smurda

Marissa Mayer on why Google chose sans-serif fonts for search results:

When I had to make a decision about should the Google results pages be serif or sans-serif, I didn't have enough users to do the split A/B testing and mathematically figure that out, so I ended up reading a lot of research and ultimately finding out that serif fonts are more readable, and sans-serif fonts are more legible.

The serifs create a horizontal rule that guides the eye, so serif fonts are much better when you’re reading long pieces of text. Sans-serif fonts are more legible which means that... when the serifs are removed your eye can spot read a character much better and much more quickly, and as a result it is much better for spot reading. In an activity like search it turns out you want to facilitate spot reading to a much greater degree than reading long prose.

Here's the 2006 talk: https://stvp.stanford.edu/podcasts/nine-lessons-learned-abou...

On the East Coast there are more cities with dense populations, so public transit can be effective and car ownership rates are lower.

In the West, many cities are urban sprawls that built out instead of up, so public transit is less effective and car ownership rates are higher.

I wish LA or Phoenix or Vegas was dense living where public transit could be effective, but since they’re urban sprawls and public transit isn’t aa effective as a densely populated city, most people own cars to get around.

In 2024, 78% of Alphabet’s revenue came from ads (72% in Q3 2025).

Ads subsidize experimentation of loss-generating moonshots until they mature into good businesses, or die.

Wow. Huge congrats! This is a real business that is profitable.

Our industry focuses so much on venture-backed startups (many of which are unprofitable) that would lose sight of one important goal when starting a business - be profitable!

"We cannot allow Europe's biggest export to be regulation," is the phrase I think of after reading this article. I am hopeful that Europe will continue to cultivate an environment full of talent and capital that can produce formidable alternatives to the hyperscalers.

But, today, as the article notes, "European alternatives do exist...Yet for many organizations, distinguishing real alternatives from false promises has become increasingly difficult."

One theoretical use case is “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” (HNDL) attacks, or “Store Now, Decrypt Later” (SNDL). If an oppressive regime saves encrypted messages now, they can decrypt later when QCs can break RSA and ECC.

It's a good reason to implement post-quantum cryptography.

Wasn't sure if you meant crypto (btc) or cryptography :)

Many cities have mixed-income housing strategies to create a social and economic mix, including London where council housing is peppered in throughout the boroughs.

"Building more densely in the right places will not just enable the delivery of more homes, but will also improve access to jobs and services, while helping to fund desperately needed social and physical infrastructure. It will help people to be active and healthy, by locating more housing within walking and cycling distance of local amenities and public transport access, and by reducing reliance on car ownership. Furthermore, it will help to foster socially and economically mixed neighbourhoods, which are a key part of maintaining London’s vibrancy and economic success."

-London Housing Strategy https://www.housinglin.org.uk/_assets/Resources/Housing/Othe...

I lived in downtown SLC near Pioneer Park where there are a few shelters and affordable housing complexes. As a result, Pioneer Park became a place where most unhoused congregate downtown. IMO this is an effort to get the unhoused out of downtown.

The location of the new facility is out by the airport, in the middle of nowhere, cutting off the unhoused from the social fabric.

If the goal is to help the unhoused be woven into the social fabric the answer is to build up, not out, so they are a part of city living, and should include:

1) Small-scale, incremental affordable housing, 2) Mixed-income, mixed-use neighborhoods, and 3) Preservation of older, cheaper buildings

I like the spirit of the project. I don't like that is quarantining a portion of society.

Another word for coarse is impasto technique, where the paint is so thick the painting-knife or brush strokes are visible and leave a pronounced texture (e.g. Van Gogh, Rembrandt).

Another cool prompt could be specific painting techniques (e.g. pencil shading, glaze) as if you were training an actual artist in a specific technique.

Squares don’t create activity — activity creates squares. In other words, “People do not use city parks and squares because they are parks and squares, but because of the uses to which adjoining streets put them.” -The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

I love this book, and it is used in many Urban Planning courses. She notes that Rockefeller Plaza works because it borrows life from the city. It is surrounded by offices, shops, restaurants, transit and used all day by different groups (workers, tourists, skaters, diners). Rockefeller Plaza succeeds because it is intensely connected to daily life and fed by continuous pedestrian traffic.

I've been using Restate for durable execution. The TypeScript SDK was easy to use.

In the past, he admitted he paid a lower tax rate than most Americans. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/romney-admits-he-pays-lower-tax...

It’s nice to see someone who knows about, and uses, the loopholes advocate for closing them.

I love writing with a dash—it packs a punch! On Writing Well by William Zinsser, who taught writing at Yale and Columbia, says this about the dash:

Somehow this invaluable tool is widely regarded as not quite proper—a bumpkin at the genteel dinner table of good English. But it has full membership and will get you out of many tight corners. The dash is used in two ways. One is to amplify or justify in the second part of the sentence a thought you stated in the first part. "We decided to keep going—it was only 100 miles more and we could get there in time for dinner." By its very shape the dash pushes the sentence ahead and explains why they decided to keep going. The other use involves two dashes, which set apart a parenthetical thought within a longer sentence. "She told me to get in the car—she had been after me all summer to have a haircut—and we drove silently into town." An explanatory detail that might otherwise have required a separate sentence is dispatched along the way.

https://dn790000.ca.archive.org/0/items/OnWritingWell/on-wri...

I like the paper from Anthropic on Constitutional AI that helps with transparency on how a model is trained, and therefore what values it might have.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claudes-constitution

https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.08073

This sounds like a comment from someone who doesn't have visibility into how good the models are getting and how close they are to fully autonomous, production-grade software development.

Many founders and CEOs are also investors. This situation shouldn’t be any different just because this his role is a turnaround CEO at Intel.

I loved the visualization of EV certs in browsers, but in 2014 vendors like GoDaddy charged $100/yr for them. https://web.archive.org/web/20131023033903/http://www.godadd...

I'm glad LE, browsers, and others like Cloudflare brought this cost to $0. Eliminating this unnecessary cost is good for the internet.

This curve variable is very cool! It will be interesting to see if this becomes a new standard integrated into other variable types.

When a company wants to develop a product and has to choose to build, buy, or partner this kind of acquihire is a great move. Buy the builders with unique domain expertise to build it from scratch internally. If you buy a company with a fully-baked product the post-merger integration risks organ rejection.

This is why the internet and HN should exist <3

I was in GATE in a California school district in the 90’s. In our town of 100k people, 30 of us were put in a GATE classroom for grades 3-6.

The best part about the program was being around other precocious peers. I think many of us would have been described as misfits - clever enough to sit at the adults table but clearly not a fit there.

30 years later, I have deeper relationships with those 30 people than my high school or college friends.

Yeah, there’s good data on liq pref.

For the drag I was just referencing the original article in this thread. Both liq pref and drag are such onerous terms that the only way investors can get them is when the company has lost their leverage by not having other interested investors.

This is happening more now.

Liquidation preference was included in 20% of all Series B-E Silicon Valley venture financings in Q3 last year.

When a company is not doing well and there are no other investors who will finance the next stage of the company, investors have the leverage and can include a liq pref and drag along to force other shareholders to sell.

https://assets.fenwick.com/banner-images/Silicon-Valley-Vent...

This is cool. Splunk Search Processing Language (SPL) is a real vendor lock-in feature. Once the team has invested time to get ramped up on SPL, and it gets integrated in your workflows, ripping out Splunk has an even higher switching cost.

5 years ago I was at MIT’s QC lab and 4 qubits was the max number of entangled qubits their machine could reach, sustainably. All the marketing fluff from IBM and Google about hundreds, or thousands, of entangled qubits is misleading - they don’t maintain those entangled states for long durations. Only when we can get hundreds of qubits to maintain entangled states for sustainable periods of time can we then attempt the theoretical use cases of the technology.

When public markets rewarded growth, you could let costs balloon and hire teams without worrying about profitability. Now, public markets reward profitability so you need to cut costs. Isn’t it that simple and this is just Zuck’s corporate spin on it?

“We use the word ‘inflammation’ colloquially, as if we understand what we are saying. But dig a little deeper and the word becomes a clown car of meanings. Is it the chronic irritation of an autoimmune disease? The lingering residue of a postviral syndrome? A nonhealing wound?”

Good description of a generic catch-all term that could have a variety of specific meanings.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/18/all-the-carcin...

Policymakers are making a tradeoff between privacy and economic value. When governments see the potential for creating large tech companies and loose copyright policy can give them an edge, they must decide to choose between privacy or economic value.

South Korea has mirrored Japan's policy: https://metanews.com/south-korean-government-says-no-copyrig...

Only the companies in an investor’s portfolio that they truly believe in get a bridge - otherwise it’s a bridge to nowhere.

IMO bridge rounds aren’t driven by the investor’s fear of a markdown - they’re driven by the belief that the founder+team can figure it out and get to the next stage. When risking even more cash on a company that isn’t an obvious winner, you really have to believe in the team.