skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Going through exactly this when trying to optimize a site for a large company. Designers ended up with a little cursive font for headings. Getting approval from bigcorp takes forever. So many months in, that's the design.

There's no cursive-looking font that is commonly available on all machines. So we either have to use a font, or render images. Since it's used in more than a couple places, the font ends up taking less time.

Or I could try fighting the design, customer relationship, corporate branding, etc. teams to convince them the site's better off with just "Sans-Serif". In short: fonts aren't going anywhere.

Now, it would be nice if a dozen or two fonts of varying styles were included by default with browsers. But I imagine that'd just lead to designers raging about how <someone> is trying to limit creativity and enforce conformity.

FFS, many fonts don't even render properly on Firefox on Windows (like on medium.com) so I highly doubt usability is being considered as a main priority here.
The USSR based a LOT of stuff in the Ukraine, both in terms of operational units, and supporting industry. Most of which was inherited by Ukraine when the USSR was dissolved. While many of the operational units were also dissolved, or traded back to Russia (for example, some Tu-160 strategic bombers), arms export is a pretty sweet way (relatively) for a new country to get some nice cashflow. Wiki says that Ukraine received about 30% of the USSR's arms industry... which is a lot.
Software Developers HATE This!
Great info!
I think the author is more of a musophile, and expensive stereo equipment is the altar on which he sacrifices to the muse. IMHO, real audiophiles become sound engineers. There's no way you're going to have a better sonic experience listening to a record in your living room than you are at the mixing desk or in a live room of a recording studio.

Of course good audio equipment costs money, but studios don't spend thousands on individual gold stereo cables and such nonsense. If you want to sell me a cable costing thousands of dollars it better have 24 channels of balanced audio, be 50 meters long, and weatherproof. But in terms of just getting quality playback of a quality recording, you can get by fine with relatively affordable pro gear - it just doesn't look as nice as 'audiophile' stuff. This is the real difference. I've done sound engineering for a living for years and also make electronic music, so I have maybe $10k of highly specialized audio equipment surrounding me right now. But it's not very aesthetically beautiful, rather it's utilitarian and nerdy.

There is a pro analogy to this that you can see at shows like AES, hwre certain boutique manufacturers charge out the yin-yang for summing mixers (volume/pan only, no EQ or tonal modification of any kind), as long as they look like they came form the 1950s and have giant chickenhead knobs and so on. You get what you pay for up to a point, after that the value proposition goes down but there's a social exclusivity premium instead by having something others can't afford.
I've found ABP's filters to be sporadic in their effectiveness. Open up the network inspector tab and browse to theguardian.com and others - look through what cross-site requests are still getting through.

I detail what I use in this comment [1], but I still set up friends and family with ABP because it's easier to use. I just find I have to manually blacklist a lot of domains to get it to actually work. You only need to make one request to Google for them to know what page you're on.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9083895
Which pizza place? Was this in-person or online? The animation on Stripe's launch page is pretty much what buying things with Bitcoins is like for me: https://stripe.com/bitcoin.
If you have a computer between the user and net, then yes all bets are off because you can generate certs the browser will trust.
I used to sit in the review queue and try to save questions from being marked as duplicate because it sounded similar to another question but was fundamentally different if the other reviewers just took the time to comprehend what was being asked rather than blindly voting based on title. The worst was when they would post why it's not a duplicate of another post in their post and it would still get shutdown by the reviewers. It was a losing battle and demoralizing. I also hated pedantic edits to people's questions and tried to shut them down, but everyone always seemed to agree that capitalizing the "s" in JavaScript 5 times in a question or removing that "thanks" at the end because the guidelines say you shouldn't do that was super important.
Content on Stack Exchange is licensed under CC-BY-SA. Therefore Stack Exchange (as well as any other site on the internet) has the right to repost your material if they attribute it and share it properly.
> Smoothing out bumps or making it "easy" and worrying about fragile stuff is totally unrelated to acting intelligent.

I stared at this sentence for a while and didn't quite decode it. Sounds like you've had your share of bumps. I don't know how old you are, but you may eventually decide you wouldn't change a thing.

But quite a few kids raised in good environments seem to have missed our on bullies (real, not cyber), and stupid, cruel authoritarian teachers.

This results in a naive and fragile person who is not equipped for the real world.

Have you read The Diamond Age? Neal Stephenson makes a similar point when the headmistress (really YT from Snow Crash) answers a complaint about a teacher.
Junk title, but you can apply this article's critique to many communities in general (especially online ones with a myopic user base). On the whole, the StackExchange sites contain a wealth of information that's readily accessible and can't be duplicated easily. There's certainly room for competition that's not just a plain forum, but what that looks like I'm not sure.

"Harmful" though? Have we already forgotten "experts-exchange" so soon?
Time Warner Cable calls customer “C**t” after she reports cable box problem
Platzi guys on https://courses.platzi.com/classes/startup-class/

Typo on "How to operate, raise, talk to investors and creat a great company."
Please fix.

Also ...not cool on the Front Page of a high visibility event.
better yet "I Tried to delete my StackOverFlow account. You won't believe what happened next"
A Lesson on Growth Hacking from Plummet Free Fall
That app's nav menu feels sticky when you're closing it.
From what I have seen, yes. Stable = complacent and comfortable in their mind.

On the brink = Will work 100 hrs a week and must succeed to survive.

Makes sense from that narrow perspective, but I think that only works in cases where hustle is the majority of the work. Come to think of it, the majority of investors are only interested in problems which are fairly low tech but require a lot of marketing/hustle.
Whoa. This is only the second intense fire in a skyscraper that I know of. The first being the original 7 World Trade Center on September 11th.

Modern fire protection standards should be able to handle stuff like this. I know the code in New York is so strict, we would never see something like this. I bet they are still having problems creating and enforcing building codes over there, given that it is a relatively new build environment.
Nice article!

I use an electric typewriter. Nothing beats it for creative writing: no app or digital device comes close to a blank sheet of paper and silence.

I found a store like this once in Toronto. An "office machines" shop tucked away in a small corner of the city. It's really quite a trip.
Any startup based on scraping Craigslist will probably get shutdown.
They're not the government, so I think they have a strong right to do this

Personally I agree, but only on the basis that they appear to be only archiving publicly accessible information and the old mantra of "what you post online, stays online".

Just imagine how much crime we could stop if local police had full access email, phone, and social networking data.

Or if everyone's lives were already controlled to the extent that they're essentially living in jail already... that seems like the ultimate result of a gradual increase in pervasive surveillance: people will become so used to, unable to oppose, and scared at the possibility of even thoughtcrime that they'll have no choice but to complacently conform, not unlike Orwell's 1984.
And it's fixed. Thanks a lot suprgeek.
Exactly. The more leverage you have, the more money you (can) make. That's why we had a string of billionaires coming from internet companies (in a relatively short period of time) - internet enables a small team of humans to provide a service and sell to anybody in the world. Finance has a smaller, but less risky and longer-lasting leverage - invested money.
SO is much more pleasant if you stick to the less populous niche tags where there isn't a race to get the first answer, pompous mods, and other negative side effects of gamification.
Be a better, more efficient leader: stop lying
...Protecting Israel's security is "part of my country's raison d'être," Merkel said in a March 2008 speech to the Israeli Knesset. "For me as German chancellor," she continued, "Israel's security will never be open to negotiation."

Partly as a result, Israel gets nuclear-capable submarines from the Germans, as well as any other weapons it wants. This time the Israelis wanted more modern launchers for rocket-propelled grenades and anti-armor weapons, made by Dynamit Nobel Defence near the western German town of Siegen.[0]

[0] http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-weapons-e...
Considered harmful... by this one person.
I like this proposal. Although as you say, it only cuts the direct link between the site and the resource.
This is a classic:
http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html
Also check his open code lisp section!
I would like to add as somebody whose first language was lisp, car/cdr never represented a problem. It looks more balanced than first/rest.
The thing that got me were emacs, SICP lectures and the whole idea of lisp writing lisp. I don't think changing syntax would help much because lisp attracts certain types of people (I believe).
Some places are really beautiful, but would not be less beautiful just because people can enjoy them.

Maybe the solution is to preserve these places until we have relatively cheap tech (like quadcopter drones) that can carry people to some of these places. Allow them to come in only at certain times or whatever so normally the place is still as wild as ever. Or VR connected to drones that people can fly around... there are many possibilities in the not-too-distant future that probably.

But right now the only practical way to make these places accessible is with paved roads so that's what happens.
I think this is a really good answer. However I slightly differ on #1.

Python calls the default sequence container a list. If you took that literally, it implies O(1) inserts.
I came to similar conclusions in 2010 or so; I had gotten a fair number of points whiling away my hours as a help desk TA in my CS department, I then got a job, asked some questions about Perl, and then faded out. Then as I realized money making was - broadly - absent from SO, it became clear that the digital sharecroppers were what was fueling whatever money making venture it would turn out to be.

As the community moderation approaches began to migrate from the lighthearted to the grim-faced bureaucratic, I migrated away.

While I have derived value from SO, I derive more value today from reading documents and manuals than I do from StackOverflow questions.
Gosh, there is no reason to be embarrassed about your mission. Your mission is more inspiring than any other I've seen in the startup world. While all the other 'cool' startups are doing things like "enabling people to watch other people play video games all day", you guys are literally saving and changing lives. And if it works you'll be doing it at scale. It's inspiring, it matters, and you should be damn proud.
> It's quite a convincing product, quickly becoming an integral part of the OS. And rightfully so.

Not really. Microsoft, itself, actually suggests that you use a third-party antimalware product.

It scores pretty low on AV-Test.org[1] too, but it's better than nothing.

[1]: http://www.av-test.org/en/antivirus/home-windows/windows-8/
We are currently prototyping a Co-operative community that works a lot like OSS projects. It includes a parent Co-operative that helps fund individual projects.

Key to the idea is the Co-op Source software license. Shaped by cooperative principles, it benefits the community like typical OSS licenses do for the open source community. We also plan to give a percentage of revenue to OSS projects as voted upon by our members.

I've been following assembly when they crossed my radar a while back but my ideas predate them by 15 years. I have simply been waiting for reality to set in wrt OSS business models. I love their collaboration but their choice of license is a fatal flaw, IMHO.

I have been watching the sentiments of many in the OSS community and many key contributors are growing frustrated that so many people take, take, and demand more and more of them. They have bills to pay and families to feed.

My hope is that we can find a way to create a sustainable community that pays you to work on your muse...

If you are interested in joining/helping us see:

https://groups.google.com/d/forum/coopsource

Also, in about four weeks visit us at:

https://www.coopsource.org

You can also contact me directly at kahunamoore at the domain listed above.

Alan
The title photo is cool. I like how he stows his LaserJet where other people might stow an old typewriter that they will probably never use again.
The thing with the monthly threads is that there is rarely a followup on the questions.
FWIW, I personally scheduled his account for deletion weeks ago; not sure why it wasn't removed, other than that the system thought he canceled the deletion (which we allow, because deletion is permanent).

We're working with him now to figure out what happened.
> It's been more than a decade since
> Hollywood released a movie with a
> realistic patina.

Aronofsky's The Fountain was made with only practical effects. It's beautiful.
This highlights one of the fundamental flaws of text-based communication.

In text-based communication, deciding what is important is 100% on the reader - and while to you someone may be responding to irrelevant parts of your questions - to them, it is what they found interesting and thus important.

In face to face communication, the onus of importance is far more shifted to the speaker, because based on tone and facial expression - combined with societal norms - the listener has a much easier time seeing what you find important and a much harder time being able to only latch on to the irrelevant tidbits.

> where I put big disclaimers in my questions to steer users away from those useless (to me) responses.

I have found myself doing a very similar thing - essentially trying to convey the information that gets lost of text to insure the reader can understand what I want to convey is important.
To sounds to me like the guy acted like an arrogant jerk, and a mod or bunch of mods has a low tolerance for such behavior.

SO is a victim of its own success, it's too big and has a DMV like user experience. But if you act like a jerk, you shouldn't expect a warm response.
cromwellian, you are not alone in this. I have been using CDNs for years and now, all of a sudden, they are deemed the root of all evil? I get it though, digital fingerprinting, heartbleed attacks, superfish, those are some serious privacy issues. But this blogpost? It feels like the whole debate about not implementing socialism because it allows for a small percentage of people to abuse the system. What about the amount of energy saved by using a CDN, the decrease in latency, the browser support? Doesn't that count for anything?

This is a serious question: What damage does Google Fonts do to the users visiting my website using these CDNs and does it outweigh the benefits? Why should I take this "Hey, CDNs can deliver JS and therefor are able serve customized code, which theoretically means they are spying on us" seriously?

More and more am I starting to believe this privacy thing is turning into mass hysteria and it's being cleverly spinned by some organizations in order to gain traction. Maybe am I missing the point and if so, please, enlighten me.
I don't think so. In my opinion, close-votes are the biggest problem. As I learned lately, 5 votes are enough to take a question down and then no new answers are possible, even from people that where just writing one.

I really hated it, when my questions (or questions, I wrote answers for) where closed down. You invest effort and time to write a question or answer -- but all is senseless as soon as 5 people kill the question. And also it takes forms that every question that is just a small degree beyond the "group norm" will be taken down in short time without that anybody can do something about it. 5 "Soup Nazis" (as somebody else named it) or just people that do not read carefully suffice (there is nearly no benefit, to do so -- there are some "attention" checks, but those mostly will guide you to adhere to group standards and less likely will force you to really understand the question).

I did not find out completely, but it even seems that when some moderators vote to leave questions open and 5 others vote to close, it is closed. That would be the most ridiculous thing!

BTW: I give you an upvoting, at least here, because the voting system should not only reflect opinions, but interesting views.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns8bG9AbfwM
Aside your abstract commentary here is a defense of your argument that the web will lose something valuable if more sites stop directing their visitors' browsers to send requests to advertizing companies and CDNs for resources. I think that's baloney - the web will be better off for it, because it will be faster, more private, and simpler.

No semantic information is lost (except for the semantic information in Google's profile graph - let me play my violin). There's no balkanization, because there's no noticeable difference to end-users (which is why cross-site requests for things like fonts is so nefarious).

The web would provide all the value it currently does, because that value is founded entirely on linking.

You seem to maintain that wanting to achieve private browsing is "paranoid". Can you expand on this belief?
Functional Pearl No.2 – The Max Number of Surpassers
That's not "creating" money - you have "money" in your account, but that's just a number. In reality, that money is on the bank's balance sheet, and it can lend it to others (or a part of it, depending on the regulations). It can also lend money that was actually created by the central bank and loaned to the commercial bank. But regardless of the number on your account, if the bank runs out of money (is insolvent), your money is gone (absent government guarantees/bailouts).
I think a better approach is to answer the question as best as possible and provide constructive guidance for a better approach if they are headed down a fruitless path. Those are the best answers when I'm querying SO for solutions to my own problems.
You're already going against what Stack Overflow is by creating toy problems.

Stack overflow is for asking real questions and solving real problems.
> That's not enough. You need the knowledge of "the organizer will ALWAYS open a door that contains a goat" to draw the conclusion of the article. That knowledge is implicitly assumed.

It's not implicitly assumed, it's stated in the original question: "You pick a door, say #1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say #3, which has a goat." You pick a door, the hosts opens another door which contains a goat. He can't open the door you chose, he can't open a door with the prize, he can't not open a door. Introducing a possibility which is not a part of the specified problem turns it into a different problem.

> I have shown that by assuming a different knowledge - in this case, the organizer only opens the door that contains a goat when you choose the door that contains the car - you can end up with different probabilities.

For every "the organizer only the opens a door that contains a goat when you choose the door that contains a car", there's an "the organizer only opens a door that contains a goat when you open a door that doesn't contain a car". Not knowing the host's behavior means that it isn't part of your analysis. If you don't know why he does what he does, all you can use are the facts in front of you: there are three doors, you pick one, you are shown a second door which doesn't contain the prize, and are offered a chance to choose.

> I'm pretty certain that the probabilities in this problem are unknown unless you know the behavior of the organizer in EVERY situation, not in one particular case

Not so. If you knew the host's behavior (which the original problem does specify precisely), you can use it in your analysis. But not knowing it, means the best decision has to be independent of it. And if you knew the door that contained the prize, you could use that in your analysis. But not knowing it, means the best decision has to be made independent of it.
You've just reinvented HTTP Etags. :) It's a cookie-like resource caching mechanism where the server can return an arbitrary value (usually a hash or timestamp).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_ETag
A good way for Google to address this would be by enabling CORS and encouraging the use of crossorigin=anonymous to avoid credentials being sent for fonts:

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' crossorigin='anonymous'>

Unfortunately, a quick test (http://chris.improbable.org/experiments/browser/webfonts/goo...) shows that this can't be done currently because fonts.google.com doesn't have an Access-Control-Allow-Origin header:

https://redbot.org/?uri=http%3A%2F%2Ffonts.googleapis.com%2F...

(Oddly, the actual fonts are served with "Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *" so it works if you self-host the CSS, which would presumably be a bad idea: https://redbot.org/?uri=http%3A%2F%2Ffonts.gstatic.com%2Fs%2...)

This is the behaviour defined in the HTML5 spec:

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/infrastructure.html#c...

In some ways, this feels like an oversight in the spec because crossorigin=anonymous is actually better than the legacy behaviour but any use of the crossorigin attribute triggers mandatory full CORS checks.
How Rectal Thermometers and Antarctic Excursions Gave Us “Wind Chill”
Lenovo Releases Tool to Remove SuperFish
Learn Lua in One Hour
What a strange rant.

First of all, this guy continued answering and asking questions since he published this article, so I guess he changed his mind about deleting his account. http://stackoverflow.com/users/2189331/jdevlin

Secondly the italic bits about how he should be allowed to delete questions because he created the content make no sense. All SO questions and answers are collaboratively created so he can't claim ownership.

I agree the moderation is out of hand, and it should be easy to delete your account (but what's this about a link that "got misclicked")?
I do find it odd that Wordpress would call these fonts from the authenticated section of the site. If it was just a bundled theme or plugin served publicly I don't really see the big deal, it is the web after all. But in my opinion authenticated sessions are authenticated for a reason, thus requesting assets from an un-authenticated resource does seem to be a concern. Just bundle the font!
Are you suggesting that finance isn't?
What are major conventional weapons? Does that include rifles and pistols?

Phillipines apparently has less than $1M in exports, yet it's home to Armscor / Rock Island Armory, which sells quite a bit into the US.