skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The truth, of course, is that the law is the only thing keeping corporations alive.
To the extent that's true, paying the worker doesn't change that at all.
Nokia N97 mini Cherry Black Unlocked Quadband
Nokia N97 mini is a Quadband GSM and UMTS equipped with HSDPA touchscreen display 3.2 megapixel resolution with 640×360 pixels and 16 million colors, 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, 8 GB of internal memory, Symbian OS v 9.4 S60 fifth edition, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi connectivity, integrated GPS receiver, Nokia Maps, media player and FM radio, video calling, proximity sensor, accelerometer and qwerty keyboard that pops up.
I have a very difficult time associating the word "efficient" with the California DMV.
Fonts can be embedded into PDFs, if I remember correctly. Most PDF creators handle this for you automatically by default.
What would change things is if online learning offered a more certain verification of skill and ability than is offered by the conventional university.

That would change things for employers immediately.

But that kind-of assurance would be hard to give within the context of online course with form-based tests, however challenging the tests are. Someone who can absolutely anything online might still not have the social skills necessary for many jobs. We hope that someone who's done four years at a good school has absorbed some social skills. If there was online way to actually guarantee that a person has abilities that an employer wants, then online could win.

The other side of this is how quickly business in general becomes nothing but online interaction. The sooner that arrives, the sooner ability to interact well online will become the main qualification and thus the sooner an online degree will have prevalence.
Not really - just an old lady defrauded by Nigerian scammers.
I use the font stack builder here[1] to make css font stacks 10-12 fonts long, to cover the fonts that look best under each of windows, linux, and osx. They're not identical, sure, but I find that for headers and body copy, as long as they're close, that's fine with me.

[1] http://www.codestyle.org/servlets/FontStack
Exactly. I was running a much older version of WP and it took 6 hours to upgrade, including making sure all the plugins worked correctly.

I immediately got the "white screen of death" afterwards and had to do a binary search to figure out which plugin(s) were the culprit (and then try to track down newer versions or alternatives).

Some API changes are not backwards-compatible, so your themes have to be upgraded also (for example, the "show comments" api will by default say "comments off" on every page that doesn't allow them, which it didn't before). I'm sure there's other such changes I haven't yet noticed.

I'm glad I upgraded, but it was a major hassle and nearly a full day's work in my case.
I'm aware of the metaphor. What I find ridiculous is that you're part of the attempt to argue that sex between consenting adults behind closed doors has no larger socio-economic effect, and when someone points out a larger socio-economic effect you try to pretend it's not relevant.
The article is trite and uninformed.
Unlike web typography, PDFs usually use font embedding to ensure that they display "identically" on all platforms. To do this, some subset of the intended font is included in the PDF file.

Due to this habit, you probably wouldn't think of a PDF as using Calibri or Georgia. It could use one, the other, or both. Font choice becomes a static thing.
Unfortunately, the options are very constrained if you require both features and security. The only platform I know of with a strong security history and a decent feature-set is Apache Roller: http://roller.apache.org/
Yes. Examples?

How about Automattic, Inc., the folks behind Wordpress? But maybe one can define what they do as "support and maintenance".

Or IBM, they sell hardware, (among other things) but with open-source operating systems on it. They contribute to the development of this software.

We, Akvo Foundation, also release open-source code of our products but may not qualify in your normal definition of "business". http://akvo.org/

Akvo is a non-profit foundation, but one which has as one of its goals to be able to self sustainable on the charges for running some of our services. We are what some people call a "social enterprise".

So some of the main differences between us and a "standard" company is:

- some of our investors don't expect to get paid back in money, but rather in increased efficiency / improvements / new ways of doing business, within the sector we are working in, water and sanitation development aid (we also have investors who expect some ROI in the form of cash).

- we can't turn a profit, but neither should we run at a loss.
Ah, I see, I had no clue about this. Thanks.
> Sexual competition is not nearly as simple as job competition, for several reasons.

I think you have an oversimplified view of the employment market.

> Many people have multiple sex partners, but a single job is staffed by a single person.

Employers often have many, many employees -- sometimes more employees at one time than anyone has sex partners in a decade.

> Sex isn't required to eat or keep a roof over your head.

. . . and working at IBM probably won't give you herpes.

> Sex isn't taxed.

Thank goodness.

> Sex doesn't go on your resume.

Not your professional employment resume, anyway -- unless you have sex professionally (as in the case of porn stars or Las Vegas prostitutes).

> Sex is between two people (or so), not a person and a corporate entity.

. . . and one doesn't normally fill out an application to get hired by one's spouse. So what?

> People don't involve lawyers or accountants before having sex.

. . . except sometimes. Have you heard of "white weddings" and "prenuptial agreements"?

> Trading sex for money is, in almost all parts of the US, illegal.

The porn industry is huge in the US. There's definitely some sex going on, there.

> Individual's choices leading to STDs or pregnancy don't compare, on a magnitude level, with governmental regulation changes that affect employment because the majority of Americans who have health insurance are only covered thru their employers

On the other hand, governmental regulation changes meant to address STDs do at least match that "magnitude".
It's on Blastwave: http://www.blastwave.org/pkg/pkgcontents.ftd?software=zsh...

# pkgutil --install zsh
yup, I'm on crack. Ignore me.
> Antonio, have you considered making software to allow people to upload their phone bills?

That's what I had in mind when I wrote my article.

There are two viable approaches. The simplest one is to ask questions about the current or planned usage, and provide the best plans accordingly.

The second, more complex, one would be to allow a person to upload their phone bill, parse it, analyze it and determine the most advantageous plan(s) according to their usage patterns.

This is the most complex option because ideally it should allow for some flexibility in terms of handling bills from different carriers, entirely stripping the personal data (e.g., not even storing it somewhere on the server), and so on. However, it's also the sleekest and easiest one from the user's perspective.

It would be neat to offer both versions, this way a user could decide which method they prefer. And from an implementation standpoint, it would make sense to release the first method first, and then add uploading capabilities at a later stage.

Another challenge for the project will be ensuring that the data for the plans are up to date, but a solid effort in this regard and a good disclaimer should be enough to make a service like this useful, honest and (hopefully) lawsuit proof.
Why? Because security is hard to do unless you (1) build it in right from the start and (2) are good at it, and neither of those things appears to be true in the case of WordPress.

You appear to be suggesting -- I can't tell how seriously -- that WordPress is deliberately made insecure so that when Automattic (ugh, I hate that name) want people to upgrade they always have a security issue they can use to scare people into doing so. Sorry, but that's absolutely nuts.

(In case it isn't clear: I am not, in the least, defending WP's security record. I am pointing out that the things you're saying here are crazy.)
There is a text editor called e-texteditor (http://e-texteditor.com) which has this feature, with a nice visualization of the resulting tree.
Yes, but such a policy should be in place before you start using open source code, by the time you wonder about giving back to the community these should be passed stations. After all, using open source code also comes with strings attached, not in the least what you will be able to do with the code that you produce. If you find out - as a manager - that one of your employees has tainted a bunch of code by importing open source software in to the company repository and modifying it extensively then you have a problem just the same.

Yes -- the policy we have is roughly:

MIT/BSD/Apache: OK for any purpose -- Note the license requirements in the project's top-level LICENSE file.

LGPL - Only as a library, and only for non-statically-linked projects.

GPL/MPL/Copyleft - Only for system utilities, not to be integrated into any existing code base under any circumstances. We'll still contribute GPL licensed code back to projects.

On the flip side, the side-effect of this policy is that we rarely contribute anything back to GPL projects, but quite often contribute changes back BSD/MIT/etc licensed projects.
All those are power user features though. Most users don't even know they exist, and why would they, since they aren't very discoverable.
Any chance a poll can be added to this one? I have to agree that the Futura "looked" much better.

However, their bottom-line reason for making the change is very interesting and compelling: Cross-branding and language independence.

This appears to be the classic sacrifice of aesthetics for functionality.
usually by using too many or ones with poor readability

Very true, and if I had to distill the advice in the article down, most developers would go far by starting with these guidelines:

1) only use serifs for headings.

2) only use sans-serifs for body copy.

3) keep the number of different fonts on the page under 3 at most, including the logo and any other graphic flourishes.
I disagree with the idea that the possibility that one set of people might be more "advantaged" than another is good justification for ensuring nobody gets a leg up.

. . . and claiming otherwise, specifically when those sets of people are identified by social or economic class, is pretty much "code smell" for "class warfare".
Is Online Education More Effective Than Traditional Learning?
Can someone explain how building this is more than a weekend project for a talented amateur?
Yes really, also for a number of reasons...but I have to eat my words here.

I haven't lived in the UK for a while, so when I searched to find out what was up with the OU, I went to http://www.open2.net/ which is specifically for OU-on-TV resources. I should have one to http://www.open.ac.uk/ which is the real OU site, and where there are multiple study paths and resources, of which the TV broadcast lectures are only one option among many.

Sorry :-/

What I should have said

Non-UK HN readers should check out the Open University - this is the best landing page: http://www3.open.ac.uk/study
You can get an accredited degree or pursue post-graduate studies, and while an OU degree is not as desirable as one from a top-end institution, it is still respected - not least because of the student dedication required. The OU does have absolutely outstanding course materials.

Student fees vary, though they're still a bit pricey - roughly $15,000 for an undergraduate degree if you live outside the UK, about half that if in. You need to be in Europe in order to take exams at least once a year.
My Solaris 10 box has it installed by default:

Last login: Sun Sep 6 12:01:35 2009 from 192.168.1.113
Sun Microsystems Inc. SunOS 5.10 Generic January 2005
bash-3.00$ zsh
unknown%

That said, I prefer Fish when I can get it: http://fishshell.org/index.php
> On the flip side, the side-effect of this policy is that we rarely contribute anything back to GPL projects, but quite often contribute changes back BSD/MIT/etc licensed projects.

There's an interesting datapoint. I wonder if that's a common thing or not. It definitely might be.

Your policy makes perfect sense by the way. I don't know how large a group that policy applies to but I can imagine that if the group is large enough that you will have to have periodical refreshers on it and that people are required to sign off (or check a box) on having followed that policy before their code is accepted into 'trunk', just to reinforce it.

Same with new hires.
Just downloaded this and gave it for a whirl. Running Ubuntu (Jaunty), it definitely felt buggy. (Which is ok, considering it's stage in development)

For starters, the window maximized height-wise past my screen and I couldn't resize it so I had trouble seeing everything (all I did was copy the default config)

Additionally, loading up YouTube.com in it made it grind to a crawl. Video loaded, but the front page took a good 10 second pause before it was fully loaded.

I like the idea though and I plan to tinker with it more in hopes that it is more ... uzbl :)
I'm not sure I see how your example is similar to Mark Cuban's example. For instance, conducting surveys (one of the tasks Cuban was talking about having interns accomplish) is part of a wide range of professional fields -- including experimental psychology (according to my girlfriend with the psychology degree), political analysis (according to major news networks), and usability testing.

> Either way, the intern would have lost that week or two (even if they recognize it was a bunk internship)

. . . and what else would they have done during that time?

Sometimes, one must try two or three things to find one that's worthwhile. Should I then be able to bring suit against a software developer whose software wasted a week of my time before I decided it wasn't doing me any good, before I moved on to something better?
So a few years back I wrote my M.Sc. thesis as a part of which I implemented an engine for Polish interactive fiction (a.k.a. text adventure) games (which is a very different problem from English interactive fiction because of inflection and the fact that in Polish the order of words in a sentence is not as rigid as in English.) The example game I made using this engine was a remake of the classic "Hobbit." All the code was in Common Lisp and it was a console game at that point but I wanted to add some graphics to make it look more like the original.

I looked into several options, starting from cl-sdl, but (at least at the time) none of them worked on Linux and Windows with the Common Lisp implementation I used (which was clisp.) I don't remember the details but I spent a good week pounding my head against the wall. clisp has a very good ffi mechanism but you can't use ffi to call into SDL because SDL (on some platforms at least) needs to use its own main() function, so once you're running your Lisp code it's too late.

In the end I decided to implement the graphics part in C and just talk to the Common Lisp backend over a pipe. If you speak Polish you can check out the results on http://www.jfedor.org/pfedor/hobbit.html

Note that this method would not have been possible for anything much more complex, like say an arcade game, and also that in other languages it would typically be trivial (say using pygame in Python.)
seL4!

...wait, that's cheating, isn't it?
As well as on SunFreeware: http://www.sunfreeware.com/programlistsparc10.html#zsh
Funny how people who have no involvement whatsoever in the music business seem to know all about it and how to fix it. Take a look at Led Zeppelin. In 1969 they recorded LZI on their own dollar, signed a great record deal and always owned all their music. What is it that has prevented everyone since then from following that model ? "Information wants to be free" Information has wants ? LOL
there is absolutely no way those are all thinking of applying to YC one day

I said might apply. If each of those 23000 members thought that there was even a 1% chance they would apply to YC someday, I'm sure they would think twice about posting that Admiral Akbar ascii and a funny quote in a comment on HN when they probably do it all the time on Digg and Reddit.
> Not every company is ethically responsible

What annoys me most about many of the opinions expressed in this discussion is that people think it's okay to punish the honest employers, and the people those honest employers would like to employ, for the actions of the dishonest employers.
The chief performance issue is that the default cookies handler has to spin off a new process for every cookies handled and that can make things really slow. That might be the problem you are having now. There are better scripts available, but I can't tell you much about configuring them.
Argh, no, no, no, no. Bad.

An AppsFire user spends $80 on apps.

An iPhone user does NOT spend $80 on apps. How much do they spend? I'd love to know, but even with zero background in stats I know it doesn't make sense to assume AppsFire users are representative.

This is just as bad as that "iPhone app economy is worth $2.3 billion" article. Apple just celebrated 1.5 billion downloads a couple months back - including FREE apps - I'm expected to believe the AVERAGE app cost per download is greater than $0.99, counting free apps?

Now it's $3.3 billion?
Not necessarily. It can also make society worse off overall in part because certain types of work just don't get done.
Guidelines one and two have no empirical support. It seems to be the case that choice of font is merely a aesthetic decision.

See:

http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-102999-110544... (PDF)

http://www.laurenscharff.com/research/AHNCUR.html

http://sigchi.org/chi95/Electronic/documnts/intpost/tst_bdy....

http://www.surl.org/usabilitynews/22/font.asp

https://eldorado.tu-dortmund.de/dspace/bitstream/2003/24419/... (PDF, German)

http://www.designtagebuch.de/die-gefuehlte-lesbarkeit/ (German)
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/tq/ has all the Technology Quarterly stories on one page. TQ (and indeed the Economist's weekly science coverage at http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/ ) is so consistently good that I urge HNers to just post one link rather than multiple individual stories.

No harm, no foul, but the multiple threads are a bit redundant.
I am running it now (just got it through arch linux package management), and it has made a good first impression. I liked the transparency of all settings within the config file, customizable keybindings, ect. The defaults seem pretty usable; probably the most apparent problem that I can see is its speed -- for instance, loading hulu took quite some time.
> Have you never worked somewhere because you hoped it would pay off huge in the end, even though you had other and higher paying options?

That's called a "gamble". The potential for loss is inherent in that type of decision. Does the potential failure mean the potential win should be prohibited?
Did they get what they were promised?

If so . . . where's the problem? Is it that people just assumed they'd get more than they were promised?
Ex-president of Google China to launch startup incubator
It all depends on the student and the subject, but in many cases online classes can be more effective if they tailor the lesson to the individual student. In large classrooms, there is a tendency to teach to the middle of the class, leaving high-achieving students bored, and low-achieving students lost. Correctly structured, online classes can teach to each student's level.
> If it even has the potential to turn a profit, then he should foot the cost of the risk, not the interns.

Do you think he's not paying a bunch of money to make a project like this happen -- even if he doesn't have to pay all of his workers initially? If the difference between "intern" and "minimum wage" is the difference between the project happening and the project not happening, I still don't see how it's so terrible to let him try when the would-be interns think it's worth their time.
I wrote one of these calculators in 2000 for a bank, my first paid job out of college. I have no idea what happened with it, but it was in VB (don't ask), and took about 2 days to write.

If I'm feeling brave later, I may have a look to see if I still have the code.
Writing a DSL with Python
Ikea didn't anger fans of Futura. It angered fans of typography.

Reasonable people could debate whether Futura looked dated and idiosyncratic. But almost nobody seems to have a defense for Verdana, which is a typeface that makes a number of concesssions for legibility at small sizes on a computer screen.

Worth reading though is Brand New blog's "Verdanagate" post:

http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/verdanag...

Brand New certainly seems to think this is overblown. Gruber at Daring Fireball suggests that this is an elaborate ruse to get Ikea lots of attention and publicity from designers.
Agreed, this debate may sound silly to some, but for those of us that are passionate about typography, making this sort of change is akin to the movie studio going in and recutting Pulp Fiction to "make it better" or having the staff at the Louvre adding a little something to the Mona List to "make it better".
There is a third way, buy out the patent on useful drugs that the gov't wants to encourage.
Yeah Hoboken...
awesome
What about flash?
YouTube - Jovan Perisic - 2009 - Pustite Me Da Je Prebolim
Just noticed that there've already been interesting discussions about Uzbl on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=626281

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=578618

What I wonder the most about is why they don't try to bring a command line interface to firefox, kind of like how you can call safari and its content from applescript.

I think firefox can already be used with keyboard shortcuts only and they have a hard time getting their browser to be half as fast.

What configurability is concerned, I think that mozillas choice of saving all the user configs etc in a sqlite database is easy enough to access by script.

Still interesting and probably good fun to fool around with!
Do those people treat the Ikea Catalog as some sort of bible? Ikea is a huge company, they surely have good reason to do this.
Not only are AppsFire users likely unrepresentative, but the set of AppsFire users that completed the whole survey (i.e. "Tell us how much disposable income you have!") are even less representative. Apparently the editors are TC have the weekend off.
Warning: Doesn't work on Windows yet.
I'm a ZSH user myself, preferring a simple [user@host#dir], but my favorite amusing BASH prompt is:

PS1='C:${PWD//\//\\\}>'
How the Web OS has begun to reshape IT and business
> the default cookies handler has to spin off a new process for every cookies handled

What? Why?
Works fine if you have the right plugins.
I have to say I don't entirely see why this is news. Swine Flu is no more dangerous than any other Influenza A infection (Influenza A accounts for about 70% of flu cases in any given year). It's distinguishing trait is it spreads faster than other flu viruses. But as the article itself says...

"The overwhelming majority of our patients have had mild symptoms and are usually better in three to five days," the university said.
None of the WSU cases have been fatal.

I think a lot of people are confusing Swine Flu with Bird Flu in their mind and freaking out. Swine Flu may lead to more cases of the flu this season but it's still just the Flu. Assuming you don't have another underlying condition you should be fine with rest and chicken soup.
Givology: send a kid to school.
Drop the "Swine" and the headline is as scary as it ought to be.