skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Um, the fact that there is a HOWTO tell the difference tells me that there isn't really much of a difference in real-world visual impact. Sure, Helvetica kerns a lot better than Arial, but the vast majority of people don't see the difference.
Machine Vision on the Horizon: Vitamin D Launches Object Recognition for Video
Reverse Execution in GDB 7 is imminent
Still, do not despair. The problem here is not that the car is considered disposable by that criteria. The problem is the criteria itself, in particular: 1) the definition of the asset's value, 2) the definition of maintenance costs, and 3) the notion that the asset should be considered "disposed" when those ill-defined maintenance costs exceed that ill-defined value.

The problem with #1 is that an asset's value to its owner is only partially represented by the amount of money for which it can be liquidated.

The problem with #2, is that they include operational costs (fuel, etc.) that one would bear regardless of which car they owned.

The problem with #3 is your concept of 'disposable', which may work for you but is not universal. Someone else might only consider it 'disposable' when problems begin to appear in a notoriously expensive-to-repair subsystem, like the transmission. And, even then, the car tends to not actually be disposed because its parts can be used to keep other similar models alive.

I guess I feel like your lament hinges upon one very narrow possible meaning of the word 'disposable'. Perhaps "fully depreciated" is more close to the idea you wanted to capture?
It shows a video of mock-up screens on a rendered 3D cad model.
This is just how to tell them apart easily. The sum of the visual difference between text set in Arial and Helvetica is bigger than that.
Posted an hour ago. No discussion yet ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=839313
Deploying JRuby apps on Google App Engine
Reading the article the biggest thing that hit me is that the two versions of the union paragraph are not equivalent at all.

The first one says that the labor movement was not founded by heros. It insinuates that anyone who claims otherwise must despise current labor unions by contrast. And it leaves open the possibility that you're setting the reader up for a sudden about face where you come up with some non-obvious reasoning for why labor unions were founded by heros after all.

The second eulogizes the heros who founded labor unions. Then makes it clear that there is no reason to think that current union leaders would be capable of less if asked. And concludes that the shrinking of unions must be due to external circumstances.

With that in mind I can draw up version 3 that says what version 2 does but not at length.

"Why are labor unions shrinking today? Some say that we have lesser leaders today. Admittedly today's leaders do not regularly face hired thugs, etc like their predecessors did. But there is no reason to believe that they would be any less capable of heroism at need. The cause must be external."

I made the same major points as #3, without causing offense, with fewer words than your short version. The secret is to avoid offense by figuring out what could be offensive and not saying it, rather than figuring out what could be offensive and elaborating on how you're not trying to offend.
Anyone download this yet? I'm dying to know what language it's written.
Inferring Friendship from Location Data
but this sort of thing seems to keep happening to me

Very respectfully, you strike me as the kind of person who is easily discouraged.

Let me tell you a story about discouragement (or the absence of). When I was in high school my parents told me the didn't have anything saved for me and I'd have to pay for college. I spent my entire junior and senior years applying for scholarships. There was one really big $20k scholarship in particular though that I thought I was a shoe-in for.

Well, the notification date passed and I hadn't heard anything. So I called and called, trying to find out what was going on. The obvious answer was someone else had won all of the 5 scholarships they awarded. But I wouldn't stop until I knew for sure. Finally, I found out that they had all been given out, but that 3 students had declined (they were school-specific). These 3 were going to go back into the budget for next year. I pleaded my case with one of the administrators, and within 24 hours, one of those awards was mine. $20k just like that. And there were 2 more just sitting there if anyone else would have done as I had.

When a magazine ignores your article, it's up to you to make it impossible to ignore.

Anyway, back to your question... ask your partners to hand over the company. If that doesn't work, buy them out. How much? Well, how long would it take you to start over, and how much is your time worth? (i.e. (time to recreate) * (value of your time) * (their ownership of the company) = buyout at this point, because you don't have any realistic valuation criteria beyond that)

It might be a good idea to start something new. And don't let things happen to you, make them happen.
Quickly Scan Your Gmail Spam for Missed Messages
Angry-Coders Comic: Steve Ballmer Hates Me
Is there an in-joke here? I can see the difference between this and the original, but who is Parkinson, and why is this a remix?

There's something I'm not understanding. Am I the only one?
Why open-source DNS is 'Internet's dirty little secret'
Hi Rob,
That's great to hear - one of the opportunities I've noticed is in finding testers who are highly targeted - a flaw of usertesting.com for sure. Also their technology is not as robust as yours (just simple screen capture+audio). The demo-targeting Business B shouldn't be as difficult as the software solution you already developed.... Who knows you might even use Facebook Connect to get highly targeted users... So I think you're in a good position competitively and I wish you the best of luck in the future.

-Daniel
Alpha Blondy, who is a reggae artist from the historically war-ravaged West African country, Côte d'Ivoire, has a song called Kalashnikov Love -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgSkpRhP5nI -- which I think speaks to the sort-of mythical level of importance this gun has achieved in the developing world. It's a great song.
Bottom line: what worked for them (37signals) may (or may not) work for you.

Should you drink their Cool-Aid? Only if you're thirsty.
.next() makes sense when you think that generators are also iterables and must support the corresponding interface.

having () and .next() would violate Python philosophy: only one way to do it.
... but they may feel the difference without noticing.
Hoy: YSE 5 YEarS / festejamos 5 años con fiesta en L’Horiginal, 20:30h., gratis
I think a problem Rebol might have is it's name sounds very outdated, like a strange cousin of COBOL.
I've long commented that one of the ironies of C++ is that it demonstrates that the idiom is better written ++C.
It might not be obvious given a few characters, but the overall impact is huge.

People who don't know the difference, and can't articulate it, will /still/ know something is wrong, even though they can't put their finger on it.
This kind of stupid fruitless horseplay does not in any way contribute to the emergence of "some good apple contenders". What is needed is companies who are willing to put the effort to figure out what would make their customers satisfied and then turn it into a product. Look at the Zune HD and its Zune jukebox software and Zune marketplace - Microsoft took Apple's successful model, improved slightly on the implementation, mainly esthetically not functionally, but still, and made a great "apple contenders".
My experience has actually been the opposite: with the notable exception of the launch 360s, Microsoft hardware has been well designed, fairly priced and long lived.

I'm still using the Microsoft natural keyboard and optical mouse I purchased in ... 2001? The sidewinder joysticks were always excellent. My original XBox is going strong; the Duke being perhaps the best designed and built gaming controller to date. The 360 controllers are similarly excellent (though I miss the Duke's size). The wireless notebook mouse I bought 2 years ago is the best wireless mouse I've used, period.

I can't speak to the Zune, having never owned one.

I assumed that with that track record, the accusation that "the 360's reliability problems were known but allowed to slide in blind pursuit of launching first" made the most sense. It was deeply disappointing, but I do give the hardware group itself the benefit of the doubt.
Direct link to ZDNet: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/itmanagement/0,1000000308,39760362,0...

I can't help wondering if this Shalowitz guy actually believes what he's saying.

He fails my clown test - he answers a question with the one-worder "Correct".
It looks like it's using Numenta's technology:

http://www.numenta.com/about-numenta/numenta-technology.php (link grabbed from the article)
Fred Wilson: Startup Visas
That's going to be pretty amazing. Reflector as it is, is a life saver.
It's especially common in Germany because of some odd laws about debt collecting. I don't remember the details but somehow it's a offense for YOU not to respond to their demand for money.
Most people pay up because having a judgement against you screws up your credit rating.
Inspiring but kind of creepy... =)
When Cortez burned his ships when he came to America, it was to give his men a choice between following him and certain death - failure wasn't an option.

Fear can be a powerful motivator. Of course, if things go wrong, you end up murdered by massive armies of Indians. Or something.
Why A Link from TechCrunch Will Not Make You Rich
Simple solution: Palm should make the ID field a text box in a preferences screen somewhere. It would default to the correct "Palm" ID, but hey, if the user wants to change it...
Except, for some reason, the capital R in Helvetica, which is a very curvy letter.
And I wonder: does Google staff its ad division with simpleminded trusting folk who just fell off the turnip truck?

I have a friend who's reported blatant violations of the AdWords policies against (1) sending people to a page full of other ads; and (2) ultimate landing pages on very different domains than displayed.

He's sent screenshots. I can trivially reproduce what he's reported from my home consumer DSL. But then after his report is forwarded around a bit at Google, he just gets the response back, "we don't see that."

Gee, ya think maybe the scammers are identifying Google IPs and sending them what they want to see?

Google even asked him for an outside proxy they could use for testing!
Deduping Storage Depulication
The coming of 'The Singularity'...or not?
Well, this is not a simple substitution in the original. There are entire paragraphs removed. The ending remains pretty much the same.

I am not getting the point.
It does seem a bit messy to read, at least compared to eventlet/gevent which does some nice monkey-patching of the socket API.
This should check the Content-Type header and only modify text/html - otherwise it might mangle outgoing JavaScript / XML / etc files.
Old but still a great read.
GAE is an awesome platform. I really don't see myself ever setting up apache/nginx/mysql ever again...
May as well throw in .hg

Oh. Now we're blacklisting.

If you are going to use this solution, you are better off blacklisting all dotfiles except .htaccess, assuming you allow it.
Lottery Math 101
See here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=839237

and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality
Interesting, this is the first Python async/comet library I've seen to take advantage of generator coroutines:

def echo(remote_addr):
their_message = yield until_eol()
yield "you said: %s\r\n" % their_message.strip()
hmmm... While reading through I visualized drawing the top-down perspective. Guess I'm guilty.
Umberto Eco: The Lost Art Of Handwriting
Startup trades cloud storage for your hard disk space
Having a pen-dominated UI is also a huge usability mistake. The pen is a great optional peripheral. But UIs that require pens have been rejected time and again.
Very slick. I wonder if this upcoming release adds proper support for C++ templates. As is, I don't know of anything other than Visual Studio which makes debugging STL or Boost-heavy C++ code a reasonable task.
Probably very little--any version control system should meet that requirement.
I find the original experiment (just from reading this article) to be a bit sketchy. It seems to presume that the unconscious mind is a separate entity from the conscious mind, and that free will must exist only in the conscious mind. What of the idea of the surface mind and the deep mind concepts?
This is one of the reasons I have become a big fan of Python. It lets you easily use objects and OO concepts when they are the best approach, but it does not force you to use them when the particular problem is more functional (or even more procedural for many short, simple scripts.).
Yet this completely wipes out the savings from not having a car, in most places where not having a car is otherwise feasible, I'd imagine.

But 25 minutes (10 each way and an optimistic 5 to get something, wait in line, check out...) is too long for this use case anyway, in my opinion; it's just barely possible with a car, and I live about 12 minutes walk or 3-4 minutes drive from a store right now.
Do dysfunctional families breed entrepreneurs?
My impression from this statement is that to resolve dependencies objects can/should be designed to reference the primary environment where they are to be run instead of the having these details passed per object creation and/or functions calls. I could be totally wrong but that was my first thought while reading it.
The development of GPUs never ceases to amaze me - they keep pulling some crazy speed increases out of the bag. It's the usage/market side that pisses me off - continually horrible integrated graphics in all but the high end systems and Apple continuing to rip us off to get a decent graphics card in the Mac Pro.. eugh (£280 for a Mac HD 4870 in the UK.. $460ish).
How dare you call MA a bikeshed!
What should I use in a title that is informative and gets people interested enough to read an article? A munin graph isn't quite as punchy.
But the R only curves so that its leg meets the base at a logical angle. Arial's straight leg looks straighter, but if you isolate it as a piece itself then that straight part cuts off at a diagonal angle to maintain the flat bottom.
Fun exercise: write a new headline for this article which isn't a vast, trollish overinterpretation of the actual results.
I disagree about prozac as a cause.

My hypothesis is that the elimination of leaded gas resulted in a new generation growing up without the brain damage caused by chronic lead poisoning. Elevated lead levels have been well documented as causing reduced IQ and raised anti-social behaviors.

>Lead pollution is dispersed into the air and into the vicinity of roads. Lead is a toxic metal that accumulates and has subtle and insidious neurotoxic effects especially at low exposure levels, such as low IQ and antisocial behavior. It has particularly deleterious effects on children. These concerns eventually led to the ban on TEL in automobile gasoline in many countries. For the entire U.S. population, during and after the TEL phaseout, the mean blood lead level dropped from 13 μg/dL in 1976 to only 3 μg/dL in 1991.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetra-ethyl_lead
An open letter to the enemies of Net neutrality
Even if you do use .htaccess files, you still shouldn't be showing them to anyone who requests them from your web server!
There's actually a bunch more parallels I spotted that didn't make the article:

- User comments. There's thousands of customer letter extracts scattered throughout the book.

- Transparency. They openly admit some of the really cheap lines are only there to match their competitors' prices, but they don't offer a warranty and recommend against buying them!

There's also a wonderful air of carnival hucksterism around the whole enterprise, your purchase won't just solve a problem it will change your life. That reminds me of the Utopianism I love about the tech world.
Palm Smacked Down In USB Dispute With Apple
I am speculating, but I believe this was because so many people focused on the Michael Arrington reference which was just a starting point, not the main focus of the essay.

By switching that to something completely noncontroversial (a bicycle shed which may not even exist physically) he was showing how you can come to the same conclusion without the lightning rod in there, and also at the same time emphasizing what he was really writing about.
Sounds like lisp "special variables".
Oh, wow, interesting; I hadn't thought about it that way.

(The R does still have a little serif though, which always bothers me.)
I just try to plan better, improvise, have someone cooking for me or just eat out (not these days tough).

Ultimately, that's the choice, yes: is it worth having a device to avoid having to plan your life around not having it.

The problem exists even if you have a car but live out of town.

That's true. The difference in rent/mortgage is important there, though. In reality, the car I bought last weekend will not cost me anything like 10-12K over the next year (2K for the car, 1K for insurance, 1-2K for gas) unless it has terrible repair costs, but there's an upper limit of 2-3K on repairs before I just buy a different car. Now, if you're paying $500/mo plus insurance and drive it 50 miles to work every day, it might be different.
This inspired me to generate some automatic font comparisons using Mathematica: http://cronus.ws/~mta/fonts/

Any feedback is appreciated.
WebGL in Firefox nightly builds, demoed with 3D Spore model
On of my friends wrote his Ph.D. thesis on anaphora resolution. In it, he used homoerotic literature as the corpus. (It's much harder to figure out which "he" the text means when every character is male.)
Audio for this talk at SXSW. http://odeo.com/episodes/23012329
Video of talk.
http://startonomics.com/blog/welcome-to-startonomics-and-sta...
"I realize that in today's programming world, I am a heretic."

Yeah, right. Nobody ever questioned this "everything should be OO" paradigm. Except that Java was actually the last language influenced by it. Someone should tell this guy about Python, Clojure, Ocaml, Haskell or even Javascript.
SGI Rolls Out "Personal Supercomputers"
You know, as I was cutting out the stuff about Arrington, I was thinking to myself, what is the second biggest bicycle shed? What controversial but peripheral issue are people going to seize on now? Labor unions, probably.

Ugh. After spending so much of yesterday arguing about whether people's dislike of Arrington was due purely to their high standards for journalistic integrity, or whether (this being the whole point of a disarming manner) they were also influenced by his manner, I just can't face the prospect of spending any of today arguing about labor unions.

I did not say that the labor movement wasn't founded by heroes, but that is the last I have to say about it.
LiveJournal Flash worm used CSRF to expose private entries
I wish I had the talent to rewrite the article using homoerotic examples. That would be awesome! Sigh...
I disagree with the title.

Free will is a question of the degree of choice we have; the test seemed to attempt to measure whether that choice was conscious or not by aligning it with the verb-producing part of personality, or the ego.

I think this is an oversimplification.
What I learned from the comments (and comment voting) on the first version: surprisingly, the HN community is more passionate in their disdain for Mike Arrington than they are in their worship of pg.

Hopefully this article will allow people to focus on the real points of the first, because he explored some interesting territory there.
The Unspoken Truth About Managing Geeks
The Art of Spinning a Conversation
Very nice, it would be interesting if you could do a Microsoft Sans Serif - Helvetica comparison as well as those two fonts are almost identical, with only very very subtle differences.
Does anyone know of reputable research and blind tests that back up the common designer sentiment against Arial?

The reaction of many designers seems to smell of elitism and subjectivism more than anything to me, but I'll be happily proven wrong.

Are designers commonly aware of why Arial exists. I presume many designers must understand the very strong business & licensing reasons for Microsoft to have developed this typeface.

Do many designers also understand the distinctly different approach to pixel alignment in display faces, which some people prefer while others prefer Apple's approach (I subjectively prefer Microsoft's approach).

It's easy to pile onto the I hate Microsoft and everything they touch bandwagon, but how much unbiased and objective research has been applied to the question of qualitative value to the target audience? Is an old typeface only good if it's designed by the Swiss?

Something is stinky here. There are so many subjective factors at play while the language surrounding debate rarely recognizes those factors.

[Update: As noted by DrJokepu below, Microsoft didn't develop the font originally. I think the underlying licensing and business considerations remain a similar discussion.]
By having a large enough install base, they just might be the first to actually execute the idea successfully enough to really make it useful. I guess the major problem that's always been there with this kinda stuff in the past is that its just so inconvenient. But having it integrated directly into the browser (by default?) kind of axes that qualm -- plus the whole "age of twitter" thing, with our growing habit of blasting updates back and forth about your every moment helps a lot. Allowing your friends to easily join in the conversation can really help you feel like you aren't just shouting into the abyss.

The only thing that I still question whenever I see this stuff (including one of my own projects, so maybe I'm biased), is whether or not it meshes with the way we really communicate, and if it fits with the way we'd best want to leave our marks when annotating the web.

I mean, its obvious that we'd want to be able to see what's out there in the universe of all available conversations for what we're looking at, but does that mean its best to keep them all in a single stream, which is what it looks like sidewiki wants? And moreover, does that really just boil down into a triviality in implementation details? Or is it something more? Do we need to start re-examining the nature of how we comment? Maybe the single page collection idea works well for blogs and stuff like that because we're more or less being co-ordinated by the original author (and the conversation that grows out of the seed they planted), but when we start annotating, we aren't necessarily going to be discussing things in nearly the same frame as the meme generated by a page at large.

Maybe I don't want to talk about missiles on a link dedicated missiles. Maybe there was something in the article that sparked off something tangental (I can't spell, or even tell if that's a real word, sorry) about transportation, or energy, or something that would just be lost if I just let it drip into the chaotic conversation that 4chan drove towards jihad on its sidewiki page. The "implementation detail" way of resolving the issue is just to silo up conversations, but still allow people to find the common root that links them all together, so you don't always start at zero. And that's fine, a page can very easily have a 1-N relationship with its impending streams of thought, just like bit.ly lets links have 1-N shortlinks that pad our individual egos, but still tracks the traffic generated to the destination in aggregate.

But what about N-1? N-N? Things start getting really interesting. To me, its interesting on the scale of pagerank.
"A CURE FOR CRIME? PSYCHO-PHARMACEUTICALS AND CRIME TRENDS"

This is a very poor title for an academic paper.
Facebook enables apps to peek at mail
Announcing Ubuntu 10.04 LTS: The Lucid Lynx