skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good for them. They're proving that you can get obscene valuations by using second-level advertising on the back of a low-profit, highly overvalued social network.
Bram Cohen on great programmers
I travel a lot and with more recent laptops I've never needed a second battery
I've enjoyed the Head First books series - you'd probably want to check out head first java and head first servlets and jsp. These books are very casual, wordy, and informal, so if you want a dense overview (which you might, considering that you are not new to programming), you might want to look elsewhere. But if you like the writing style, they'd be a good intro for even an experienced programmer.

oh - a link to this is wickedlysmart.com
Slide Gets Their Huge Valuation And Raises $50 million
Don't make too much fun unless you know the numbers. For all I know they might be generating huge profits. What makes you think their valuation is too high?
Actually I've noticed exactly the opposite.
Kevin Rose doesn't deny Digg has secret editors
I absolutely agree -- the phrase"jump the shark" has now jumped the shark. Seems to be egregiously mis-used and over-used especially by tech bloggers.
Long time lurker, finally registered to respond to this.

On controversial matters like race, religion or abortion, no matter what your position is and how sure you are about it, there almost certainly exists someone on the other side who's better educated/informed and just as sure as you. My ideal community site would allow the most extreme opinions, but not let any group jam the signal for others. For example, the Wikipedia page "Race and intelligence" would be much improved if it were split into two pages side by side, each editable by only one of the factions.
Benford's law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Haha...I can imagine its a quad core, 4 gigs of ram and running vista.

:)
I was more joking than being serious.

Max Levchin's name is worth a lot of money, though, so that might have been a major factor in the high valuation. Do you think they deserve half-a-billion valuation while running on the back of Facebook? I don't know their numbers, but 500 million dollars is a lot of money.
eSolar Gets $10 Million from Google.org
Depends on what you mean by "suck" -- I don't know any hackers who are IM strength or better, perhaps because of the enormous amount of time you need to devote to both programming and chess to become an expert. But I know lots of good hackers who are also above-average chess players.
There's also a free program that does that, along with various other background noises:

http://www.peterhirschberg.com/mysoftware.html (Aire Freshener)
As a programmer, I can tell you I really don't mind that changing my website requires a programmer. It's perfectly convenient for me.

The only reason to do something differently is a client requirement, or a desire on my part to get someone else to do stuff for me.
It's not a question of "branding someone a traitor". There was an embargo against Serbia at the time, and the 1992 Fischer-Spassky chess match constituted a major commercial transaction (considering the press coverage and the $5 million prize money at stake). The State Department told Fischer about the consequences of playing the game well before it happened -- not only did he play the game anyway, he spat upon the letter from the State Department. IMHO he got pretty much what he deserved for that sort of behavior -- why not just play the match somewhere else, anyway?
My high point at chess was when I was 8 and beat some newb with the four move checkmate. My chess career quickly went downhill from there.
Compared to other server side web technologies, Java is definitely not slow. It's a common misconception that Java itself is slow, probably because many Java desktop apps are slow.
I mostly post controversial comments. This is obviously not the ideal way to get high karma, but I'm not very active and have 188 karma anyway, so it seems to work fine.
Mashups are great for cheap bastards
It's pretty amazing what you can do with free tools and services nowadays. And its even better when you can combine the power of these tools with the data within your internal systems.
Maybe you won't get to 250 points and will be stuck with orange as your top color forever!
I agree. CSS as a layout system is poorly thought out and even more poorly implemented. Why, to center an object, do I have to remember trivia like "the parent needs a width." You need hacks and non-intuitive tricks for cross-browser CSS. Tables are verbose, but they "just work" more often. I still use CSS layouts, but man what a steaming pile.
LOL, this is always one o my favorite insults, "he uses tables in his html"
Most likely because PG or whomever else coded the site doesn't know how to use HTML with CSS, doesn't care to learn, and doesn't think it's important enough to learn.

People might down-mod me for that, but it's basically the truth.

Now, the only real benefits that Paul would probably consider CSS giving him would be the bandwidth usage (stylesheets are cached) and maintenance issue.

I can't imagine either of those two would be enough to coerce him into learning a whole new way of doing things.

I certainly think that PG is missing many more benefits by not coding the site properly, but from his vantage point, (and everyone else who would see learning css as confusing and pointless) it's likely that the risk/reward assessment is not pointing in favour of a tableless layout.
Maybe I'm completely out of the loop on this one... but how do they make money?
I'm not sure. You don't buy facebook apps, you just use them if someone else invite you to. Is it possible that the advertising revenue is deep enough to support a 50+ employee company?
Isn't Dvorak a self-admitted troll? It's quite obvious he either doesn't know about postgres, which means he didn't do any research for writing this article, or he does and he didn't mention it, which would mean he's trying to make his angle more legitimate than it really is.
Cloud Computing: Watch Out IT, It's Raining Jargon
>The answer being who gives a shit?

As a web developer, you should. It will save you work in the long run (see below).

As a hacker, you should, the same way you care about the beauty of readable code in any other language.

As a business owner, you should, because it will save you money, in bandwidth costs, future maintenance, training etc etc.

>Does it look fine in most browsers?

It looks fine in most browsers because the browser decided to make it look fine. That doesn't mean that it'll look fine in the browser everyone is using tomorrow. That means more work for you down the road, for no particular reason.

Do I care about it? No, not really. But I do get a little annoyed at hackers that concern themselves with code elegance in every language except HTML.
>How old is your computer?

On the internet, it shouldn't matter. :)
Does it matter for this site? No.

Should you, as a developer (ahem... I mean hacker), care about the quality of the markup your app is producing. Definitively yes..
You can't "hack" html or css, they aren't languages. Furthermore, CSS is a lie. A lie for designer snobs.
>Why, to center an object, do I have to remember trivia like "the parent needs a width."

Because you're still viewing the page as a table. Once you stop doing this, you stop asking questions like these.
>You have almost completely re-think your UI when you are developing for a different device. Re-using CSS layouts is nearly impossible for that.

You don't re-use the CSS, you re-use the HTML. That's the point. All it needs is a new style sheet, not a whole new webapge.
I really wish someone made wise estimates of their current revenue/profit numbers or at least provide the thought process that went behind coming up with $500M+ valuation.
That's the Digital Mars D compiler being benchmarked. I bet the GDC compiler is really, really close to GCC's performance since it uses the same optimizers and backend.
CSS has a learning curve yes, so it always going to seem harder than it should be in the beginning, but otherwise it shouldn't make a difference time-wise to create a table or css based layout.
It certainly seems a lot easier to get a huge valuation from Wall Street than from Sand Hill Road. A lot of these "mega-valuations" (zillow, ning, slide, etc) have gotten funding from PE, hedge, and investment houses instead of classic VC.
> It will save you work in the long run

That's the biggest lie of them all. And maintenance? No one does that, they do re-writes. How many hours have I wasted on this joke of not using tables?
...says the developer snob.
> As a programmer, I can tell you I really don't mind that changing my website requires a programmer. It's perfectly convenient for me.

That's refreshingly honest. :)
Yes, in fact web advertising has proved to be deep enough to support all of Google!

Of course there is a limit to the total amount of advertising dollars available and many half-good companies may not be good enough to support themselves with advertising, but there is no question that a good company can do very well on advertising alone.
I'm sorry you haven't seen the light yet, brother :-)
Wow, I really wish Dvorak would stop using such insane, incredible, horrifying and superfluously inappropriate superlative hyperbole.

I just ignore his stuff these days.
Oh, so when everyone keeps saying the cake is a lie, they mean "CSS" by "the cake"?
$500 million is 4 times as much revenue as Facebook anticipated for last year.
I will. Just in general - not for programming.

Part of my problem with music and programming is - that I like distracting and complex music.
I've been frustrated lately at humorous comments and the rapid rate at which they are upmodded. A quick bit of humour can be great at cutting to the heart of the issue, but it often seems like humour comes at the expense of over-simplification. Apologies for taking it out on you though!
Did anyone die when he spat on the letter? I don't care for his political views either. But I don't think anyone should be chased around the world like that because of the views they hold.
That's an interesting perspective. The problem that initially jumps out at me is what to do when there aren't two clear sides to an issue. Any ideas on handling complicated, muddled, and contentious issues with multiple sides?
I would have violated the trade embargo for prize money that big.
I expect that by "CSS layout", they meant "HTML which is laid out by CSS".
I respect that you disagree with me but rational argument would be better than downmods.
"I've quit coding for a year."
I think it's within 20%.
AOL adopting XMPP aka Jabber
So lets assume that the costs for a successful web company are a small fraction of revenue (maybe 20%?). That's profits of 100 million a year for last-year's-Facebook.

So if this company makes 1/10th the profits of Facebook, it will take 50 years to make enough profits to cover it's current valuation. Of course, if this company is as profitable as last-year's-Facebook then their total profits will exceed their valuation after 5 years.

So I guess the question then is whether social-networking apps have the potential to generate similar revenues to the big social networking sites.
Benchmarking ActiveDocument vs ActiveRecord
Me neither, but my MacBook Pro's battery has close to 200 cycles and it's pretty much dead. I'll need to get a new one, and it's nice to be able to just swap it out.
The Onion's articles are usually too well summarized by the title to be worth reading. This one had more to say...not much, but worth reading if you were going to read the new york times style section instead.
Have you ever operated a website with over a hundred pages? Just curious.

And as far as hours wasted, having coded both ways, and originally viewing css as stupid and more work, I can now code a website in half the time using it than tables.

In fact, when I'm just hacking something quick, it's great not to bother with any layout at all and just come back to it when I have the time. You can't do that with tables.
Verifying Elections with Cryptography, Google Tech Talk [Video]
Even if they did, you can basically re-do the entire UI without touching the HTML if you separate presentation from it by using CSS.
Because the data is tabular?
PlentyOfFish.com
Possibly Greenest City - Masdar City in Abu Dhabi
... Until you realize that your fancy CSS doesn't display properly in IE6.
Skype mood feature security vulnerability
Premature optimization is literally a waste of life.
I'll agree that that's the ideal, but I've also found that designers and clients are good at coming up with layouts for which it is far simpler to change the HTML than to try to contort it into the right places with CSS.
Instead of sending back those dollars to us and receiving goods from us, they would stuff them under a mattress

Usually they take the cash and invest it in US Government Bonds or private stocks and bonds. This high demand for bonds means our government can offer them at really low rates, and there are still takers. (China has something like $300 billion of US Bonds.) This is an added bonus for us. In this way, our currency's primary status is kind of self-perpetuating. Our currency is backed in faith in the solvency of the US Government, and our Government can borrow money really really cheaply to deal with any crisis it needs to, keeping it solvent where other governments would fail.

(For anyone out there that is scared what will happen if the rest of the world started dumping it's dollar-back assets, remember that less than half of the 'National Debt' is owed to foreigners, and many of these countries use dollars to stabilize their own currencies, so this would amount to financial suicide for them.)
It's not like China is sitting on a big mountain of Ben Franklins somewhere. If it is smart (and it is), it invests the dollars it is hoarding in US Bonds or some other very safe vehicle (US Bonds might as well be bulletproof, short of WWIII). The problem is that even though China is investing in dollar-assets, this isn't counted in the silly trade deficit figures.
Facebook was anticipating on the order of $30 million in profit, as I recall (serving out billions of pageviews is never cheap). Feel free to multiply all of your time estimates by three.
I've bought a 15" macbook pro (2.16GHz model) and a more recent 17" macbook pro (thanks, work!). I prefer the 17" - it's not that much bigger than the 15, and offers significantly more res even without the 1920x1200 option.

I don't think the macbook air would make a great dev machine.
That's a very keen observation. I am not sure about the 'lot easier' part though.

One thing that's common among all these "mega-valuations" startups are star-founders who have had billion dollar exits in the past.
He wasn't chased around the world for spitting, or for the views he held -- he was accused of violating the trade embargo, which is a serious allegation.
I'm open to new perspectives. In what way I should I see the page such that "center me in my parent" is unreasonable unless the parent has a fixed width? What, in particular, about the box model makes this impossible?
Funny is, Microsoft's market cap is 30x Intuit's. Facebook's worth $15 billion? Slide's worth $500million. See? Ratios are easy!
Hi dfranke - I'm the author of anyterm and I run my.anyterm.org. No, you don't have to trust me. my.anyterm.org is clearly insecure. But it is useful to people who don't need much security. I understand that many people just use it for text-based chat and things like that. Also, some people will subscribe because, although it's insecure, it's a better choice than flying home half way through their holiday....
What are doing to use it for? Dev / Scoring Chicks (like thats gonna happen) / Browsing... ?
Do women have higher bandwidth than men?
It's a moot point anyway because most of the time when you make a moral stand in your product you end up making the experience for its audience better. The tricky part is knowing which types of people you'll lose or gain based on those moral stands.
Hey may not be a web designer, but he's certainly not an idiot.

http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/08/30/cited-in-the-fi...
http://www.songfight.org/ ?
"I am amazed I managed to create this program in the first place, I barely barely even understand how it works and I wrote it. This is because the program scans in multiple dimensions is very hard to conceptualize. "

He may indeed be a savant.
I have to disagree with you Paul, A list suits much more this kind of data than a table.
Java is definitely not slow, not at least compared to Python or Ruby. And if you're going to write your webapp in C, good luck. Actually Java can be quite fast now, often times faster than C because of the JIT compiler and incredible optimizations. IIRC the latest release of JRuby is faster than the C Ruby implementation.

With that said I never liked Java for web development.
One important fact you miss (and the author missed also). All US bonds are dollar denominated assets.

The dollar was hugely overvalued (and still is, but less), as a direct result of China (and others) buying all this debt. By the time we repay this debt, the dollar will be less overvalued. This means that China gave us a $1=100 yuan loan, and gets back $1=80 yuan (numbers strictly made up, interest neglected).

To push the analogy way too far, it's as if I bought stuff on a credit card, with payments due in AngryProfessorBucks (which I can print as many of as I want).

So in short, it's good for us, but sucks for China. We get cheap products now, and pay for it with low value currency later.
The notion of "center" doesn't exist without a width.

Now, you could give the object in question a width and simply give it margin-left/right: auto. That would center it in the width-less parent, but it wouldn't fix its position to the particular spot you're currently seeing it in.

For understanding, take it up to the highest level, the browser window. Make your browser 1024x768. Now make it bigger or larger - where is the "center"? It's moved depending on the size of the browser window.

If you have a parent whose width is variable, you can't center the child. The key is that, unlike years of using tables to hack up a website, the canvas CSS uses is variable; its height and width is undefined. Thinking of it like this, it makes perfect sense that center isn't used.
"The consequences are stunning: Digg is not a democracy of news, and the way headlines make their way to Digg's homepage are neither fair nor transparent."

LOL, some people act as if Digg is a nation-state or, even, Google. Was there really anyone out there who thought that Digg has no moderators for spam, kiddie porn, etc?
A mature version would be great for surgeons and pilots.
Um, Tabular data of a single column is usually referred to as a list. :-)

Seriously though, it's not just a list, it's an ordered list.
Which, on a site like this, can be safely ignored! :)
So you admit that fancy CSS for mainstream sites is generally a huge time sink?
I don't follow. At any instant in time, every element on a webpage has a well-formed width. So why can't a child be centered, using that width?
No, spending time correcting bugs of a browser that 3% of a particular site's users actually use is a waste of time.

Correcting IE6 bugs on a mainstream site is part of the job. (and not that bad once you get the hang of it unless you've got a heavy design)

I'd be very surprised if a CSS version of Hacker news needed any IE hacks at all really.
It's not just an ordered list! It's also a database!

But seriously, you can play that game forever. At some point, you have to pick one definition and stick with it. This site uses tables.
It's been pointed out that HTML is not Turing complete. You can interpret a page as a state and a link as a transition. That makes HTML the equivalent of regular expressions. Definitely worthy of the title hack.
For classicals I find light-hearted sonatas and chamber music good for concentration. Symphonies are usually too distracting.

Other times I like the "ambient" channel on www.pandora.com. A while ago when I was hooked on Flight Simulator I had a Boeing 747 running in the background while I worked. The engine sound + distant radio chatters produce a calm atmosphere.
I remember reading somewhere that this could be used to detect fraud when you're looking at a set of numbers. It's counter-intuitive, so most people, when they're making up fake data skew outside of Benford's law.

A quick search on google says that I wasn't dreaming.
http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/may1999/nigrini.htm
>At any instant in time, every element on a webpage has a well-formed width.

That's not exactly true. Every block element has a width, but inline objects do not. Furthermore, some block elements may have fixed widths, while others may be designed to take up as little as they require.

The "center" attribute that you describe would run counter to the visual formatting model of the standard that is in place to support a number of other things. That would mean that its behaviour would be next to impossible to design around if you were trying to account for all of your users screen sizes at the same time.

See here: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/visuren.html#containing-block
That's just it though, it doesn't. It simply uses tables to display the list, when it doesn't have to.

Not worth arguing over in all but the lowest levels though.
Ok, I relent. Bubble 2.0 it is.
Sure does (East Side). I was talking about MCplusplus, though.
It's not overvalued at all. They could probably pull in $50M-$100M a year in revenue right now with their traffic, extrapolating a bit from the revenues we're getting from our single application.

I'm pretty surprised by how many hackers here are completely missing this boat. IMHO it would be worth it to do a little more research before dismissing the entire space - this is going to play a larger and larger role in the future of the internet IMO.
Silicon Valley TechStars mixer this Thursday; applications open Sunday
There are only three columns on the front page now, but when I was working on the site I experimented with different layouts in which there were more. Why constrain myself by using a degenerate case of tables?

I can't believe this thread has 49 comments (and counting). What a classic bicycle shed.
I'm curious what PG thinks. This seems like a bad idea for Slide to me, as they've now limited themselves to an IPO, or an acquisition by a massive corporation.
This is their fourth round of funding - it's quite common to go to a larger institution for later rounds of funding for a mezzanine round before an IPO.
I was a lead developer on a massive website...

If you are a programmer on a large site you won't touch the design. It will be done by a skilled designer, or designing firm. You won't care how its done whatsoever.

There is a lot more to say here...but basically you won't touch the design. Or want to. Or care how its done :)
MediaTemple Grid Upgrade the ClusterServer on the Way
You might want to work through "Core Java Servlets and Java server Pages" available free at http://pdf.coreservlets.com/. A good understanding of servlets and jsp will stand you in good stead when you graduate to frameworks like Struts.

Likewise you might want to play around with basic JDBC before you look at ORMs like Hibernate or Cayenne.

As far as frameworks go my reccomendation is to use Wicket. It avoids a lot of the cruft of Struts.
Its not pure humor; I really think its probably overvalued. And I'm a pretty sarcastic person anyway, so most of my comments come out like that.
Well, you're participating... :-p

But seriously, what do you mean degenerate case of tables? CSS?

I suppose my biggest gripe is a statement like that; once understood and learned, HTML w/ CSS is actually easier to use. It's easier to code, re-code, fix, format, and just generally muck around with.

Aside from that though, inconsequential.
Redefining Professionalism for Software Engineers
Dec. 19th, 2004

Perhaps it's just me, but I find his more recent stuff a lot more interesting (especially the puzzles).