skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What if it doesn't matter who the CEO was... Maybe it was the sheer size of Microsoft that limited its ability - hard to turn on a dime when the numbers are that big. IBM was everything in the computer business, and then they just ceased to be interesting. At some point, Google will probably go the same route.
If the police killed more innocent people than guilty ones, as the military often does and then just blew it off as collateral damage, yea, I'd be wanting to disband them as well. But they don't, cops rarely kill an innocent.
If you only want to move to the next line if you are at the beginning or the end of the line, I guess it works. For any other navigation, your cursor jumps to a random position. I just tried this, and for any line longer than about 3 characters, "next-line" becomes "random position on the next line". Not useful.

Other problems include lining up similar constructs:

my $foo = Foo->new(
bar => 'baz',
quux => 42,
);

With a non-monospaced font, there may not be an integer number of spaces that would allow you to align things.

Using a proportional font for programming seems like using a railgun to put a square peg through a round hole. Sure, you can do it, but why not just get a round peg?
It was mentioned (at least when I read the post).

I find Pragmata so narrow it hurts to read. :(
We ignore the kkk.

No, I decry the KKK. And the FBI infiltrated the KKK, and private lawsuits have largely bankrupted the KKK. The KKK gets plenty of push-back, and deserves every bit of the push-back it gets.
When I hit "Return", it duplicates the current line's leading whitespace on the next line. That will still work perfectly with a proportional font. When I hit "cursor-down", most text editors that allow proportional fonts know how to put the cursor where it visually belongs.
"Fancy" is not the word to describe HN's AJAX voting. "Minimally functional" is closer.
Microsoft got comfortable, bottom line. They made XP (which rocks so hard, btw) and then felt like they won and stopped innovating. The article points out that Ballmer had a blind spot because he wasn't a techie, which I think is very accurate. Once MS was winning, they decided they had XBOX to keep them afloat but didn't really continue innovating. Now they are struggling to catch up with the innovations other made during the MS comfortable-on-top period. Really, imo, they should re-release XP.
Of course war occurs, but that won't always be true, and we should strive to not need it.

As for the next generation, please, we're all bound by the decisions of previous generations all the way back to the founders; that's just how it is. They can kill any entitlement we enact, so no, I don't feel for them. We should be responsible, and only enact entitlements we can afford, but if cut back on the wars, we can afford a hell of a lot.
From article:

There are other mechanisms that might render the Earth uninhabitable by our kind of life. Over geological time, the partial pressure of oxygen in the atmosphere has risen. With more solar energy inputs, it may be that oxygen levels continue to soar. Above about 28%, even waterlogged biomass will burn handily: and there are indications that atmospheric oxygen (currently down around 16%) has been well over 20% in the past. If oceanic photoautotrophs pump out too much of the stuff, the continents may well be burned back to bedrock by the resulting lightning-triggered fires.

I get that more oxygen in the atmosphere = a potentially combustible atmosphere.

What I'm a little confused about is why we never hear about spontaneous greenhouse fires? Wouldn't the presence of all those leafy greens push large amounts of oxygen into the (relatively) closed local atmosphere? or is the innate ventilation to the outside world from a not purposely constructed vacuum environment enough to offset the potential dangers of this? I assume it must be or we'd at least occasionally hear of greenhouses resulting in explosions?
Regardless of IDE support, code is structure and patterns.

Monospaced fonts make it easier for me to spot that structure and observe those patterns, whether to simplify my scanning of the code, help me spot bugs (e.g., omitted punctuation throws off the shape of a form), or navigate within a file.

I do essentially all of my writing — email, web forms, text editing, console — with monospaced fonts.
Well, part of it comes down to the fact that the text is read differently, depending on whether it's block letters or code. If you're writing prose, you process most text on a word-by-word basis, if not sentence-by-sentence. For instance, periods have very little spacing around them because there actually doesn't need to be that much more distance between letters at sentence boundaries—periods are not crucial characters, and thus do not have to be marked off from other letters. They are themselves boundary markers.

The situation is different with code. Every character that you type, unless it's within a comment, is very important. It's even quite possible that accidentally putting two spaces after a period might have some semantic effect, and it's certainly possible that having two periods instead of one will have some semantic effect. The programmer absolutely must be able to easily read code on a character-by-character basis, and thus he wants a typeface that treats each letter absolutely equally. It's only slightly distracting if your W is wider than your L, disrupting the natural grid of your text. But in a language where punctuation is just as important as the words themselves, you might just as well be troubled if your periods or commas have a tendency to disappear into the flow of letters.

Not to mention that there is nearly no block text font that has as much of an interest in differentiating I/l/1 and 0/O as programming/monospace fonts do.
Sorry, I tend not to notice when people respond to my comments, it'd be great if this site had an easier way of letting you know when people do (maybe I'm just not aware of it?)

Anyway, the main issues I ran into were all related to database queries. This application was not a standard CRUD-style app at all, it has a lot of pretty complex queries for building reports. I found the way that CakePHP deals with joins and associations really clunky and hard to use compared to Rails' ActiveRecord. I'd often have to write the raw queries and try to shoehorn them into CakePHP's ORM objects.

I just found myself frequently frustrated with the way it was working. It's been too long since I really worked on it for me to be able to give much more detail than that (also, it probably has improved a lot since then too).

That said, using it as a web framework still made coding the app a heck of a lot easier than it would have been without it. Also, I found that it really improved my PHP skills, I picked up a ton of good stuff from using it.
check this out, which might help: http://www.getappsdone.com
It might be interesting to keep every vote for each comment and use something like the Netflix prize algorithm to calculate whether you'd like the comment. Hiding comments would then be based on personal preferences, rather than the community at large. If nobody at all likes the comment, (i.e., it's spam or something), then it can get removed automatically. Of course, this takes a lot of work to implement, and it might require HN to have a longer privacy policy...
Ruby in a Multicore World
They discussed his website on a recent BBC documentary (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nn7vs) at 00:32:37 (transcribed below). The whole documentary is certainly worth watching.

Davis:
"Berkshire Hathaway is a massive company which feels like a family firm.
All the usual corporate vanities are absent and not a cent is wasted. Take a
look at the Berkshire Hathaway website here. To call it low key would be to put it
kindly, it looks though it's from about 1994, no-frills. All the financial data
is here but they haven't even got around to even uploading a photo. And
that's all very much Warren Buffets style - why waste money on a designer.
Buffet insists his website does the job."

Buffet:
"I think it's what we are, I mean, it's factual."

Davis:
"You could put a little picture of something on there perhaps, or."

Buffet:
"I want people to get facts about Berkshire and, you know, I don't
really think it makes any difference what I look like."

---

Davis:
"Buffets idiosyncratic style is not just charming, it's a financial asset,
it saves time and money..."
Ruby Fun Challenge for Newbies
I would add these two tips:

Don't use gray text on a white background.

Don't be afraid of larger font sizes.

Cough.
Scintilla-based editors, GTKsourceview-based editors (I just tried with Scite and Gedit) and Emacs all correctly position the cursor when using the arrow keys and proportional fonts.

As for lining up similar constructs, I mostly code in Python, and the PEP 8 style guidelines explicitly forbid that.
Thanks... I will check that out! How is the community there? Do they post often? Do you check the site out regularly?
Probably not, you'd need to sign a contract. You could pay full price(600+) for one...
Yes but...

He's like a very good baseball fielder who moves to where the ball will be. It's not his doing that the govt. is doing all this bailout crap. He just positioned himself under the rain of money.

He got rich BEFORE it, remember that.
The BBC had a documentary on Warren Buffet last week that is worth watching http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00nn7vs/The_Worlds_Gre... (website is discussed at 00:32:37)

Berkshire Hathaway run a $150BN business with a staff of just twenty, and Buffet often points out having a fancy website is not a priority as long as it is functional.

In many ways their website is analogous to the likes of Google in providing just enough to make it useful and not much more.
Uhm, yeah, that's certainly not universal in Europe. I had 4 bikes (including having the locks cut) stolen in 2 years in Berlin before I just gave up.

A lot of people here get cheap old bikes just because they're the least likely to get stolen (though I had two of those stolen too).
The other hidden cycle-eating demon: code cache misses
I charge $40/hr, and I'm the cheapest guy I know. Anywhere from $40-$150 hourly for competent people.

Nobody looks at apps that are below about $5k in size. So that's your starting point for something simple (tip calculator, etc.). Web services, datacenters, anything algorithmic is way, way more (~50k?)

Never hire people on eLance.

Market: grows 10-20% every six months or so. You won't get rich, especially if you expect Apple to do all your marketing. You can make a living if you're competent. Blockbusters are pure luck, but if you get one you can make 50k a month. 5-10k a year is much more common for niche apps with no marketing (what everyone seems to write).

Free+in-app purchasing may change the market quite a bit ("oh, you want wheels with that car?"), but nobody really knows yet.

App review is a bitch, so get a developer who's been around the block to advise you on getting through review.
Let a thousand flowers bloom! (But yeah, clojure.)
More generally, downvotes exist to provide negative feedback into the system. It's a useful and well understood engineering principle that negative feedback is a useful tool for molding the output of a system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_feedback
This post is a followup to this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803826
I tried it in Emacs. Your definition of correct does not agree with mine.

If you draw a line parallel to the left-hand edge of your monitor down from the character that the cursor is currently over, it should touch the character that "next-line" will move to. That is not what happens when you use a proportional font in Emacs. (If you are on the 10th character of the line, you will move to the 10th character of the next line.)

What happens makes mathematical sense, but Emacs is a visual editor. Programmed text editing is nice, but sometimes you notice a visual property of the source code, and would like to exploit that instead of some lexical property. Visual editing lets you do this, but proportional fonts destroy this ability.

Anyway, sorry to hear about the Python style guidelines. If I did Python, I would ignore that one. (Haskell is whitespace-sensitive and allows you to align similar constructs. So this is just a Python thing.)
These tips are written with legal writing in mind (and desirably so; as a cohabitant of a recent legal graduate I can report that the legal world has some awfully retrograde typographical principles), but I would not hesitate to recommend all of them to anybody writing block text.

And I must say, an example like the paragraph from Oscar Wilde is as beautifully composed a work of human art as I am likely to see on a daily basis. Surely worth emulating in any field.
i hope he/she ported over bookmarks and preferences too, rather than starting a fresh new Firefox install
QNX Ignores Desktop Standards, Security
Attempting to run it under wine ran into an unhandled exception :( Does anyone have a video they could post of this app in action?
Muderation, obviously ;)
Yoga and Its Effect in Our Body
I've been using non-monospaced fonts for a long time now. I also have had no issues with things I or others have lined up. "Lining things up" usually amounts to screwing around - like variable names having identical lengths, at the expense of clarity. I actually can't think of any issues that I've had. At all. I have noticed that it's a easier to read, scan, and recognize the code. There is, after all, a reason monospaced fonts are hardly ever used elsewhere - not in technical reference manuals, dictionaries, fiction...

I usually keep my mouth shut about it because a lot of programmers identify with monospaced fonts (especially ugly ones). I suggest others do the same: quietly try it, because after the "this is different, therefore I hate it" feeling passes, you might find you prefer it.
I charge $125/hr, and I turn down people willing to pay that amount on an almost daily basis. Just another data point.
My favorite as well for textmate and coda
It is a breach of contract (if the EULA is enforceable), but it's not a criminal act. And I doubt they'll go after anyone for it.
If other comments had been posted, you would lose your place. Also, the screen flash would interrupt reading.

Not to mention, some people don't have superfast broadband.
Why Google Doesn’t Like Its Phone Bill
Interesting reply. I have a couple of questions for you.

1. How do you get your clients?

2. Could you elaborate on "5-10k a year is much more common for niche apps with no marketing (what everyone seems to write)." I'm curious about your apps and results.
His website couldn't have possibly exhausted then... (?)
128 benefited mightily from Tip O'Neill when he was speaker of the house. Much of this coincided with the Reagan defense build-up. O'Neill made sure his state got more than its share of those dollars.

This also held true, to a lesser extent, for the late Ted Kennedy. But now that Tip and Ted are both gone the 128 area has had to compete on its own. Hence Si valley's growing lead.

To some extent it's a matter of following the money.
1. The contrast is a bit on the low side. But generally grey text on non-white background is the way to go. You have to reduce contrast a bit when writing for the web. Straight black on white text is just a bit too much on most modern LCDs. I would say they overshot a bit. Could also be the result of different hardware displaying stuff differently. Bright and dim monitors really make a difference.

2. That’s why the FSM gave you CMD+. The proportions are correct and that’s all that counts on the web.
Patterns are easier to identify with a non-monotonous font, as research into word-shapes shows. Some of the fonts I use have wider-than-usual spaces, or—and perhaps you've noticed this—punctuation like the em dash that have the correct width. Patterns, right?

What you're saying only applies if your "patterns" consist of forcing everything into the same length. I suspect that you might not know what you're talking about, but only because of your choice of language ("shape of a form", "code is structure and patterns" - what exactly is that supposed to mean, if anything?). It would really help me if your points were more concrete, and you gave some real examples.
you could run Pig locally on your machine and still get all of its benefits. it should work on small datasets as well as huge twitter-scale datasets
A couple thoughts
1). I usually love Dustin's work but am acutally underwhelmed by the design. I hate the black on white. It hurts my eyes
2.) Snail mail is meaningful becasue it shows that the person took time to WRITE and then send a letter. Its not nearly as meaningful if its typed up.
> I tried it in Emacs. Your definition of correct does not agree with mine.

Yes it does. In Emacs, with a proportional font, if I'm on the 10th character of a line and press "up", I do not necessarily move to the 10th character of the previous line. I move to the character visually above the current one.

Sorry it doesn't work for you - we must have differing Emacs setups. I'm using Emacs 23 in GUI mode.

Also, I'm a big fan of Haskell in general, but sometimes when I'm coding I think its whitespace is a bit too significant.
Landscape of Open Source Games(slides)
Ask HN:  Which idea irritates you because it has not been taken far enough?
As an example, I am irritated by evolution not being taken far enough on the net.

Sure, you can view open source as evolution in action, but much of that relies on human intelligence rather than a more direct evolutionary process (e.g., like genetic programming).

One can imagine some sort of evolutionary process that is midway between genetic programming and human intelligence.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-based_computation
'When your laptop is turned on and plugged in, you should pull the battery out of your computer. Yes, pull it out. "I know that's inconvenient," Buchmann says, "but keeping your laptop plugged in when the battery's fully charged—that combination is bad for your battery."'

Then, when you tug your laptop the wrong way, and the power cable pops out, the machine just shuts down instead of switching over to battery power.

That's beyond "inconvenient".
Find New Passion - FREE Discreet Married Dating
Are you married, but not dead? Interested in discreet married dating? Welcome to the 100% FREE elite premiere dating website for married men and women from around the world
The problem with Pig is it is very much alpha. Schemas are not definable for many things. Look at how the code example had to be truncated since he was explicitly pulling so many fields. If you need to write your own UDF functions to do anything mildly significant. UDFs can be written only in Java. If that doesn't work you have to resort to Pig Streaming and take the associated performance hit.

Pig is still pretty cool, but it is not all there yet. A lot of the claims of avoiding Java made by the presenter are misleading.
http://www.vvork.com/

I like it because it's contemporary art, but the feed is almost entirely images - so it doesn't weigh too heavy in your feed reader...
Snail mail does take more effort, though. Which directly leads to the following things:

1. Politicians receiving mail from their constituents will take a snail mail more seriously than email.

2. Love letters seem more meaningful when received via snail mail.

It also leads indirectly to the fact that there's no spam filter for snail mail to get stuck in. Not because there's no spam in snail mail, but because the amount of spam is reasonable. 95% of email is spam, which is manageable for the user because of spam filters, but false positives in spam filters make snail mail actually a bit more reliable for the average recipient.
1. Agreed. They have #666 on #f5f5ed, which is too much. A slightly colored background allows you to use #000 without it looking harsh. I like combinations such as #000 on #fcfaf4.

2. Larger font size makes up for lower contrast. The proportions can be correct, but if the text is low contrast the size should be upped to compensate. Ctrl++ is an extra gesture that annoys users (especially when they have to Ctrl+- when they return hit back). Why not make things easier for users?
So what they're saying is, the least computer-literate people use non-Google search engines, and are more gullible. Deeply discouraging. Sure, if you run a startup, you want to get people to give you money, so this is probably grand news: let's check the referrer logs and give Bing users a giant flashing ad that tells them they're the 1,000,000th visitor! But as someone who wants to users move forward in general, it's pretty damn sad.
This legalese seems to be common:

http://www.google.com/search?q=linking+to+this+website+witho...
Why charge so little? I'd only charge $40 to work in a language I don't know.
Not for you, I guess.
I'll second the rate. Adding more, most apps we see are typically around $40k (+/- $10k) but as high as $100k.
The programming world is like this too, only worse. Programming techniques transfer between languages, but nobody seems to realize that. Instead, you see each new language community "discover" something every other language community had known for years. "Those languages suck, so we ignore everything they do."

It is depressing, and I have nothing more to say about this.
Dear downvoters,

In this community, we don't vote based on whether or not we agree. We vote up if we think it is worth reading, regardless of whether we agree or not. We downvote when the message is inappropriate - flames and trolls, cheap humor, that sort of thing. I don't go to the comments to see who agrees with me, I go there to see who disagrees, and why.

Sincerely,

mkyc
Depressing even if true. Can only hope for new life from new companies.
Comparison ads is new - they are starting with mortgage, they will get into everything where you pick one out of many based on some criteria. With this google gets closer to the online PoS to say.

They tried a shot earlier with Google Products and now they are back with a more promising channel.
That is a valid point. The minority view however does have value, and at times adds the most value to the discussion. When the minority view is treated in the same way the troll-post is then I believe the community suffers.
I upvoted you for the rather ironic screenshot. As for the best way to get upvoted: "Agree with the rest of the crowd." HN is a very "Go with the flow" crowd. In my observation it doesn't usually pay to have a difference of opinion, which is slightly ironic since this site is aimed at hackers, who, you would hope, should have unique viewpoints.
Anyone who has read "The Wisdom of Crowds" or has studied the Bay of Pigs disaster knows that groupthink is a terrible idea. I can only hope that your apparent approval of reinforcing groupthink was intended as wry sarcasm.
This trend is inevitable if all of the "specialized" branches and sub-branches really have independent meaning. It's hard to talk concretely about this, but my intuition says this is highly unlikely: chances are that connections between seemingly unrelated subfields should allow us to unify concepts and discover more meaningful mathematical truths.