skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Almost every person I have ever met who hates Microsoft was either ignorant of the matters (meaning they just read what other people said and never had original thoughts) or had a specific beef in one area that they let inform their thoughts about the company as a whole.

Lots of web developers, especially those who were not professional developers in the 90s see and hear this horror story of a big mean monopolist who set out to destroy Netscape. It is funny how history chooses the more salacious of headlines, easy to forget that IE4 was a breakthrough browser that ate Navigator's lunch heads up. Certainly the OS integration made a big difference but this picture of an evil lurking monster hoisting terrible code and practices upon us is and never was true.

The other thing I think which happens is group opinions get formed. Microsoft is strongest in the enterprise, which is more apt to say - big businesses. Big business and the entreprenuerial hacker/dev dont get along, bigbiz in large part wants and fosters a need for programmers. Their hierarchical and red tape laden structure destroys creative spirit so what you get is lots of people who accept this, learn within that framework and dont really develop beyond the skills needed for their job. They latch onto Access and VB and do it badly because no one with great skills taught them any better and their bosses just need X to work and performance or elegance dont matter at all. This mindset gets associated with Microsoft people and the non-MSFT crowd begins to think anyone who does Microsoft work is some mindless noob with no skills.

It is sad really, because Microsoft is years ahead of any other company in the way they treat developers. If you havent used Visual Studio you wont understand that.
I think it's a great idea. As aitoehigie said, there's a lot of less technical developers out there that don't want to handle that stuff, but want something more custom and/or powerful than a base vps or managed hosting service.

Just find a way to whitelabel it yourself.
I played rugby all through school in Scotland. Starting at eight years old they had us spend months on tackling drills, and a lot of it was how not to hurt yourself in making a tackle. I wince just about every time I see an American football hit now I live in the U.S., just from the risk the tackler is taking with their body.

However there are other significant differences between (union) rugby and American football which make removing protection dubious. There is no blocking in rugby so only the ball carrier faces being hit and is almost always aware the hit is coming. Also a man on the ground must release hold of the ball so there is no need to go all out to force a fumble.
I believe some studies have shown that removing traffic control devices can actually reduce accident rates by forcing drivers to be more aware of traffic around them and make accommodations.
How Good C# Habits can Encourage Bad JavaScript Habits: Part 3
This post continues to focus on areas where C# developers tend to make bad JavaScript decisions based on their previous training. The languages are similar enough syntactically that C# developers tend to not invest the time to learn JavaScript’s differences.<p>The following post points out several misunderstandings that can get you into some confusing situations: Function Scope, Hoisting, & Closures
I believe Rackspace has affiliate/reseller programs that might take care of the user/pass issues. You could also just hand over the keys to the server, not the hosting account.
I remember Amazon tried doing this a few years ago with Listmania. I really liked that site because I could just search for 'hosting' or 'sci-fi' and I'd get an idea of what the community thought were the best options. Then I could research the top ten results myself. It was a really nice site for basic research and I kept coming back to it about once a week -- the had lists on everything

1. I think your design is better than Listmania's design. Allowing embedded images is a huge plus.

2. Watch out for tons of spam when you get popular.

3. Change your name? Listering.com and listles.com are both available.

4. Make sure your results don't get stagnant. For popular terms like "Hosting" or "Best Movies" etc try to make older lists lose their ranking really quickly. It'll keep the discussion alive, let new people have a voice, and keep your site up to date -- all super important things with a content site.
Sure, few people deliberately initiate a collision. However, that false sense of invulnerability you mention may induce behaviors that increase the likelihood of initiating a collision.
It's great that Google has contributed to this project. I think it's really important for every community to set aside a little space to recognize this issue and send a clear message of support from gay and straight members alike. It's not just a gay issue, it's a matter of civil liberties, and the health of young adults in our communities. When a kid needs support that isn't available in their immediate network, at least they can know that there are many real communities all around the world where things are better. It's inspiring that a huge company like Google can offer that dream of a tangible welcoming community that a kid can aspire to be a part of someday.
Is it not the case that all Google profits are eventually taxed again as capital gains or income taxes?
Well it does make a difference to me. So there's one data point.

I used to think like you do... some things changed my mind. At MIT they (my professors, colleagues and textbooks) always used non-gendered language. Here's a good essay by Douglas R. Hofstadter that got me thinking about the issue http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html
1. On the authentication screen, white text is displayed over a light gray background which makes for very bed legibility.

2. Can some of the sidebar widgets be collapsed or even removed to help reduce overall noise?

3. I'd suggest moving the "Activity Update" panel above the "Tasks" panel, just under the user's name and profile photo, since updating status is presumably the primary goal for most users.

4. The "Edit Profile" button below the primary navigation could be removed and replaced with a hover invitation link next to the user's name or perhaps by clicking the profile photo, further reducing the number of elements competing for attention. On a related note, could "My Tasks" be removed since it is already displayed prominently in the main content area?

5. On "Case" pages, the actions displayed below the primary navigation are difficult to visually scan and parse. This is compounded by the fact that unrelated buttons share colors, making it difficult for the user to create a mental model and anticipate expected behavior. A dropdown menu of options might be more appropriate to show all available actions in this case, and would further reduce overall noise.

6. There is another usability issue to consider with the buttons placed directly below the primary navigation bar. If I run the cursor too close to the top of the target area for the buttons, I can easily trigger a dropdown hover from one of the primary navigation menu items above it. That could get frustrating in everyday use.

Have you done any structured usability or task completion testing with real users yet? Check out Steve Krug's book "Rocket Surgery Made Easy" for some ideas there. You could also gain a lot of inexpensive insight using services like feedbackarmy.com, userfly.com or loop11.com. Hope that helps.
Atom Smasher Ramps Up Chase for 'God Particle'
...flash competes with the App store.

I don't think that's at all the case. Flash is mostly used for rich content on web pages. If it competes with anything, it's new browser features like HTML5. One could make the argument that Apple is trying to discourage the use of flash-based competitors to iTunes such as Amazon VOD and Hulu. Though that's a bit of a stretch.

It is no coincidence that flash gets dropped from the MBA at the same time that the app store for the Mac gets launched.

I think the coincidence is more mundane. According to Jobs, Apple made a more realistic battery benchmark for the Air. It now involves browsing 25 popular websites over wifi. Killing flash would almost certainly improve battery life in that benchmark.
Because countless global companies don't claim to be "not evil".

Anyone Google hires in the UK (up 'til now anyway) has been educated at the expense of the taxpayer, for example. If someone breaks into their offce, the police will show up to investigate. Why shouldn't they pay their fair share?
Your first sentence sort of illustrates your second sentence's point, no?
Because "Google has managed to lower its overseas tax rate more than its peers in the technology sector". They're all doing it, but Google is doing it best.
You've made a statement that a certain quantity is far larger than zero, so you do incur a burden of proof for that statement. p * n > 0 doesn't imply p * n >> 0, not even for large values of n (and "approaching infinity" doesn't apply to constants).
You are right, my target audience are developer and invariably for most of them it is trivial to build their own servers. But still it required some time to be spend on these tasks which can be utilized for something else more valuable for his /her business.
And 'trust' that's what exactly I want to harvest from my customers for the success of my service.

You suggestion of more advanced/complicated setup (Nutch/Hadoop et) is well taken. Thanks

Edit:Spelling
Then everything is an entirely different thing. The simple act of a single cell engulfing mitochondria is not the birth of a species.

Even on content I would bury this if I had the button for it, it makes pretty heavy claims without any evidence and necessarily brushing aside fundamental problems with the overall conclusion.

I am not bashing the scientific article that this editorial is 'about'; but the article itself, besides a tiny nugget about the necessity of mitochondria being perhaps otherwise overlooked, it is just drivel.
Ireland usually gets a bad rep from this but companies like Intel, Google and MS are the biggest employers in the country. If they were there for purely tax reasons you'd expect them to be shell companies, rather than having multiple fabs in the case of Intel or a few thousand employees in the case of Google.
Yes: better would be interesting AND relevant to HN.

These reminders are a good thing.
This wasn't sarcasm. :/
The problem with the statement is 'Like any successful PhD' ... There should be some analysis to back that up.
Edward Tufte's impression of Windows Phone 7: 'Ooh, look at me! I'm Windows Phone 7! I think I'm so smart! Look at all my buttons! I'm Windows Phone 7! Typography! A bloo bloo bloo!'

I'll take the karma hit; I couldn't resist.
I'll hazard a guess that quite a lot of that bleeding isn't because people can't accept that, but because you whined about losing karma.
The US Corporate Tax is one of the lowest in all the world.

http://www.qbalance.com/Corporate_Tax_Rates_United_States.ht...

But Bermuda still beats out us at ZERO corporate tax rate.
IPhone 4 Launched Into Space, Takes HD Video
My dream MBP is that they drop the optical drive completely, install 128GB of flash for a system drive like the new Airs, and then have an optional 500GB data drive for those who need the additional space. Then they can use all the saved space to either make it lighter or fill it with extra battery (or both!)
> "When has increasing the size of the government EVER reduced the net cost?"

Isn't that exactly what the CBO has estimated as the result of health care reform? A reduction in the deficit despite the increase in scope (and thus surely number of desks) of government?

> "The question is: If they hire these accountants and they don't reduce the overall cost by several billion dollars, can we fire them?"

I was making a point about the whole equation. If you absorbed my point you would already know that my answer is an unqualified "absolutely".

> "If a tax hike fails to improve the economy"
No-one has proposed that tax hikes will improve the economy. Tax hikes are proposed to reduce the deficit. Which, by definition, would depress the economy.

I have to tell you, it's pretty difficult to talk to people who are so certain they know what the other party is thinking and how they will react.
I don't see the point in carrying a mouse if you go for the Air (or any MacBook for that matter); the touchpad is incredible.
It's still up at http://jonathan.tang.name/files/arclite/index.html
Normaly thats right but you can pass pointers on a channel you share mutible state.

Listen to the go talk at Emergin Languages Camp. Rich Hickey asks about that in the end.
Most Australians don't get the point of all the helmets and padding in the american game. AFL has strong rules for protecting the head, to the point that players attempt to exploit this and ducking their head when they have nowhere to go hoping the tackling player will make contact with them and draw a free kick.
Google is "flying a banner of doing no evil, and then they're perpetrating evil under our noses," says Abraham J. Briloff, a professor emeritus of accounting at Baruch College who has examined Google's tax disclosures.

Maybe it is the lawyer in me, but why wouldn't any international business do whatever it could legally do to minimize its taxes? I understand that governments might want to consider these as loopholes and seek to end the right of U.S. taxpayers to avail themselves of these tax-minimization strategies. But, as long as it is legal, why should a company voluntarily seek to expose itself to higher tax rates when it has the choice not to?

I guess when you as a company claim the high ground ("do no evil"), you will have people making their own judgments about what ethical standard ought to govern your conduct and this would explain this professor's remark. By that measure, though, one could argue that companies such as Google should seek to attribute all their revenues to California because that is where their main intellectual property development efforts have occurred and hence pay corporate tax rates at one of the highest rates around simply because they "owe" it to California.

I get this question all the time from web-based startups: why run our revenues through a high-tax state when we have the option of running them through all sorts of lower-tax venues and saving on taxes? The universal answer for smaller companies is "set your company up in a way that let's you pay the least tax you can legally."

Why should Google be held to a different standard on penalty of having its perfectly legal actions castigated as "evil"? Is it the view of some or many in the HN community, for example, that a private enterprise has a form of "social responsibility" to voluntarily subject itself to the tax rates of whatever domicile it happens to have its major operations in (in this case, California) when it legally has the option not to do so? That seems unwise by free enterprise standards and I am genuinely curious to know why refusing to do this would be called "evil."
I don't believe that this is an attempt on Apple's part to hate on JRuby.

I am however very curious about what impact this will have on the development of JRuby and other JVM-based languages, such as Clojure and Scala. It's no secret that a lot of folks in the (J)Ruby community work on Macs, but I think that bleeds over into the other languages' communities as well. For example, I'm pretty sure Rich Hickey uses a Mac, and a tweet from Michael Fogus earlier today suggests that he does as well. Not sure about the Scala folks, but I wouldn't be shocked to find out that they're Macheads too.
Because Google have a public image of behaving ethically. Everyone expects banks and evil multinationals to do this kind of thing.

Is it ethical to avoid paying tax as an individual? Many would say no. But when a company does it, they lay their blame on the shareholders and the market. So the more outrage about this subject, the better. Our governments can either raise taxes or lower taxes. But they shouldn't let individuals and business get away with pretending to pay taxes when they're not.
Yes, someone at my school broke his neck in a scrum as well. And I've heard plenty of similar stories over the news. On a rugby field, the most dangerous place is in the scrum.
Well, in contrast to Tufte, I actually have built a couple of Interfaces...
Upvoted anyway!
great read, joel. thanks for sharing. just about no one knows how to tell how a story better than gladwell (sidenote: seems like he'd make for a great pitch-man)

the NFL is reacting with their gut right now. i know they're trying to send a message, but the officials are going to receive the brunt of the criticism when there's so much ambiguity between the rules right now.

this is an issue that needs to be addressed after the season...maybe that gives a YC-startup time to put together a new helmet ;)
Companies aren't usually friends, but CEO's can be. Larry Ellison has repeatedly referred to Steve Jobs as his best friend, and used to serve on Apple's board.

Back when Jobs was only "interim" CEO and Apple was at least nominally looking for a permanent CEO, he and Ellison played a prank on some guy who seemed overeager to apply for the job: http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9801/01/apple.oracle.reut/index.html and Jobs was the photographer at Ellison's wedding.
This is a nice idea, so points for ingenuity.

There are a few small problems though:

- Page 'load' time is a bit ambiguous, I'd prefer page 'rendering' time, perhaps. (The author does note the limitation of this approach.)

- Time to window.onload may be a _very_ long time in some environments, especially when 3rd party scripts are present, especially (if memory serves) in IE.

- From eyeballing the "Bounce rate by page load time" the linear trend placed on top seems dubious -- if anything bounce rate seems to drop until the 3700ms mark. (The author notes in the text however that users seem tolerant up to the 5000ms mark).

Quibbles aside, having more page rendering time data correlated to bounce rate is an excellent idea, as I've seen some posts in web design land get pretty carried away with n-th degree optimization because they read speed matters for Google and Amazon.

In my experience, I optimized a site's page rendering time dramatically, expecting a bump in average pages per visit, and saw absolutely no change whatsoever. We need more data :)
The other huge difference is that tackles in rugby are mostly from behind with both players moving, meaning there is less in the way of an actual collision. American football has a lot more tackles involving two players running into each other head on or the tackling player running into a stationary player.
Just a heads up, and the post notes this, that this way of timing is already well into the page load sequence: the server has received the request, built the HTML and has started sending it, and the browser is already parsing it.

Also, be careful with when different browsers fire the onLoad event. For example, Safari 3:
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/safaribenchmarks.html

Overall though, a cool hack even with the caveats above as it could give you actionable data.

Another good source of loading time metrics is Google Webmaster Tools. They have two metrics, one in the download time in the Crawl Stats section the Site Performance metric in the Labs section. Combined, they give you a really good insight into how your website is doing over time. A good game to play is spot the (very clear) inverse relationship between the number of pages crawled vs download time.
Related: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1811518
One of the first things you have to do is installing the firebug extension for Firefox.
Anti-competitive, design-by-committee, aversion towards open source, corporate culture, bureaucratic, etc.

I don't hate Microsoft but I avoid targeting their platforms.

EDIT: Oh, and there's the malware thing.
Google's generally done well at not being evil. This, however, is being evil. I don't care if everyone does it. By skimping on paying their taxes, Google and other corporations the world over are forcing people to cut education budgets, cut road and infrastructure maintenance budgets and raise rates for individuals who have infinitely less money than Google.

High taxes and the existence of bad laws is no excuse for exploiting the loop holes in those laws. The correct course of action is to pay the taxes, volunteer information on how to close the loop holes and lobby for lower taxes.
As a reluctant and occasional watcher of AFL (QLD'er) I can say that the comparison to AFL has no value. The rules of AFL impose many constraints on the tackler and the pay-off amounts to less than the turnover of possession in soccer. The best comparison to US football would be Rugby League which favours more 'hard hits' than the more internationally renowned Rugby Union. I've yet to see studies compare the results but my impression is that the League player suffer significantly less brain injuries during their professional careers.
I might use it if you would include spaced repetition learning as a service. For example, I would like to get a text message or even an email at some user defined interval (every 6 hours, once a week, etc.) with words in the list selected by a spaced repetition algorithm so I can really learn what they mean.

If I just added it to a list, I doubt I'd ever really learn them and the service would be useless to me.
Not a resource, but speaking as someone who is not a Javascript or Python expert, but used to know his way around C++ and java, my suggestion is to ignore everything you think you know about C++ and Java when learning Javascript. Do not be seduced by the ALGOL syntax.

When learning a new language we often think in an existing language and then "translate." Until you start "Thinking in Javascript,' I beg you to "Think in Python," not C++ or Java.

JM2C.
I don't think how it's useful to you matters, since we're talking about "intrinsic" value of knowledge. Unless I misunderstood the meaning of the word.
That is a pretty hilarious/interesting idea. If Apple doesn't do that maybe Adobe will license and start packaging Click-To-Flash with the Flash plugin. That would be very nice and pro-consumer on Adobe's part.
Give ooc-lang.org a try ;)
SEO Quiz Answers - The best to Basics
I hadn't thought of this in light of the App Store announcement, but apparently it's essential to do so.

From the review guidelines:

- Apps that use deprecated or optionally installed technologies (e.g., Java, Rosetta) will be rejected

That's interesting.
Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NInuBeY...
Any complexity not covered over by the language will end up in the user's program.
My neighbour should not get screwed harder so we are made equal. There's no such thing as a "fair share" of rape.

Besides, if you look at the things the government is doing with the money recently vs. what Google is, there is no contest!
As a translation to the joke:

"How do you call an elevator in English?" "With your finger."
Removing pads you'd still have nothing that looked at all like Rugby.
Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison are good friends. As for Apple and Oracle, corporations may have enemies, but I'm not sure that they ever have friends.
I think , the value addition will be customization and time saving.
As you suggested the StackScripts can build/install common things, what if you want something else ie. a different version of software etc.
Thanks for the feedback.
Edit: Grammar
Sorry, 'far from zero' is really meaningless and I shouldn't have said it that way. I don't actually mean to make a positive statement about the existence of complex life elsewhere in the universe, though intuitively I think it's absurd to believe our little planet is the only one with life on it. I mean, why would we believe that other than residual religious dogma?

Our understanding of n is not a constant.
Make cars out of glass and put spikes on the dash and you'd see different results.