skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Found via http://www.cnewmark.com/2011/02/the-world-wide-web-foundatio...
Holy crap! Fucking Howe! I was on that server three years ago for about two weeks before I could no longer take it. It was a misconfigured piece of junk when it was brand new. I've had a lot of success with Web Faction since then.
At ProjectLocker (http://www.projectlocker.com) we use Trac for issue tracking for ourselves and as a hosted service. By extension, so do our customers :).
Nonobjects and design fiction
Ok no one is letting a robot cut their hair

Oh, but how close we are!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bgRszdUdhQ
Because hessenwolf and I are philosophically opposed here, I'll give my take. Balance your impressions between us as you choose.

---

Frequentist statistics attempts to answer the question "How will my experimentation appear knowing that there is some hidden, unknown truth to the world which generates it?" The methods then proceed to use a variety of clever arguments to show that seeing a certain experimental result (considering all possible experimental results) constrains the possible underlying reality and gives you a good guess at to what it is (and allows you to estimate how much it might vary).

Bayesian statistics asks the very different question "How does this observation I'm making affect my current knowledge of the world?" It is pretty difficult to look at the methods without seeing an interpretive nod toward the process of learning. To do this update step, Bayesians consider the relative likelihood of all possible underlying realities given that they've seen said experiment.

It's not clear to me that these two methods are at all asking the same question. In particular, they each consider (marginalize, integrate) vastly different properties and their results have different interpretations. However, since both of them fit into the space of quantifying the effect of observation on the parameters of a model of the world they end up in constant conflict.

Moreover, it's easy to construct Bayesian arguments which correspond to exactly the same algorithms as some Frequentist arguments. Bayesians argue then that their path to reach that algorithm is more interpretable and clear, especially to non-mathematician. This method collision serves to further conflate the two methods as enemies.

---

tl;dr: Bayesian statistics is an average over possible realities, Frequent averages over possible experimental outcomes. It's not clear that these are comparable at all, but since they often try to answer the same questions we compare them anyway.
Yeah, I think I remember seeing it at their HQ when I interviewed. I vaguely remember Paul saying that Trevor had drawn it, but I could be wrong.
How to keep your wife from flirting with a plumber
but in this case agiletortoise didn't gain any benefit from the website -- he simply wrote a program that directed the user's browser to go there.

I don't get that. Doesn't agiletortoise get benefit when their users get benefit?
There is no corporate mandate to use anything. You are free to use whatever tools you want, and nearly all internal sites work fine with Chrome/Firefox.
Hiring Programmers 1-liners from popular CTO's
I don't think you have to bring implicit contracts into it. If I walk down the street and someone's shadow falls on me, I simply don't have a cause of action against them. If someone looks at me, I don't have a cause of action against them. If someone calls my name on the street, I don't have a cause of action against them. (Barring extraordinary circumstances, of course.) You don't need to invent theories about how I'm entering into an implicit contract with the whole world by going out on the street, among whose terms are that people may allow their shadows to fall on me and look at me. It's simply that no tort is created by looking at a person or linking to a web page.

There's no law granting exclusive rights in URLs unless they're copyrightable.
I have the "Ghostery" Firefox extension installed. It blocked 18 (sic) different advertising/tracking/whatever services.

I don't think I've ever seen so many items blocked on a single page before.

But it loaded fast, after blocking all that stuff :-)
Sorry for misunderstanding, now I see. Thanks for the explaination!
Ah OK. I was thinking of rights in the sense of "rights enshrined in law," as in "European Convention on Human Rights," rather than what is ethically or morally right.
I do have a few members who share ~5 links per day on the site including myself. In a given day the site receives ~20 new links. Most of this is just now starting to gain momentum as Feb 1st is when the site launched with a new design and a few new features.

The site has close to 100 return visitors daily and building.

Revenue is not a concern at the moment.
#5, true value of bootstrapping, is probably the most important thing in this article. So many companies omit this crucial step.
Fair enough; with your clarification I can see what you meant.

Still, what you call 'freeloading' I see as local approximations of a more-logical system, where someone else – anyone else – pays rather than companies directly. Since it allows a necessary good thing – business formation – to happen, it looks like a step in a fairer/more-functional direction to me.
Pictures of kittens for use as placeholders in your designs or code
How can just buying a communication company resolves your issues. Don't they think that if people want to communicate in 2011, they don't miss any ressources. Maybe they should ally with Facebook to bring a social integrated "Suggest to the government to make things better because we will take the time to listen to you". Understand why the fire is on and get to the source to fix it. (If they think about killing everyone as the "source", I give up!)
Very slick UI. How is this done? Is the main UI HTML/Javscript or QT? I guess it's good that I can't immediately tell.
Fixed! Good catch.
This is a ridiculous conflation of the facts.

"The problem is that the 'open access' rules attached to the so-called 700 Mhz C block require the carrier to allow the use of any hardware or software that it can’t prove won’t damage the network."

Put simply, Verizon must allow customers to use "unlocked" phones on their network.

How in the world do we go from that to "Verizon must only offer unlocked phones"? Then the author claims that the motivating actor is Google, who only sells one unlocked phone, and it only sells it in a GSM variant. Jump ahead to a quote from Markham Erickson, who just happens to be the executive director of the Open Internet Coalition. I'm sure his view is impartial and objective, right?

The biggest "tell" that this is link bait is the fact that they chose the iPhone as the headliner. News flash: every Android phone sold on Verizon is also in violation of this rule interpretation.

Apple has no qualms about selling unlocked iPhones. They do it abroad. Apple recognizes the value of a channel partner, and consumers have voted with their wallets. When given the choice between a $600 unsubsidized iPhone (which is still available, by the way) and a $200 phone with a two-year contract, customers go for the cheaper phone. Thus Apple sells phones though the channel that moves units. If Verizon is forced to open their phones, expect prices for Verizon phones to skyrocket, resulting in a significant advantage for their competitors. I find it very difficult to believe that the government would give such an unfair advantage to Verizon's competitors.

The overview on Ars Technica is much better (as usual) and doesn't attempt to sensationalize the impact of the ruling. Note that it's from 2007. There isn't much new here other than the fact that someone is attempting to troll Verizon with an old ruling.

http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/07/fcc-sets-700mhz-a...
> Take float – it’s a property to make text flow around an object. It wasn’t designed to create columns on a webpage. And there’s no CSS property that creates columns, or a header.

Yeah. How much time have I spent mucking about trying to achieve a stable cross-browser column layout. More often than not I just use a table. I know in design land this is an absolute no-no, but at the end of the day 1) it works 2) it's simple 3) it's x-browser 4) it's reliable.
Excellent, be sure to request an invite and I'll make sure you get one.
I'm dubious about this idea that web site owners have the right to dictate which web browsers their users are permitted to use to access their site, but it's certainly more colorable than a complaint about launching Mobile Safari with their page. It could be passing off, if nothing else.
Multi-column support is already in CSS3, and is supported by all modern browsers... with the usual exception of Internet Explorer.

However, multi-column implementations tend to be still a little rough around the edges, and some of the more complex formatting options don't appear to work. Also except to use -moz and -webkit a lot, unless you're using a framework like Compass which will handle the cross-browser support for you.

It also looks like there are a few Javascript libraries to give IE support for the multi-column CSS properties.
Seeing the Past 02/28/2011
> You can put "Users may not breathe while using this website" in your ToS but that doesn't make it enforceable. A ToS has to have some basis in law.

You seem to be confusing copyright law with contract law. ToS are generally considered part of contract law, under which anything that is not illegal can be part of the contract, and the parties agreeing to the contract would be obligated to comply.

There are exceptions to enforceability (like contracts of adhesion and unconscionable terms, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_form_contract) that may limit enforceability of a contract or terms of use, but "basis in law" is not necessarily required.

In contrast, copyrights (and patents, and trademarks) involve certain rights granted by law and explicit and unstated limitations to those rights. Owners of copyrights/patents/trademarks may make assertions that go beyond their rights and are thus not enforceable as they have no basis in law.

In the Wolfram|Alpha case, then, the questions involve (a) does linking to a site constitute acceptance of the terms of use? (b) does using the site constitute acceptance of the ToU? (c) are the terms actually an enforceable contract (not illusory/unconscionable).
While this is true, it may not have placated that person. They may be evaluated on how much money they "save" by getting explicit discounts from vendors. If the discount is already baked into the price, then it may not count towards the metric the sales guy is evaluated on.

It's possible the sales guy was a jerk. It's possible the sales guy is a rational actor working inside broken incentives. It's also possible that both are true.
Thanks! It's HTML/Javascript. (Note that you can use it as a webapp, we couldn't do that with Qt obviously)
Forrst is great if you want to see what other designers and developers are working on. Talentopoly is great if you want to see what they're reading.

I think there's room for both as I am a Forrst member and still found myself wanting to build something like Talentopoly.
As a non-designer I've used both blueprint and the 960.gs grid system.

They both work fine and I've never ran into the problems he describes with either one.

My somewhat limited understand of the two is the blueprint addresses issues with typography and sets a typographical rhythm, so it has some advantage there. However, I think it's pretty easy to trash that rhythm if you don't know what you're doing.
This is awesome. scipy and numpy are my main dependencies, they were pretty much the only reason I was not moving to Python 3 yet.
CSS isn't to blame for a lack of creative application of itself. It doesn't matter what the `float` attribute was intended for, look at all the cool stuff it can do! Yes, I know it's hard to make column-based layouts. But really, go use a table (JUST ONE) if you must—but it still isn't too hard to do using CSS.
But Peter Thiel didn't say that Palantir was the next Microsoft, did he?

It appears Palantir is doing well for themselves (although, who knows, maybe not), but calling themselves the next Facebook or Google smacks of hubris.
We manage to saturate the memory bandwidth. We can do 3,000,000 get / sec on a Core i7 machine with entries of roughly 1 kib in size.

Having benchmarks is our #1 priority
Well, this is the pun; although I guess a better description would be "a made-up word with a meaning that might not be instantly clear to non-French speakers" rather than a "pun".
How is that implausible? If you kept your distance, fine...It's also fair to say that a person won't inhale as much smoke since it isn't as contained as it would be indoors, but if you're standing downwind from it or if it wafts in your direction, there will definitely be inhalation.
My theory is that this isn't a pun, but rather a term that's no longer in use.

I seem to remember that some early elevator systems had two connected shafts and two cars, instead of one car and a counterweight like modern elevators. In this arrangement, cars go in a loop around a pulley at the top and bottom, always in the same direction. Thus, one shaft is the "up" shaft and one is the "down" shaft.

This image depicts the top floor, so elevators only go down from there. It may have been common practice at the time in France to call the elevator shaft that carries you down to be the descenseur and the one that carries you up to be the ascenseur. Nowadays, ascenseur is used all the time because an elevator car goes both ways.
even better - use Compass: http://compass-style.org/

Takes Sass to the next level. Actually makes Blueprint usable.
I'm guessing that the 10x to 15x is for someone who is purchasing and looking to slowly build it or use it for recurring revenue. The company that is looking to make the purchase might be looking to do a lot more with it (bundle it with their current products, etc) and it might be worth more than 10x to 15x. Ask them what they plan on doing with it. Also, how much work would it take for them to replicate?
It isn't necessarily a matter of personal entitlement issues. Asking for discounts is Standard Operating Procedure. Literally. It is his job to ask for discounts. That's all the procurement department is there for: achieving a pile of requests for internal customers at the lowest possible total price. Asking for a discount never causes the price to go up. It is a totally defensible business decision to always ask.
If you're using node.js ; stylus seems really good. I'll be using it as soon as I have the time to clean up my CSS.

[LearnBoost's Stylus: Expressive, dynamic, robust CSS] : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2162620
The problem with CSS is that it wasn't designed to solve a particular problems. Solutions to those problems came later with the tools that were haphazardly thrown together.

Example: vertical centering in CSS is far harder than it should be [1]. Why doesn't "vertical-align: middle" just work for divs like it does for table cells? I'm sure there are reasons. They just aren't good reasons. What's more: why hasn't CSS3 fixed this? It's a longstanding problem.

CSS is littered with examples like this that just go to show there was (and still is) a disconnect between what the W3C is doing and the problems people actually have.

My other big problem with CSS is the "inheritance" model. For one, it shouldn't be called inheritance. It should be called "cascading" because that's what it is.

Inheritance at the class level would actually be useful (and is another glaring omission).

Layout, even with CSS3, is still far harder than it should be. The approach CSS should've taken is to to work through a whole bunch of layouts and figure out how they're implemented. If it's hard, CSS still has gaps to fill. Don't release a spec until those gaps are filled.

[1]: http://www.jakpsatweb.cz/css/css-vertical-center-solution.ht...
The idea behind the hosting of resumes is because the goal is to have it be one of the websites you check everyday. And for designers looking for developers, IT professionals looking for designers, and vice versa -- you can qualify potential co-work partners.
Objective reasons:

- faster (especially on 64-bit multiprocessor machines)

- works on Windows out of the box

- scalable on multi-processor machines

- support

Download a version and see for yourself!
I really hate that these types of articles always bust out this weird dichotomy of "centralized" vs "decentralized" arguing. I don't know why this is, perhaps there are historical reasons for doing this, since at one point it was a big divide -- really defining the types of available arguments. Now however, it is 2011, and the world is a bit different.

Mostly, the centralized/decentralized divide is now a big mushy space called "networking". Those of us who have grown up with the idea of both PCs and Servers and Mainframes, don't look upon them as religions so much anymore. There are very good reasons for each of these architectures, and they map to different problems.

Further there are many times solutions from centralized or decentralized space work equally well in terms of technology, but not so well in terms budget. For example, where I work we all carry around MacBooks as our primary working computers. We recently have needed to do a bunch of development using .Net on windows. We decided to buy a very powerful server box, (24 cores, 140GB Ram etc) to be the main computer for windows dev. This allows several developers to remote in, and run VS2010, is pretty fast, and cost about 1/3 of the equivalent in new resources for each dev. It works for this case.

Conversely we decided to buy lots of cheap little machines for our test lab, and cluster them as needed, rather than a single big iron machine using VMS, because the flexibility was more important than cost.

These decisions never involved a tech flamewar, just a "what things will actually solve the problem, what tradeoffs exist, and how does the budget work best with them".

tl;dr -- sometimes terminals are a great solution for the cost, don't exclude them based on an old, mostly irrelevant anymore, religion.
I was even more puzzled when the network went down, which it often did. Half of us worked on Windows PCs and half worked on Unix workstations. When the network was down, the PC folks kept working because they had self-contained local work environments.

Never underestimate the power of a self-contained work environment. Being able to focus your entire development process to a single machine can be extremely powerful in certain contexts.
Light requires a lot of energy. WiFi radio waves are really not that strong. Even if there were a chemical like that, its light would be overpowered by street and window lights.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Can you explain?
The Eric Meyer reset is great for a base sheet... clears all those little default values you probably forgot about http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/

I swear by 960.gs or any of the fluid interpretations (http://www.designinfluences.com/fluid960gs/) for most of my projects. It is such a simple concept to understand, adding classes .container_12 or .container_16 (now in 24 columns) to wrap your content and then .child_X classes to each div or block level item you need.

Saves a huge amount of time, and is something that lends its-self to more organized styles if you don't spend all of your time designing. When the objective is to ship something quickly, frameworks are absolutely the route to take.
It's a cognitive dissonance issue. People will perceive more value in a discount when they are clearly shown how much they would have paid without the discount, versus how much they are paying with the discount.

Think about how good it makes you feel when you paste in a coupon code during the last stage of a checkout procedure and watch the price drop to half what it was before. You can't quite believe that it has worked correctly, its that satisfying.

If you want to really milk it, write a checkout pathway with some javascript that makes the digits of the price spin round like an odometer, preferably with the sound of a slot machine paying out.
Why Bytemark Hosting didn't use Xen
Not really a job board -- but a easier way for IT pro's to share that aspect. We've had people be contacted because of their talentopoly hosted resume already from some of the big boys -- so that function is getting noticed.
Why doesn't Wolfram just block this? It would be a little bit of work, A naive solution is to use short-lived cookies. But there are more sophisticated means to ensure that users get to the result page via a query.
They've always been pretty rent-seeking.
Yes 2, 3, 5 or 7 only for easy steps. Anyone who has 6 easy steps to do anything is clearly an idot.
Aside from anything else though, they're called Palantir.

I mean, IIRC, that didn't pan out too well for people in LOTR.
How did you overcome the "chicken and egg problem" of getting the first batch of people to join?
I think it's fairly standard in journalism (both newspapers and magazines). A lot of bigger magazines and newspapers have a full-time headline writer who basically does only that, possibly along with some related headline-ish tasks like pulling out those random quotes from the article that get printed in large font in insets.
I know, it's hard to draw a nice objective line in the sand. A general-purpose browser with a new UI, for example, ought to be allowed without requiring permission from anyone.

On the other hand, what if I write an iOS app just for getting answers from Wolfram|Alpha that displays the content using Webkit? I could certainly understand Wolfram arguing this kind of thing requires permission.

I'm curious about DuckDuckGo's use of Wolfram|Alpha content. There's an example of framing content and deep linking together. I assume they have permission or an army of lawyers?
When I worked in an office, nobody was a smoker (Sweden...) but instead we had coffee breaks. The time when we needed to refill our coffee mugs would synchronize and we'd end up around the coffee machine in the airy full-window hallway.
Another alternative: LessCSS -- http://lesscss.org/

Include less.js in your page and you're done. No externally running process necessary -- the less.js file renders your .less files right in the browser.
I was browsing through the web server implementation:

https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio/tree/master/src/cpp/core/...

Can anyone familiar with writing web servers in C comment on this? For instance, how full featured is it? How useful is the code for learning about web servers?
This looks like a crowdsourced curation of content relevant to a particular vertical (have I thrown in enough buzzwords?).

That actually seems like a reasonable idea. The problem you may have is that a site like Stackoverflow could (and IMHO should) copy it and integrate it into what they have. It actually seems like a good extension for the SO model.
I'll take that one step further and say that Compass makes CSS intelligible, reusable and efficient to write. The Compass people have taken the time to understand what the right cross-browser techniques/best practices exist for lots of common CSS problems, so I don't have to worry about it. I wouldn't do CSS without it ever again.
Hmm, I just switched from click to mouseover- I'm not sure if it's better or not. It makes it jump around a bit. I'll leave it up and let me know what you think.

(p.s. thanks for the feedback!)
i can't help but feel that this kind of hatred is only derived from a lack of understanding of css. particularly the primary case for floats. admittedly a bit clumsy, they do whatever you ask them just fine.

it has it's quirks. though considering there are only a very few contemporary designs css couldn't achieve, surely it's doing something right.

that's not to say css couldn't be improved. but to think it takes "magic of the deepest kind to implement what should be simple", as one commenter says, seems like ignorance to me.
Hah, I'm in the exact same boat and had the same initial reaction.