skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey John I know you are around HN and might look at this thread. I really want to hear what your opinion is of http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/

I've always thought a unification of it with jquery/node.js/processing.js into one ultimate stack would be interesting. Any thoughts?
For a split second I thought it was a newly discovered da Vinci sketch.
Hmm..that's not very good, is it? I for one almost always open links this way...
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YouNoodle is going through some exciting growth right now.
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You're right, and it's insane that you can't drag a file to the browser dialog on windows. But that doesn't make it less insane that you couldn't drag a file directly to a webpage until just recently.

I don't think that it's just browsers that aren't innovating -- desktop UIs have been stale crufty shit for years. OSX may have had some improvements but it's still a lot of cruft. Ubuntu seems to be doing some interesting things recently, but that doesn't get linux off the hook for not doing interesting things earlier (and I'm speaking here about average-user-friendliness, not cool stuff for us hacker types).

To be honest, I think a lot of the innovation in mobile UIs has come from the fact that it was hard/impossible to port over the old UI, so they actually had to think up something new. Touch and form-factor are just the constraints that forced people to actually think about UI. Desktop UIs could be orders of magnitude better if the OS shell teams were put in the same situation.
The CSS3 solution is the Flexible Box Model. It's been implemented in Gecko and Webkit browsers for a long time now: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/04/the-css-3-flexible-box-mode...

Anyone want to write a compatibility shim for IE?
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Have you ever imagined a story narrated on a saree? India and its garments, especially sarees have been the bed of seamless creativity.
if you can point to some language in the spec that would
prevent the optimization, I'd love to see it.

The author added an update that says, among other things:

In contrast, the Java language definition is quite clear
that infinite loops may not be terminated by the JVM.

(with a link to the JLS)
Yes! And the Android back button as another example of operating systems playing catch-up to web browsers. (Clearly the innovation and imitation is flowing in both directions.)
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It pays to be forward looking when your supplier reserves the rights to re-negotiate your terms.
Maybe I spent too long around TeX and Postscript, but it seems perfectly natural to me that when a layout can't be described in a declarative language like CSS, you would turn to a computational language instead.
I kind of feel bad now because this really isn't that big of a deal... I think I just couldn't pass on the opportunity to take my general dislike for 'transparency' out on someone. Sorry, Posterous! :(
iPhones don't even support Main profile (though some suggest that the 3GS actually has enough power to do so, it's only software limited by Apple to keep the line homogenous).

Search for "Baseline Profile" on this page for the full details:

http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html
We used to do it that way, but we stopped because it was breaking people's installs. Sometimes we have to push half-baked code, and if you sync at that point, bad things may happen.

Also, we stopped doing it because it meant revealing features before we were ready to reveal them, like sponsored links. That is when we split the public and live repos. Before that, the public repo was the live repo.
The new $100 bill and the war against counterfeiting
Choice and accessible design
I don't really like the precedent this kind of case sets.
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http://www.opower.com/Careers/CurrentOpportunities.aspx

This is from a friend of mine:
I recently changed jobs to a software company with a focus on utilities - OPOWER - and we're growing rapidly. I was employee 75 and we're projected to have over 150 by the end of the year. As software is our product, we need the best and smartest engineers and developers we can find. It's a very cool, casual atmosphere and a great place to work but being on the east coast, it's very hard to find the level of talent that we need.

On the off chance that you know anybody that would be willing to move to DC, please, please let them know that we're hiring. Beyond the fact that DC is, in fact, a great town to live in, it's a great company with wonderful benefits and new candidates receive options in a growing company. I know it's a long shot, but I figured it's at least a good excuse to get in touch. Seriously, we need the best people we can get, and fast.
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Infographic: Important aspects of SEO
Recently, I stumbled across a great SEO Infographic which addresses many common questions raised by Webmasters or Search Engine Optimizers
Browsers know how to do this perfectly well with text—it's simply justified alignment. Shouldn't it also work for inline-blocks?
I never read that Doctorow article but will now and the book sounds fun. But he is wrong if he thinks punk was about reaching a destination. I was there. It was about energy (or in his words, process).
Grandparent wants to want to compare P(found guilty|unattractive) to P(found guilty) to reason about whether attractiveness and the jury's finding are independent.

You want to compare P(found guilty|unattractive,guilty) to P(found guilty|guilty) to see the same while taking into account the desirable bias against guilty people, which is of course more informative but has both components unknown.

These arguments tend to crop up whenever someone notices dependence between effects desired to be independent. The argument is then about where the the dependence lies. The topic is always politically sensitive.

I favor the grandparent's position, since it's the simpler one (and actually tractable). That doesn't mean it's right, and if someone's sufficiently convinced otherwise, they can attempt to estimate the guilt of various convicted (perhaps by waiting 50 years and looking for pardons). The results would have to be extraordinarily convincing, however, and quite possibly they would be harmful in that they would establish a genuine bias against unattractive people, which was the original problem.

So this is a situation where the grandparent's position is better whether or not it's right.
Check out http://caniuse.com/data.js
I'm always out of the loop... I thought I was hip to be generating CSS with some glanky PHP compiler that I wrote.
I appreciate how useful it is to them, but them having it doesn't mean I don't have it. They haven't stolen anything from me, I haven't lost anything, I don't really care if they have those stats.
I'm relatively sure, from his phrasing, that Jobs was just inaccurately quoting the MPEG-LA CEO.

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/News/Featured-N...

"no one in the market should be under the misimpression that other codecs such as Theora are patent-free. Virtually all codecs are based on patented technology, and many of the essential patents may be the same as those that are essential to AVC/H.264. Therefore, users should be aware that a license and payment of applicable royalties is likely required to use these technologies developed by others, too. MPEG LA would consider offering on additional licenses that would make these rights conveniently available to the market under a single license as an alternative to negotiating separate licenses with individual patent holders."

If you read that quickly it says the same thing as Jobs. On a second read it's all hypotheticals, maybes and weasel words.

It's not in their interest to point out all the patents that a codec that isn't even in use yet infringes. That just makes it easy to work around them. Just like Microsoft and Linux, unspecific patent threats are much more powerful than actual patents.

It's interesting to note that the MPEG-LA CEO is also the CEO of a genuine patent troll company that just sued a bunch of phone manufacturers... including Apple.

http://thepriorart.typepad.com/the_prior_art/2010/04/mobilem...
thats politics vs IT for you
Why does that contraption look like a cross?
Was that Functional Completeness not obvious in my joke?

Except that in this case, they're not quite as equivalent as NAND / NOR are — continuations assume a lot more "required stuff" (as you put it) than just a basic memory space, a means to test values, and the ability to set the program counter.
Social icons in CSS3
Wow! That's a crazy and ingenious idea and it seems to work:

http://limpet.net/mbrubeck/projects/justify-block.html

View source to see the details. It's very slightly tricky because the last line of a "text-align:justify" element is not fully justified, so you need force it to wrap. In my test file I used a generated "spacer" element to do this. In practice you would probably hide this element by setting its height to zero or something.

One nice thing about this is how it continues to work even as you resize the container so the children don't fit on one row. (Resize your browser window to try it.)
The vid I linked to is not my dad's. I think he got a segway-style 2 wheel robot to work. Took him about two months, but he doesn't have much spare time. The biggest problem was adjusting for inaccuracies in the measuring equipment.
Lessig - Against Transparency: The perils of openness in government [2009]
I teach kindergarten and my solution to the Bingo Card Making Problem is to write the words on the board (at which time we talk about the definition, use them in sentences, etc.), then I hand out paper and have each student draw the grid and write the words down randomly (gets them comfortable with learning spelling and writing). That all takes about 5 minutes. But your solution works, too.
Keep in mind that iPhone just happened to be a breakthrough in phone UI. Windows Mobile has been around for many years before the iPhone was more than a dream in Jobs' head. It's only recently that smartphones have actually become usable and not just frustrating toys.

What are these orders of magnitude you speak of on the desktop side? I don't frequently find myself wishing OS X did much differently.
Let me get this straight, when Microsoft add private API to IE, it's called violating standard, while -moz or -webkit are called innovating?

How much is the difference between DirectAnimation from IE4 and WebGL?

And CSS filter from transition/transforms/animations/whatever?

And XML Data Island from E4X?

As a matter of fact, the whole concept of DHTML was introduced by Microsoft, including AJAX, which first appeared as msxml in IE5.
Depends on what the fu is. We are very interested in computational finance e.g. backtesting, measuring alpha, beta, gamma. Best way to find out more about us in general is to read our blog https://dev.youdevise.com.
Isn't 'attractiveness' relative?
Make sure to read the first comment of the post, the poster wrote a number of nonsensical things ;)

The compiler does not try at all to analyze the loop to understand if this can exit or not, because it can do this only for very trivial cases. Instead since the variables are not references after the loop, the loop is ignored as it does not matter what will happen, but the outcome of the computation will never be used, so it can be skipped at all.
dough rollers
I want to come to this world 200k years after the experiment, born naturally into a world where my specie is not the lab-rat of another more intelligent. In a world full of our own inventions, cultures, and languages. I also want a family tree with people whose life stories fill my youthful evenings with pride and curiosity.

Sometimes you have to make personal sacrifices (like being the first to be brought back to life) so that millions or billions after you get a chance.
A trick that may get the desired effect is spacer TDs -- without specified dimension they'll each expand equally to fill out the desired width. Working example for Mac FF/Webkit browsers:

http://gist.github.com/386146

edited to add:

Live example, now including liquid-width demo as well: http://xavvy.com/news.yc/html-distribute.html
Glad we are getting known, I hope for good things like being committed to learning (dojos, lightning talks) and using non-dogmatic agile practises (serious continuous-integration farm, pairing effectively, self-organising teams). Would be very happy to talk with you if you write to the address on the careers page linked to in the parent.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1307786
Enlighten me. And to be more specific, I'm talking about regions where geography and zoning prevent any significant expansion of housing supply.
The On2 patents on VP3 only covered some optimization techniques and are not required to implement VP3 or Theora.
In his BBC series "British Isles: A Natural History" Alan Titchmarsh was made up to look like a Neanderthal, put on normal clothes and then went for a walk down a busy street - hardly anyone noticed. You can see a picture of him on this page:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A21606040

An excellent series: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/britishisles/prog...
Fixing layout in javascript has negative performance implications. Either you embed the js in the html, in which case every page is larger than necessary, or you put it in a separate file, in which case your layout can't be rendered correctly until another file is loaded.

I'm not sure what the author's point was exactly. There are tons of things that are easier to do with "classic" html or just plain hard to do with css alone. Even though we've been hearing ever since its invention that css is incredible, I'm still not convinced. It's certainly useful, but in so many ways limiting and annoying.
The only bit that doesn't sync there is where you mention how you've attempted to make it un noticable to users. That doesn't feel 100% open. It's not about making a blog post about it - it's about having it in the TOS and FAQ. Otherwise it looks like your trying to hide it - which feels sneaky :-p
MobileMedia in this case is basically Nokia, Sony and the MPEG-LA patent trolling the smartphone industry.

Interesting times.
"You couldn't pay me to use an existing desktop mail client over Gmail."

So, I understand having your email everywhere. That is a killer feature. But you can also provide that feature by simply having a web gateway to your IMAP mail.

What exactly is the killer feature of gmail? The tagging is nice, but other programs have similar features. Teh spam filtering is nice, but actually there are better spam filters. The only thing I can think of is the integration with google docs and I actually hate that feature. I don't know how they managed it, but opening a pdf with google docs is about 5x slower than downloading the pdf and opening with evince. So, it's pretty much a non-feature unless you can't be bothered installing a pdf reader.

I guess I find gmail useful, but I'd still rather use a normal email client if for no other reason than interruptions in my network connection don't affect working really.
An "oversight" for four months? On a critical part of your business that has a direct impact on the perception of the quality of the blogs you host? Are you trying to become the Facebook of blogging (in a bad way)?

You have a nice service, but this is too much. Also, it prompted me to take another look at your terms of service, which are surprisingly onerous. You've lost a user and an advocate. Good luck.
I was talking mostly about the CPU utilization, not just the annoyance factor. I would hope that the HTML5 equivalent would be less power-hungry.
Pay-For App Review Site Put Hundreds of Fake Reviews on the App Store
Mutually Assured Minefields
"unless Flash dies off completely, Canvas ads will always suck more CPU cycles than Flash ads."

Who says they'll progress at the same rate? That's ridiculous. Flash is at least 10 years old and has been in extremely heavy use, so it's likely plateaued in terms of performance on most platforms. Canvas (and the rendering engines for it) are very new by comparison.
That percentage amazes me.

Anyway, when the other person doesn't have Skype or I want to call an actual phone, I prefer localphone ( http://www.localphone.com/ ). On average I think their rates are cheaper than Skype's (.9 cents/min for US and Canada), plus I can use different clients.
The iPhone illustrates exactly what I mean -- Windows Mobile is an example of trying to port Windows (and all it's associated cruft) onto the phone. It's better than it was, but it's still pretty terrible and a lot of that has to do with its legacy. For iPhone they really sat down and thought, what actually works on a smartphone? This took a long damn time as far as I'm concerned. I have a motorola phone from 2008 and the interface is godawful and makes me want to tear things apart every time I have to navigate its unwieldly menu system. My previous phone was from 2004 -- there was almost no improvement from one to the next.

As for the desktop, a lot of where I see potential is in interactivity between programs. Pretty much any time there is interactivity between programs these days it's because the application developers programmed it in, and I think there's a huge opportunity to weave application interactivity into the desktop shell itself, so that things Just Work, without everyone having to code that stuff up all the time.

There's also, in my experience, a crapload of user time wasted doing menial things like window management that doesn't need to happen.

Those are just a few things -- don't want to give away all my ideas...
Ah yeah, sorry, I meant cable. I should check, though, thanks for the reminder.
Grand Central Dispatch also comes to mind.
I've met the CTO from Skimlinks and he ran me through just how incredibly hard it is to build and, more importantly, maintain an affiliate marketing aggregation program. If Posterous decided to build their own they would certainly sacrifice product-development.
I beg to differ. As a translator, I can say the rates are fair, considering the simple content, the well designed job management system, and the reliable, fast paycheck.
SBCL is definitely worth learning and is fine for writing applications. Should you choose it over Clojure? Tougher question. There's a lot, lot, lot of good books and documentation about CL but Clojure has popularity and momentum. No matter which you choose, I don't think you can go wrong.
gotta agree -- a table with spacer TDs is going to be your best solution here. like mbrubeck mentioned, justified blocks are going to require a hack since it's the last line of content.

perhaps the design can be thought out again, though. instead of getting the first flush with the left and last flush with the right, you could just create a bunch of blocks with centered content (think: floated list items in a list). there will be a little extra spacing on the left and right, but you can design it so that it's not too bothersome. i'm thinking

(_A_)_(___B___)_(__C__)_(_D_)

instead of

(A_______B________C______D)

your point about CSS having not really solved this problem yet is a valid one, but solutions are in the works (namely, the flexible box model).
It does change the effects -- but in a predictable and possibly-useful way. A loop that doesn't exit or do any work itself is far more likely a bug than an intentional behavior; removing it like other do-nothing code may benefit far more programs seeking "optimization" than the alternative.
Right, but how do you see that happening with desktop OS's? Their limitations were already largely thought through at Xerox PARC decades ago, and that's how the mouse and windowing systems were born - they're very good methods of dealing with the limited screen real estate. If anything, there are less limitations on them now. Touch tablets are potentially an area for expansion, but I don't know that I've seen anything that warrants a radical change on the desktop.

As for the menial tasks, I do next to no window management - my screens are completely unorganized, but a combination of Expose, alt-tab/tilde, and Quicksilver tend to make that a nonissue.
World hottest news: Student convicted of hacking Sarah Palin e-mail account
I can translate most text faster than I can fix a machine translated text.

It is better to offer translators easy access to electronic dictionaries from within the translation window.
I don't think app storage space is the problem.
Update: After several hours after posting this I couldn't repeat "copy link" trick. Neither in Chrome, nor in Internet Explorer. And middle click now works as intended in Chrome. It seems Posterous and/or VigLink changed some of their algorithms. They didn't get rid of affiliate magic (VigLink javascript is still there). But thanks for fixing bugs - the most annoying for me was non-working middle-click in Chrome.
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Web Apps do have advantages over traditional desktop software -- what I'm trying to get at is that we can take what we've learned about web apps, and apply that knowledge to 'traditional' software to get desktop apps that don't suck. It doesn't have to be about web apps vs desktop apps, or one catching up with the other. Within a few years I don't think there will even be a concept of desktop vs web apps, not because one killed the other, but because they will have been integrated.

> Some browers now automatically populate a home page with your most commonly used apps/sites.

This is exactly what I mean. Now? This could have been done years ago. Don't even get me started on the bookmarks system (offline and online both). There are innovative things that can be done with these simple aspects of web interaction that could have been done years back -- it's not like there's some miracle tech that is making new stuff possible. UI designers as a group (or maybe more fairly, the companies that employ them) have, in my opinion, been inexcusably lazy in regards to pushing forward the computer user experience.
Guy who "hacked" Sarah Palin's email account found guilty
Hm, I don't know how contracts work in the US, but at least where I live, I don't think "a service has to cost money" is part of what makes a contract legal. A contract is a contract, it doesn't matter if it is about money or anything else.

Also, it is not really free, Posterous is getting something in return. At the moment for example the affiliate links. So it would be a kind of quantum state contract? If they don't add the links, they are free, therefore it would be legal for them to add the links (or do bad thing X). Then suddenly they wouldn't be free anymore, and they would have to remove it again.

I don't think that makes much sense.
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I wonder how high that percentage would jump if Skype launched its own line of Skype-enabled phones.
Many Microsoft add-ons are inherently Windows-specific. DirectX cannot be implemented in a reasonable manner on any non-Microsoft platform. The same can be said for ActiveX, which depends on COM which is huge.

I don't get your first sentence. First you're claiming that people accuse MS of violating standards when they add things, and then you claim that people have adopted some of Microsoft's add-ons, thereby contradicting your first claim?