, is dying.

Hopefully, the notion that such a paradigm can ever exist will die with it.
But the 'like' tag has numbers in parentheses. People should be immediately able to see that it's a kind of voting.

Now if there was a like/dislike system in play, well that's different.
This is at least partially a reaction to the Linux community's tricks to get fonts. Some people in the Linux community wrote a program to automatically download and install Microsoft's TrueType Font Collection fonts after installation. That way, Linux can use all the fonts that Microsoft spent millions of dollars designing, Linux itself isn't affected by the fonts' license, nobody in the Linux community has to spend resources to design decent fonts, and the user isn't hassled much.

All the font foundries saw that and said "we will never allow that to happen again"--especially since the intersection between their customers and Linux users is nearly the empty set. Their proposed solution is to allow embedding only if the font files on the servers are covered by the DMCA. That is why there is a trivial obsfucation of the font information in the EOT specification. If somebody distributes a program to scrape a bunch of fonts of the web and install them onto a person's computer, they can use the DMCA to take the program down (just as the movie industry did with DeCSS). It isn't 100% effective, but it does help prevent casual piracy. The copy-protection bits of EOT are a lost cause in the long run. But, they will be somewhat effective in the short run. That is just like DeCSS--the first couple of years, it was difficult for an inexperienced user to find a trustworthy DeCSS program with a usable interface.

I support EOT because Microsoft already made it the de-facto standard in 1997, and Microsoft already said they won't implement TTF linking in IE. That means that if other browsers don't implement EOT, we will always have the hassle of having separate font files for IE and other browsers. That is silly. It is the other browsers' fault that they have been so lethargic to implement font linking. Now, 12 years later they finally implement it, but in an incompatible way. Then they turn around and blame Microsoft for having a 12-year-old implementation that is incompatible with their nubile mechanism. Who wins at that game? Only people who value smugness over productivity.
I remember reading in one of Bruce Schneier's books that some clever thiefs set up a fake ATM machine outside the Burlington Mall in CT. When people went to withdraw money, the machine recorded their credentials and then displayed an ambiguous error message.

You have to wonder how they got the information from the machine, as it would have been relatively easy for the police to watch it once someone figured out it was a fake.
Chocolate drink could help you do the math
The CSS may ask for an oblique, but on my Mac, which ships with Gill Sans, I get an italic. Just to be pendantic. Obliques are slanted faces; italics are slanted faces with cursive letterforms.
I'm using a wildcard ssl cert from them on some of our sites now. It works fine. Their logos are ridiculous, so we don't use those.

They are so cheap because GoDaddy does everything with a metric fuckton of volume.
Although the black-body spectrum of the sun does peak at green, that's not why plants are green. Consider this: they appear green to us because they are not absorbing the green light.

So, then, why green? For that matter, why not black? Apparently, there's some speculation that early microbes were purple, which meant that they absorbed the green light. Chlorophyll might have appeared only in later microbes, so it would have needed to absorb what was left; namely, red and blue light.
I've used them with no problems. Generating a certificate isn't very expensive, really, and I am surprised the prices didn't come down sooner than they actually did.

It's about time, though.
> stretch it just a bit

You are clearly not a graphic designer. Altering typeface proportions is the biggest no-no and the first sign of an amateur design botch-job. Just an FYI :-)
They posted an (admittedly biased) comparison of some of the other web based image editing apps a while ago on their blog. http://aviary.com/blog/posts/aviary-photoshop-express-picnik...
ACM ICPC World Finals 2009: gold medals go to Russia and China
You think Python is less a moving target than a newly invented Unix-bound domain specific language for system tracing?
It might be great in print but it is horrible on-screen. Generally italic faces should be avoided on the web whenever possible. Failing that, it is much better to use one that was designed specifically for on-screen use, like one of the Microsoft C* fonts.
http://potrace.sourceforge.net/ but we weren't talking about bitmaps.

I have no doubt that a trained typographer can identify fonts at 100 paces in a hurricane, but if he sees his font in printed material, contacts the publisher and says "That's my font" and the publisher says "No it's not" what is his recourse? He'd have to get some kind of order to search the publisher, or otherwise demand that the publisher prove that its a different font. How do you convince a judge that two fonts are the same, without superimposing them? Does "Look at the serifs!" hold up? I'm not saying that its impossible to prove the origin of a font, just that it gets a lot harder once you leave the digital world.
When Cloud Computing Doesn't Make Sense
That's basically the same as the "this is the year of Linux on the desktop" argument. I won't hold my breath. Open source end-user products always seem to improve at a snails pace.
The word 'should' always throws up red flags for me, as though it is a pre-accepted fact and not open to debate.
The number of professional bloggers is based upon that technorati survey (based upon 1300 technorati users) where 2% of users said that blogging was a primary source of income for them. So basically 26 technorati users have been scaled up to half-a-million pro-bloggers.
There's been a nicotine inhaler available in the states since 1998. It requires a prescription and hasn't been very popular.
I have the same problem with the naming -- just clicked to figure out what this "dropbox" would offer, only to find out it's a comment system :|
I wish I thought of this back in my high school english classes and got everyone together to not submit anything. However, all the teachers I remember did give failing grades for assignments not submitted to turnitin. If you had enough failing assignment grades, obviously, you fail the class. The reasoning would be that you had to complete your entire assignment, which involved submitting to turnitin and physically to the teacher by the due date, to receive the maximum amount of credit.

Failing that, not turning it in made the teacher question your "academic honesty". Very frustrating, especially as I remember there were some students that found it very difficult to get access to a computer to even type up their essays, let alone internet connections to submit online.
Ask PG: Spam Control on HN
Given HN's incredibly easy signup process (not even a CAPTCHA), one would think that spammers would be going crazy in here. But I haven't seen a single bit of spam, either in the comments or new articles lineup.

How is this achieved? I mean what kind of spam filters?
I Chose to Support Entrepreneurs with the Founder Institute
Oprah is the Blue Light Special of Twitter
Their purpose is undermined by the fact that they don't even use @font-face on their own site. The could have and should have, given that the first specified face in the stylesheet is "Nimbus Sans", a free font.

What I actually see on visiting Open Font Library is the headline "Typefaces we can all share" in Helvetica Neue, a typeface that in fact we cannot all share.
i, and probably many other people, flag anything that looks like spam.
Earth-like planet found
Not that it applies to me but what about TechStars / etc colored indicators?
Yes, and commercial vendors get compensated one way or another because they use social tools, the law, to enforce their law-provided control over their product. Typeface vendors are welcome to do that too, using the law and not putting their trust in DRM, which is breakable, to enforce their control.

However, complaining that people who make their own product freely available, for whatever reason (be it for demo, ideological, political, etc purposes), is taking away compensation from those who don't make their product freely available doesn't help the cause to get people to pay for things, or their equivalents, they can otherwise get for free. Adobe charges high prices for their tools because they can, and people will pay because it is considered there are no better tools, free or otherwise. People pay for stock photos because it's actually easier and often cheaper to do so rather than risk having to deal with being caught not paying. Trying to convince the engineers who control the format to add DRM bits, which is what the OP was responding to, is exactly the wrong way to go about maintaining control and is a losing battle.
Common Lisp changed the way I program because the macros open your eyes to a whole lot of code duplication that you can't avoid in other languages - this encouraged me to really work at those bits of code until they actually contain the bare minimum of boilerplate code possible.

Haskell changed the way I program because laziness can allow you to express your code in much clearer and simpler ways - this encouraged me to use more memoization.

Functional programming is definitely where we want to be in theory, so if practice permits, use it!
Here's how I think it works:

Cert issuing companies are in business because they somehow got Firefox, IE, Opera, etc., to include their authority certificate by default in the browser.

You could start your own competing service but you'd somehow have to overcome that obstacle.

Second, many of those companies offer "business validation" services. This is the more expensive cert, maybe $400 or more. They make sure you have a D&B number, and ideally do a bit of auditing to be sure that you are legit.

So if you are one of those companies and you can make money just for selling a cert, and without having to do any sort of audit, why wouldn't you? With such a basic cert you are mostly just allowing users to have ssl transport without an annoying browser message. That is worth something.

There are even cheaper ones that use a second cert which I think is just a basic part of SSL. You could buy a cert and then issue certs, and as long as the web server includes the full chain, it should be OK.