skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, I never thought I would see proportional fonts specifically designed for coding. I've coded almost exclusively in proportional fonts for over ten years. The font I use the most is Georgia. It makes code easier to read and more pleasing to the eye, just like any other text.

Besides personal preference, I think there are two main reasons people avoid proportional fonts: column alignment and two-space indents.

Two-space indents are an unfortunate trend in coding styles, because they practically mandate the use of a monospaced font to see the indentation. I use tabs for indentation, which let each developer adjust the visual indentation to suit their own eyes. Four-space indents are OK too.

I would love to see programmer's editors provide a way to control the amount of visual indentation that each leading space represents.

Column alignment of course is not possible with proportional fonts, but that's an easy problem to solve: don't do it. Instead of this:

void DoSomethingWithStuff(SomeReallyFancyTypeName thing,
string name
int count,
bool condition);

Write this:

void DoSomethingWithStuff(
SomeReallyFancyTypeName thing,
string name
int count,
bool condition
);

While you lose the advantage of seeing all the parameter names lined up, it becomes much easier to visually associate each name with its type. My eyes tend to wander when I have to scan across a wide horizontal gap to match things up.

This style also leads to much shorter line lengths as can be seen here, and it's easier to maintain: You don't have to realign things when you change the length of the function name or one of the type names, or when you add a parameter with a longer name than the ones you have already.

A case where column alignment is more useful is ASCII art in comments. I've experimented with using a monospaced font for comments and proportional for code, which solves that problem nicely. But I don't use ASCII art much myself, so I went back to proportional for everything.

I'm looking forward to trying out these fonts!
Thanks for the thoughts - as you say, they've furnished us with no reasons.

If people are flagging it because it's been posted before, I'd've thought it would be polite for them to point at the previous discussion. Thank you for doing so.
I had a chat with the maid of a place I stayed in for a month. She was pinay and very happy to be in Singapore, housed, fed and paid around $500 a month with a few hours off on Sundays. The FOB expats of course fumed at the idea, but the alternative for her was earning a fraction of that, stuck in a small village, her life at risk from health issues or aggression.

I haven't talked to construction workers, but I've briefly worked in parts of India with about the same level of earnings (<$70/month). Again, 16h days in the sweltering heat of Singaporean construction sites, and a first world infrastructure, are a HUGE improvement, and so is the much better salary.

It just so happens that the available pool of talent for this legal, structured work overwhelmingly lives in certain countries. But those who do it, seem pretty keen on the work and happy with its results - even if Berkeley residents are outraged that organic cucumbers and probiotic yogurt are not available for the raita. Happy to be proven wrong, by independent third party sources.
I hear the OpenCores website is nearly unmaintained. Someone went and made a github clone of all the code:

https://github.com/freecores
Built on memes? You mean because he used memes as images within the tutorial / blog post? I'm not quite understanding what you mean. I'd encourage you to read it, regardless if you don't like the memes.

I found this article to be really awesome, as I've been thirsty for good Erlang resources.
What's with the dot.org link?
I've been nearsighted for a long time and wear glasses. Recently I developed presbyopia, and now cellphone screens look blurry unless I remove my glasses. Most of the time my vision with glasses is fine, until I want to look at my phone. A screen that looked sharp to my ancient eyes with my glasses would be wonderful. First world solutions!
In the 1990's and early 00's, Linux was significantly more stable (and cheaper) than Windows. The infamous "blue screen of death" occurred frequently. Linux gained a lot in server-land compared to Windows for this reason.

Windows has gotten more reliable in the last decade. It is rare that it out and out crashes anymore, but it still seems to start doing odd things that go away after rebooting. I would still pick Linux for reliability of the underlying OS any day.

On the other hand, Linux was (still is) difficult for a typical end-user on the desktop. It was easier to install and operate software due to the Windows GUI etc. Linux has played catch up with GUI desktops etc.

As far as development tools (I have developed both Windows and Unix software), Microsoft Visual Studio has some very nice features such as IntelliSense compared to the Unix/Linux vi/vim and emacs tools. Notably, emacs has the CEDET project which is working hard to add IntelliSense like capabilities to emacs.

Bit by Git
I would have liked to have seen the example page have a section how it behaves with ASCII art that you sometimes see in comments.
The Concert Programmer: Making music with code, live
I completely agree with your DMV comment. I'd love it for someone to take a good look at DMVs across the country, and see what works and what doesn't. Can things be digitized that haven't? Can processes be split based on time (efficient, quick tasks vs. longer discussions)?

I fear going to the DMV, but why should this be?
>>There's gotta be an official name for these. That skinny page with varying font sizes of text images or embedded youtube videos encouraging you to buy/ act now / sign-up for their free newsletter til a big call-to-action at the bottom after scrolling for 10 minutes?

There is; long copy sales letters
Your other option is: you press a button in a wagon, ask to call the cops to the wagon with problematic passenger, and on the next station cop patrol is already there on the platform waiting eagerly.
And the issue pretty much dies right there. Come on, it's totally doable, isn't it?

P. S. I understand that usage of the word "wagon" makes native english speakers' heads explode.
If you are starting completely from scratch? Go cheap. Basys/Nexys or something like that. HDMI ports and ethernet ports and 1GB RAM will not be useful to you if you have never written HDL before.

Give up on free tools...
Reminds me of the little trichotomy I grabbed from Huizinga's Homo Ludens: good-faith, cheater, xor spoil-sport. I don't think that cheating exists in diplomacy. It's all part of the game. Counterintelligence what it is, I expect that the intelligence was received by the Israelis with some skepticism.
I've abstained from Amazon Linux for the same reasons: to evade vendor lockin and facilitate cleaner non-EC2 dev environments.

Though I think Docker improves the situation by decoupling applications from their host environment.
Surprisingly, you see that sort of issue (perhaps in a more subtle way) a lot, even in evolved libraries and languages.

By "I consider NullPointerException for any reason to be a bug" I mean that, even if the program is going to crash hard, it should give a better error message. Crashing hard is sometimes the right thing, but high error-failure distance is never good.

This may have changed, but for a while, OCaml raised the dreaded (and useless) Not_found error on List.head [], and it wasn't until 3.10 that you got a stacktrace on a runtime error. (Of course, most people who use OCaml or Haskell in production rename those functions to, e.g., unsafeHead and make the optionized versions the default.)

Debugging and error-handling culture has come a long way, even in the past 10 years. Clojure, for example, is a great language and I am overall a huge fan, but it was painful to debug when it first came out, and it used to be fairly common for runtime errors to manifest as NullPointerException.
Ask HN: Do bootstrapped businesses lose much money on free trials?
I assume these companies probably run on ec2:
https://www.hostedgraphite.com/
https://circleci.com

And probably many more that I can't think of at the moment...

I noticed many companies that do something similar offer a free trial for their services. How much money do you think they lose out this way? I assume they probably run an ec2 instance per customer, at least for the hosted graphite.

The cheapest ec2 instance is around $15/mo. If the trial is 30 days I’d assume they’re likely losing a lot of $15's here and there.

Am I wrong?
Scanning over the page and the 'explanation' page, I found a headache developing as I tried to read everything there.

My experience so far is that I find this far harder to read. For reference's sake, I don't do parameter alignment in my own code (see Stratoscope's comment), but still find it easy to scan code in most-any monospace, probably because my eyes just know where to jump to all the time...

For all the words in favour of proportional fonts, I would venture that when the words on a page are in fact ultimately forming macroscopic symbols (identifiers), often with PascalCase or camelCase or underscore_words, uniformity no matter the characters used is perhaps a more useful feature than making the words easily comparable to those read in prose?
"operating system for wearable devices like smartwatches"

/facepalm

Please, just focus on Glass and preferably other wearable displays, so we don't need to waste a ton of money and time on something that will never be anything other than a fad.
Location: London UK

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocation: Yes. Dual citizen of UK/US, so easy relocation to many areas.

Technologies: Python, JS, PHP, Dart, Good eye

Resume: izolate.net/resume.pdf

Email: yoshtalwar (gmail)

Github: http://github.com/izolate

Full stacker specializing in Frontend & Design. Comfortable creating RESTful backends in Pyramid/Flask (Python). Like to design and build UIs. Preferred vanilla JS/jQ for a while, but opening up to MVC frameworks. Have familiarity with Backbone, Knockout, Angular and can be brought up to speed very quickly.

Workflow: Vim to develop. Use gulp.js for linting/css prepros, ansible for deployment, etc.
NFL players to use tablet computers during games
On the info page:

"""
<div><span class="highlight">M</span></div>

<div><span class="highlight">M</span></div>

<div><spam class="highlight">M</spam></div>

<div><span class="highlight">M</span></div>

proportional fonts can make it easier to spot typos
"""

The example given demonstrates that a certain subset of typos can be caught using proportional fonts, but not all.

If a word has too many or too few characters in it, I think you are more likely to spot it utilising a monospaced font.

EDIT: the quote has been made more legible.
You are making the assumption that there is no point beyond which we can no longer cope with the problem no matter how much money we throw at it. Can you justify that assumption?
FWIW here is pg personally stating the reason for text submissions being faded out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468231

I think it is censorship, but i'll concede it's weak censorship and that plenty of users seem to be ok with it, which is valid. You're right, that one person's censorship is another person's curation - though I would personally go a step further and say that curation is a subset of censorship, without the negative connotations. Whether it is or not depends on whether you agree with the net effect.

>A text-based submission puts the words of the author at the very top in a prominent and unfair position for attention.

I guess we would disagree here, since I don't believe it is unfair. The prominence of the author's post is the entire point of a text post - the author is asking a question or presenting a product or something, and the rest of the thread is a reaction to that (or reactions to reactions, etc.) It's implicit to the medium that the tree has a root.

Reducing legibility and reducing prominence are two different things, at least to me. I have no problem at all with upvotes or downvotes affecting where subthreads wind up in the sorting order - that's precisely what they should do. But why also make content more difficult to read as well?

If anything, that makes those elements more prominent, as it send a visual cue that "this is something you can easily ignore as it's not worth your time," which may not be the case.

Keeping comments and text posts legible forces people to actually read the content, consider it on its own merit and act accordingly (downvote, upvote, ignore, respond, whatever). It encourages conversation rather than the creating of filters to stifle it.
I fixed physics to get your attention, now please buy my fancy blow tube
Roger Bamford (Oracle) Joins MongoDB, Inc. as Distinguished Architect
On the subject of (re)creating Amazon Linux outside of EC2, under the terms of the GNU Public License are they not required to distribute the source code to any paying customer who asks?
I think you're bringing up some great points! I'm really excited for the opportunities improving the language will bring to give leverage to community issues. That said, I think a lot of community issues are also just about education.

String choice is a particular point for me. I think it's great that we have three string types as they each have their own tradeoffs. That said, I don't think the particular choice of Stringy type made is often driven by the tradeoffs as much as by convenience or partial information.

I really think it often does boil down to the Prelude design. Solving the momentum issues there is a huge problem.
As usual, the event listeners shown are just jQuery making the binding. It would be really great if it actually stepped back through the stack to see what initially called jQuery's bind. I can't think of any general solution to the problem that covers all libraries, but jQuery is so ubiquitous it should be worthwhile.
That's pretty cool stuff, I like being able to see at a glance which elements have events on them, wow. The Firefox developer tools are nice.

Outside developer tools Firefox is missing HTML5 directoryReader support and Chrome style screen sharing neither which are in standards, but really really helpful for developers.
Is Scala the new Ruby? A deeper view
New .KIWI Top-Level Domain is a fruit too | gTLD.club
Fonts do it because outside of code there is just always a space character inserted before every parenthesis. Adding additional space inside the parenthesis character would just increase that space, something that is not desirable.
Presumably it was a nickname.
I did a fair amount of experimentation with phone gap/Cordova a couple of years ago. What really killed me wasn't so much perf as places where you want or need native UI. For example, if you want a nice mapping experience, JS based maps suck on mobile compared to the native map widget.

Based on this I think the Xamarin model makes a lot more sense in today's mobile landscape. Be smart about building shared logic and view controllers and wire it up to fully native UX.
Any reason why "classic" is not on this list: https://news.ycombinator.com/lists ?
Newegg offers USB hubs with individual on/off switches for $6. If someone wanted to 3D print an artistic enclosure for that, to the point where it felt like a nice addition to the desk, that might have a market amongst the security conscious.
Well, dam! ;-) Learn something new every day.
There was a little. Mostly stevan and Yuval going "oh god not that".
Yes, it is Gravity without strings, extra dimensions or any weird things. Now please visit http://IGG.me/at/SandPiper and support a better way to measure your lungs. THanks!
Don't be afraid startup/VC bros. Just raise a little more money and start subsidizing your users' data use as well.
Nice, but the white iPhone home button looks a little weird. Otherwise super cool.
OK, but my point remains: a regular person who doesn't hang out on HN is not going to have a good UX signing up for Diaspora.
Nice!
A more traditional version of this in the shell that I love to use day to day is bashplotlib: https://github.com/glamp/bashplotlib
How I'm writing a programming book
What:
I'm working on http://helpmonks.com right now. It helps teams to manage the never ending flow of emails.

Why:
Some have similar tools, but they all concentrate on the HelpDesk aspect of it. Instead of re-inventing the wheel we simply integrate with popular existing helpdesk apps. Furthermore, we encourage sales and marketing to use our app.

Thanks.
I think the top will get too cluttered. Here is an overview: https://news.ycombinator.com/lists.

Although, not all lists are up there, like: https://news.ycombinator.com/classic
> Mr. Zuckerberg retorted that he preferred to think about it as an “on-ramp to the Internet”

And the gov't of course welcomes the initiative as it lifts the rest of the world onto the surveillance platform.
On my Macbook I've tried many many coding fonts, yet Ubuntu Mono is actually the best. All others either seem to render weird to me or I don't like their look in the first place.
Edward Tufte (original creator of sparklines) hosts a long-running discussion of theory and practice:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...
Learning from Kaggle masters
How To Name A Company Startup Product: The Igor Naming Guide
David Foster Wallace and the Dark Side of News Media
> We view working at Thread as a founder bootcamp where you'll learn about all parts of starting and growing a startup.

This is amazing. I cannot stress how much respect I have for companies that care so much about the personal growth of their employees. Definitely applying.
What's frustrating is how un-data-driven these efforts are. Surely we have some empirical research by now on the most cost-effective ways to improve quality of life through aid projects. And my guess is the top ten are all sanitation-related.

But they do this. What a [presumably tax-subsidized] waste.
Don't worry, the thugs who rob you are so smart and tech-savvy that they already know how to unlock the iPhones and drain your card in minutes.

...Or, they have no fucking clue and will just take everything you have on you because they're mugging you :-)
"Imagine your water meter giving you free quick showers but charging you for a bath."

Am I the only one that doesn't think this is ridiculous? We already pay for the water we use to take a bath or a shower. So basically this amounts to free showers. Isn't that something to be happy about?
Although it is concerning that Facebook could essential become 'the internet' for people in developing countries you can't sit in your nice, comfortable office and tell people that should be their main concern. When you don't have internet access and when you can't access essential services with as much efficiency as we can, privacy and monopolies aren't the main concern. Easy access to health information, banks, money, and business opportunities are the main concern. Long term thinking is hard to grasp when you are forced to focus on the short term. Long term thinking is a luxury a lot of people in developing countries can't afford.
Soak a dish towel, old t-shirt, or the like in water. Then wring it out over the bathtub, HARD. Wring it out hard, like you're wringing out blood from your enemies. Grunt while you are doing it.
In my experience FPGAs are broadly used as "glue" chips to interface between microcontrollers, DSPs, codecs, and other hardware elements (encoders, LEDs, etc). Technically these are called CPLDs but depending on how much work they do, they may use a larger family with more logic cells and memory.

Basically if you need to interface with any digital hardware that isn't natively supported by your microcontroller/CPU/DSP, you'll probably want an FPGA to do it unless you have enough resources to write a bit-banged interface in the micro.
It's not a good marketing tactic to disguise a startup launch with a linkbaity title and passive-aggressive copy.
Elon Musk: AI could be more dangerous than nukes
Nice, however there is a much simpler solution that works for 99% of cases. [1]

Add a .gitattributes file to the root of your project with the following line:

*.pbxproj binary merge=union

Very occasionally you will get duplicate items but Xcode then warns you can take approbate action.

[1] I started using this approach a couple years ago after finding this:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12909222/tell-git-to-trea...
I prefer Inconsolata, but it renders poorly on Windows in some applications. Consolas is a good fallback though
The ends don't justify the means for me. The study hopes to gain a better understanding of the early causes of anxiety and depression. We're not saving the human race here, we're not necessarily even saving lives.

Even if a new treatment for depression were developed due to this research (which it probably won't), and you were clinically depressed, would you want to receive it knowing it was came about after the torture and eventual deaths of 20 baby monkeys? I wouldn't feel comfortable with that.
Well, even the graphs contain memes.
Proposed Seattle Bored Tunnel Underground Simulation (2010)
Because other people are taking care of sanitation related problems. Why can't we tackle more than one issue? Throwing money at one problem, solving it, and moving on to another one isn't necessarily the most efficient way to solve those problems.
> I'd be far more interested in seeing analysis on this broken down by volume of dollars / revenue.

We don't really need to filter companies that are solely or primarily dependent on advertising. We can compare the entire amount of money spent on advertising (which is a superset of what we're really looking for) versus everybody else (which is just total revenue minus advertising revenue) to see it's not even close.

One source[1] for global ad spending puts it at $467 billion (for 2010), I couldn't find more recent hard data but another[2] estimates it at $581 billion for this year. Let's assume the estimate was right and round up to $600 billion.

WalMart had revenue of $476.3 billion last year[3]. You can combine WalMart and any other company in the top 10 of Fortune's Global 500 and their combined revenue would exceed total advertising revenue[4]. The combined revenue of all 500 is $31.1 trillion[5], even if that included every penny of ad revenue it would still be a ratio of 50:1

[1] http://www.wpp.com/wpp/press/2011/dec/05/groupm-forecasts-gl...

[2] http://www.statista.com/statistics/237797/total-global-adver...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_Global_500

[5] http://fortune.com/global500/wal-mart-stores-1/
> 4 on 1 is not a good place to be, indeed. It's preferable to being on the ground with multiple attackers, but that's another story. Search Youtube for "krav maga multiple attackers". It's not easy, but with some training it's not difficult either.

Dude, please don't say that. Maybe someone who has trained at least for ten years could handle a 4 vs 1 fight. Maybe. And never with 100% probability of winning.

If you are in such a situation, just run the fuck away, or give them what they want. And stop believing and spreading the fact that handling a 4 vs 1 fight is doable "with some training".
Advertising dollars have to be less than what a company makes on the product advertised (at least over the long term, but probably in the short term as well). As such, it would be wholly unsustainable for advertising to be the dominant mechanism of revenue generation globally, since that would imply that companies are spending more on advertising than they could possibly receive from selling their goods and services.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding...perhaps you were referring only to businesses selling access to a web service?
Another difference in usage between British English and American English: In the US, you go to a movie theater to see a film. Or you go to the theater to see a play.

In the UK, you go to a cinema to see a film. Going to the theatre is understood to mean going to see a play/musical/performing arts.