skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The reason is that microformats are a perversion of CSS/HTML. CSS is not markup; it is to define visual style. I think it rather humorous that web "developers" rejoiced at the leaps and bounds HTML made when it went from HTML 4.01 to XHTML 1.0. One of the reasons is that browsers made up what ever HTML tags they saw fit. XHTML provided a way to define a standard set of tags and attributes and give application developers the means to extend them without breaking other peoples code. This includes semantic descriptions.

Most of the arguments for using microformats are forgetting that many smart people have already, more or less, solved the content description issue. Thats what the X in XHTML is. By specifying that XHTML is valid XML, you can abide by all the rules for XML... mainly the extensible portion. You can add custom attributes to any tag you feel. There are DTDs, XSD, RelaxNG, Schemetron, etc; DTDs and XSD seem to have won the battle over document definitions. The only arguments against custom XHTML attributes are becoming more and more irrelevant. Arguments based on browser support for custom XSD or DTD documents are already irrelevant because most browsers have, or will, add support for them as a requirement to support novel things like XSLT. Arguments that DTDs and Schemas are two difficult are not really arguments. They are difficult for a reason, semantic definition is difficult. Many of the problems with microformats, i.e. namespace collisions, have been "solved" in the various XML standards. There are already many, many tools for parsing and using XML including namespaces, XIncludes, XSD, DTD, XSLT, etc... However, the tools to make microformats actually usable and useful, do not exist. Other arguments about custom attributes not being XHTML Strict valid are also irrelevant. Adding custom attributes by definition shouldn't be strict valid. Strict validity is checked against the xhtml1-strict.dtd DTD. Not being XHTML strict valid isn't a bad thing as long as the document is still valid XML and a schema/DTD document exists to prove it. This is, in my opinion, a major flaw in microformats. There is no source of validity. Anyone can use any thing for microformat descriptions. There is no perception of validity what so ever.

Most of the arguments for microformats, especially coming from the community tend towards ignorance of details. When you don't fully understand the details of the XML roots of XHTML, you tend to try and hack it or reinvent the wheel. Really diving into XML technology beyond XHTML sheds insight and vision on where the XML trend is moving, why, and where XHTML can follow along.

The only questionably valid arguments are for the current landscape not fully supporting XHTML+XML. However, as I have stated, that is quickly becoming a non-issue. You can also argue that XML wasn't meant to be the solution to the semantic web... but I ask, why isn't it? Tell me why a language designed to mark-up any data cannot describe the semantics of that data?
Of course, it might also be the case that between the 9 day trip from the Fallopian tubes to the uterus the mother's diet affects the fertility conditions of her uterus differently for XY and XX offspring (for example, making it 50% likely for an XX to implant itself but only 45% for an XY to implant).
According to DNS and WHOIS, news.ycombinator.com is hosted at ThePlanet.com Internet Services, Inc.

Since "where are YC funded companies hosted" is a common question, I'll answer that too, based on the list of YC-funded companies at http://www.ycombinator.com/faq.html:

$ echo reddit.com loopt.com clickfacts.com textpayme.com snipshot.com inklingmarkets.com flagr.com wufoo.com youos.com likebetter.com thinkature.com jamglue.com shoutfit.com scribd.com weebly.com virtualmin.com buxfer.com octopart.com heysan.com justin.tv iminlikewithyou.com socialmoth.com xobni.com versionate.com adpinion.com anywhere.fm fuzzwich.com bountii.com auctomatic.com disqus.com draftmix.com webmynd.com rescuetime.com reble.fm heroku.com tipjoy.com addher.com 8aweek.com | xargs -n 1 | lam -s 'www.' - | xargs -n 1 host -t a | grep 'has address' | cut -f 4 -d ' ' | xargs -n 1 whois | grep OrgName | sort | uniq -c | sort -srn | sed -e 's/OrgName://'

8 Amazon.com, Inc.
6 SoftLayer Technologies Inc.
4 ThePlanet.com Internet Services, Inc.
2 NoZone, Inc.
1 BitPusher, LLC
1 Columbus Network Access Point, Inc.
1 Global Netoptex, Inc
1 Layered Technologies, Inc.
1 Performance Systems International Inc.
1 RackForce Hosting Inc.
1 ServePath, LLC
1 Slicehost LLC
1 Time Warner Telecom, Inc.
If you want a feature in an open source project, the logical idea is to send them a patch.
I meant to add a link.
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2005/02/javascript_t...
Don't they mean Engrish?
To me, semantic markup is about making reusable patterns of information that relate to the content. Can I harness that to my advantage in CSS? Of course. It's really no different than saying "I'm going to make every sidebar I ever make have a class called 'aside'." Is technique grounds for issues over ownership?
why is that a reply to me?
And as a result, Joel's writings are a lot more valuable.

I have a personality like Atwood -- if I'm mad about something, I immediately feel the urge to write a scathing and negative blog entry. Every time I do this, though, I get a lot of negative feedback. So, I try to tone down my personality and stick to instructional entires now, and amazingly I get positive feedback every time. Nobody cares what I think... but if they learn something, then my blog is worth reading.

"Show, don't tell." is what they teach in elementary school. It is a very valuable piece of advice. (In this case, I mean "show why foo is good", not "tell the reader that bar is bad". Criticism and snarkiness breads criticism and snarkiness.)
Portrait Post Processing Tutorial (Aperture and Photoshop)
"A big goal of Mozilla is to try implementing difficult ECMAScript features, helping to lead other browsers by example."

Whether or not Mozilla is focusing on "difficult" JavaScript features (and I don't think they are), they're focusing on the wrong features. By and large, the things that will make JavaScript more useful to people are features that we simply can't work around. Access to webcams or local storage, cross-domain xmlhttprequests (actually coming in firefox 3), better support for canvas, etc. I'd much rather have JavaScript 1.5 and get features that would enable me to do new things than to have generators or getters/setters. I couldn't care less about things like "let" scoping.
FIRST Robotics Competition
This is a poor list of YC Companies.
Isn't it the father's sperm that carries the X or the Y x-some that determines the sex of the baby? How could the mother's state determine which sperm is accepted to be "the one"?
Tell PG to update the YC FAQ, then. :-)
Co-linux should have a smaller footprint. Then run ie4linux on that.
This is FUD. Yes, Sun will probably tell their paid developers to focus on features that will be pay-only initially... but so what? If Sun wants to play this way, they can. Someone can easily fork MySQL and only distribute their super-cool features under the GPL, forcing Sun to play catch-up.

It won't be good for the community, but this is what happens when greed gets involved. (This is not a first, though. Google has their internal MySQL fixes, and plenty of companies are selling tweaked versions of Postgres. Both products are still quite useful despite that.)
No need to wink and nudge--you can have the fruits of someone else's breaking of NDA:

http://www.tuaw.com/2008/04/23/apple-iphone-sdk-beta-4/
This is why I read everything in Gnus. Just the text, please.
Saying something negative about somebody is not the same as "gleefully taunting" them.
Let's say half of them ever actually make an effort to develop apps (100,000). This could possibly be wildly optimistic.

I bet only 10% of them will ever actually ship anything (10,000). Of these, probably 90% will suck (1,000).

It still seems like enough to have quite a few really awesome applications that cater to enough lifestyle/professional niches (photography, GTD, CRM, ...) to create a little bonzai-tree software ecosystem, one that Apple has by the balls at all times.
1) Personally, I don't, nor do I count either it or "Semantic web" as tangible, exact things. I just meant to point out that you can use "next version" to anecdotally refer to a shift in trend, which was how it was used in this case.

2) That which the bigger companies are pushing, which ultimately relates to a not insubstantial section of the web to follow suit.

3) You're absolutely right that microformats haven't been marketed yet. If it's news to you, have an exploration around the microformats wiki. You'd be surprised who's doing what.

If you're interested in some examples of the companies I mentioned:

- Yahoo uses hCalendar, hCard, hReview on almost all business listings, search results, events, and reviews.

- Flickr supports XFN and hCard on all profile pages, and use geo on their photos with geo tagged photos.

- Google use microformats to enhance their search results. I believe that XFN in particular plays a part in determining link relevance and they certainly use rel-nofollow. Across various Google products you will find hCards, XFN, rel-license and so on.

- Apple's .Mac webmail supports hCard.

- Microsoft are supposedly doing some big things with IE8 and microformats. They already use hCalendar in their WindowsLiveWriter.

- Technorati started a lot of the microformats. Basically no part of their site isn't covered with examples of them. They have a variety of services that you can use to do clever things with the microformats you use (such as their hCard to vCard converter - add a link to your page which when clicked parses the hCard and turns it into a vCard for easy addition to your address book).

Aside from these, you can add Twitter, Digg, Dreamweaver, Drupal, Facebook, Last.fm, Moveable Type, Pownce and Wordpress to the list of microformat users.
One could probably make a career out of traveling to the latest emerging world power every few years.

In the 90s, going to Japan to teach English was a huge deal. Everyone seemed willing to pay lots of money to learn English.

Now China. Next...?
I assume because it uses your argument against you.
Also, who has the time to write an outline of what they're going to say, pretty up a bit for the camera, record the video, edit out the part where the cat spills your coffee, watch the video again, compress the video, and upload the video?

I will stick to text-only comments, thankyouverymuch.
Kawa Scheme is JIT-compiled to JVM bytecodes.

If you want a media RSS feed that matches the orientation of your wireless digital photo frame, to my knowledge you have no other choice than my site, which uses Kawa Scheme.
umm, i gave a reason that email setup would be relevant to os (i.e., in a vista criticism). i did not say "omg mac is so much better than linux".
"If you want the software to improve, I just think you should either file tickets or confront the developer."

You could remove a few more words and make it

"If you want the software to improve, file tickets or confront the developer."

;-)
I heard rumors that Apple is a bit of a control freak that's fanatical about user experience. That seems to preclude letting anyone release anything on their platform.
The general feeling I get from developers for OS X is that on the whole, Apple supports them well in their endeavours and that Apple gives great respect for people who develop on their platform. That being said, the lack of an SDK from launch was a bit of a blow to developers.

On the whole though, I'm expecting Apple to really push this, as they're talking up the App Store as a whole new market for them to enter into. They're not about to take the risk of harming their developer base.
I was unaware of Octopart but after checking it out, it seems like an excellent service. I posted it on my blog so that others can check it out too.

I also agree with the concept of being good and idealistic programmers. My blog is basically a development journal to record my progress and thinking as I write an open source wireless (Zigbee) protocol stack. Many companies charge large amounts for these embedded stacks, but I figure that hobbyists should have access to the same things that large companies do. Only good ideas can come out of it.

If anyone is interested, you can check out my dev journal and blog here:
http://www.freaklabs.org
At SS08, MA@TC quoted "Man in the Arena" [1]. An excerpt from the same work by Roosevelt:

"Of course all that I say of the orator applies with even greater force to the orator's latter-day and more influential brother, the journalist. The power of the journalist is great, but he is entitled neither to respect nor admiration because of that power unless it is used aright. He can do, and he often does, great good. He can do, and he often does, infinite mischief. All journalists, all writers, for the very reason that they appreciate the vast possibilities of their profession, should bear testimony against those who deeply discredit it. Offences against taste and morals, which are bad enough in a private citizen, are infinitely worse if made into instruments for debauching the community through a newspaper. Mendacity, slander, sensationalism, inanity, vapid triviality, all are potent factors for the debauchery of the public mind and conscience. The excuse advanced for vicious writing, that the public demands it and that the demand must be supplied, can no more be admitted than if it were advanced by the purveyors of food who sell poisonous adulterations."

It is nearly impossible to take MA seriously after he uses terms like "Amatuer Hour at Twitter" for one of the most influential technical individuals in our community right now. Blaine Cook is a Man in the Arena, MA is a slandering journalist. MA should apologize and hold the same standards to himself that he asks of his readers. That is, if he was ever serious at SS08, something which I must now question.

[1] - http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/3745/tr.html
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=96553 105 days ago :)
It's not that simple. It is well-known from other research studies, particularly the ones which document the effect of social status on gender ratio, that the woman does have an ability to influence the gender ratio of her children. The most likely mechanism by which she does this is altering the porosity of her cervical channels, which could change the ratio of male to female sperm, but as far as I know no one has observed this directly.
One of my professors is nuts about the semantic web. This same professor believes Ray Kurzweil; I don't think it's a coincidence.
What use is semantic metadata that is generated automatically? The whole point of "semantic" is that it's created by humans to describe the data; you can't get around the "extra work" requirement without defeating the uniqueness of the semantic tags. And if the extra work still stands, the average Joe will not bother with it. Hell, I wouldn't bother with it, in any form.
Agreed, I've often wondered about the division of labour at MS HQ. Someone told me today that there is a dedicated team of around 50 people just devoted to managing the "Start" button.

A software idea can be built many ways and usually more than one of these will be "right". But the moment you have a group of people with equal control and conflicting "right" ideas, you end up with something quite decidedly "wrong".

Small core development teams, with one visionary produces better, more usable software. For me, I will always take a product that feels easier to use than one overstuffed with obscure features. Hence, I use a Mac as my primary machine (also flit between Debian and occasionally XP).
Start-Up Rule #2: When Pitching, Bring Your Guy
Not unless I had a good book or two to read...
Not all websites are basically just documents with a management interface, however.

Remember, there are an awful lot of sites with database back ends that store structured data. The technical difficulty of emitting that structured data out into a web page using a microformat (or RDFa, or whatever) is going to be pretty low, so if it's useful (for SEO or anything else), I expect it will start happening.
always check retailmenot for coupons, you can get free shipping
Crock Pot Recipes
Crock pot recipes for the crock pot and slow cooker.
I think most people who read HN would have thought of that; from Jeff Atwood's article, it sounds as though the primary problem is a political one, not a technical one. A plugin already exists that can be that "patch," but the project leaders are dismissive of the problem.
Live blogging: Max Levchin of Slide opens the Web 2.0 Expo keynotes
It wasn't clear whether you were criticizing Vista or responding to my claim that the goodness of default email clients was irrelevant to the evaluation of the OS.

These OS war threads are always overheated and people basically read what they want to read into your comments. Sorry for misunderstanding. I'm pretty done with this.

edit: I will say, though, the post re:linux also could be understood to point out the weakness of your argument in general, and not so much to claim that linux is better than both OS's.
> there is a dedicated team of around 50 people just devoted to managing the "Start" button.

Worse: it took 43 people just to build the shutdown feature.

http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...

This article will tell you everything you ever needed to know about why Vista turned out the way it did.
Anonymously - In Kentucky
Intel Mash Maker
I wrote a framework and I am still using it, because it's more flexible and easier for me to extend than the other ones. That said, I think it was a waste of time from a business perspective. When you want to build a project, take something open source, rock-solid with a community behind it. You can focus on building your project and not fixing bugs in the underlying layer.

Before writing my framework, I had written another one and learned a lot. The second time around, I've made something really powerful and cool, and it really helps me. But it's still not as thoroughly unit-tested and consistent as the ones built by a community. I'm just one guy.

By the way, in cae you want to see it:
http://code.google.com/p/pal-framework/ :) It's open source.
I'm not so sure its a good idea to trade in journalistic neutrality for "full disclosure" and personal point of view.
Are there any online printing services where you can send a PDF like that and they send you a nicely printed soft-cover? I realize that it may be expensive, but still.
softlayer ftw (most of the time)
Personally, I blame Valleywag.
Octopart very well received after its first time on the Reddit frontpage
That's a great quote.

In the same vein, I've been saying lately that people who think the iPhone is just one phone among many are just like people who thought the a computer was just another typewriter.

Ohh, wow. I just said something by Jim "Bear Sterns is fine" Cramer was great. A broken clock and all that.
"The future of social apps are split between brand advertising and direct-to-consumer sales [...] people make billions of dollars selling virtual goods, like eyes or hair for characters in online games or social networks."

More advertising for inane smiley faces. Just what the internet needs.
Lonelygirl15 team gets $5 million in venture capital
If you're looking to scale (as in, you need at least one dedicated machine and will likely be adding more), I highly recommend Softlayer. Their pricing is reasonable and support is pretty good, but more importantly (for my startup) their setup time is incredible. Adding a low-end machine usually takes about 2 hours and higher-end machines take 4-6 hours. That kind of agility has really been invaluable.
There's the wikipedia list also, which used to have all of them, them several wikipedians insisted on "notability" so it's much less complete than it once was.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator
I would have guessed it would be more along those lines.
Web 3.0 will be the "always-logged-in internet"
Web Design is 95% Typography.
There are lots of services that teach Mandarin to English speakers. I think there could be better ones, but it's still a growing space.

On a separate note, some people would consider "chink" to be derogatory, super or not.
Great job, Octoparticons!
(Feel free to use that name in your literature ;))

Congratulations!
I made a little bit more robust version. Some of the whois calls (like heroku.com) have 2 OrgName lines and some don't have one at all (like weebly.com).

Amazon.com, Inc. 7
youos.com
jamglue.com
shoutfit.com
socialmoth.com
webmynd.com
heroku.com
8aweek.com
SoftLayer Technologies Inc. 5
scribd.com
xobni.com
anywhere.fm
bountii.com
disqus.com
ThePlanet.com Internet Services, Inc. 5
snipshot.com
virtualmin.com
heysan.com
adpinion.com
reble.fm
Hurricane Electric 3
weebly.com
octopart.com
auctomatic.com
Internap Network Services 2
loopt.com
likebetter.com
NoZone, Inc. 2
flagr.com
thinkature.com
Peer 1 Network Inc. 2
rescuetime.com
addher.com
ServePath, LLC 1
reddit.com
American Digital Network 1
fuzzwich.com
Columbus Network Access Point, Inc. 1
versionate.com
Performance Systems International Inc. 1
justin.tv
Global Netoptex, Inc 1
clickfacts.com
RackForce Hosting Inc. 1
draftmix.com
Time Warner Telecom, Inc. 1
textpayme.com
Logicworks Corporation 1
inklingmarkets.com
Layered Technologies, Inc. 1
buxfer.com
Rackspace.com, Ltd. 1
iminlikewithyou.com
BitPusher, LLC 1
wufoo.com
Slicehost LLC 1
tipjoy.com
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
domains = %w{reddit.com loopt.com clickfacts.com
textpayme.com snipshot.com inklingmarkets.com flagr.com wufoo.com
youos.com likebetter.com thinkature.com jamglue.com shoutfit.com scribd.com
weebly.com virtualmin.com buxfer.com octopart.com heysan.com justin.tv
iminlikewithyou.com socialmoth.com xobni.com versionate.com adpinion.com anywhere.fm
fuzzwich.com bountii.com auctomatic.com disqus.com draftmix.com webmynd.com
rescuetime.com reble.fm heroku.com tipjoy.com addher.com 8aweek.com}

orgs = {}
domains.each do |c|
whois = `host -t a #{c} | grep 'has address' | cut -f 4 -d ' ' | xargs -n 1 whois`
if org = whois.grep(/OrgName/).first
org = org.sub(/OrgName:\s/, '').strip
else
org = whois.split("\n").first.split("(")[0].strip.sub(/\s+[A-Z\-\d]+$/, '')
end
orgs[org] ||= []
orgs[org] << c
end
max_size = orgs.sort_by{|k, v| k.size}.last.first.size

orgs.sort_by{|k, v| v.size}.reverse.each do |o, ds|
puts "%-#{max_size}s %5s" % [o, ds.size]
ds.each {|d| puts "\t#{d}"}
end
puts
puts "%-#{max_size}s %5s" % ["Total # of Domains", domains.size]
puts "%-#{max_size}s %5s" % ["Total # of Providers", orgs.size]
I ordered some business cards from them as well. Not outstanding results, but adequate and functional. I'd prefer to shop around to find something nicer when these run out.

That said, I've never gotten any phone calls from them, and if they have been contributing to my incoming spam, I've never noticed it.
Developer Life, Yo
Read the tooltip of the second image in that article :)

I laughed.
Billionaire to set up magazine for snobs
Give Rails a whirl, you won't regret it.
Octopartisans, surely?
I don't want to violate the VW embargo, so seek out VW's coverage in your own time, but by comparison it's cheeky and dare I say affectionate.
The article poses a possible explanation at the end. The development of a fertilized embryo depends completely on the mother. Perhaps certain conditions reduce the viability of male embryos or increase the viability of female embryos. That seems like a simpler explanation than some sort of sperm selection.
Shall we ban Techcrunch now?
I'm not really in Octopart's demographic so I can't attest to its usefulness, but the comments on Reddit seem incredibly positive. You must be doing something right. Congrats on the continued praise and positive feedback you guys seem to be getting.