skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I’m tired because it’s 2010 and we are still dealing with the same issues that we thought we were solving with CSS back in 2002."

I don't know, maybe you weren't doing real work in this industry back then, but things are light years beyond what they were like in 2002. We've got JavaScript implementations that actually perform well. DOM works largely the same across browsers (remember that Layers debacle from Netscape? WTF). PNGs work properly. We have largely similar rendering across all browsers. I'm talking about things at least being in roughly the same place on the screen, having mostly the same styling, whereas you couldn't even count on things being in the same general location between browsers before.

"We are all working from the same W3C specs so why can’t we at least make everything render the same way."

Have you read the W3C spec? It defines a plethora of optional features and many key required features are ambiguously stated. In other words, it's a poorly written spec. What do you think is more likely, Microsoft intentionally breaking spec or the spec being poorly worded? Considering the differences between Gecko and WebKit that you yourself have also mentioned, I'm going with the common denominator here, the spec.
It seems hollywood is taking them very seriously. I guess you should look at what they do, not how the write it.
I wish that all colleges had a room like your workshop room. Actually, I wish every building had one.

Also, excellent idea on the phone booths, and the team rooms.

Leave it to 37signals to come up with an amazing space like this.
Will you invest in a Chinese company?
I don't get the impression that they prepared their customer base for this. E.g. you know why you're paying "an absurdly low price" for RightNow and you should't be surprised if things change in an adverse way. E.g. I don't know anything about your and their situation, but say they grow so big they have to move to AWS and now providing service to you costs them cash money. You wouldn't be surprised if at the very least they passed that new cost of "goods" through to you.
Nexus One now runs Windows 3.11
The debt usually has a cap, so I assume the cap.

Stronger deals have no cap, so I am merely hopeful.
Great resource, though I've personally found cufon to be easier to deal with across browsers.
We allow public comments on our SaaS blog, but we don't use things like UserVoice for these reasons…

If the issue is a minor annoyance, people will be minorly annoyed. They will probably write support; we'll handle it; they'll get personal service; everybody's happy.

Until they see that other people have it too, and have the option to "vote it up," etc. That way, a minor annoyance a person would live with -- and be happy that you fixed -- becomes a major gripe.

Basically, your customer's interaction should be with you, not other customers, unless other customers are part of the "features" of your product. Because other customers will misrepresent, inflame, etc., meanwhile the initial irritated customer will have his/her first interaction with a tool, not a human being.

The moment they interact with a respectful person AT the company, they will calm down. Not so with a comment form.

Basically, it's an argument that goes both ways :)
Ask HN: Python framework advice
This has been asked on HN before, but it was a couple of years ago and the development of Python frameworks is moving rapidly.

I'm looking for advice on which Python-based frameworks we should use on a new project.

This project will have a high level of traffic (~50 million page views/day), and will be ported from another platform from scratch, but we will need to use an existing PostgreSQL database (therefore it might be preferable not to use ORMs). We'll also need memcached support, as well as templating.

We want something lightweight, flexible, that doesn't try to do too much for us or at least makes it easy to replace functionality (for example, we have our own session management and rate-limiting systems that we want to preserve).

Also important is an active community, good documentation, and proof that it can scale (that is, it's already being used by large sites).

I've looked at many frameworks, but none I've found so far seems to meet all these requirements. (web.py seems to be the most appealing to me, but doesn't seem to have any large clients; Django seems to be the most developed, but I'm concerned about the "doesn't try to do too much for you" requirement I've listed above).

Any advice would be appreciated!
And which games did you play that require the keyboard? Or that you actually know wouldn't work perfectly fine with touch interaction? These are games highlighted for mobile use. Each one I tried (only about 8) was fine without any keyboard interaction. Or was the "flash wasn't designed for touchscreens" argument just too easy to grasp on to that you didn't actually try any of the games?
I can't really defend an ebook that isn't even published yet but I don't think your logic tracks.

Current - The book hasn't even shipped yet so I'd assume it will be current for people who purchase it now

Uses Hyperlinks - I love hyperlinks and they're a great feature but I wouldn't call them a deal breaker (and the lack of hyperlinks here is more a limit on the concept of ebooks not a fault of this particular one)

Free - If this book has in fact managed to distill even most of the 900 page spec down to 85 easy to read pages than I think that's more than worth $18. We have web programmers on staff who make double that in an hour.
Not to take any sides, but you're wrong on two counts.

First, Talmud itself may well be anti-Semitic in this sense, only this is irrelevant. For example, the Bible says, quite clearly and redundantly, many things that Christians reject. Bible doesn't matter--Christians and their actions do. Likewise, Judaists matter and not the Talmud.

Second, Jews, in the sense of targets of most anti-Semitism beyond the troglodytic variety, are not a religious, but rather a social construct. Hitler wrote this in Mein Kampf, and this is why it's not okay to talk about anymore. The thing that makes it tricky is that while the racial aspect is relevant, it is not relevant in the way that makes criticizing Jews racist. That would have been Jew-by-culture <=> Jew-by-race. Instead, we have Jew-by-culture => Jew-by-race.
The problem with the approach you just described is that it's missing analysis.

It's not missing analysis, it's missing the analysis phase.

Instead of working against human nature by tediously building use cases, data flow diagrams, logic flows, process breakdowns, etc., etc., etc. before doing any development, analysis, design, development, testing, and deployment are tightly coupled in many small iterations. That's the whole point.
You can also think one step ahead. When you build your business around a SaaS offer, it is exactly like the old Microsoft way, you depend on the offer and you can be locked in.

Surprisingly people get all excited by the new services with great API, nice teams behind them, bootstrapped, etc. but forget that when you do that you explicitly tell: "Yes provider XYZ, I accept to depend on you and to let you partially control my business.".

This is why for my small bootstrapped project management/code hosting offer I propose a full daily backup and the software as GPL at the same time.

That way my customers get the comfort of SaaS and the freedom of the GPL as they can migrate away without pain. I secured a couple of companies with 10+ active coders this way. They know they can download the software (which has an active community) and install it on their system if they want, when they want, for free. Finally a bit like what Wordpress is doing.
Police shot girl, 7, during TV show filming
He didn't say never dick around with twitter, etc. In the context of this quote, he's saying that for many people, it's gotten to the point where the dicking around has become a constant distraction from anything more real (or good).
No, quite the opposite. It's actually tamed for public consumption. As bad and as short sighted as it is, over fishing is actually not the worst thing that we've done to the fish populations of the world.

For example, it ignores the fact that in the Pacific Northwest, in an orgy of short-sighted stupidity, we've managed to kill off nearly all of the greatest salmon runs in the lower 48. (Look around for the Elwha dam sometime.)

Nowadays, to find salmon runs the likes of which the Pacific Northwest was once known for you, there's only one place left: Kamchatka. And I have my doubts about how long they'll last. The only problem that the Kamchatka rivers don't have that the Elwha and Columbia Rivers had (some of the world's greatest salmon runs before human stupidity finished them off) is dams.
It wasn't a speech about technology, it was an offhand comment during a speech to students at Hampton University, which the Economist then chose to center an article around.

The comment itself had a kernel of truth but if you expand it to a 4-graf article then yes it turns out not to do the situation full justice. Stop the presses :)
Google buys VOIP engine behind Yahoo, AOL, WebEx, Lotus conferencing
No human behind eScienceNews; it's powered by an artificial intelligence
We increased prices at 80legs from on-demand ($2.00 per million pages) to subscription + on-demand (starting at $99 per month + $2.00 per million pages).

It was a success for us. Here's why:

1. It was early on - just a few months after our public launch.

2. We offered a limited free version in conjunction with the price increase.

3. We lost some customers, but they were only worth max $10 per month. We were able to work with some of those customers to setup custom plans that met their needs.

4. The customers we did keep went from being worth $50 - $100 per month to $100 minimum per month.

5. Our major competitors charge thousands per month, so we were still absurdly cheaper than them.
Is anyone here going to Startup Weekend: London
You have a terminal with no keyboard, no webbrowser and no (or heavily firewalled) network connection.

WHY do you need a anti-virus?
It's not like the user is going to be downloading apps from some dodgy porn site or opening word docs from a spammer.
The case is needed because the iPhone doesn't yet have an NFC chip(unlike http://europe.nokia.com/find-products/devices/nokia-6131-nfc...). Once Apple adds a chip this will be just an app.
My main argument is now that they have allowed public comments and such backlash occurred, they cannot feasibly double back on it. Any purging of comments would only further feed the fire and damage there PR as you mentioned.

I don't believe that the avoiding the creation of a public forum on your service's site is surpessing information and communications though, but I will agree that once one is made it must be dealy with judiciously and should not have its contents purged or modified after the fact just because they are not in the companies best interest. This would only hurt further, and from what we have seen so far here, ZenDesk has left all the comments intact.

I also don't think such a backlash would be felt if originated from elsewhere, even from many other sources. The main issue here is that all of the users who are first discovering the issue have no time to think about how it truly effects there business, but are only tossed into a frenzy of doubt and anger.

Many of the users would not know about the complaints and discussions on twitter, and there competitors would not be getting so much attention if it were not directly linked and discussed on their page.

Of course I cannot know how much different it would be if they did not provide such a public discussion area, but it seems now they have provided a universal entry point into the user-mob that they must actually maintain.
Not finished yet, but worth a mentioning: http://diveintohtml5.org/
Indeed, it most certainly goes both ways.

But at a certain point in its growth if a company doesn't maintain their own forums alternative ones that they don't have any control over or maybe even knowledge of will spring up. And that will happen instantly in the case of an atrocity like this one.

"Keep your friends close and your enemies closer." If you pull a move that turns a lot of the former in to the latter, well, that bit of advice is probably all the stronger.

Of course, you need to actually respond to them if it's to be of any good and that doesn't seem to be happening as of yet.
I've been asking about admin tools and buisness analytics inside of rails (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2849695/ruby-on-rails-adm...) this is a great example of something that I am making from scratch on my own.

Do you have any tips or rails libraries that can help?
Bonus points: if you tell them you're going to do it ahead of time, it gooses sales like crazy.
Harmful Drinks in America (Diet info + nice graphics)
BTW: No, I'm not trying to be the next Ron Conway.
I agree with the other commentator in spirit. Just because the spec is free doesn't mean it is suitable for web developers. The HTML5 spec should be written for browser developers.

For example, the C++ spec is available (although, not sure if its free, but imagine it is), but I'd recommend it to VERY few people. I'd much more likely recommend Lippman's text or Koenig's, even if there is a $20 price premium on those books.

In the same way, if this book distills HTML5 into what is necessary and useful for web devs then it is worth $20.
You shall know the 20% by they are lack of works?
Saying I "don't have a clue" and that I want to "look down on somebody" is not very nice. I have no reason to be angry at you, do I? I don't know you.

Perhaps you're not used to people telling you their honest opinion anymore. That's my opinion about your strategy from what I read in that thread - it's what I think and what I will continue to think.

Sometimes you will do things that other people think is shit. Actually, most things you do, some people will think it's shit. If nobody ever tells you that, it means you are surrounded by dishonest people, or people that are afraid of offending you.

I'm obviously not afraid of offending you, as I need nothing from you and you need nothing from me.
Sorry, procrastination filter got me for an hour :(

And it's updated exactly as you said, and I timed it. "slowly" is exactly once per second as far as I can tell.

http://www.github.com/robinduckett/orwell is the repo, take a look yourself :)
Better said than I could have done.

I do like to get a sense that the company could either be big or is likely to be acquired; I prefer the first as the second is hard to judge.
Yeah, the Economist is good for foreign reporting and business reporting but since Obama's been elected they've been so clearly biased and/or recycling silly 30-year-old Washington conventional wisdom that I actually didn't renew my subscription.
From talking to Anton, it seems like GitHub integration is next up on the TODO list. Any feedback on whether you'd find that useful and how you think it should be done would be really appreciated.
Creativity linked to mental health
I hadn't considered smooth scrolling, I'll have a look when I get home.
I don't understand why they're charging more per user as you scale. I don't know that I've ever seen a service like this.

More typical would be $12 per mo per agent from 1-3. $10 from 4-20, etc.

What's crazy is their service is considerably more expensive than hosted Exchange servers (which give you volume discounts, not increases) though Exchange probably costs a lot more to run. We use Zendesk and like it, but if we ever get to 20 or more support guys the business case for building our own ticketing system will be a slam dunk.
Let's assume those are all available options. Which one should he pick?
Never gonna happen. Too many enterprise apps depend on IEs render engine and ActiveX.
They are still trying to pull it off and hopefully the resources of google will help them. The problem vark faces is that they have to build up a large and active community of people willing to answer questions.

I was an early user and I still make myself available for questions all the time. But I'd say probably 3 out of 5 times I get a question, I just don't have the time to respond with anything useful. And after a certain amount of time, you're past the "real-time" threshold so there's no point in responding.

But when vark works, it really works and it is awesome.
Does the author like AJAX? Because it grew out of Microsoft's initially IE-only XMLHttpRequest functionality. A marketplace in which multiple browsers compete and the best platform-specific features rise up to enjoy broader cross-platform support is what's best for the web. Dear Microsoft, please ignore this misguided blogger.
On the second point, how do you suggest I go around doing that?

As for the "blow away the scrolling", I made this to be configurable, sure it's nice to be simple, but I made it so I could tweak it on the fly. You wouldn't have found any chunk size to be ideal if I hadn't made it editable in the first place :P
Well said. I'm doing the kind of diligence you're recommending. My point was that I at least cannot get a good sense of the founders in one meeting. I need to build a relationship and see how they're approaching product, market and customer acquisition even though I don't care about particular projections.
FWIW The HTML5 spec also comes in web dev flavours:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html-markup/
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec-author-view/
I totally see your point.

The other school of thought says, though, that if there's not a single point for them all to coalesce around, the uproar won't happen.

If you're determined to screw your customers, of course, nothing will stop them ;)
Cold Stone PB&C (Gotta Have It size, 24 fl oz)
2,010 calories
131 g fat (68 g saturated)
153 g sugars

Wow. Just wow! You must feel bad/ill after drinking it, right?
Chrome uses WebKit as its rendering engine…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#Development
I guess my point is that the product IS the sense of the founders I am trying to get.
I agree with you. I noticed something about Delicious: when I add a URL, it's rare that someone else hasn't already bookmarked it. That means that Delicious has, to a first approximation, everything interesting on the web. All organized by humans in a rich way. That's an astonishingly valuable data set. Relative to that value, the use that's being made of it is so low it's criminal.

Even if they aren't capable of evolving it, I wish Yahoo would at least make it fast enough that I don't cringe every time I use it.
For scrap metal trader, perseverance pays off
I had been evaluating using ZenDesk for our new help desk. Does anyone use any other help desk products that are inexpensive (3 agents) and easy to use?
If "the hacker" is truly brilliant, at hacking, then he likely will be brilliant or smart at other things too.

Besides your options 1-5, think about things that are wrong or lacking in the world, and work on fixing some of them. That might require code, but most problems don't. Even problems that do require code are not saved by the code, they're saved by recognizing the problem and doing anything at all that's effective. Coders don't save the world; deployers of code and other resources save the world.

Your 1, 2 and 5 will build your chops, whether the first focus of those efforts are world changing or not. You also might benefit by working with someone who has a vision and has figured out how to execute on it.

If you take away the implied requirement that 1, 2 and 5 need to be code-focused, your first efforts might build chops and allow you to focus on problems rather than solutions in search of problems.

I'm not saying you shouldn't code, just open your mind.
I would go with something like Nesta, it's a simple CMS built on Sinatra that makes it easy to do very custom things (like you might need to for conversion rates, etc).

http://effectif.com/nesta

I am re-doing a couple of my marketing sites to run on Nesta after trying Wordpress and just plain old Sinatra and not being completely happy with either.
I don't know, but usually, nature is better at creating ecosystems than we are.
It's usually worth trying to ssh into the machine when X locks up (if you don't want to just reboot). Depending on what caused the problem, this will often still work even when it's unresponsive locally.
The one that pays the most money. Donate most of it.

Edit: added second sentence.
The quote is clearly a complaint about the quality/truthfulness of various media sources in an environment where the listener gets total freedom to choose their media.

It's a warning to students that with more information comes more responsibility to be skeptical. This has been a theme of a lot of Obama's speeches and it's clearly something that's important to him as a former professor.

Now you can get all victimized and complain about how he's singling out talk radio for criticism -- but before you do that, I'd like you to wholeheartedly endorse/defend the content of said talk radio hosts. You know, the ones who continually talk about Obama's birth certificate or draw ridiculous blackboard conspiracy theories based on word association between various boogeymen ("liberals", immigrants, black helicopter plans for global government).. Obama's not saying they should be muzzled or have their right to speech taken away, he's saying they're full of shit.
I can't believe it's nearly as common as it was 5 years ago. It's anecdotal, but all of the big IE-only industry-specific web apps I've had contact with have been rebuilt.

There certainly are some in the wild, but Microsoft doesn't need to have support for these old applications hold back progress. They certainly can (and do) have separate modes within the same browser, they could even run separate engines. They could also just distribute a separate "Legacy IE" application to support these apps.

But that's one of the many problems with Microsoft: they refuse to make hard decisions.
"It's a question of whether piracy (copyright infringement) is illegal and unethical."

Those are two completely different questions, and have a wide variety of answers depending on local laws. What's illegal for you might not be illegal for me. What's not ethical for you might be perfectly ethical for me. You suggest that murder is something we shouldn't oppose, but murder, or the killing of someone, is validated every day, whether it be through execution or self-defense.

I love paying for software I use. I love supporting the artists and people behind the artists for the music they create. I buy movies, and enjoy them. That doesn't mean I don't use TPB to obtain material. It's much easier for me to watch a movie on my Netbook by downloading the movie via TPB rather than rip it from my DVD, move it onto my Netbook, and watch it there.
That's not really an answer.

If you're raising prices because of a profit issue, then you are prepared to lose some customers (the least profitable ones) so you can better serve the ones that give you a profit.

Which is why I asked for strategies that worked, not "Don't."
Zynga, Facebook Make Peace, For Now
HN Feature Request: if I may not downvote, don't show me the down arrow
If I may not downvote, don't show me the down arrow. It's misleading.

I'm sure it's just one line of code in the 98 year language. If you can't figure out how to do it, I'll be happy to help you out.

(For some reason, my previous submission was deleted)
Said it there, will say it here too:

I’d love to see a “trip report” several months after you move in that talks about how you actually use the space, rather than how you think you’ll use the space.

Just because something looks 'cool' in the plans doesn't mean that it'll be cool in reality. If it were me, I'd put in the bare essentials, and then figure the rest out based on experience rather than theory.