skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looking forward to Jeff's next post - a comprehensive study into the colour of his keyboard. Highlights include the little blemish on the H key and that slight greenish tinge to the letter markings. I'll be reading that one over and over again for months.
How is this not blackmail? What's to stop me from registering ezillow.info and doing the same thing?
REVOLT: The Segway-maker’s next move
Disney/Hulu deal brings ABC TV to Hulu.com
Grunties's comment FTW. "monospace good, non-monospace bad, all other considerations irrelevant. Next?"
I'm a fool, I meant Google Voice instead of Google Talk, the service they built out of GrandCentral. I don't trust Google to stay interested in the Voice product long enough to change my primary phone number.

Good idea about running our own XMPP server, thanks. If we start interacting with our clients more via chat that would definitely be the way to go.

FWIW, for instant messaging I primarily use Skype, although I have had an AIM account for 10+ years.
I'm impressed with the mario-physics. Controls just like the original.
inconsolata

droid-sans mono
Probably my favorite feature is the much-improved scrolling on OSX. It's just as smooth as Safari now.
I have an all-ett. It is indeed uber thin and unnoticeable in my back pocket. It is sometimes so thin that I have a hard time opening it. I believe it will put an end to back pockets wearing thin and stretching out or growing holes. I like it.
Virtual Neurons Acting Like the Real Thing - The Blue Brain Project
that's the same thought I had when I saw that Arial was the first item on their list. I once tried to use a non-monospaced font, but that lasted only a few seconds. it just doesn't fit!
Matrix? What's wrong with the "equivalent PC x 2" algorithm? Maybe it needs to be trendied up a bit with some shiny translucent plastic? Or maybe it's the fact that the variable 2 could be updated at a later stage without throwing out the whole algorithm and starting again?

(Chill out fanboys, just kidding. Sheesh, you guys are tetchy)
Ask HN: Apple TV or Mac Mini?
I'm looking at buying an Apple TV or Mac Mini to use as a home media centre. Which one would you recommend? And have you tried running Linux on either of them?
We're using Nanite on a project for delivering e-mails in the background (for now). We have bigger plans for it, but its pretty easy to get running once you get RabbitMQ going.

It has also been running really well in production, though no real load to speak of yet. However, we also run an ejabberd server which has been bullet proof, as are most erlang servers of decent maturity.

Being able to run any number of agents and have them be load balanced with Nanite out of the box, and also add and remove agents from the system flexibly and at will is great.
How about the X11 "fixed" font and my favorite - "terminus"?

Fixed, by the way is the font you see when you start xterm in most environments. Hold Ctrl and the RMB while the mouse cursor is in a xterm window and you can see it in different sizes
I guess platform/rendering engine difference should be taken into consideration when choosing the "best" fonts. Same font is usually rendered very differently on different platforms with anti-aliasing on. For example, Monaco looks fantastic on Mac, but just so-so on Windows/Linux. (Though for bitmap fonts this seems not a real issue.)
10 places to sell templates (stock)
Don't take it, $250 is peanuts. You're providing a valuable service for them, and clearly they were aware of and encouraged it. I doubt they'd take you to court, but I doubt they'd win anyways. There's no reason you can't own a domain with their trademark in it, as long as there's no confusion that you represent their company.

Call their bluff, let them cut off your API access. They'll lose customers, you'll lose $250. Not even close.

All that aside, I still wouldn't sell it to them just based on principle. You spent your time enhancing their product with their API, and they have the audacity to try and bully you into taking this ridiculous offer.

FWIW, that's it for me ever using Zillow. I won't do business with a company with such low ethical standards.
HP Researchers Design Intelligent Social Network with Focus on "Real" Friends
Obviously, how to optimize your wallet. :)
I don't agree, but in most cases where its cheaper to pay for a domain then go through the courts that magic number is around $3000.
I didn't think this particular post was all that bad. He gave links to several products, described his experiences with them, and talked about something that we all deal with -- how to carry around our stuff. Nothing wrong with talking about that. (Several other HNers have posted about their wallet stuff here, so there's interest at least)

I'd be wary of dismissing every Atwood post out of hand.
Arial? I've tried using non monospace fonts for code. They've never worked out for me.
This company is a great example of why the market is so much more important than your idea. A simple business of fixing and upgrading iPods, marketed online, brings in millions per year. Simple and brilliant.
Arizona Criminal Defense
Criminal defense representation in Scottsdale, Arizona and throughout the East Valley, Mesa, Phoenix, Tempe, Tucson, Prescott, Flagstaff, Glendale, Peoria, Chandler, Gilbert, and the state of Arizona. Vladimir Gagic offers experience and aggressiveness in helping his clients achieve just representation when accused of felonies and misdemeanors."
this is awesome- will use it immediately.
Number one is Arial? Way to blow all credibility right up front.
From VC's Math Problems to Yahoo's MI Contribution
Three Rings presentation on freemium game metrics
Both great!

I would add Envy Code R:
http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-cod...
Interview: Y Combinator Founder Jessica Livingston
I have several of each running for the same application.

I'd recommend the Mini. It does everything the ATV does, and much more, for not a lot of extra $$$.

The ATV is a nice little device, but you're fairly limited in what you can really do with it (no Netflix streaming, for example). One nice this about the ATV is that you can stream audio TO it from iTunes on another machine, I use that feature a lot.
You can knock out a basic interface in Flex pretty quickly, just hardcoding the data (I've done fairly complex interfaces in a few hours this way).
Manik Surtani On JBoss Infinispan - A New Era For Open Source Data Grids
I guess my problem is that marketing is the only thing Dreamhost is good at.
awesome post! for use of "prostitution" and "capitalism"
I use good old fashioned HTML. It has several advantages:

- You can easily change it, even when in front of a customer/user

- You can get actual interaction. Flow and what happens when you click different links, how pages are linked, etc. is an important part of an interface.

- You can use it as a starting point for coding

- You can easily put it on the net so that customers/users can click through it in their own time, not just when you're there.
Perhaps we just need to put strings on public funding so that study/experiment data is made publicly available (after a short period of exclusivity).

It wouldn't be too different from the Patent system. In that, in exchange for a limited-time monopoly, you agree to publish the details of your invention to further the state of the art.

It might also help scientists learn from each others mistakes, as it would also catalog -failed- projects. Something journals don't do and which doubtlessly results in redundant efforts.
You can just run FF in wine and watch it from there. It works for me. Sometimes the video doesn't appear, but if you hit full screen then return it to normal, it starts working.
Just add TPS reports and you're working at Initech.

Have you ever been on a day-long 7-person email conversation to change one string to another in a text file, and 6 of those people were IT people? I feel your pain.
It's both! It's recently started to appear on its own, without the text, in some promo material, and in that context it's just referred to as the "Amazon smile."
Don't use Vera, use DejaVu. It's the same font, but with many more Unicode characters. (λ looks much nicer after I made the switch.)

Link: http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
Terminus. LispM font.

Smoothed blended TrueType programming fonts are for clove-cigarette-smoking nancy boys.
Was unaware of that as well. Kind of like how I had no idea the space between the 'E' and 'x' in FedEx are supposed to make an arrow.
Origami: Between The Folds
I'm building tools for myself and other web developers at www.binaryage.com:

FirePython - realtime logging from Python into Firebug

Visor - Quake-like terminal.app - took Visor by Blacktree and pushed it further

FireRainbow - javascript syntax highlighting for Firebug

xRefresh - browser refresh automation

My most ambitious project is www.hashpage.com, which will be web-based tool for creating mashups. Imagine WYSIWYG grid based editor for visual prototyping + Bespin for coding on top of GitHub, sites are published in the cloud (App Engine).
http://www.iplotz.com is a sweet hosted solution with some basic collaboration tools as well. Works very well for us.
The worst part about the ABC player is it assumes you are sitting right in front of your computer and requires you to click a link to continue the video.

Retarded.
Brandz Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands [pdf]
I think it might be dependent on what language you use. In Perl, alignment is very important, as you have a lot of code that looks like:

my $foo = Foo->new(
named_initargs => 'go here',
and_also => 'here',
);

(There are various technical reasons to avoid this style, but I think it looks too nice to avoid.)

As a result, a non-monospaced font would be a nightmare.

However, perhaps if you are using a language where everything is positional (Java, C), then maybe it doesn't matter:

Foo foo = new Foo(args, go, here,
and, if, you, run, out, of, room,
perhaps, they, can, be, written,
like, this);

Note that the only alignment is the initial indentation; one space is always as wide as another space, so a variable-width font won't mess anything up.

Obviously if you are using Haskell or Python, you will care even more about alignment, and hence will want a monospaced font. You will also want a monospaced font in your terminal emulator, as most console apps depend on all glyphs being equally wide.
I am a big fan of Anonymous, it is currently my emacs code font.

http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymous.html
Moi? 'cause I'm not making the point you're railing against, and thus confused. It was barely on topic, in fact.
"Further, the output format ought to be determined hubristically from the HTTP Accept header; that lets clients select output formats without resorting to ugly ?format=xml crap."

I have to disagree. First of all, do not assume anything based on mime types the browser (or whatever user agent) asked for. It's very hacky to expect consumers to mess with their user agent's Accepts header to get the response format they want. Specifying the desired format such as ?format=xml is simple, clear, specific, and reliable. I prefer default format be XML and other formats available by passing a format parameter.

The REST of article has some good suggestions. I made a pun there. Did you catch it? "REST of the article". Because it's about REST? That's comedy gold.
Debugging Ajax in Production
In terms of the programming model, web workers are processes, not threads. They have no shared state, and use asynchronous message passing as the only inter-process communication - very much like Erlang. This makes them very simple, and fits in perfectly with JavaScript's existing asynchronous event-based model.

"What operations 'block' in js?"

Web workers are important because everything blocks in JavaScript. JS in the browser is single-threaded, which means that if you do anything computationally intensive (reading from a Gears database, sorting a huge array, image manipulation on a Canvas element) then your page can no longer respond to UI events until the processing is finished. Without worker processes, the only way to do long-running computation without blocking the UI was to implement your own cooperative multi-threading by "yielding" with setTimeout(fn, 0).

(Note: I'm talking about the model exposed to JS programmers, not the underlying implementation which might be based on native threads, native processes, or green threads.)
The ABC player does blow, but I manage to run it on Firefox in XP. I really hope they just move to the Hulu player.
The issue isn't with Hulu. The issue is how media is licensed for different markets. For example, let's say that Lost is licensed to ABC for broadcast in the US and licensed to Sky TV for broadcast in the UK. Who gets to put it on Hulu? Can Sky TV put it on Hulu and get ad revenues from American viewers? Could the producers of Lost put it on Hulu and get ad revenues in markets where they already licensed it to another company?

That's the issue. The internet tends to be international, but there are some things that are still national and here's where they collide. If Hulu comes to the UK, the programs will be different simply because different people own the distribution rights in the UK.

If you want to do something about this, write to the companies that broadcast the shows in your territory that you'd like to see them on Hulu. I'm sure Hulu would be more than happy to be a part of the UK market. I'm guessing the issue is more getting UK broadcasters on board.
Hmmm. Brendan Eich in 2007:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2007/02/thre...

'''So my default answer to questions such as the one I got at last May's Ajax Experience, "When will you add threads to JavaScript?" is: "over your dead body!"'''
Without question, that's incredible. Little steps forward and we may just have complete technological simulacrums of life, would these not also be considered life as well?
I've been doing just standard HTML mockups, often with some sort of generic stylesheet, so that I don't have to spend much time fiddling with CSS. The things I mock up are typically applications for internal use, this wouldn't work well for client work I would guess.

This works well for a generic stylesheet: http://www.mostinspired.com/blog/2009/01/28/rapid-interactiv...

On the most recent application that I did mockups for, I ended up taking it a step further and building a quick prototype in Rails that I populated with dummy data. Our final development will be in Java, so this is throwaway code, but it was useful for working out how some problems would be solved. I doubt that I would do this for most things, but in this situation it was beneficial.
Nope. Still at beta 4.
Ask HN: Are there any startups founded by Indonesians (esp. in Bay Area)?
Hi, i am originally from Indonesia, and just curious on how many tech-startup founders that are Indonesians (since Indonesia is not well-known for CS).

I've met quite a lot of Aussie founders (the country where i spent the past 6 years of my life) but, so far, never meet a single Indonesians founder.
I couldn't resist.
Do you have a spaceship I could borrow?
A sweet solution to the insider threat
AP CEO Tom Curley Threatens Google: "They Will Not Get Our Copy Going Forward"
From his comments on the same post:

"I think message passing shared nothing beats shared memory preemptively scheduled threads."

So Web Workers are an implementation of his preferred solution.
I'm CTO of a 15 person start-up in London and I made the decision to go all Mac. This has worked out well for us, except that the CEO insists on using a PC. The only real complaint I'd have is that the MacBook Air seems like a flaky machine compared to all the other Mac hardware.
> the enviros and the lefties

Please don't lump us all together like that; this enviro-leftie is very pro-nuclear. Following political ideology blindly has never been limited to any particular viewpoint.
Even if Facebook end up not making any money, it contribution to the next generation of software engineering will be important. Solving major scaling issues, make Facebook a full scale lab for tomorrow. They will set standards for how to approach some unique problems.
Cheap Catalogs Printing
i was expecting this to be some kind of linux kernel debugging article given the domain name but it's actually an introductory article on ruby's debug gem.
Question (marginally related): Why does Twitter have such a great reputation, technology wise?

Here they are getting featured by Apple, and yet I have never seen a company with a product so widely used that is also so ridden with technology issues (I know, their tech issues have nothing to do with using Apple products).

I just wonder why they get a free pass from the tech community, while it's breaking world news when there's a 15 minute glitch in any of Google's services.

I don't mean this in a disrespectful way toward Twitter (or Apple), but it really strikes me as odd.

Admittedly, I'm also feeling somewhat bitter at Twitter at the moment, since I can't change my Twitter picture right now on a feed I'm setting up for my employer, because, and I quote, "Twitter is stressed out."
If you end up using it in a production system, please follow-up with your experiences. I've adopted a skeptical approach to these sort of javascript-based CSS-layout implementations, as some unforeseen problem usually gets caught during QA.
Use agents (http://clojure.org/agents) and write an implementation of a ray tracer that uses many cores.
Monica Hansen Videos and Photos | shan.biz
What Disney-Hulu Means for Apple
Recently there was a Amazon comedy logo where the smile went DOWN wards, because it was failing.
Leap forward for invisibility cloaks
All that scorched-earth stuff is a backup plan, so the power in the negotiations isn't completely one-sided. It's good to have leverage.
Anyone care to daydream about the possibilities and consequences as this becomes ubiquitous and evolves?

Building thermostats decide temperature using a hedonistic utilitarian function? Waiting room TV's that find the best channel for the people in the room on their own? Hacker news karma happens automatically via your mind-over-matter device?

MOM becomes the abbreviation du jour as mind over matter is too wordy, so mom domain names get more popular.
It's from 1998, back before they started writing articles on how Obama should start Twittering.
Apparently you've been in a coma for the last 6 months as Twitter's problems were essentially all that TC and the related tech blog scene wrote about all winter long.

If Twitter is getting a 'pass', I don't want to know what a 'hard time' looks like from Arrington and the crew.
Ask HN: Which CSS grid system do you prefer?
I've been researching various CSS frameworks and am currently utilizing a customized version of the BlueTrip CSS framework, which itself is a combination of multiple CSS frameworks (Blueprint, 960.gs, Tripoli, and Hartija). I have also worked with 960.gs, but settled on the 24-column/950px wide/10px gutter grid used by BlueTrip and Blueprint as I feel it offers more layout flexibility.

Lately, I've been noticing an increased interest in the 960.gs grid (12-column, 960px wide, 20px gutter). However, I found it slightly harder to work with for complex layouts and nested grids.

For those that use CSS frameworks, which grid system do you prefer?

Note: I am aware of the arguments for and against CSS frameworks, but have found CSS grids very useful for improving development speed and consistency.
I find that using print statements is usually much more effective in debugging than using a debugger, because it forces you to think about how the code being inspected behaves as whole instead of what is causing a particular bug.
Why don't you virtualize Windows for your CEO on a Mac? Would he even notice the difference?
Huh, and I thought logos were right first time around.

I do believe mine is though :-P
Your post(s) could have been made entirely accurate with the judicious application of the word "some". It was probably already implicit in your mind, but not necessarily in the mind of the reader.
I don't completely agree it's the same thing but I do like this example :)
Every song put out through a record label, or actually every song? I highly doubt there's any drive at anytime in the future that will be able to hold every piece of music (no matter how bad) produced .. ever.
Caltech researchers pinpoint the mechanisms of self-control in the brain
YUI (reset-fonts-grids) http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids/
This is a perennial question amoungst UX/IxD/UI folks. I haven't used Axure and confess to be suspicious of its hype.
My secret weapon is still: paper. I know you said digital, but in my experience all digital prototypes have the inherent weakness of needing a nontrivial investment of time and brainpower JUST TO MANIFEST the thing, to say nothing of making it well designed, or even just coming-out-how-you pictured-it.

I never have this cost/risk with paper. And ALL development participants (users, devs, designers, businessy types) can use pencil and paper expressively.

Bottom line: keeps the focus on the design and the user task and not on the clumsy medium. Helpful?

If you twisted my arm: I'd either say vanilla drupal instance with commmon modules (views, etc.), rails stack with widget libraries or ...Powerpoint.
++ for Dina. It's an excellent programming font and looks great even at 8pt. It allows you to see much more code per screen.
The fonts are listed in alphabetical order.

But still, as stated in the article:

"It can be a little difficult to distinguish between uppercase i / lowercase L and nested single/double quotes but that can be said of many proportional fonts."

For source code editing, I'll stick to a monospaced font myself.
Demystifying jQuery selector optimization
The plan is that when his PC dies we are going to give him a MacBook and set it up with Mail.app, etc. The only thing he needs that we'll have to install is MacOffice so that he can reliably exchange Microsoft Office format files with the outside world.

He's not a bad guy, he's just really used to his PC, but he's coming around because he's had so much trouble with Vista that it's not funny anymore.
Being a hacker and dad of girls, I have to admit I am always very excited and proud of women achievement in the tech world.

I still think there are not enough ladies hackers out there. I thank you Jessica for your work, this should inspire more girls to become hackers.
I'm perfectly happy with Courier New. Most editors on windows use it by default and I never felt the need to change it.
>would these not also be considered life as well?

Is a simulation of life considered life? Good question.
That price chart is consistent with what I've seen in projects at big companies I've worked with. SQL Server costs of over $20k/box are normal - and that applies to UAT and test boxes also.

The real danger of using expensive proprietary databases is that because of the cost per box you tend to design your projects to use one big expensive server instead of multiple small, cheap servers. The big server approach eventually hits a scalability ceiling and then you have to pay for X more big expensive servers and re-architect a bit. This may sound absurd but I've seen it happen more than once. The killer feature of the free, open-source databases is as much the "free" part as it is the "open source" part.
Message to Tom from the Interweb: "Do not piss off the Goog, your Internet life depends on it".

Seriously, as much as I don't see eye-to-eye with many of Google's decisions and tactics, they own the gateway to the web (currently) and will destroy you if they feel like it.
That's a fairly old article, but I think it's a pretty good introduction to get your feet in Clojure wet if you don't have a Lisp background (at least, it was useful to me).

I also bought the Programming Clojure book from Pragprog last night. Would anyone be interested in a review? (once I read it)