skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Auto insurance
Auto insurance, student loans consolidation private, direct and federal loans, car insurance, auto insurance companies,US and UK insurance companies, health insurance agent, health insurance company all information
Mostly due to the tag-closing behaviour.

I guess I don't really understand this; best practice in HTML is to close tags and quote attributes just as in XHTML. The only difference is XHTML requires it.

As for self-closing tags, the only one I use, at all, is <img>, and I'm perfectly OK with having to handle that (largely because I don't; there are already libraries which will generate my HTML for me).
Happiness, whether consisting in pleasure or virtue, or both, is more often found with those who are highly cultivated in their minds and in their character, and have only a moderate share of external goods, than among those who possess external goods to a useless extent but are deficient in higher qualities. - Aristotle

Of course, Aristotle was a bourgeois (i.e. not proud of being ignorant) and his opinions should be taken with a grain of salt.
Will Wikileaks drown in its own red ink?
As if that weren't bad enough, at least half of them are still below average.
He nailed it but was wrong on timing? That's like really nailing it on flying cars and the return of the Messiah. Maybe in a few centuries we'll be reaping the benefits of XML databases and salute Steve Yegge's prophetic vision. Come on.
That is interesting, from where did you get the notion that site asks you to pay. That would be a serious miscommunication which the author will surely like to remove.
Makes sense. Here in America, we spend a lot of our income just "keeping up with the Joneses". If next-door neighbor Mr. Jones has a nice HD flatscreen, I absolutely have to get one, if not a better one, or else I look relatively less successful[1]. It was this mentality that drove a lot of people into debt over the last decade or two. Everyone's income was basically flat, but they saw neighbors improving their standard of living and buying stuff, and so, afraid to admit weakness, they bought stuff too, using credit beyond their means, which of course caused the neighbors to do the same thing. Ditto for the housing bubble - people took out mortgages they couldn't afford because they looked around and saw their peers doing the same thing and didn't want to be left behind.

[1] - "I" here stands for the prototypical American, not just me specifically.
When I read that headline a few days ago, my interpretation was this: the study shows that educated people tend to prefer Obama. However, they can't print that, even if it's true, because it will insult a lot of their readers. So "educated" becomes "over-educated" which retains some degree of accuracy and doesn't offend "over-educated" people as much as the other version would offend under-educated ones.
What do you expect? He is from Microsoft. He may never have used anything other than Windows.
In "Marketing Warfare," Reis and Trout explain that while you should take advantage of a competitor's weakness, you should never make it your primary point of attack. In stead, you should attack a competitor's strength.

The problem with a weakness is that a competitor can fix it, nullifying your attack. In fact, they may already be working on a fix, so you may get to market and discover your entire strategy is bunk. Whereas they can't 'fix' one of their strengths. In more modern terms, attacking their strength is leveraging The Innovator's Dilemma.

So about multi-tasking. Whoop-de-doo. This is a weakness Apple can fix with a minor point release of their OS. iPads have more battery and a faster processor, they are probably already toying with the idea. This is not a point of attack for Google.

OTOH, the Apple Store is a strength for Apple. The well-behaved apps are a benefit for users, so having an open ecosystem is attacking Apple's strength. If Apple opens its ecosystem up, junkware, malware, and other forms of app garbage will quickly follow, which will eat away at Apple's control of the user experience.

Thus, openness is a great strategy for Google to follow, while multi-tasking is simply something they should do but not hang their hat on.
Depends on your goal. If your goal is to avoid making statements that are wrong, then sure. If your goal is to be interesting and say provocative things, maybe not so much. :)
I'm not sure exactly how optimized Dvorak is. There are far more sophisticated (computerized) ways to optimize keyboard layout now than there was back when the Dvorak layout was created.

Also, although those punctuation characters are indeed important (though I'd add '/', and '-' to your short-list), you probably type the alphabetic characters far more (just my guess, admittedly).
A way to get notified of replies to your comments on hacker news
add http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=your_username_here to google reader to create an rss feed from it. Then subscribe to that feed however you like to follow it and be notified of updates. yay.
I don't think it's proud of being ignorant, but rather an anti-intellectual.

Geoffrey Canada (a guy who's doing some great work as CEO of the Harlem Children Zone) had an interesting comment during an economic competitiveness summit on a similar trend:

"There is a sense in this country that in my belief is anti-intellectual. There is almost a case to be made against smart people and that has penetrated I think from the top leadership in this country right through the ‘hood’ where people look down on folk who are academically prepared gifted and we’ve gotta change this culture, America is fascinated by whether you can drink a beer. That’s not, that should not be the qualification for a president. A president ought to be able to lead the nation in a direction where young people aspire for the kind of genius that’s around this table."

"Smart" people have sometimes done mean things and deserve some of the disdain they get, but I'm just disappointed how much social value is placed on silly things like excessive beer drinking which leads to popularity and thus what some young people aspire to do because intellectuals are seen as irrelevant and dull.

I think there is some connection between this perception and lower desire by students to want to enter into math and computer science... right at the point in history where such skills are in demand.

(p.s. video of summit where Canada made the comment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z7_A-rkOjA )
Flying cars are nowhere to be seen, neither is the return of messiah.

The point is that Steve's predictions are actually observable, though some of them are advancing at a slower pace than he thought (and a tiny bit different, like JSON instead of XML, which IMHO is irrelevant).
Just came here to say the same thing. Also loved many saying that Facebook hasn't open sourced anything (and even in the ones that do realize that they've open sourced code, no one mentions Tornado).
Thank goodness I took typing in high school. If you didn't, then get yourself a "typing tutor" program and practice, practice, practice. Amaze your friends with touch-typing prowess and vim muscle memory!
I don't buy it. It's all anecdotal. Is there a statistical correlation between the cat remaining with a person for more than X minutes and the person dying within Y days? My bet is that staff predictions have a better track record.
Hyped Launches With Affiliates Selling HOPE to the Hopeless
Wow, after two years of WinAVR and the Arduino IDE people get something like this! I wonder how the compile and run time is on board? I do have a feeling that this also might make it easy to write bad programs as quickly as good ones!
I'm not sure if that applies here. Most people "waste" a certain amount of their week on downtime, and that's probably healthy for them. Whereas in ages past that was checkers at the general store or a bard's stories at dinner or listening to the radio, today it's TV and video games. A person who watches 40 hours of TV a week for fun is in just as much trouble as a guy who plays WoW or EVE for 40 hours a week.
Cute article.

One nitpick--newspapers did not put the interesting parts above the folder in order to entice people to read the rest. They put it there to entice impulse buys, and they couldn't care less if it gets read.

Websites are fundamentally different in that respect because even if the point is to sell ads, like with newspapers, we can actually track the ads on websites so we can't get away with just going by how many people bought the paper.
There are a few people trying [struggling] to make flying cars too!

(but I agree with you :))
Yeah, but keeping this stuff in mind can really help when you're ordering members in a struct/class.
I think the "buy" menu item on the home page suggests commerce.
For some perspective on this, check out how public photography is regarded in France:

http://www.largeformatphotography.info/forum/showthread.php?...

http://photo.net/street-documentary-photography-forum/009utT
It is not a matter of choice. There are better web frameworks, as well as there are better tools for some tasks.

Seriously, I'm not saying that Rails is better than Django.

I'm sure there's a set of tasks where Django is much more better at than Rails. I'm just saying that I can't stand it that I have to write plugins for pretty standard stuff.
Only if it's a standard distribution (eg bell curve). It's quite possible with a non-standard distribution to have much more than half above average as well. Now median on the other hand, by definition, separates the distribution in half... </pedantic>
testing this here :)
Chicago Family Law, Illinois
Illinois Divorce Lawyers, Chicago Family Law. Listing of Chicago divorce lawyers and Chicago divorce attorneys
Not that I'm doubting you, but it doesn't really make sense to me.

Browsers sniff the doctype to change rendering mode, but that's after they've already decided that it's HTML that they're going to display.

IE6 & 7 do content type sniffing, where they ignore what the server tells them it is and try and figure it out themselves, by looking at various bits of info including the start of the file.

This could lead to HTML being downloaded if it happened to look like a RAR file to IE, but generally it has the opposite effect as in something being sent as plain text that happens to include tags being rendered as HTML.

If anything, shortening the doctype should make something look more like HTML since it works without any doctype at all and the shorter the doctype the more room for HTML tags.

On the other hand content-sniffing is always going to give you unexpected results. Is there anything about the particular file you had that makes it atypical or likely to look like a binary file if you only consider the start of it?
So far, this is all I have seen today:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_gets_faster_de...
On branching
damn, sorry guys, seems like "Google was not able to access this page to check for updates. This page may be unavailable or have other restrictions that prevent Google from getting updates."

perhaps it will work later. <holds thumbs>
I see where he is going, but I think he used a terrible example of the 37 signals web page. He says they don't call you to action until the bottom of the page. But their four products are clearly displayed "above the fold".

I was buying what he had to say until he used this example that clearly didn't sell the point.

EDIT
Also his design is amazing. Someone of less a caliber might not have gotten me to read the article. I'm still going to be putting my "buy" button "above the fold"
Just because you didn't get the biggest percentage cut doesn't mean you still didn't get a price cut! Be grateful they are even passing this on to customers...they very well could have kept the extra .02 as added profit margin.
not for any amount of extended typing

Agreed, but there's an ace in the hole: It apparently supports Bluetooth keyboards out of the box.

I have literally been waiting for this for fifteen years: A portable machine that (a) lets me carry a little portable keyboard that can be separated from the display, and (b) doesn't also make me carry around a useless extra keyboard that is attached to the display. (I don't like laptop keyboards. They are almost as un-ergonomic as the iPad's virtual keyboard is likely to be.)

Now if only we can get the thing to run emacs...
I can't agree with the 37signals.com screenshot being described as "the user shouldn’t feel too overwhlemed. Everything has a bit of space and isn’t fighting for attention."

As I've been designing the marketing pages of my app I've drawn lots of inspiration from lots of different sites. And everytime I bring up one of theirs, I'm struck by how cramped and jam-packed full of extraneous information they are now.

If you compare http://basecamphq.com to something like, say, http://checkoutapp.com/ or http://sifterapp.com/ it just comes across as too much.
I haven't read this book, but this other review was a great overview.

http://www.amazon.com/review/RUGSCP3XBNBUV/ref=cm_cr_rdp_per...
Yes, that's why he's leaving to pursue Bingo Card Creator fulltime.
They are 'observable' if you bend your critical faculties to a point where small airplanes are flying cars and the Messiah is your favourite politician. Most of Steve's predictions are nonsense. Most predictions are, so it's hardly Steve's fault. But going through great logical contortions to defend some predictions the guy was either brave or foolish enough to commit to paper in 2004? I'll say again, come on.
Apple Open Source
The first 10 years of touch typing, I thought that writing in a language that had very long variable and method names was unpleasant, as the time it took to focus on writing code delayed my mind thinking about the code. I'm not sure when the final shift happened, but it is now nearly twenty years I have been typing, and my hands know where all the keys are. I have no idea which finger presses which key, because my mind is 100% not involved. A direct mental interface would certainly be a nice improvement though.

To anyone out there who is still hunting and pecking, do yourself a huge favor that will pay dividends over the years, force yourself to learn to touch type. It doesn't take long to at least get to the point where you don't have to look at the keyboard.
According to what I've read, it's not too surprising that some of these studies found no effect: a 400 UI daily dose is too small to make a difference, especially if not taken in a gelcap (vit D is fat soluble).
Interesting story. I wonder, though, about the company's dependence on Adwords. What if costs go up, and/or the site is unable to get good search engine ranking for proofing services?
I'm interested in how this applies with another one of the author's posts - about the rise of Behavior Generated Content (http://blog.hellohenrik.com/?p=268). It seems like there should be a good idea in combining the two (and in fact, I'm working on something that does that).

I don't know if it's about pure shallowness or vanity as much as people simply enjoy a little attention now and again (some more than others). It relates to the Maya Angelou quote: "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." It's a great concept to start incorporating into our applications - how are we making people feel by using our applications?
The issue with WoW in the original WoW and The Burning Crusade wasn't that only a small fraction of the people saw the content, it was that only a small fraction of the people could see the content. If I wanted to even set foot in the final dungeon, I'd need 24 other players with me, and all 25 of us would have had to have beaten all of the previous dungeons many times (and they're limited to being done once a week) and done a pile of quests to even get into those dungeons. So I'd literally have to have been max-level for about 4-6 months and playing 20+ hours/week during that time before I could attempt the final dungeon, and then the bosses were so hard that only a few hundred teams could beat them.

The solution Blizzard implemented in Wrath of the Lich King (the newest expansion) is to scale the big dungeons (raids) so that 10-man teams and 25-man teams can do them, and also have easy modes and hard modes, so that Ensidia (the best WoW guild) can be challenged by the Hard Mode and the more casual players can struggle against (but ultimately beat) the normal mode. They also kept adding new ways to get gear, so that people trying to break into raiding on the top level wouldn't have to spend months in the earlier raids, and they were pretty successful at that.

You're absolutely right that a more fully developed world with content that not every player would see is very important, but that content's only valuable if it's accessible to all the players. Anyone can go to the Cow Level in Diablo II, which is what made it great. But not everyone could kill Illidan or Kiljaedan in WoW, which was why it was a waste of money.
I wonder if the timing has to do with all the bad press Amazon had the last few days.

Now I know this was in a pipeline for a long time, there is no way you do something like this on a whim. But I wonder if they moved up the timing of the release of the announcement in order to get some good press going again
I think the answer is in why so many people are enjoying Instapaper. My problem with delicious is that it's too hard to get links in to the damn thing.
PCI is a half-baked "solution" to protecting cardholders, and in the end it's just an excuse to charge merchants more fees.

The card brands (Visa, Mastercard, etc..) work closely with acquiring banks, merchant service providers, security vendors, and everyone else thats getting a piece of the action. Every time one of these companies speaks to a merchant the PCI boogie man is brought up, and it results in higher costs for merchants.

In the end its about shifting blame, and of course making more money. That being said it's a good thing there are security standards for cardholder data to prevent and lessen the impact of a breach. I just wish an independent group was overseeing it.
Sorry for the title mixup, I saw the video of the talk you gave at Yahoo Brickhouse a long time ago. It was very helpful at the time; I was only just starting to get into user tracking and analysis. Thanks
Regarding 1:

* XML is the most popular vehicle for representing loosely-structured, heirarchical data. Relational databases can't do this very well. ...XML can be mapped straightforwardly to the objects and data structures of modern programming languages, so it works better than relational modeling for serializing things like object graphs.*

While his estimate of market share is off (he suggested >50%), he was right about the future popularity of document databases. The only thing he got wrong was the specific serialization format.
I don't know mcuh about LISP. But what I know about OSes means I know the advantage of Everything is a File.

On Plan9 if you can open / read / write / close / remove you can do almost anything : networking, graphics, serial, debugging, mouse control, the list extends by design.

We have a few Schemes ported for those who had a personal itch. ALISP claimes a port but their site is down for me.
I'd like to say it was broken on purpose to make my point...clearly I make a poor revolutionary. (Updated to include OpenID and Twitter)
http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=5753
What's one of the reasons? That Django makes it incredibly easy to write functional, interesting template tags?
How to make digital content graspable? [video]
HN Meetup Boulder - This Week
Hi Everyone,

Let's see if we can get enough people rounded up for a HN meetup Wednesday February 2nd, 2010 at 5:00 PM at the Southern Sun. Please reply in the comments if you can make it.
Sure. And they did say those things. And the sites that genuinely cared about user needs, both past and present? They did the 'inefficient' thing. They optimized for whatever was best-of-breed at the time (IE, FBConnect) for ease of use, then found a way to also cater to whatever came up next. Many headaches were caused by IE/Firefox incompatibility, but Firefox is still gaining marketshare today.
"Have I just hit a bad corner of the Lisp world?"

Sort of.

The real problem is that it is difficult to know what the current 'best' implementations of different libraries are, and what versions of common lisp they are intended to build under (and operating system!)

This is compounded by the fact that the higher level libraries have more dependencies.

As there are dozens of libraries and a smallish CL community, this leads to the problem where author of sub-library a makes change which breaks dependent library b, and no one realizes this for months and months. When someone such as yourself comes along (even if it is possible for the library to work quite well with minor changes), the build process fails is not so obvious about what is wrong. Your reaction is to say 'CL is totally fucked' and run screaming to the hills is only natural.

That said, I have a few tips:

1.) If you are going to use an open source lisp, linux is generally the easier operating system to run it on.

2.) If you are going to download a library, don't use asdf-install.

ASDF itself is great for actually structuring the project and laying out your directories in a coherent manner (managing dependencies), but asdf-install is a waste of time (in my opinion, anyway, I'm sure someone will disagree with me).

Instead, go to the library's page/repo and download the latest version.

Make sure that someone has been working on the library recently (I try for < 1 year since last update).
(Another good way to check if a library works is to search Github...
EX: http://github.com/search?type=Code&language=common-lisp&...
).

Once you get a version that works, hang onto it somewhere in case the guy working on it breaks it with an update. If you can find a version that almost works, it is (a lot of the time) worth it to salvage it and push the updates.

Just read the error messages very carefully and it should be fixable.

asdf-install is great in theory, but there are too many synchronization issues, and not enough humans pushing fixes/updates to manage them.

3.) Keep your lisp image up to date. The people developing libraries are generally using the latest build of clozure/sbcl/etc. You should too.

Scheme implementations don't have these problems because there is no expectation of write once run anywhere with regard to libraries. Different implementations have their own package managers and BDFLs.

Clojure doesn't have this problem because it hasn't been around long enough to have a lot of dead libraries.

I'd like to point out that it is perfectly reasonable to program functionally in common lisp. I take a fairly functional style in most of my code.

edit:punctuation, grammar...
Production Server Sysadmin Essentials (rails)
Small airplanes already existed in 2004, and politician and son-of-god is quite a bit different than XML and JSON which are basically interchangeable serialization formats for the purposes they are both used.
ok, sorry for what may be a retarded question: I looked at the site but can't really understand what this does for me. I have an Arduino. Why and for what would I use Pyxis?
Math doesn't coerce anybody. People do. Just keep in mind that prices are discovered, not decreed, and don't send armed men after me for disobeying you, and we'll get along just fine.
Time-To-Know Aims To Revolutionize The Classroom
Brad Feld: Be the CEO of Your Job