skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: CSS best practices
I might be going out on a limb here so please bare with me.

First off, I'm a developer not a designer. I work in a studio where every designer is expected to do their own markup and CSS. As in, transfer their Photoshop designs to HTML/CSS. Which I believe is excellent. However, since most designers aren't developers there's often conflict on how to implement HTML/CSS. In my day job I don't do an awful lot of HTML let alone CSS. I do however need to take the marked-up HTML and CSS and implement it. Website performance is part of my job.

I have the following believes on how HTML and CSS should be implemented. I think my requests are reasonable and very much achievable. At least, I don't believe I'm over anal retentive here. I do like some opinions on what the HN crowd thinks because I might be completely wrong or missing the obvious.

Here we go:

- Start with creating a theme. The theme will capture the basic colors, the fonts, the font sizes etc. Create styles for as much of the basic HTML elements as possible like a the paragraph, a link, the different headings, what a basic table looks like, what a basic form looks like etc. when having a theme it becomes much easier to treat pages as building blocks. A programmer can now easily add a page with a form that was overlooked in the design and have the form mainly look within design parameters. Adding a list is now easy. Adding a table is now easy. You're using basic HTML with no specific styles added. If you need your form to look slightly different for a certain page you can always override or add to the default theme. The theme can be easily be included on each page. The theme takes care of the boilerplate styles.

- Break your CSS down to multiple files rather than using the monolithic global.css for everything. When the monolithic global.css seems to grow, old styles are left in place because God knows what page might break if you take some it out. Have your global.css contain your theme and create separate css files for all your pages that need specific styles. You can create a contact.css for the contact page that alters some of the theme style or layout for that specific page. Your styles become modular. The downloading of multiple CSS files can be easily solved on the back-end by combining all the needed css files for a page in a single cached file that is served instead.

- id's are for behavior (Javascript), classes are for style (CSS). I see no reason to use id's to apply style to HTML elements. Also, designers seem to come up with the most weird id names that more than often make no sense within the context of the Javascript code that you're writing to target those elements. I've seen more than often that a certain content pod used to be unique in the initial design but later on the pod had to be used multiple times on the same page and an id was used to style it. Furthermore, classes allow you to apply multiple styles as in <li class="menuitem active">.

Your feedback is very much appropriated.
I distinctly remember Apple saying that web apps were the future and the iPhone with mobile Safari was ready to bring that future now.

It wasn't, and still isn't. There are and will always be large classes of apps for which Javascript in a browser isn't a reasonable approach.

It turns out there are political limitations to writing native apps for the App Store... so now those same devs are finding the bed they wanted a bit uncomfortable to sleep in, and blame Apple who wanted them to write web apps in the first place.

I think what Apple originally wanted was a pure console model. They and hand-picked partners would get to write native apps, and everybody else would make do with web apps.
Zed Shaw: You Shall Know The 20% By Their Lack Of Works
Think life is good now? Just wait, it gets better.
Reminds me of when Sony Records sued the MP3 portal Launch.com earlier this decade, even though Sony had been a part owner of Launch.com for more than a year at that point. I wonder when a similar folding-onto-itself might occur here.
The only reason they would be associated with porn now is that they took a stance against porn in the first place.

Of all apps, only a small fraction of them would end up being porn - present approval process could still happen. Adult content would also be segregated into an adult store - with separate authorization processes so if puritan parents decide to make it difficult for their offspring to get porn, difficult it would be.

And, most of all, this is not about porn - it's about the notion of a walled garden as being desirable. It's, like someone mentioned, that garden of pure ideology.

Jobs, now, is the Big Brother on the screen. It's up to us to wield the hammers.
Depends where you're from, I think. People in the Bay Area make more distinctions, but I don't think people elsewhere do. When I lived in Texas, I tended to think of "Silicon Valley" as a generic term for "Bay-Area tech industry", and probably would've included not only SF, but also places like Scotts Valley (Seagate) and San Rafael (formerly Lucasarts) as edge cases.
In the fall? Next month. With Ruby® on® Rails®, building a Facebook clone will take mere minutes!
Pure CSS speech recognition! Seriously, I didn't even click the link because it didn't make sense.
Lol, google translate shows "I am a Chinese but not Chinese.".

English doesn't seem to distinguish between ethnic Chinese and Chinese nationals. Goes to show how much is lost in translation.
Tuts+ launches dedicated Mobile (iPhone + Android) Development Tutorials site
And, most of all, when you are an important public figure, you must be very careful with what you express to anyone but your closest friends.
Just get American Express, after all you need second backup card anyway, and they are less paranoid about international travel (than Visa in my case).
When will settings.py be replaced by a YAML file?

just kidding

/me ducks
This type of car-buying service is really convenient. When I bought my car a few years ago I used a service called CarBargains and ended up saving around $4k. IIRC CarBargains cost $200 vs CarWoo's $39.
Ah, it was just a metaphor. That makes it alright then.

Also, from the follow-up article: "I am a 40-year-old trying to be a 20-year-old, and I realise my career is done with and I have to find something else" - not sure if that is really a victory to be proud of?
> You haven't voted on any of the stories currently on the frontpage.

He doesn't like any of the stories on the front page, so why is this a surprise?
How do you mean, exactly?
Yet Another Facebook Privacy Glitch
The iPad doesn’t need to do everything
Seriously. I can imagine a lot of intensive testing & analysis done with MRIs & sophisticated biochemistry. After all that, it's "You're blind. Here, use this stick."
You bring up some valid points - we definitely don't have it all figured out and this will be an interesting experiment.

Feel free to give us a call and chat: 877-417-4966. We are good at accepting feedback!
Max and I had a conversation about this piece and one thing we wanted to avoid was pigeonholing our bug reports into a category system like I've seen so many others do: Fill out 15 drop downs to describe the state of your machine when the bug was found. What component, what OS, browser etc… There has to be a better way than that right?
Btw we are definitely soliciting feedback, so let er rip.

Don't hold back. You won't hurt our feelings.
First Time Buyer &#8211; What is the best mortgage?
What's the point in choosing a tool which doesn't give you the power to do what you want, then coming on the internet bitching about it?

Your browser is doing the restricting. If you can't override that then it's not working in your interest, it's working against you on the web publisher's behalf. Dump it.
i don't have a favorite area - to say. I want to get a book to pique my curiosity.
$30 a day is $11k per year in effectively passive income.

That's nothing to sneeze at.

Indeed, it may shock you to know that many of your favorite authors probably earn less from some of your favorite books.
If there's ever a time when my wife distills my desires to building a "man cave" or "trekking" that's when I know I married the wrong woman.
It's a highly pervasive cognitive bias: http://lesswrong.com/lw/vx/failure_by_analogy/ Granted, that link is not directly about this issue but a moment's thought shows it trivially extends to the ever-present "argument by analogy" on the Internet.

(At this point, I all but flip the idiot bit on someone if they post an argument containing an analogy. Using it for a description is logically defensible but usually very dangerous. I've been trying to eliminate them from my writing and thought.)
It's hard to beat Cato for solid libertarian policy research.
A new Handbook
Sometimes it seems the quality of HN is deteriorating, and then a submission like this, which you'd think one has to be at least 35 to even understand, gets 149 points. Pretty amazing.
That seems like common usage. It's used prominently in either SICP or The Little Schemer (I think the latter).
Tradebot had zero trade-lose days in last 4 years
Check out the book Anatomy of an Epidemic that just came out. The first 110 pages cites at least a couple dozen studies on this.
Google updates Android platform versions chart, 2.1 finally in the lead
I remember when this came up on Reddit a year ago.

Summary: hold on to your man by emasculating him, then wait for enough depression to kick in that it suppresses his urge to improve his life.

Also, I'm going to guess that most of her fond remembrances of romantically planning their future together primarily reflect what she hoped for, not what he did.

In other news: people who write long-winded, self-obsessive essays and books tend to be self-absorbed.
I hate installers too, which is why whenever possible I'll pick a no-install program.

Forget all the installer stuff, download an exe and run it and there's the program. At the most, download a group of files, extract them into a folder and run, and there's the program.

Definitely keep the advanced and simple choice when "simple" means "we install the toolbars you would never choose if we asked".

Also dump the freaking download managers (Adobe, Microsoft) and FEAD Systems Optimiser (Adobe) and the download-a-program-which-downloads-the-installer (Microsoft .Net framework).
I use e*trade's "Max-rate checking" product and it's amazing:

- Until recently they had a great interest rate on your checking account (2.5% APY).

- I also get direct deposits, and mail in checks (is more convenient than going to the bank for me, and I don't need the money right away).

- They offer ATM fee refunds at ALL ATMs. That's just awesome. Not only do they not charge you a fee, they'll instantly refund the fee the ATM charges you (comes in very handy in Vegas ;)

It's no-fee with great customer support. I've been very happy with them.
I disagree completely; it's silly to have a big touchscreen that's filled with buttons to do things that aren't part of the normal application workflow.

Having a standardized Back button allows me to reflexively hit a button with the expectation of returning to the previous screen without needing to pay attention to what application I'm using or where the UI designer decided to place the button onscreen.

Having a standardized Menu button allows developers to place options or advanced workflow mechanics in an easily-discoverable location without needing to dedicate screen space to more buttons. This means more of the gorgeous touchscreen can be devoted to content I care about, and not the buttons that every application should have in the first place.
Cloud Computing as an Energy Savings Tool
It's worth noting that BankSimple has a blog entry endorsing USAA as the best existing bank in the US: http://banksimple.net/blog/2010/03/21/the-best-bank-in-the-u... .
The only reason they would be associated with porn now is that they took a stance against porn in the first place.

That directly contradicts this:

Adult content would also be segregated into an adult store

You can't operate an adult store and avoid it becoming associated with your brand. Unless it has no customers - in which case: why operate it?
yeah, but I'm not sure it would make that much of a difference. I should throw together a classifier and see.
Thanks for the link. I'm pretty much done with keyboards that hve the back row higher than the bottom row. Right now I'm using a diNovo (flattest keyboard I could find) with a pencil (hexagonal, so it doesn't roll) under the front edge. The only downside so far is that it's still a straight keyboard layout.

I like the idea of a changing position, though. But I take enough breaks from typing that I think it's more position and comfort at this point.
Conversion stats, rodents of unusual size & the finest swordsman that ever lived
A local high-school science program did this a few years ago as well, for an MIT sponsored challenge. Came up with the same basic idea.
CarWoo doesn't serve my area (I checked recently, since I just bought a new vehicle), but I definitely view dealership filtering as a positive. I don't want to do business with somebody who consistently ranks poorly in satisfaction surveys.

That said, I'd appreciate if there was some copy, somewhere in a FAQ, explaining what they mean by that.
Cool! Thanks for being so open with the info.
Yep – and I did it all, using those tools, for a couple of years. :) Now, when I go back to Mercurial (which I know better than Git, mind you), I get frustrated. Those tools are much more blunt than their Git equivalents.
> The UI is quite distinctly non-native on all of them though.

... which is what really matters to the end user.
It's not sad. We were required to draw our own periodic tables, multiplication tables, units and measures, etc. because you remember things better.

I bet a kid who makes his own periodic table learns and remembers more elements, quicker, than someone who gets to buy it printed and framed.
I often do it multiple times per minute. That wouldn't fly if each required a clone. :) (See another post I made in this thread for what I'm doing that involves so much history mutation.)
The comparisons of what Apple is doing to their iOS platform and to Adobe against Google's search algorithms isn't a stretch, it's just like reading a textual representation of a trainwreck.
Chinese scientists demonstrate 2Mbps Internet connection over LED
My mother-in-law thinks that shopping online is crazy because she thinks people can steal her credit card number from over the wires too easily and because you don't know if you're using a "real" shop.
I'm in the same boat. A few months ago, I decided I'm not going to learn a new programming language unless I need to.

These days, learning a new programming language every year is the fashionable thing to do. This trend, IMO, is stupid. I'd say build something new every year with what you already know. If what you know isn't enough to build that something, then go ahead and learn a new technology. (For example, I mostly program Cocoa but now I want to build a webapp. I can't write a webapp in Cocoa, which is why I'm learning Django.)
I kind of wondered if this was coming, due to the very specific nature of Twitter's job postings as of a few months back that kind of treaded on al3x's turf.

Best of luck to him. Also, I think I want in. On being a customer, not an employee. I just got my dream job.
Interview with Lev Mazin of AskYourTargetMarket about RoR developer position
Andrew Lee of One Third of My Life interviews Lev Mazin, Co-founder of AskYourTargetMarket.com about his open RoR developer position and his company.
Honda U3-X Personal Mobility Prototype
I've looked at the Kinesis quite a lot, but have never been able to use one, so the cost held me back. One thing I like about it over other keyboards (Microsoft Natural, for instance) is that it doesn't maintain the leftward 'sweep' of the keys. The MS Natural is perfect for the right hand: fingers 'sweep' up and down along the axis of the wrist/elbow. But the left hand, while pointing the wrist in the right direction, forces a finger sweep that's now nearly perpendicular to the wrist. It's mindboggling.

So two things hold me back: I've grown to love 'short travel' keys: if activation was at 1mm I'd be ecstatic.

In reality, I'll probably order it here shortly: I need something that's more comfortable. Getting the foot pedal as well (for shift) is probably the best combination.

Do you use a foot pedal? If so: single or triple? From years of bad habits, I pretty much only use left shift and ctl (even going so far as to use my ring finger for QAZ): I think moving that motion to my feet would be a pretty good change.

Apart from eagerly awaiting your reply, I have to say: I don't see how our voting history would have much to do with our preferred keyboard layout.
How would one go about stopping that? Does phishing break the social contract that allows people to keep their rightfully-squatted domains? As in, when someone's using their domain for phishing of your site, will ICANN take their domain away since they're abusing the privilege of having that domain?
The bot vaporized the page
Reminds me of the Napster pig latin stunts:

http://www.celticguitarmusic.com/Mland_napster.htm

Probably wouldn't last that long...
Scientists Concerned About Safety of New Airport X-Ray Scanners
I am a junior angel in Silicon Valley. AMA
I occasionally invest in startups. Please chime in if you are also an angel.
I don't know. Saying "no" is hard. I think it's a fun hobby but I can't do it full time.

Here you go: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1356140
In Arthur C. Clarke's "A Fall of Moondust", there is an accident and a bus full of tourists sinks into the lunar dust, is covered over and lost. This presents massive engineering challenges as the dust is so fine, the location unknown, resources limited to what's on the moon base, and the trapped people have a limited air and water supply so there's a tight time limit.

There's a scene where they are trawling for suggestions from the public in a TV show contest - people suggest ideas, and an a panel of experts rip the ideas apart. A side effect is that it's a great publicity boost for the difficulty of doing things on the moon and the achievement of having a base there.

I wont spoil the rest of the book for you, but has anyone tried doing this with the oil leak? Engaging the public in that kind of way, not just asking for blog comments on a news article, but a real challenge in an X-Factor style big-hype approach?
I was gonna go with "Whoosh indeed", but that's better.
The iPad is an information display and user interface device which can also leverage computation.

Take a look at the music applications available. TouchOSC is revelatory. It doesn't make music. It's a meta-tool. It lets you construct your own controls for musical instruments. (Actually, other devices can use Open Sound Controller signals as well.)
* Don't let information split over pages where possible, It's better to move them onto the next page so they are all together (Eg: you're education, CakePHP sections).

* I would also consider putting page numbers on them (In a small font, so if people print it out they can easily sort them)

* Also what paper settings are you using, It seems landscape to me? Use A4 or Letter (Depending on your local standard) and portrait mode, since most bosses like just to pile up the resumes and other documents they receive together and to be able to easily look at them, Having to flip them around is just a pain.
Isn't this a good case for small claims court?
Oh yes, because the banks seem so dependable right now. Good thing they're such experts at handling obscenely large amounts of money. I mean, it's not like we're funding them with our tax dollars or anything...
Tom Robbins is funny, quirky and occasionally drops nuggets like this. He is one of the few fiction authors that I recommend.
Being "adult" may not be the problem. You may want to think of the problem as a "niche market" problem. Retail companies
that succeed in niche markets do so by branding themselves better than everyone else. You might look for a different
"niche" to market like adding hair trimmers, body washes, etc to attract a different clientele and market the higher margin toys as a website afterthought.
personally, I think that the husband was lucky to last as long as he did without succumbing to torpid disillusionment with himself, his potentialities, and his powers. I'm so jaded and disgusted with myself most of the time that I tend to not trust anybody who doesn't seem to want to blow their own brains out.
This is very timely, thanks! I'm still in the middle of reading http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html and this already answers one question that was floating around in the back of my mind in the first paragraphs.

I'll read the whole thing when I'm done with the other link (which is a really long and very interesting piece).
Diaspora fundraising graphed over time
did anyone reading understand what problem the article is actually referring to?

Some complicated differential equation?
I think you can safely say you are an intermediate or advanced angel.
Barclays is pretty good, but all the in branch staff are good.

All call centers suck, and all telephone support sucks IMHO.

I certainly wouldn't pay extra just to get telephone support. How often do you need it? If you need it a lot, then that's a really really niche use case.

It may be due to the Barclays online banking being pretty solid. HSBC is also fairly good.
I think that the major problem is that most IE6 only applications are intranet-based, and hence, not something we can just send a link to.

I know of at least 4 within my old company's firewalls, and probably 7 or more within the ATF's firewalls, but I can't link them over or (without violating licensing restraints) bundle them up and ship a copy either.
She is correct. It is a real skill to be able to detect the dodgy websites from the real ones. There are lots of fake ebays out there as well. Sure, you and I can tell from the domain name, lack of SSL cert, spelling mistakes, or such, but so many people can not.

Your mother in law sounds smart enough to realise that she can not tell the difference. A rare commodity these days.
Fermilab may have data to explain how matter beat antimatter
My take on it is that the author had a system that wasn't working how she wanted it to (her marriage), and rather than take the obvious approach to the problem (discussion / argument), she understood the system well enough and found an unconventional approach that gave her the results she wanted. Maybe that's a little bit of a stretch?

The story is also about understanding what's valuable in life, which folks at HN usually express in their desire to make a living on their own terms outside the traditional workforce. In marriage or employment, finding and keeping those things that are worth having is often really hard work, but if you're lucky it pays off in the end.
You're absolutely correct in saying that you shouldn't have to create boilerplate to have a footer with nav links on the bottom of every page.

I believe that the preferred way to do this in Django is by either creating a custom template tag, or by using template inheritance.

Template inheritance: create a base.html template with a {% block footer %} that can inherit and/or over ride it from any other template that needs.

Template Tags:

Create a simple tag that renders the comments thread, what's related links, etc... in a separate tag. This is the "preferred" way if you need to query the database for something that's related to multiple different views. For an example of that, see the django-pagination app.