skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
20/20

To tell on Mattel, look at the kerning. See how tight the T and the E are in Arial compared to in Helvetica. The A also looks slightly too far left.
New business model: code is free but only if you can understand it.
Has anyone tried this business model? A customer can get code written for free provided that he/she makes a serious attempt to understand it and is successful to a reasonable degree in doing so.
As someone mired in academia, I absolutely love that piece by Orwell. It's a good reminder that the writing I'm surrounded by isn't the type of writing I should emulate.

I keep a folder in my bookmarks of writing tips that I think are insightful. Here are a few:

* Elmore Leonard: http://www.kabedford.com/archives/000013.html

* Kurt Vonnegut: http://www.peterstekel.com/PDF-HTML/Kurt%20Vonnegut%20advice...

* E.A. Poe: http://www.eapoe.org/works/ESSAYS/PHILCOMP.HTM
Man who saved the world
"First, mathematics is the language used to describe physics; it does not at all constrain what physical patterns are possible to express."

Mathematics is entirely independent of physics and is not a mere descriptive language. The second statement sounds "religious"; perhaps you can demonstrate a case in point?

"It is not at all clear that the phenotype space is constrained by simple mathematical patterns."

There was no mention of "simple" in the comment to which you have replied. Simply a statement of the fact that no amount of evolutionary development can give rise to the impossible.
I heard the announcement that he left, I've yet to hear an announcement that he returned. I may be wrong, but I definitely haven't heard anything about his return.
Psychonauts is also $10 on Steam. I originally played it on the Xbox, but today, I would definitely plug a 360 controller into my PC and download from Steam instead. High res and native widescreen, baby.
Patents of Lars Bak (tech lead on Chrome's V8 and Sun's HotSpot JVM)
That was my thought exactly. Pikemen beat cavalry who beat footmen who beat pikemen.
Actually that is what the Delete button does by default, keep it for 30 days.
OCaml and Haskell seem to strike a pretty good middle ground to me. Powerful, but generally inferred static types. Haskell is a bit more concise, so I think it can be more appealing to the dynamic language crowd.

The major objection people to have to HM-style type systems seems to boil down to "the compiler is forcing me to fix my bugs before it will run my code", which seems a bit silly. It seems doubly silly when it comes from people who advocate TDD or other variations on tests-first.
The Case for Killing Granny
blasdelf [a] gmail.com
White's rules improve unenjoyable prose.
Also similar to GNIP
YouTube - Sleepwalking Fail
Why does it have to be a 'sorting' stance? Why can't you just search for something like 'size:>1MB' to get all emails that are larger than 1MB? Even if they aren't 'sorted' one can easily scale the search to narrow in on really large attachments.
Nice! I usually keep flash disabled so I completely missed that. Thanks.
I still use gnuplot, and it frustrates me enormously. But I still know it far better than any other scriptable graphing option, and it's free, so I suffer it.
Found this out working at a Web Consultant when working with a google appliance. Specifically this page: http://bidmc.org/Search.aspx
On the not taking notes part: on a lecture in an intro AI class the professor was giving the following advice to the audience: "I always take notes and never look at them. By taking notes the brain process the information at language level which increases remembering"(PHW).

I agree that having read the material helps, but if you haven't ( either because you were lazy/busy or the material was not available beforehand ) taking notes surely does help.
I am guessing that ending it with "We are not your lawyers and have no obligation to provide you with advice tailored to your specific circumstances, the laws of your state may differ from those of California; if you are too dumb to figure this out you have no business founding a company." would probably not pass muster with a court :)
Yep. These are all things that simply take time to learn. It seems the author is just bit a inexperienced in these and mostly wanted to blow off steam. I was also annoyed by these things, but that's what drove me to figure out a better way and/or automate them. I added the same tips (and some more) as a comment to the blog.
When I first saw that $2500 figure, I was taken aback as well. But then I thought maybe she has a website and that could justify $2500! Alas, no! Did a quick google search for "Logi B. Designs" and nothing!

Now I really need to understand why she needed $2500 from her grandmother... that is a lot of sweaters!
Deport everybody. Or just leave it there. Mogadishu/Somalia isn't even that destabilising to East Africa which mostly has more or less functional states. Also, the only reason Somalia doesn't have a stable internationally recognised government at the moment is that the US has a hate on for Islamists of any stripe. If they hadn't put so much effort into the puppet Transitional Government and the invasion of Somalia by their Ethiopian client Somalia (possibly absent Puntland, probably absent Somaliland) would no longer be a failed state, it would just be a really shit one.

Seriously, imagine the Cosa Nostra take over the running of AgeanManhattan, protection rackets and all. Now, what do you call them? The government. They're a subsidiary government of Greece, which holds ultimate, internationally recognised sovereignty over AgMan, but whosoever holds the monopoly over the use of force is thus legitimate and sovereign.

Also, seriously Greece is not a terribly impressive first world country but it is one. I wouldn't be surprised if they had paramilitary police units sufficient to subdue a dense, networked city of 6 million. I figure 20K would do it easily. They would more or less definitionally have total air superiority, which combined with large well trained, armed and co-ordinated police/soldiers would render any putative contest grotesquely one sided.

Also, these people wouldn't be citizens, they'd be guests/subjects. No vote, no political power, no constituency. The Greek police don't play very nice with Greeks. I imagine the Greek Army would be nastier.

(Leaving to go to bed, will reply to any reply tomorrow, hoping there's a discussion here when I get back, ciao)
You're using a site that has an FAQ. :) And when I look at what's in HN's FAQ, I don't think I'd want all that information on the front page.

On the other hand, there are changes that could be useful. For instance, "rules about submissions" could be on the Submit page, and "rules for comments" could appear when actually commenting. A lot of the other things could be written or linked from a user's profile page.
The only issue is that IMAP was never designed to deal with labels, so labels are mapped to folders. This can cause issues though. Deleting something from a 'folder' only removes that label from it. Then you have to go to 'all mail' to delete it.

You can work around this issue by using the Advanced IMAP Settings and hiding the 'all mail' folder in IMAP, then setting the 'delete mail once all visible labels are removed' setting. I had issues with using this and offlineimap to sync... Sometimes when I moved a mail from one 'folder' to another offlineimap would delete it from one folder and then create it in another, but Gmail's IMAP server would see that the mail had no labels on it (in the middle of the operation) and then move it to the trash instead. This issue shouldn't come up with a client like Outlook or Thunderbird though because of the way that they operate (I believe that there is a 'move' command in the IMAP protocol that they use).
I noticed that and wanted to make a joke that they probably removed a subsystem, and it took about five "fucks" worth of effort to do so.

But upon further reflection, I think that's probably the first occurrence of 2.5.x. That was an experimental version, and probably had lots of old subsystems removed, and a few smaller (but soon to grow) ones in place of them. (It was "experimental" in that the 2.5 kernels weren't supposed to be a part of any distribution. It eventually grew into the more mature 2.6.)
Opera is free for personal use. It has been since version 8.5, released in 2005.
One sentence jumped out at me: "But no one wants the horror stories of denied care".

Isn't that what insurers in the US do routinely, deny people care ?

Those two seem to contradict each other, on the one hand, apparently there are people that seem to receive too much care, and on the other hand there are lots of people whose insurance cuts them off from care they need.

What am I missing here ?
I do enjoy the 'conversation' view though. It's nice that it will pull in the messages that I sent into a thread, rather than just relying on people quoting the whole message in replies.
The Elements of Style (which I personally dislike) isn't written for professional writers, it's written for non-professionals.

In today's culture people are barely capable of writing a sentence without losing half the vowels along the way, and god forbid you're American because you already lost half your U's before you were even born. Forget about adequate grammar, or even half-decent spelling.

White is a professional writers, and with everything there's one key thing to being talented and that's knowing when to break the rules. Breaking the rules when you know what you're doing can be amazing and produce awe-inspiring works, however breaking the rules because you're too ignorant to know they even exist certainly doesn't make you amazing and the only awe you'll inspire is stupidity.

The rules are very valuable, but any half-decent writer has already figured out the rules merely by reading.
From what I understood of the invite codes, only the direct invitees will have some invites (8). People who receive invites from friends will not get any. Therefore, the initial release is capped at 800,000 logins.

Just wanted to clarify as some people are in the 'please invite me and i'll come back to spread some joy' mode.
20/20. I've definitely gained a new respect for Helvetica and a hatred towards Arial after seeing a few of those (3M mainly).
Nice! I just added a project like this to my "weekend apps" list a couple of days ago.
Ryan Singer on UI Fundamentals for Programmers
Dell Latitude Z: Inductive charging, Linux/ARM mini-OS, RFID reader, and more
I don't feel that that's necessarily the case. I think that most people delete things like Facebook/Twitter nofitications. And his complaining about the size of the spam he gets is a mute point. The only reason that he cared about that was due to his proximity to his quota.

Gmail automatically deletes spam mails older than 30 days. It's not like people will fill up their Gmail account with massive amounts of spam just sitting in their spam folder.
I haven't tried it because I don't care if my customers understand code -- that's why they're paying me for it. And I'm not a fan of writing code for free; it doesn't pay my bills.

Do you have a specific example of how this is a viable business model at all? Is there some way of making money from this that you didn't include in your question?
I thought so too, but when I compare them side-by-side, it's not as obvious:

http://img87.yfrog.com/i/picture5da.png/
Akzidenz is even easier to spot than Arial. A showdown between Akzidenz and Arial would be hard.
SimplePie Development Shuts Down
Fighting the Battle Against Money Scams
> all the tests that I looked at were massively recursive

As a matter of simple honesty please tell us how many tests you looked at - I think we can all agree that binary-trees is massively recursive.
I've argued this as well--rationing happens right now, it's just distributed among the health insurance companies.
I guess part of my complaint is also this: People often put a bunch of answers to questions out there that no one asked, usually because the site isn't self explanatory, if people are really asking you questions, you have a great opportunity to fix your site, not make a list of fixes to the stuff that is broken on your site.
The point of class is not to teach you how harsh the real world is. The point of class is to teach you the material, whether or not you'll remember it a year later.
The job description of "professor" is certainly a strange beast: teacher/scientist. It makes about as much sense as actor/programmer.

The perverse incentives this creates are massive. Universities hire scientists rather than teachers in order to get their hands on half the scientist's grants [1]. Scientists waste their time masquerading as teachers because they can't get grants if they don't work for a university [2]. This is harmful both to science (I'm not doing research in class) and students. Of course, they don't put much effort into teaching because they are judged on their ability to get grants. Actual teachers are squeezed out, since there is no room for them.

My proposed solution? Completely decouple research and teaching. The NSF can subsidize science, the DOE can subsidize universities, and teaching institutions will no longer have an incentive to hire scientists as teachers.

[1] If a scientist gets a grant, the university will take about half as "overhead".

[2] Not strictly true, due to a few national labs, but close enough.
> They've gotten in all kinds of trouble in the EU for not being able to provide guarantees about how long they retain data.

The thing that I don't get is why they can't just 'wipe' the data. Maybe I'm misunderstanding GFS/BigTable here, but you don't necessarily need to 'remove' the information from that database. Just 'zero out' the data in there (or overwrite it with random data).
In fairness to Arial, the numbers in lots of faces are not as well-thought-out as the letters. "3M" is a bit of a worst-case scenario.
An important lesson I learned today...
I know significantly less about almost every topic than almost every user on this site, so it's not very often that I fell that I can distribute something of value, but here it goes.

Yesterday I spent a couple hours trying to figure out how to get CakePHP to get a filtered list with many complicated options to work correctly. After nearly pulling my hair out and getting increasingly upset, I just stopped. Came back to it 6 minutes ago, and figured it out in less than 5. :)

Came right here to post this bit of advice. Frustration always block clear thinking, working efficiently is almost always better than working more. If things aren't going your way, sometimes "plowing through" is not the best way to go. Hope this helps someone...
I'm not saying it's boring; I'm saying it's needlessly verbose.
20/20 is pretty good for someone who's been accused of not caring what font was used so long as it's fixed-width and readable.

I actually do have my list of fondest fonts; my current font lust is http://www.clearviewhwy.com/

At $795.00 I really cannot justify the investment to myself, but it would be nice to use the optimized for legibility fonts for display text.
Yea, but sometimes people will empty their Trash though. If it was archived with a 'remove after 30 days' tag on it, it wouldn't really be possible to accidentally purge all such emails.
Find Your HIPAA Violations Before Others Do
Why the Future of Robotics Matters to Intel
But not all questions in a FAQ have to be 'about the site'. For instance, we have an enormous section on how to get various pieces of hardware to work with our software.

Basically the FAQ is our first line of 'defense' in the support process, we hope that the FAQ will help the user, if that isn't the case a 'real live person' (tm) will take care of the request.

Other things about billing and account issues and so on have found their spot there. It saves us tons of support questions and that really helps to keep us productive. If a question was never answered before it goes in to the FAQ in the appropriate section.

So, really we should probably call it 'QTALSAO' but that's a bit non-standard :)
I always fail to be amazed how stupid people can be. Disliking someone is one thing, threatening a persons life is already a well established crime that no one would think right to do in public but then people get a case of Internet Stupidity Syndrome and say something that's tantamount to treason.

I swear they should pass a course people are required to take before going online. Question #1 on the test should probably read: Is threatening someone's life, family or property a crime online? If anyone answers no they should be banned from the interwebs.
The Grill: MIT Professor Hal Abelson on the Hot Seat
How about "the buck stops here"?
An example of how well Django stays true to the principle of loose coupling.
IIRC, MS Exchange does this. At least w/ attachments. I don't know about attachments from outside of the 'Exchange Ecosystem,' but if one Exchange user sends an attachment to 3 others, only one copy is stored in the Exchange DB.
Results 811 - 817 of about 687,000,000 for test [definition]. (2.19 seconds)
after seeing this, I doubt whether 687,000,000 is correct or not..
I don't really see how this is a business model. Also, how exactly do you determine if someone can understand the code?

If you're determining who has to pay based on if they don't understand your code, doesn't that incentivize you to write hard-to-understand code?
Mereology - the theory of parthood relations
No one gives a buck!
Until they publish accounts we don't know if it's thriving. They could have 2million free users all using 1.99gb and no paying customers at all.
Taking notes does not help me. I get distracted by the writing and can't pay attention. Then again, I have ADHD, but you can't claim taking notes will help everyone.
My physics teacher used gnuplot, and he taught us how to use it then required it for plotting homework solutions it really doesn't look so bad and in many situations I think it looks so much better than excel generated graphs.
I'd still rather have the solutions so I can go at them my own pace.
Twitter vs. Second Life: A n00b takes another look
I got that on the fact that helvetica's capital A's are tighter, which I think came through better in Mattel than in Toyota. Since then I've also learned that Helvetica's capital O's are almost perfectly round.
is it not a very bold commercial from Doubletwist..will they be able to reach the expectations..anyone tried the product ?
I am the author of the Xiomacs page. The project is indeed abandoned, however I never really throw away code, and some of the ideas have turned up in another project. I will keep you posted.
I think of 'gorillas' as having revenues in the Billions or customers in the millions...

I guess everyone has a different concept of the boogeyman?
I certainly learned plenty

Maybe more than you realize.

Obviously, the term "entrepreneur" is used quite loosely in this example. But that does not discount the incredibly valuable experience this girl is getting. She has positive mental attitude, initiative, passion, a little vision, and gets off her butt to get work done. IMHO, that puts her in the top 1% of her peers in the things that will be important in her future.

It's easy for some of us to take these things for granted because we had to find our own way to success. But believe me, I know so many adults that could make their lives so much better if they were only this "childish". That was the lesson I was trying to cite.
I have 2 very simple apps up on the catalog and the "hoops" he's referring to took me a total of 25 minutes to "jump" through.
the reason for me is that (afaik) ruby-debug doesn't work with ruby 1.9.

im soo much more productive when i can set a break point and see why my flow isn't working.
> The major objection people to have to HM-style type systems seems to boil down to "the compiler is forcing me to fix my bugs before it will run my code", which seems a bit silly.

I disagree - immediately requiring types to check can add a bit too much friction for exploratory programming, and types aren't a perfect design tool for everything. It isn't "wah, I have to fix bugs before my program works" so much as, "translating my entire design into types upfront is slowing down my brainstorming too much". I'm not convinced waiting ten minutes before the code has to get past HM would cause a big increase in bugs slipping through, but it really does help make the language feel more flexible.

I think a better time for such static analysis (not just type-checking) would be when the code becomes a module and the programmer is already thinking about what to export, etc. Requiring a chunk of code in a scratch buffer or REPL to fully type-check is probably a bit too strict, except checking calls to existing libraries. (Optional type-checking is a different matter, of course.)
The thing I noticed first was that no one sends rejection letters anymore - you just go into the resume black hole (unless you actually manage to get an interview).
Congratulations to Harper. Met him briefly at bar camp here in Chicago last year.

I'll never forget when some unfortunate fellow let slip that he did SEO for a living and Harper just ripped into him for "gaming the web". It was a sight to behold.
Nice module. One comment: the way you use default database is quite unconvenient. Why not define pzinit(db) or - even better - define class pz and put all those methods altogether with init(db)?
Intel gives incentives to OEMs to lock out AMD.
Google pays Mozilla to lock out other search engines on Firefox start page and search bar (and it does not allow customization at install time).
Apple does not allow 3rd party apps colliding with Apple produced ones on App Store.
Any comments on these other monopolies' actions? Every company does the same.
Hopefully it's only a matter of time before they Internet-Explorer the whole antivirus market.
All the Arial bashing is rather boring. Which designer is using Arial over Helvetica when designing logos? Of course Helvetica is the superior choice if those are the only two typefaces that can be used.

I dare say most people use Arial on a computer screen, and the only way you're going to tell Arial and Helvetica apart is to use a huge font size. That would be a real test.

BTW, I scored 19/20.
For the review schedule, while it is a good learning strategy, how many students coninue it after the course? It seems naturally as we get jobs we review by necessity, not out of habit. Do you think the students reAlly understood the importance of reviewing after taking your class or do they just forget it?
Teaching colleges do exist that have no research expectations of their faculty, but high teaching expectations. Although, the fact that the name "teaching colleges" exists at all says something.

But everything else you said: pretty much, yeah. Once, I was in a meet-and-greet between grad students an interviewing faculty candidate when it dawned on me that as a second year grad student, I had as much teaching experience as he did.
A poll saying "Is Person X better off dead?" is not a 'threat' on their life. A poll stating "Should I kill Person X?" is closer to a threat, but not really. There are plenty of people who will talk at length about the people they would 'like to kill' or who 'need to die,' but throwing all such people in jail would only benefit the corporations that run the prison system in the US.
Pepsi to Cease All Advertising Immediately
O rly?

Monthly text messages sent:

2000 - 14.4 million

2005 - 9.8 billion

2008 - 110.4 billion

Data: http://www.ctia.org/consumer_info/service/index.cfm/AID/1032...

2010 proj. - 192 billion

Data: http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=12176

I don't think text messages are going to be "killed" by anything in the very near future.