skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
| ...and it does not separate style from content...

I often hear this mantra, but why is it really important?

I think it's a good goal, but not to the extent that a designer is spending a ton of extra hours working on a layout simply to try to ensure this perfect separation of style from content.
Confluence

:(
Indeed.

On the other hand, while somebody who makes $100k and lives in Boston won't exactly be struggling to make ends meet, he'll have a lot less money to spend frivolously than somebody making that much in Alabama.
Also, for the few of us that might want to remix a track, a limit of 6 tracks is grossly inadequate.
Not coding for 800x600 in these days of high resolution, high-bandwidth design, is a logical tradeoff.

For whom? You? Or your client/employer?

There are millions of people, credit card in hand, who will just click somewhere else if they have too much trouble with your page.

My clients don't want to leave a single penny on the table. They're the ones who determine the tradeoff, not me.
Not really Hacker News, but it is about time!

I have received many of their "bills" in the past and every time, been incensed by the scam. I actually received one yesterday for my latest start-up's domain. Incidentally, yesterdays was the first that actually said, in large, bold letters that it wasn't a bill, but was a solicitation. What has had me so incensed is that for folks who don't know better the letter from ILS looks pretty darn official. And given GoDaddy's memorable ads during the SuperBowl, there are a lot of folks who don't have any idea what they are doing who have purchased domain names.

In short, these folks are nothing but scamming jerks and I'm happy to see someone taking notice and action against them.
At that resolution, you'd be somewhat insane to maximize your browser window. You should be using software that divides your screen into regions.
I read the terms of the contest and noticed that myself:

The Contest is void in Quebec and where prohibited by law.

(http://code.google.com/codejam/contest/static/terms.html Section 2 - Eligibility)
The #1 Free, Online Wiki Experience Winner Announced!
(Note: by "helps" I assume you mean to suggest that grad school should restore the humility that the workforce fails to inspire in programmers. If that's incorrect, then we are in fact 100% in agreement.)

Only if you're in the right graduate program. There are a lot of MS (and even some PhD) students in CS departments who are just looking to increase their base salary.

Furthermore, I've found that taking grad-school classes part-time is kind of an unfair advantage vs. being a full-time student. While I have time to really explore the material for the one or two classes I'm taking at once, while the full-time students are carrying a heavier course load, and TA'ing or teaching at least one more class, even if they're not working on their thesis or dissertation.
"when a bug wasn't found ... or pointless hours spent on rewriting the tests"

Both of those are very real problems with unit tests. You should expect that thoroughly unit-testing your code roughly doubles the amount of time you need to spend on it.

The real benefit of unit testing isn't in catching bugs, though: it's that it lets you refactor without worrying about breaking things. Without a complete set of automated tests, most companies simply institute a "Don't touch that code; something might break" rule. Then their codebase becomes a sprawling mess, nobody touches it because they don't know what'll happen, and nothing ever gets done.

Virtually all development "best practices" do not speed you up: most slow you down by a significant amount. The point of them is so that you can make any forward progress at all. There's sort of a brick wall that happens when a piece of software gets bigger than one head can contain, and unless you adopt techniques to mitigate that, you'll find that you can't do anything other than rewrite the code from scratch.
Nuance Suit Against Vlingo Could Shut Down Yahoo’s Voice-Driven Mobile Search Service
Isn't this easy to do with tables?
In OSX, the layering nature of windows to make drag-n-drop more usable sometimes becomes counter-productive.

There are times when I find I just want to focus on a single item and block everything else out, which forces me to either maximize Safari, or close down all my applications.

I don't care for Spaces too much right now, it's kind of buggy with Photoshop/Illustrator.
Am I the only one who thinks this is silly?
It is about time, I felt a massive sense of justice when I heard this happen. They sent so many fake bills to me, forcing me too figure out what bills are real and which are fraudulent.
Plotting Graphics using Python and Cairo
I was replying though to the poster, not so much the article, specifically as he stated that they are "just a part of the business".

I'm not sure what else they should be, exactly.
Hulu is kicking Youtube's Ass
Google App Engine Goes Down and Stays Down
I have to admit, using Safari is a much more aesthetically pleasing experience than Firefox. Firefox is definitely more "geeky" and has great development tools though. The current version of Safari is a bit buggy, so I'm back to Firefox until Safari gets fixed.
Automatically Estimating the Location an Image was taken (without gps)
I have to disagree with you somewhat here. Until businesses stop seeing IT departments only as "cost centers" you'll be able to try to "convince" them of what's in their interest until you're blue in the face. And I don't believe it's only IT's job to convince the business what is needed. Many businesses need to take a more active role in analyzing and understanding what IT departments do for them- they're the ones footing the bill, after all. You wouldn't make a new investment or buy a new (insert item her) without first UNDERSTANDING what you're getting, would you?

Furthermore, my company views all IT department spending as a cost and only a cost. But think about this: in the last several years, we developed a sophisticated (insurance) Simulated Rating Engine that actually performs rating of policies for underwriters. This rating information directly makes our company money- either by raising the amount of premium we charge, or lowering the exposure for claims against the company. But I can guarantee you won't get the company to consider this IT "making" them money. They paid a fixed cost for some magical technology black box. Now, the results of USING the black box are counted toward the underwriters, not IT.

This is just one concrete example of why I believe CA attitudes about IT contributions to the business need to change. Without that type of shift, IT will always be just another cost on the balance sheet- only able to take orders from the business (even if we are actively changing things and/or doing what's in the company's interest).
From what I can tell, this is just a restatement of The Anthropic Principle, which itself is not a theory, but a trivial answer to a trivial philosophical question. He says we can make "all kinds of predictions", but I wonder if he has ever made even one.
The direct download links have been removed by moderators several times already. Please stop posting them.
I see a flaw in this logic. One certain bad thing that will happen to you if you leave every day as if it is your last is that you'll end up being > 200 kg (would you go to the gym the last day of your life? Would you resist the urge to eat as much as you like?). Another is that you will stop learning anything (would you go to your french course in your last day?) Another is that you might become a drug addict (some people might decide to see how crack feels like in their last day, something they wouldn't do otherwise). Another is ... ok, I believe you get the point.
IE and FF handle column widths in tables rather differently, which can cause some problems with table based layouts. I've been round this circle recently and ended up back with a 'pure' CSS approach
Agree. This was really disappointing - I mean, obviously the vast majority of us have already known for a long time FF 3 was coming, and we would have upgraded to it when it was available. The only reason to try to push for a huge "record setting" download day is to get the word out to new users.

Now whatever new users were drawn in by it only know that on the day they specifically hyped up as "the day to get FF 3", Mozilla failed to even keep their own servers up. That might speak well of the idea's popularity, but it certainly doesn't speak well of their planning.

In short (too late), don't throw a party if you're not equipped to handle the guests.
Thank you,
I found one more demopad, or demo.com
There's absolutely no reason you couldn't trivially whip together a little ogg or mp3 file format that packs in an arbitrary number of tracks.

If I'm not mistaken, several audio collaboration tools already do this.

Article -> meh.

Theres only one thing that could allow a format to overtake mp3: 10x better compression without reduction in quality, or drastic power requirements for playback.
Generating Graphs From -vmstat Output
http://www.gemnation.com/base?processor=viewWatchDetails&...

1.7 million and it looks like a piece of junk. You'd think that rich people of that quality would at least get something of actual value, like a 100 million gallons of horse shit. Now that's a status symbol that says something about the wearer.
Isn't it nice that no one really cares about running Windows apps any more?

But if you need to, for some reason (e.g., testing IE6/7/8), and if you're using a Mac, use VMware Fusion. It's pretty simple.
Do you have a Honey-Do list? | ServiceLive Blog
Tables should really be used for data that requires it e.g. number sets etc., and not for layout.

True, using tables for layout in some sites is much simpler than CSS but people who do that usually do so today because they do not know how to do it in CSS properly.

Either way, all is fine, until they start using tables within said layouts (e.g. for number sets or even more mutli-columning in subsections) and things start to get problematic. This is especially evident when they try to use the content in various sites or try to change formatting for cross-browser related issues (often best solved by having base style sheets for various browsers).

Just my experience and thoughts, ultimately use whatever is best for you, and you are comfortable with :)
One of the commenters on his blog hit the nail on the head: The reason you've heard of Google, Amazon, etc., is that they did have these super-hero "seed hackers" as part of their startup, so they thrived. Thus, SteveY's argument about them being necessary for every successful startup is somewhat tautological.
Why? Anyone familiar with the law?
I'm not entirely sure this is valid for HN, but it's at least more valid than Arrington's latest bitching about Twitter.
When to use tables for layout
I know gmail has been in "beta" for so long that it almost seems sarcastic BUT google app engine is absolutely 1000% beta! As such things like this are more than par for the course. If people were paying for the service that would be one thing but this is probably one of the reasons they aren't selling the service yet. </fanboy>
My company has utilized MediaWiki, Twiki and Confluence (current) over my year with the company. By far, Confluence is the worst in my opinion. Despite Twiki's setup pains, I still prefer it over MediaWiki (and other wiki's I've personally tried for that matter).
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I considered adding "unless you went to Stuyvesant, Upper Canada College, or Eton" -- but I'm not convinced that this is useful if you're applying for a high tech job. If you're trying to get into politics, saying "look at how politically well-connected I am" is certainly useful; but if I saw a CV which mentioned attending Eton, my immediate reaction would be to judge the rest of it more harshly -- because I'd be thinking "you had all those advantages, but this is all you've managed to do so far?"
LinkedIn is Evil
I just spent the last half hour trying to downgrade my account from business to personal, after discovering a recurring charge which I hadn't realized was going to be recurring. There are plenty of buttons and obvious links for how I can upgrade my account - but not a single one for downgrading. I considered canceling, but now that I'm in the system it will be awkward to leave. Basically they have me boxed in.

From their FAQ, it appears that the only way to downgrade is to E-MAIL THEM! Even though I find this unacceptable, I went ahead and composed an e-mail using their link - only to get a 'Page Load Error' upon submission.

Has anyone else had a similar experience with LinkedIn, or am I just missing something obvious?
...well you may as well ask why MVC (or MVP or similar) is important.

They all share the base reasons, which is the seperation of concerns, which ultimately leads to systems/solutions being easier to develop/maintain/extend/change.
Waste Management Launches a Social Network
Mattress Protectors | roller blinds  home furninshings from Dunelm
Firefox SVN merge error
IMHO this is a PR stunt... there's no real benefit to using a OS X server instead of FreeBSD or even Linux... if I'm wrong, please enlighten me as to any tangible benefits to using Leopard purely as a webserver...
The Relationship Between Software Aesthetics and Quality
I'm not convinced that "how to kill your wife and not get caught" is really hacker news, though...
Probably, you're at an experience level that would make some of them real. Wait for the others to become so :D

I'm in the same crowd.
I see a lot of people bashing Confluence here.. may I ask why? Having used Twiki, DocuWiki, MediaWiki, and now Confluence; it has become my enterprise wiki of choice. If you can get over its J2EE requirements which make for a huge PITA when the time to upgrade to the next version or make it work with other J2EE applications on the same Tomcat instance, it's a pretty productive tool. It gets the job done, its straight-forward to use, and performs quite good. Can I ask why there are a lot of disenchanted Confluence users out there?
The same thing is happening for me. I just noticed that they are billing me $20/month and I'm also getting an error when I try to send them a message via their form. Not being able to downgrade in a simple way is Evil. It reminds me of AOL in the bad old days.
A good reason to dump the lottery. With the money they would save, we could just institute a open 'poor tax' and be done with it.
Maybe downgrading is considered an edge case.
One valuable point is that you always have holes in your education.

I think Yegge's half right about not being able to interview for DGTS. There's no substitute for on-the-job judgments. On the other hand, there's a profile.

Douglas Crockford, for instance, wants hackers who are friends with SICP and TAoCP. Bill Gates said something similar back in the day.
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-TBPekxc1dLNy5DOloPfzVvFIVOWMB...

I've taken Eric Raymond's hacker HOWTO as a kind of program toward DGTS.
http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

Yegge has emphasized a deep understanding of compilers and languages in the past. To me the benefits are still tantalizingly out of reach.
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food...
I've been using git-wiki recently, with great success:

http://github.com/jnewland/git-wiki/tree/master
Ah I see.

Pardon my ignorance for not reading the whole thing and understanding the implicit points behind it.
They couldn't pick a more crowded day to release such a major milestone? I don't think anyone in the press has the time of the day for Wine when FF3 goes gold simultaneously...
For what it's worth, in this completely unscientific survey, much less than 1% of all visitors to my site use 800x600. There are 15 more popular resolutions ahead of it. In fact, twice as many people show up on a mobile device with 396x320 resolution (aka iPhone).
Mobile Safari handles CSS based layouts just fine.
Although many people use LinkedIN, I don't as there are many things in thier T&C I am not happy with regarding the sharing of my personal information and those in my network.
Real questions: why is there a shop in the middle of a warzone?
Stuff like this tends to make developers nervous about adopting a new platform.

This actually makes me feel good about adopting App Engine as a platform, not bad.

Of course there will be outages. Then the problems will be fixed, and there will be fewer in the future. Would you rather do this on your own, with your own infrastructure, or use something like App Engine, and have many of these issues already dealt with before you even start?

If the outages still seem unusually frequent in a year, then I'll be nervous about App Engine.
Definitely. For example, a lot of music I like has clipped peaks so that the bulk of the song sounds louder on the radio. If that's the game they want to play, fine... but when I'm at home on my expensive audio system, I want the un-clipped version. I already like your music, so you don't have to market to me anymore. If I want it to be loud, I will turn up the volume. </rant>
Odd, I've gone from free-paid-free-paid-free a few times now by following whatever the process was at the time.

One thing I suggest for any sites like this is to get one of those "disposable" credit card numbers with a configurable time/balance limit. Login to your online card balance viewer portal and there is usually an option for this. Eliminates a lot of "please please cancel my account" debates...
Python Oddness
Singing/Dancing Stuffed Animals-- Stripped to Reveal the Robots Beneath
Rave Clothing Store, Australia, Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney | Ravegear.com.au - Ravegear.com.au
Uh O... Thems may be fighting words.
I just set it up, it looks quite good.
Inside every small program is a large program struggling to get out.

So true!! I've seen tiny self-contained applications turn into huge suites of software that no one - from the developers to the end users - had anticipated.
Sharepoint!

(No just kidding we use confluence among others)
While I don't see how this is related to hacker news, besides maybe a lot of people likeing techno music, yay raver store!
Does anyone know of Canadian/US equivalents? My raver gear is starting to get a bit worn after all these years :P
I haven't read this guy's work but this interview makes it sound pretty ridiculous. First, he just ignores the bohmian and GRW interpretations of QM that are very popular right now. Next, he seems to ignore interpretations like many-minds because "physicists agree that there's an external reality" which is presumably similar to what we see, and not actually in a big superposition. So for the sake of according with physicists' intuitions, he posits various hierarchies of physical worlds. And then, it turns out that these worlds are actually made out of "math," whatever that means, but which certainly doesn't accord with physicists' intuitions. So what's the point? The other theories on offer are far simpler than this bait-n-switch.
This article is missing the point...it is merely talking about when it is CONVENIENT to use tables for layout, not when one SHOULD use tables for layout. In a modern web world it is extremely inappropriate to use tables for non-tabular data. Yes, this means that oftentimes there will be messy CSS hacks to bring Internet Explorer into submission, but any designer/developer worth his/her salt is old hat at such tricks by now.

The proper time to use tables for layout is when one is laying out out a table. If you aren't, then you are simply performing a cop-out maneuver to save yourself time in website development. If that's what you want to do, do it, but don't call it something it's not. Just because it's easier doesn't mean it's better.
Judging from the article not the title, it looks like he is reasoning not fighting.
> In a modern web world it is extremely inappropriate to use tables for non-tabular data [even when convenient]

Why?
One to check out that has been used internally here is DekiWiki ("enterprise-friendly"). We've also began to use it on external collaborative projects. For dev you can't beat Trac right now but Redmine may just superceed Trac. Ones I tend to avoid are TWiki (hugely extensible, but therein lies its weakness) and horrors of all horrors - sharepoint. MediaWiki of "old" is great if you need something up quicky.
Has anyone done anything like this before? If so could you share some of your experiences with us?
That is a really good idea - I had the same issue with a wireless provider I signed up for (Deep Blue Wireless, if anyone has ever used them) previously.

Regardless, I think it is a pretty shady business practice to obfuscate the process of removing charges which were signed up for. It can be done really well - Netflix has made it really easy, and because of it I am willing to go back and forth as a subscriber. At this point I will never sign up again for a LinkedIn business account.
Fair question. Semantically the <table> tag is created for just that, tabular data. If you use it for layout there are a number of problems. First, it is harder for screen-readers and other accessibility-based tools to decipher a website laid out with tables than one properly laid out using standards-based development. Second, you are adding needless bloat and confusion to your markup, as you will have completely unnecessary tags littered throughout your HTML. Third, you will be going against standards-based development, which is a worthy goal in and of itself.

CSS exists to separate markup from style information, that's its entire purpose. To use tables to lay out a page is to explicitly include style information in a place designated only for semantic markup.
How much from Adsense? It depends on your niche, on how aggresively you put the ads and many other factors.

Talking about very rough average estimation, let's say you can make around $0.01 from one visit.
Stunts Today for Firefox. Sophisticated Programs Tomorrow
Could I trouble someone to paste the text? I haven't figured out how to navigate the Great Firewall of China yet, and for some reason, I can't get to seth godin's site. Thanks in advance.
Bate taken. Because it violates the semantics of what a table should be. i.e. a data matrix.
Agreed. Considering a company evil is a bit much...
Do you have good links for bohmian, GRW, and many-minds?
According to accessibility gurus that I know (proper ones who run real controlled tests with screen readers, not just random people who read blogs) using tables for form layout (as shown in that article) is bad, because screen readers have "forms mode" and "tables mode" and a form inside a table forces them to constantly toggle between the two, making it extremely hard to follow.
it is extremely inappropriate to use tables for non-tabular data

Oh no, you mean everything I've read here in the last 482 days has been displayed in "extremely inappropriate" mode?
I don't care what a table "should" be very much. How is that even determined? By what some committee says? I care what, in fact, it does. How browsers and others use it.
LinkedIn seems to be an all-around stubborn and inconvenient site. I had the same experience, but in my case it was in deleting my account. The deletion process was unnecessarily difficult, so I deleted all my contacts (I think the account ultimately did get deleted though). The reason I wanted to delete my account in the first place had to do with the fact that it was overly restrictive in managing, showing, deleting my own content. The last straw was that I had posted a question in the public Q/A section and there was no way to delete the question permanently when I did not want it to be shown.
One advantage is for people who already use Leopard on their primary computer, and don't want to bother with a subtly different flavor of *nix.