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Comment by sbierwagen | Hacker News Reader

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Heh.

Also, when did chrome stop antialiasing text? If I somehow checked a box labeled "make text look worse", then someone please enlighten me. http://bbot.org/etc/aliasing.png

EDIT: Ha ha, Windows, you card, always with the case-insensitive file systems. Got me again! Link should work now.

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The text is aliased on my Windows Firefox and Chrome, but not my Linux Firefox. The font is Helvetica, which is apparently rendered quite poorly on Windows.

That's it — Windows comes with a crappy bitmap Helvetica, and most Linux distributions are even worse because X includes an abysmally bad tiny raster one. Macs ship with a good one, and Adobe Creative Suite installers usually bundle one which is how lots of designers never notice the problem on Windows.

Basically, you should never specify 'Helvetica' anywhere in a font declaration. Specify 'Helvetica Neue', the pretty close 'Microsoft Sans Serif', or gasp Arial — it's not actually worse in any way, despite all the wankery.

Word, I usually use Arial over Helvetica just to separate myself from all those hipsters raving about it on tumblr.

So... chrome uses windows fonts, but firefox doesn't?

s/Heh/unprofessional/

The URL is unprofessional, and so are the identifiers in the source code. Protip to the devs: Dropping profanities doesn't make you look cool, it makes you look like a 19-year-old trying to impress his friends.

Get over it! They're not disrespecting or hurting anyone. They're not affecting the quality of their product. This is purely a style thing. Calling unconventional behavior "unprofessional" is a cop-out!

P.S. - I still upvoted you because I see where you're coming from, and "s//" is always funny to me for some reason.

Thanks for the upvote, but I do see profanity in a professional setting as disrespectful, because there are people who take offense to profanity (that is the point of profanity, right, to offend or to indicate intense anger?) I realize of course in this instance it wasn't meant to offend, but that doesn't mean it's not offensive.

I'd consider the site equally unprofessional if they used the words "retarded" or "Jew" (as in, "our competitors' products are retarded, don't let them Jew you!"), or if they used scatological humor. It's just bad taste.

I see "retarded", "Jew" and other terms (when used pejoratively) as in a separate usage class from "fuck", "shit" and their ilk. The former are invectives; that is, they refer to a specific kind of person. Their usage can only be interpreted as negative judgment of a human being, even if they're not specifically talking about someone. ("Don't let them Jew you" is still negatively judging Jews even if "them" is vague.)

On the other hand, "fuck", "shit" et al. exist in a bit of a vacuum. "What the fuck" is not offensive to fucks, because (hopefully) very few people identify as "fucks".

So, the vector of offense for "Jew" is different from the vector of offense for "fuck". I'm offended when people use racial slurs. But when someone simply swears, I don't see a reason to be offended. It may affect my opinion of them; for example, I am less likely to respect someone for being articulate if they can't express themselves without swearing every couple of words. But getting offended implies some degree of emotional investment in the words or concepts themselves, which I don't really see the basis for.

To put it another way: I feel like any reasonable, compassionate person can't help but be offended to some degree by slurs; and they should be, because slurs are probably not such a great thing. Conversely, I think that we are taught to be offended by swears, and it's within reach of the average person to disconnect their emotional response from them.

I find it offensive that you on some level are equating curse words with "retarded" and "Jew".

There are practical concerns in terms of content filtering. By using profanity you're cutting off some section of the internet. Whether that's a concern or whether it should be that way are secondary discussions.

Likes fine on Chrome for Linux, maybe it's a Windows setting.

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