jm3

FontSquirrel and The League both have some great faces that display very well in modern browsers.

The Open Font Library guys appear to be struggling, however: http://skitch.com/jm3net/dt3cr/broken-font-library [screenshot of the fonts not working in Chrome]

Beautifully simple idea - never thought of the semantic value in a password, only the obscurity / secrecy value.

If you feel so strongly about Facebook's "agreement", perhaps you shouldn't use Facebook.

I love that you reference "Leiningen vs. the Ants" in the name. Etymology meets entomology!

Not sure if your document could be considered a "book", but a number of services will render physical versions of your ebook for a percentage; you could make it onto Amazon's best-seller list like Gever Tulley: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1526479

Skip to the second presenter; unfortunately the videos were not split apart. Background on the author here (scroll down to ~ third para): http://dorkbot.org/dorkbotsf/archive/201004-2/

The book sales numbers in the "Pirate Paulo Coelho" link are really impressive. Thanks for sharing that link!

Mad Men has great lessons in the art of the high-concept pitch: giving the listener a compelling vision rather than being constrained to a conversation about sales numbers or product features. Funding a startup (or buying an ad campaign) should make the person writing the check want to tell everyone they know that the smart investment they just made is going to make the world a better place, not that they're going to beat the competition by x.y%.

aside: bought the Mad Men three-season box set to catch up before the upcoming season 4, but didn't realize I got a Chinese bootleg; producer's listed as Linsgate (sic), not Lionsgate. :)

"Birth Tourism" and "snakeheads" are both really interesting terms. It's fascinating when words cross language boundaries.

If a description and links explaining something eg. a new network monitoring tool [1] don't constitute content, then by that measure sites like Delicious and Wikipedia are also content-free. :)

[1] http://monkey.org/~dugsong/dsniff/

Posted to HN three days ago, here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1496726

link update: http://twitter.com/dugsong/status/18015100357, http://skyperc4.pastebin.com/g1xFFFcr

we do this as well; the inspiration came from the engineering machine names at umich.edu.

Edit: umich had a lot of funny machine names. The login servers were named for console video games (galaga, moonpatrol, galaxian), while the kerberos servers were (inexplicably) named for schwarzenegger movies: terminator, redheat, lastactionhero, etc.

This was created by Paul who presented on "the release mindset" at RailsConf 2010. http://www.pabcas.com/feeling/presenting-ketchup-a-simple-me...

This is beautiful. I love that it saves its steps as an OS X plist file.

It'll be interesting to see if they can beat what the Smart Roadster [1] delivered. My gut intuition is that Tesla hasn't the chops.

[1] http://www.google.com/search?q=smart+roadster

by @eston, formerly of Spymaster & Facebook.

[i got permissions from Lachlan Donald at 99 Designs to post his email to me here - jm3]

We [at 99 Designs] actually don't have a huge number of instances, although we are steadily adding more and more.

We have at present:

  2 x Caching Proxies (Large)
  8 x App Servers (Large)
  3 x DB Servers (High-CPU X-Large)
  2 x Workers (Large)

We started out with a lot more small instances, but found that the disk performance on the small instances is extremely variable and often terrible.

We also use RightScale for management and are at present looking at using server arrays to scale up and down the App Server layer to deal with load spikes.

The biggest thing that reduced our need for lots of servers was moving as much functionality to asynchronous tasks as possible, which are queued on each appserver via Beanstalk queues and then consumed by the worker servers. Additionally we have as many pages http cache-able as we can, which are served directly from the squid cache at the front of the app.

Hope that helps!

Cheers, Lachlan Donald CTO, 99designs

Does your number of instances scale up and down frequently, or does it monotonically increase with growth?

I’ll go first: we (140 Proof) actually have 20 instances, not 18. How many instances do other people’s apps use?

I would like to visualize this in an interactive time-series, maybe with yelp/dopplr/wikipedia annotations plus the ability to add notes. nokia once had a great UI for stuff like this called LifeBlog, but if memory serves it was windows-only and is no longer around.

This could obviously have been done with the 4s API but i felt it would be quicker to do it the way i've shown here.

http://theymakeapps.com - a directory designed to answer exactly the question you're asking. They also won a Best-of-Web award at SXSW last month.

c.f. the Fi-Times' "The Travails of Detroit" http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2b815a94-0863-11de-8a33-0000779fd2... on the detroit reality gap.

Interesting people are everywhere. You find them by BEING one. And by listening to everything.

screen is the best thing to happen to greenscreens since the buckling spring [1].

and FTW: try "nethack on" in your .screenrc [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckling_spring

[2] http://dotfiles.org/~manoogs/.screenrc

for in-progress code and data, we use Dropbox for everything, with two geographically segmented local caches. recovery takes only a few minutes.

cite your sources? :)

Are companies considered "American" if their profits are shipped to another country? If their design, business strategy, and engineering are done places other than America?

Or is that simply considered, "modern?"

"Can't call method "read" on an undefined value at /www/sites/typeface/lib/TypefaceJS.pm line 36."

(this upon attempting to convert a font to test it)

as if you need a REASON to grow a giant beard...!