skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He lost ANY credibility when he started bashing IE's font rendering. Not only that is the same OS rendering used by Firefox, but with Cleartype is one of the best font rendering out there. Some think of it as better than OS X's.

As the parent comment said, the future is even better: DirectWrite.
F--- Perl 6
Save yourself some time and only read the last 4 or 5 paragraphs. The entire article will still make sense.
Want to meet 52 amazing entrepreneurs this year?
That won't work for ISPs, will it? My email address shares a domain with hundreds of other users, and I don't think my ISP will care or want to maintain a "well known url" listing those users that want to use OpenID.
Judging from my very own current problems, I guess I'd start to support small universities and support promising young students, especially if they study some sort of had science like physics, math, computer science and such.

Such support should include money (well, students need food, books, other equipment depending on the course), but I think it should also include support with various buerocratic problems, like facing the german bafoeg-institute and other buerocrats.

Certainly, it will be hard to actually get a good selection principle going and it also needs a plan to get the money back, but once this is done, I think this is a very valuable thing to invest in. I mean, studying is pretty much a full time job (well, if you study hard to get through the universiy fast, it is), and thus, students usually don't have that much time to work and sometimes they even get to pay for being at the university.

Besides that, I would invest a large sum into neurodermatism research, just for pure egoism. I have this problem, and whoever also has this problem knows how bad this status can be whenever it goes active. (To everyone else: Just imagine the urge to scratch your inner elbow, hand or other inappropiate locations until every skin is gone and just a bloody mess is left. After that, one is depressed, cannot move properly and is in pain.) Thus, this would be a second major investment. I guess it also would not be that egoistic, as a lot of people could benefit from results from this research :)
Agreed. Redis to Memcached to Tokyo Tyrant to MySQL is pretty much apples to oranges to crab apples to pears.
I live in Africa and am very willing to spend some time at Harvard should you want an independent comparison!
I mean that being a jerk can make someone -- usually a guy -- more attractive, rather than less. (Your comment implied that you thought that when a person falls in love with a jerk, it's because that person is so attractive physically).
I was born in 1990. The first computer that I could call my own was a custom built PC with Windows XP. This was in 2003.

I cannot express in words how sad that makes me. I've heard older programmers talk fondly about the BeOS, the classic MacOS, Amiga Workbench (IIRC), NeXtStep and even Win3.1. Even older programmers talk about computers built by Tandy and the BBC, and the legendary machines built by Atari and Commodore. I cannot help but feel that I've missed something. I salute Gruber for making the point I have been trying to make for a long time now.

I've grown up in a world where we have only two major families of operating systems[1]: Windows and UNIX. That makes me a sad panda :(

Even though I hate the flimsy machines Dell make, I would love to try out the DellOS, if they ever decide to build one.

[1] I'm only talking about the desktop space here.
99% of all businesses fail because they pick the wrong keyphrase.
Some possible solutions:

* some kind of congestion pricing

* private routes (Could be roads, rail, tunnels, etc. Charge for access.)

* private vehicles (Could use existing routes or new routes.)

* reduce traffic (by increasing costs, reducing the need, increasing number of people per vehicle, reducing vehicle size, separating people and goods)

* make traffic more efficient (by providing status, prediction, or suggested routing)

* make travel more personally productive

The easiest solutions seem to be making travel more productive and reducing the need to travel.

People stuck in traffic can consume music, news, lectures, advertising, etc. Sell something they can look at or hear.

People stuck in traffic can get angry. Use that anger somehow. Give them an outlet to complain.

Provide real-time traffic information, suggest routes, provide etas.

Provide communication tech which reduces the need to travel. Conference calling, virtual presence.

Help people to live without having to travel. The big solution to this is to build multipurpose real estate where people can work at or near their homes. Another way would be to deliver stuff to them. If your food were delivered to you, you wouldn't have to go out shopping for it.

Physical mail should be digitized as much as possible.

Efficiencies might be had by separating the transport of people and goods and by providing separate transport means. For example, why not deliver a family's daily food by robotic balloons or mini-robotic vehicles that can easily weave in and out of traffic?

Web/phone services like craigslist that help people find what they want close to home would be useful.

Smaller vehicles like segways might be very useful.
Do agile software development teams need managers ?
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Sort of. I built the business, but it got litigated away from me. Last valuation of it though was several million dollars.

Now I'm starting over, and I'll do it again.
A million dollars, I could see. I can't imagine what useful thing they could accomplish with 100 million, given that the bottleneck for their avowed program is Friendliness theory. Giving them that much money would distort the organization, probably. Might be counterproductive. :)
Prototype vertical farms. It's my new obsession.

The UN projects that arable land will decline to 1/3 acre per person by 2050 (down from 1 acre/person in 1970). I'd buy up a few old mill buildings (they're all over New England, where I live), and convert them to combination indoor farms using hydroponic or aeroponic growing systems, living space (for farmers), and retail space (to sell the food to the community and offer sales space to other local farmers).

I'd use the roof for combination solar, additional green space, and rain catchment.
Industry Reaction: The Impact Of Right Media And The Importance Of Exchanges
I'd invest in 5000 promising new startups.
I did, but I'm not sure what in your comment disproves the self-esteem issue. My point is not what men think of women (how they rate them), but what women do when presented with the options I mentioned (attractive guys messaging them).

If an attractive guy messages me, I would be thinking as a woman "Wow, this is validating" instead of "No, he must have made a mistake". If it's the latter, you have to wonder what initially gave her the idea that he made a mistake? Was it something deeply engrained?

Maybe I didn't read the article correctly, but please don't assume I didn't read the whole thing. Starting off your comment like that is not very welcoming and doesn't add any value to the conversation.
You Need To Stop Being So Impatient
I meant lambdas in particular. Example is too long for a discussion specific to lambdas.
http://imgur.com/FxWyf.jpg

Executive summary : Despite the overuse of words composed on fuck, it's actually a peace advocacy
I've worked from home for a few years now and from a productivity standpoint its wonderful. For me at least, the ability to work from my desk, sitting in my chair, with my lightning, with only distractions that I create (such as music), all while avoiding any time-wasting commute is huge for my ability to focus and get stuff done.

Despite productivity benefits, the major drawback of working remotely is a lack of social interaction beyond telephone/e-mail/im, which can be very taxing emotionally because physical cues are hugely important to communication.
None of those steps are actually 'non-trivial'. My statement was meant to be sort of tongue-in-cheek. It's a true statement. It's also a gross over simplification.

This method has worked for me in the past, especially on the internet. Outside the internet however it's virtually impossible due to fundamental market restrictions.
For what it's worth, people who are children now will have missed the wild days of the Web when everyone had their own API, data, and UI stacks and no two apps looked or behaved the same.

I'm not sure I agree with the OP. When there is real competitive advantage in some newish layer of the tech stack, you will see incredible diversity. When the advantage moves on to other parts of the stack (eg applications, the web, etc), the older layers standardize and homogenize.

Today, in 2009, neither I nor my mom give two shits what OS we're using 70% of the time because our work is done inside a browser. I run WinXP in a virtual machine on my Mac. At least once a day I catch myself using the browser inside the Windows instance without realizing it.
I second that... I had a similar idea a couple weeks back. bravo!
Not really. I haven't seen him saying that they're equivalent in any way. It was more of a "I do a lot of X, which software is the fastest for it".

I think it's a fair comparison, if you ask the question this way.
I'm curious to know if you sent your kids to preschool or just homeschooled your kids all along? I'm seriously considering homeschooling my children and I'm sort of curious what other people have done with the first schooling decision.
When publisher's give advance that high it's because they know that the book will sale. So I don't think they are really taking that much of a risk with publishing this book.
If you think that's bad karma, you clearly haven't dealt with lawyers much. This is about par for the course.
Outlook syncs with Linkedin.  Work emails get personality
Our older son went to "playschool" when he was three and part of four, and we've considered it for our younger son, who is turning four. We aren't terribly concerned about the "social" aspect of school, as our kids have no problems interacting with people (adults or kids their own age), and we are a part of a homeschool co-op.

We know several other homeschoolers that have done "normal" preschool for their kids, too. I don't think it's an either/or situation--in fact, it may give you some insight on how your kids learn best (we discovered that our son does really well when taught something one-on-one, but can often become frustrated in larger groups).
tl:dr Women don't have unrealistic expectations, they're just saying that the average man is ugly.

I disagree with their interpretation that the fact that women rate men as low attractiveness means they "have unrealistic standards for the 'average' member of the opposite sex."

Remember, they didn't ask "do you think this guy is above or below the average attractiveness." They asked "is this guy attractive." There's an implicit assumption that "neither attractive or unattractive" is equivalent to "average attractiveness of men."

That assumption is wrong. Men are ugly. So of course most men will be rated as more unattractive on average than women.
Group 4: those who thought that just maybe they'd learn something about Perl 6, but were instead treated to some someone whose apparent inability to express themselves in the English language has led them to rely on 'fuck' as a crutch. I guess the title was a giveaway.
Yea this CEO's math does inspire confidence in the company. Value of an MBA/2 years vs 3 * values of an MBA/10 years.
(From your other post below)

I don't see Intel, (ok easy example) or any other hardware manufacturer dying anytime soon.

I don't think that, when the author said PC makers are "busy dying" that he meant that they're necessarily on a direct trajectory towards bankruptcy. I took it in the softer, more poetic sense that they're listless, apathetic, lacking in the proud vigor and vibrancy of their youth. This was captured best when he said this:

People today still love HP calculators made 30 or even 40 years ago. Has HP made anything this decade that anyone will remember fondly even five years from now?

I agree with you that hardware and software decoupling is a very good thing. I also do not see this as being mutually exclusive to what Gruber is suggesting. If Dell wanted to invest in being a player in user experience, there's no reason that they would have to tie their system software to their hardware.

The biggest flaw that I see in Gruber's article is that he might be overestimating consumers themselves. Sure, the computer industry is different from the days when you tried to sneakernet a 1-2-3 file to a friend's machine only to find that he was running Visicalc on CP/M. But will consumers accept this change without knowing what an open standard is, or a document format, or a portable runtime, or cross-compling, or virtual machines?

I'd guess not, given that I've talked to seasoned geeks who haven't yet fully internalized that things are different today. Consumers, recoiling from the fear of "incompatibility", all happily ran to one side of the boat in the 90s and nearly capsized it. Teaching them that diversity doesn't have to mean incompatibility seems like a daunting task.
Renraku OS: Networking, Hosted Mode, Moving Forward
Move to Detroit. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=930868 and http://www.aia.org/aiaucmp/groups/aia/documents/pdf/aiab0802...

Me and a friend have a half-baked (in more ways than one) idea that it would be fun to move to Detroit and get into aquaculture. It's something we managed to romanticize. Give it some steam-punk marketing aesthetic for giggles.

(I think half the value of HN is being able to browse your old comments to remember where you saw something very interesting.)
I would invest it in startups. Which is the best way to foster innovation and job growth.
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An extra-solar planet imager (telescope or satellite) and a nuke powered exploration probe to check things out.
Samasource: How African refugees are scoring Silicon Valley Internet jobs
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You're assuming "the same content" which is not what happens. There is no inherent reason I can pinpoint, but from experience, posted blog posts are generally better than someone using HN as their blog.
I live in Calgary, we don't home-school our kids.

I have two children, 11 (grade 6) and 8 (grade 3). The homework is about an hour each night for the 8 year old, and can vary greatly for the 11 year old, anything from 1-2 hours (practicing what they were taught that day) to "projects" requiring about 16 hours of work over 2 weeks. They're both very bright children (yes, I know that all parents say that about their kids).

Do I think it's too much? Tough call. I do think it's ridiculous that my daughter is carting around a backpack to and from school that weighs half as much as she does. Also irritating is that the onus is on the parents to ensure that things get done, I'd rather that my child is taught responsibility than taught dependence but there is a lot of "sign this and return to indicate that your child did the work" kind of stuff.

Lastly, I recall as a child having time in school to do work around projects, and more often than not I had no homework because that time was given. From what I can tell, that kind of time no longer exists (or it does but there is more work).

I also don't recall having homework at all until I was in grade 6. It starts now in grade 1 (every night was about 15 minutes).
Microsoft makes patent claim for sparklines
I would probably start filming low-budget cyberpunk movies for the hardcore viewer, since i don't have to make a profit, a cult-following is the aim. But not the "this movie is so bad its fun" type of cult following, i want the "this movie is really obscure and deep, but still entertaining, too bad none of my friends have herd of it" type. Im aiming at the Nirvana type, not the Johny Mnemonic type of film.If i actually DO make a profit, i might do a steam-punk movie :D I have NO experience or knowledge of movie making, so chances are i will fail and my films would become ideal for bad movie nights.

Alternatively I'll donate the money to someone who can actually use it to make something great.
An accountability website for voting records from city to state to national (in that order given that often enough local legislation has a more direct impact on the average citizen's life than national). The site would cross reference stated platforms of politicians vs their actual voting actions as transparently analyzed by up to 3 university poli sci and history professors one each from conservative / liberal / historial context point of view. The site would also track budgetary spending and hours worked / where worked per politician to provide metrics to the voting populace on who's doing their job, who's doing their job as they said they would.

Primary goal, to provide transparent and neutral public information to voters to enable them to make an actual choice when voting instead of lock stepping according to the current PR spin of any specific party. Secondary goal would be to complement local efforts to increase voting awareness.

Public servants should be under the same metric driven scrutiny by their employers as any other employee for any private company.
A lot has changed since then, so why are they still so reluctant?

It's this premise that I find inaccurate. Sure there's open everything, but writing an operating system from scratch to support all this is still hard. Hell, give me one commercial operating system written from scratch in the last decade.

The point is, why do it? Maintaining an operating system is big money. And you can't stop there - you've got to have a full-stack offering - business apps, fun apps, drivers, the whole set. Add to that support, interoperability with the world, backwards compatibility etc. It's a long-term commitment; you can't back out of it that easily.

The risk-to-reward ratio is pretty small; unless you have some earth-shaking innovation up your sleeve, and/or it reinforces/supports your business model significantly.
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So, the lack of response is a bit surprising. Am I wrong that FluidDB is novel? Or are people just having a hard time with the idea because it is novel?
Good idea. Consider offering it to organisations that have mentoring programmes.

My old university has an alumni mentoring scheme, but the web app that does the matching is so broken that not many people use it.
I am inline with this article. My HP is real pain in back.
Ask HN: Best Wiki and Blog Software to accompany my startup webapp
I'm working on a webapp that will hopefully launch in January / Feb. I'm at the point where I want to incorporate a blog and a wiki. The blog will be a marketing channel where myself and my partner will talk about our product and make announcements. The wiki will be used by the dev team as a sort of project management tool to track progress and dump ideas and will be private.

I'd quite like some simple suggestions for the blog tool. Something like wordpress seems like using a sledge hammer to crack a walnut.

I'd happily use a 'project management tool' instead of a wiki.

What are your experiences ? Can you suggest anything ? Or Should I stay clear of anything ?
Microsoft Launches Pivot, A Radically New Visualization of Online Objects
nginx, sqlite, openssh, postfix.
Eric Meyer: Correcting Corrupted Characters
People are already toying with many ideas to solve this issue. One such idea, was to construct self-contained satellite townships. In Pune, India, a township called "Magarpatta City", has been built. It houses, commerical spaces, Residentials spaces, schools, shopping Complexes, hospitals(http://www.magarpattacity.com/_new/unique.asp , http://www.magarpattacity.com/_new/amenities.asp). All the needs are generally satisfied within the township. This concept really helps in containing the traffic within a township. I believe, in near future, these ideas will be replicated across urban India.
Evening Came Slowly
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Red Bull. An Austrian spots Krating Daeng in Asia, buys a license for all continents, designs a can, puts some carbonic acid in that “syrup”, positions Red Bull around extreme sports … and is now a billionaire (according to Forbes: No. 151 of the richest people). And his company doesn't even have a production facility.
On the face of it - amazing gall! Given that Microsoft are using the name "Sparklines" it demonstrates that they are aware they are not the inventor - and that they know who is.

Plus there looks to be 'prior art' here http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/eurooffice...
Bribe the hell out of an education system (in any bribeable country) to make heavy use of modern psychology, esp. critical reasoning skills.
"...The Asian gaint..."

Anyway, I wonder what China is going to do when they have difficulty developing a domestic market for all the goods they are producing. Because of the recession, U.S. consumers are buying less and saving more which has caused a massive drop in orders from Chinese factories. Couple that with the fact that while the Chinese middle class has grown, there are still hundreds of millions of people scratching out a living off the land. Hundreds of thousands of factory workers without work does not a stable political situation make.
During development certainly I can iterate more quickly with interpreted languages than with compiled ones. It improves development time considerably.
I find this very interesting, but the way she explains it isn't clearly laid out. Annoyingly, she keeps referring to her own income in terms of net profit but anything else is gross.

Anyway, a link to her first post: http://www.genreality.net/the-reality-of-a-times-bestseller

She got an advance of $50000 of which 1/3 was paid only when the book hit the shelves. Expenses (including agent fees) approximate $9000. If she took a year to write the book, her book would have earned her $35k (gross, $26k after expenses) in July 2007, plus $13000 (gross) in July 2008. And that's it - until she covers the advance, that's her income for this book to date. Hardly stellar. You'd need returns from other books to support yourself in order to make a living from this.

She took back $40k against her advance in the first 4 months followed by a buffered -$2k loss in the next 6 months. That's one hell of a short tail.
Don't get tricked by the startup dollhouse theory
now. http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/eurooffice...
Funny that I few days ago I was thinking about this idea of "peer mentorship". You see, in a typical mentor-protege relationship (like in this site, which is great if it works btw) there's a hierarchy: the mentor advises the protege in a one-way street.

My idea is having connections between two people on the same level, so that they both help each other. So if HN is a gym, this would be like having a personal trainer (and being a trainer for somebody).

Rather than specialized domain or expert advise, this would be more for things like getting a new and honest opinion about ideas/implementations etc, prodding the other person to action (you skipped exercising this week again?!) etc.

I see many ways why this wouldn't work (most people won't 'click' between each other etc) but for instance I would benefit from chatting once a week or a month with someone who's following what I'm doing and vice versa.
I would build a gold statue of me