Hacker News Reader

sid0on Groupon Restates Revenue, Revenue Fell In Half, COO Exits

Standard academic linguistics is by definition descriptive.

sid0on Groupon Restates Revenue, Revenue Fell In Half, COO Exits

While descriptivists and other such laissez-faire linguists

All linguists are descriptivists.

sid0on Why do Windows functions all begin with a pointless MOV EDI, EDI instruction?

Latest Gecko is 9.0 to coincide with Firefox 9. :)

sid0on Has Neal Stephenson become too accessible?

Don't worry, Anathem's the only book where he renames things like that, and that's mainly because his construction necessitates it. He is rather self-indulgent though. Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon are good starts, and if you like them you should then upgrade to Diamond Age.

sid0on Has Neal Stephenson become too accessible?

Out of all his books I've read (Snow Crash, Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon), the world in Anathem is by far his most complex.

sid0on [German] Google buys the German Groupon competitor DailyDeal

I can't wait for this bubble to burst.

sid0on Gamers solve molecular puzzle

There is no known way of getting a quantum computer to solve an NP-complete problem in polynomial time. Integer factoring is in NP but not complete for it.

sid0on Microsoft has Abandoned Silverlight and All Other Plugins

The entire Web is a test page for this one, and I have come across numerous stories similar to my own. If you have the problem on your machine, you can't miss it: basically any time you see a capital T there will be an obvious kerning problem.

I haven't seen anything close to this, especially on Windows XP. Do you have a test page, a screenshot, anything?

can't even download the past few releases any more

OK, I can't assume good faith any more. You're outright lying now. https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases

At current rates, I expect them to last about as long as RIM, so I devote my limited spare time to helping other projects instead.

Troll.

sid0on Firefox Now Scores 100% on Acid3 Test

Not all reasons for rejecting a standard are equal.

sid0on The Google Puzzle

Sorry, it's not compatible with me either, since I hate popup windows so much I force them to open in tabs.

sid0on What's wrong with this code, really?

As I mentioned above, the best way to keep items matching a condition is

  filter predicate xs

sid0on What's wrong with this code, really?

As far as I remember you can write that as

  var filteredCollection = collection.Where(predicate);

I agree that C# is a fundamentally usable language.

sid0on What's wrong with this code, really?

Yeah, I was thinking Haskell, but any functional language will do. Problems like the one in the blog post really make you appreciate them.

sid0on Microsoft has Abandoned Silverlight and All Other Plugins

What I'm talking about is entirely Firefox-specific (IE9 renders the same sites just fine) and it applies on Windows XP as well as Windows 7.

Do you have a test page? If it happens on Windows XP too then it's probably a bug. Did you file one?

sid0on What's wrong with this code, really?

  filter predicate xs

sid0on Microsoft has Abandoned Silverlight and All Other Plugins

That may be so, but the fact is that for several months lots of people using Firefox will have had difficulty reading lots of sites that worked perfectly well in older versions of Firefox and still work perfectly well today in other browsers (which makes me very suspicious of pinning the blame entirely on ClearType, BTW; no other software on these PCs has any trouble displaying those fonts).

Read my words carefully. I did not say it is an artifact of ClearType. I said it is an artifact of ClearType subpixel positioning. Subpixel positioning is only available with WPF and DirectWrite, and very few Windows apps use those APIs. IE9 has exactly the same "problems" as Firefox does.

Given that there is no standard specification of how to choose fonts like this, I think that's perhaps a rather bold claim to make (no pun intended)

By "incorrectly" I meant "in a way that Firefox doesn't recognize". You don't blame Firefox when you misspell a variable name in a JS script, do you? Similarly, if you specify a font that Firefox doesn't recognize and it doesn't work it's not a bug in Firefox.

Again, it doesn't really matter though, because the point is that it worked on every other browser.

It worked in Firefox too -- the next font in the list got selected and the text still got displayed. The web platform provides no guarantees as to pixel-perfect rendering. If you want that you should publish a PDF instead.

Whether they are tolerant and Firefox is correct or they are correct and Firefox is broken doesn't change the end result.

It still works in other browsers, and it still works in Firefox. It has nothing to do with tolerance and everything to do with Firefox simply using a different API to enumerate fonts.

sid0on Microsoft has Abandoned Silverlight and All Other Plugins

The trouble is, the current standardisation processes are far too slow to be practically useful, while the breakneck pace of experimental feature development is too fast to keep up, so there is no useful definition of "a little" in your suggestion that we can use for planning new web projects and making decisions about which technologies we will rely on.

If you're starting a new web project today, you look at what technologies the browsers you're targeting already support with unmodified syntax. (I'd argue that that development model's a poor fit for the web, but that's a different question.)

On Windows systems, the kerning is very odd in a lot of fonts since they moved to the new rendering engine a while back. The spacing following a capital T is usually way too tight, and in some fonts there are a few other examples as well. This can render pages completely illegible at typical body text sizes.

That is an artifact of ClearType subpixel positioning. Firefox 7 or 8 onwards (I don't remember which) turn subpixel positioning off for several commonly-used fonts, listed in gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.force_gdi_classic_for_families.

Also, take a Windows 7 computer with a few Adobe professional OpenType fonts installed locally -- probably some that come with Creative Suite would do -- and just try selecting those fonts using CSS in recent versions of Firefox.

I have a feeling you're choosing the font incorrectly. Note that with DirectWrite, any weight modifiers ("semibold", "black", "light") aren't part of the font name any more. Instead you need to specify weight using the font-weight property. So instead of saying Arial Black as you would normally, you need to say Arial with weight 900: http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/971376-firefox-displays-my...

This is not a bug, though -- this is correct behaviour.

Most currently available web fonts also seem to look terrible (poorly hinted, terrible aliasing) on Windows XP in Firefox, but since they don't look great in other browsers either and they look better in Firefox on Windows 7, I'm inclined to point the finger more at Windows XP than Firefox in that case.

That's because most downloadable fonts aren't hinted for ClearType. DirectWrite with its subpixel positioning can cope much better with unhinted fonts.

sid0on Microsoft has Abandoned Silverlight and All Other Plugins

I'm not taking the bugs into account here (though there are plenty). I'm talking about the design philosophy.

sid0on Microsoft has Abandoned Silverlight and All Other Plugins

If you want to use CSS3 tools, even those that are widely supported across browsers, you often have to code up the same effect 3/4/5 times with slightly different syntaxes.

Or you can wait a little until the standard goes through and the syntaxes are unified.

If you want to use HTML5 elements, even just the simple semantic ones, you need to incorporate backward compatibility fixes for IE before version 9 (which is a very substantial chunk of the browsing public, since WinXP only goes up to IE8).

The target is not the browsing public -- it is your audience. For instance, a site for hackers really doesn't need to support IE<9.

I agree with the <video> problem for sure. There are philosophically and commercially opposed interests involved there.

Firefox still doesn't get basic font rendering right on a lot of platforms, and the current version can't even look up locally installed fonts properly

Could you cite or give examples of these?

Obviously things are still in flux, but we've all learned to deal with bugs in software. We know our own code isn't immune to them, so I think it's too much to expect the platform we're building on to be immune to them either. I don't think bugs reflect negatively on the web standardization process, though.

sid0on Microsoft has Abandoned Silverlight and All Other Plugins

That is a very dishonest representation of how the Web standardization process works.

sid0on Microsoft has Abandoned Silverlight and All Other Plugins

You are definitely not. I use Windows 7 primarily and I'd never even dream of replacing it with Windows 8 in its current state as a horribly thought-out mishmash of design principles.

sid0on JS 2 CoffeeScript Compiler

The purpose of the false statement is irrelevant. I'm generally not a big fan of perfection in programming, but compilers are one instance it's worth aiming for.

sid0on Check Out The New Blue Screen of Death in Windows 8

- You can still google the code Windows provides.

- If you're really savvy you know how to use WinDBG and load up a memory dump.

sid0on Check Out The New Blue Screen of Death in Windows 8

I'm pretty sure they're still going to have the memory dump.

sid0on TFS is destroying your development capacity

Oh man, I did the same when I was at Microsoft for a couple of months for an internship (although I had to interact with SD instead). Coming from hg I found SD to be pretty obnoxious. Thankfully my mentor was fine with it: "whatever works for you".

sid0on More information on Google's new web language, Dash

Sorry, I made a mistake: nonlocal gives you as much power as usual closures. I still stand by my statement that implicit declarations make things very confusing.

sid0on Searching for "semicolon injection" bugs in embedded Linux devices

You, sir, have scared the shit out of me.

sid0on Ultrabook: Intel's $300 million plan to beat Apple at its own game

No, it really isn't. There's a reason Intel's integrated graphics have improved so significantly with Sandy Bridge.

sid0on The New Apple Advantage

I am going to switch away from Apple's shitty notebooks and probably never use one again, and I agree with the GP.

sid0on More information on Google's new web language, Dash

Python has implicit declarations, which lead to a world of hurt because you can't directly modify variables in arbitrary scopes. Python 3 has nonlocal, but that only extends the number of function scopes you can refer to to three.

I think having implicit declarations is probably the worst mistake Python made. It just makes things so much more confusing.