skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All we're saying is that CSS was haphazardly thrown together, wasn't well thought out, and makes hard that which should be easy. In short, it sucks.
There's a good reason people specifically work on this stuff ..

I don't get this at all. Central to the design of HTML and the Web is the notion of democratic access to information and the ability for non-specialists to create it. Furthermore, the motivation behind CSS was to make it easier to do this work by separating the design from the information. CSS should therefore be, if not intuitive, at least easy to learn, use, and troubleshoot.

It's true, we need brain surgeons to do brain surgery, but we shouldn't need specialists to do basic things like vertical centering, convincing layout without tables, and overriding styles in nested elements.

We've come a long way from the intent of CSS if we're arguing that only specialists should use it.
The "free scaling" using appengine datastore is nothing more than theoretical at this point. The service has severe datastore latency problems and non trivial downtime. Looks like using RDBMS, solves both these issues for now, while Google can ponder around long term solution for the bigtable access.
Plug computers are a serious threat, though the need for physical access and relatively easy discovery mean that it's not going to be that common. Pentest teams are currently using them, which means malicious users are too.

I'd definitely be worried about those POE injectors for conference room phones and other uses. Most of them already look like a cheap black box, have two ethernet ports and power and aren't out of place.

Practically though, I'd be much more concerned about penetrations in official clients. You can get most of the same functionality out of an employees mobile device and have the added advantage of more deniability. Client malware is so common that most is not assumed to be a targeted attack, whereas finding an unauthorized plug computer will raise alarm bells quickly.

Never the less, it's yet another strong argument for implementing 802.1x.
Crocodoc allows IE6 users to download either the original file, or a PDF version containing any comments and markups that have been added to it so far.

All other versions of IE work fine (and IE9 actually looks amazing due to its updated font rendering engine).
Quite a few people are tackling DEBIT payments in innovative ways. Off the top of my head there's BankSimple (still in beta), ThinkComp (doing payment thru mobile along w/ their proprietary device), and another that I can't remember that does payment authorization using the audiojack from your iphone.

But if you're talking of supplanting the actual CREDIT industry itself(i.e., replaceing VISA/Mastercard), that's a pretty tough call. The industry is heavily regulated. In fact the credit card industry was borne out of regulation. It's also no small feat to deal with issues such as fraud, defaults, etc...
“Stealing Money from Customers to Reroute into Projects we Believe in.”
Hey HN, what do you think of our strategy? The quote is one way we think about what we are doing right now at Social Printshop. I thought it was a good idea to tell our customers directly, so i explained everything to a mashable reporter and some of my thoughts were covered in a somewhat popular article last week. The response has been mixed, in terms of feedback via email etc., but overall I support the idea of honesty and full disclosure and I wanted to open up more of a discussion here on HN.

I am generally against consumerism, and hesitant to fully embrace capitalism, but I saw the creation of a start-up as a great way to raise capital to address issues of sustainability, social justice, and the many conflicts deeply embedded in our culture.

Before you start doling out heavy handed criticism, I propose that you would think a bit about how you are (or are not) addressing contemporary social/political conflicts with your start-up.
Granted, sorry. The problem I have with Republican rhetoric on the issue is the "I got mine" smugness of it all. The message seems to be "If you want health care, get a job like me. Problem solved." But it isn't that simple. Unemployment is real even for the able-bodied and a common consequence of being underinsured. Some jobs don't offer health care (at all) or offer inadequate, unaffordable health care (small businesses, in my experience.) Preexisting conditions can lock hard-working people out or keep them from seeking optimum employment.

I'd love to hear from even one anti-healthcare reform advocate who has ever been "outside the system" (as outlined above) and thinks that's a principled position to take.
I don't agree .. not many sites use multiple columns at the moment, and they can still look reasonably good (current). If not having multiple columns is a deal-breaker for a user, they'll switch browsers (which might not be such a bad thing).

My point is, the fact that some browsers haven't implemented some features yet shouldn't be problem. A website usually doesn't need to look exactly the same on every browser - and following a system of progressive enhancement allows a developer to use newer features more openly.
Considering the Koch brothers right wing at all is an act of ignoring inconvinient facts. The Koch brothers have given more to the ACLU than they have to all political candidates combined (http://reason.com/blog/2011/02/25/the-koch-brothers-right-wi...). They oppose the war in Iraq, the Patriot Act, torture of suspected terrorists, and the war on drugs. They're in favor of Abortion rights, stem cell research and Gay Marriage.

As for the rich creating so-called grass roots organizations I don't see Anonymous going after George Soros. So they can't be all that opposed to the practice.
Why Passwords Aren't Enough
Is there any way to see the justification for killing a comment?

I trust HN's moderators, but it makes me uneasy to realize that there is a whole collection of censored comments that I didn't see until now, because I had showdead disabled.
No, but the average Pagerank for a site for sale on Flippa ranges from 2 to 4. In the scheme of a valuation, wherein the seller is trying to get the most value for his property, it's definitely a consideration.
with all this modern priority of safety over everything else, man on the Moon is impossible. Heck, even bringing an open fire into a cold dump cave full of people would be a grave safety violation.
CSS provides solutions to some quite complicated problems - to think otherwise, is trivialising the work of front-end developers and designers .. and I think that might be part reason for some of the animosity that's often expressed.

E.g. it's front-end / it's trivial ;)
Jason is spot on that Hipmunk is trying to ease pain in the flight booking industry. Booking flights is largely undifferentiated in the space with low-price sort and sites bombarded with ads all aimed at squeezing a few more bucks out of a low-margin industry (flight rev share to partners are less than $3/ticket).

Is it disruptive to the flight industry? I don't think so. I love the intent of Hipmunk but to say disruptive implies a deeper seated change that I don't think Hipmunk is driving in flights. You mentioned Square which both solves an interface pain point but is also shifting payments to a mobile on-site platform for small businesses. They are doing business differently because of Square and are able to service a new segment of customers they were not able to before (ones with credit cards).

What would be disruptive to the airline industry? I think to disrupt the industry, you would need to change the way people fly or how they buy/book air travel as a whole. One idea that I think would be considered disruptive is if someone introduced pre-paid flight vouchers to lock in prices much like you would to gas/oil contracts. This would change the airline's supply/demand model, it would change the way we "hunt" for low prices, and change the general way we view air travel (instead of waiting for a low price, we've already paid for x number of flights so we're free to go as needed).

The other points in the article are generally spot on for startups to focus on your power users and build a fan base. The one thing about calling out your competitors is that it's easy to do when you are clearly and squarely about reducing pain and friction and that your target audience clearly sympathizes with your intentions. No smart competitor would come out and call you out on trying to do the consumer some good unless they want a PR backlash.
As I pointed out in my reply the Koch brothers opposed most of what the Bush administration did and both sides play the "money for a movement" game (again going back to George Soros and friends).
It wasn't better; it was just different.
I was halfway a weekend project to find out GAE can't do LIKE-statements or an equivalent thereof, only with some hacking this is sort of possible. Moved the project to RoR and got it working in no time.
Another project I had couldn't be done because the datastore was to slow. I love GAE, and use it for quite some little projects but you have to know its limitations. SQL (and hopefully the speed that comes with it) are certainly a step in the right direction.
You would rather risk losing your data more keeping with yourself. This is a stupid post. Clouds solutions generally implement good backup solutions and with almost 100% availability to the data. Google has anyway restored more than 50% of the lost data.
Chomp May Have Just Solved The Nightmare That Is Android App Search
Maybe you should concentrate on back-end development?

I can sympathise, but I really don't think reverting to table-based layouts is a good solution.

EDIT: Reverting to table-based layouts _ISN'T_ a good solution.
> I'm not entirely sure what you're competitive advantage is then?

It's a good question ... here's a quick take on competitive positioning:

Quora: Q&A focus, broad focus, good responsiveness, Valley-based and English-only, text-oriented UX with some graphical abilities, very weak discussion capabilities

HN: link sharing and discussion sometimes used for Q&A, topics focused on hackers (including those starting companies) but , large and active community, not easy for a newcomer to get feedback or target answers, text-only UX

StackOverflow: Q&A focus, topics initially for programmers, now branching out

Sprouter's focus is on entrepreneurs and they're Canada-based so could have a big geographical differentiator from Quora. Depending on what strategy they pursue there are some other obvious potential competitive advantages and ... I haven't used it enough to know yet.

> What's in it for the people giving advice?

A key question. Sprouter seems to feature their experts a lot more prominently than Quora -- have a look at http://sprouter.com/answers
To Eric's point, summarized here, layout is not style, and CSS is all about style. No word yet on a cascading layout sheets (CLS?) which would provide that sort of capability.
Also take a look at isotope and masonry for jquery-powered layouts.

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2189251
I'll check out that site's T&C -- thank you!
It's not an impossible dream, but if Vegas allowed me to, I'd put a large bet against you.

Not because I don't think it won't happen. But your timeline is far too short to grow the audiences you'll need on whatever app(s) you create.
Plugs can take their time.

Not only can you do low intensity probes over a much longer span of time vs a wardrive or loiter-scenario, you can keep throwing new exploits against old targets so long as the plug goes undetected.
I don't see how this is bizarre. He's trying to jettison anything that loses money. Selling a business for nothing is a net profit to you if the business is losing money.

As far as Koch Industries they specifically said (in the 2nd link you posted) that they have no interest in the power plants.
"Central to the design of HTML and the Web is the notion of democratic access to information and the ability for non-specialists to create it."

I imagine the large majority of the hackernews readership can be defined as a 'web specialist' of one kind or another, so if this were true most of us would be out of a job :P

My point is - there's no good reason why front-end development should be any less complicated than back-end development. Just because people expect it to be easy, isn't a good enough reason ..
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I think the true wisdom in past future predictions is something that people didn't get right. For example another (my) take on the three first predictions, that you listed as successes, are: no practical text-to-speech(1), no truly intercontinental trains(2), no robots on construction sites(3)

If you look it from that perspecive, there's something to be learned. It's easy to vision, but it's difficult to understand what things are truly hard or things that surprisingly worked against all odds.

For example, people have been waiting for practical home robots for decades, but operating autonomously in the real world is really difficult problem, much harder that it intuitively feels (because we are so good at it).

On the otherhand, I think very few people predicted something like Wikipedia (or HN, Quora etc): free, quality information, produced by volunteers. It's hard problem too, but it just worked.

My gut feeling is that it's the social phenomena that we underestimate in our future predictions.
anandtech has some good info, too: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4198/nvidia-announces-cuda-40
Ask HN: Java/Flash developer wanted (Southern California)
Startup is searching for talented and passionate developers to join our team. We're creating a product to transform how teams collaboratively work online. We're looking for individuals who love to write code and push the envelope, and want to be a part of creating something new. Desirable experience includes:

- Flex or Grails/Java. Other technical aspects include Action Script, MVC architectures, Java, Grails, PostgreSQL, web services, Mate flex framework, layout algorithms, JMS/messaging.

- Heavy focus on UI and ease of use. Collaboration, sharing, visualization.

- Familiarity with Web 2.0, social media and collaboration concepts & technologies.

contact me dnguyen at thenguyens dot com
Wasn't familiar the story but after Google + skimming it:
Don't use the word stealing, its not accurate. You are providing a service+product that some people find valuable and they are paying you for it.

I honestly don't see the controversy unless there's more that I'm missing.
Great comment. Currently the site exposes the most popular post at the moment under the section, "What's on Talentopoly" on the landing page.

The next step I planned to take was to expose the Posts tab on the landing page.

Down the road I expect to make the landing page the popular posts page and the Request Invite links would take you to what is now the landing page (the request an invite page).

That's the 3-step process for exposing the posts more and more as I currently have it planned.
Ask HN: Simple, accessible straightforward book on accounting?
I'm looking for a recommendation for a good book on accounting. I'm trying to corral a bunch of data together into, say, an excel spreadsheet... trying to figure out the best way to account for revenues and expenses, fixed and variable costs.

Maybe it's not even a book I need, maybe someone did a blog post.
The good news is that by merely attempting to phrase a question, people often solve their own problem. So, when a coworker bugs you, just look at them without processing anything they say. If they finish talking and don't have an have an 'aha' look about them after a few moments, only then do you actually switch mental gears, ask them to repeat the question, and go on from there.
Now with the slow death and lessening support of IE6 and even IE7, my CSS life has never been easier. I build some layout and test in IE8, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, most always, my layout is laid out. I spent the time and it's gotten easier. Now people are complaining "it's too hard. I don't want to learn. What happened to the 1997 misnomer that any one can build a website?"

"But CSS is hard..." Well life is hard. Listen I have spent years learning the ins and outs of CSS. (Mostly Browser compatibility issues and best use principals.) I have spent years learning all the skills in my web development tool kit. This is what allows me to bill for my skills; not everyone can do them.
In no particular order.
Interesting... I haven't read the Mashable article, so I don't have all the context to fully appreciate this. But I can say that I don't advocate stealing! Not sure if that was a metaphor or what, but I wouldn't want to steal a dime from a customer.

However, I do have some political issues that are near and dear to my heart; hence my run for Lt. Governor of NC in 2008. But, realistically, I don't want to be a politician and it's near impossible to get elected as a 3rd party candidate anyway. And since I am an unabashed fan of Capitalism, my thinking these days is to launch a startup, try to acquire significant wealth, and then spend that wealth supporting the causes I believe in. Of course I want to do some good along the way, and one way to do that is contributing to Open Source Software (which is something I believe in very strongly as well). So all of our code is freely available, licensed under the APLv2.

If the startup ever gets off the ground and we reach a point where it's practical, I'd also like to arrange some (hopefully) mutually beneficial ways to help poor people in rural areas as well, mainly through education. Having grown up dirt poor in a rural area myself, I'm a big believer in the power of education to help people raise themselves up. So going back and arranging for free classes on technology topics, entrepreneurship, etc., would be something I hope to do someday. As you can probably tell, I am big on the "teach a person to fish" vs "give them a fish" thing.
Envy Labs Core Values
Vincent Untz's Response to Canonical & Banshee
I'm not sure how to post this without seeming like a troll, but... is this guy campaigning for or against net neutrality? I can't tell from the article. He wants to protect "our most basic freedoms", right? So... he wants net neutrality? But then he says "no taxpayer dollars [should be] used to fund these net neutrality rules."

I'm sure I'm being either naive, stupid or both right now, but I'm honestly confused.
There is a difference between humans speaking and monkeys speaking. For hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people that use the datastore API, this is a big thing.
This was more meant as a quick and dirty "quick start" tutorial. The real equivalent to your link would Google's official embedder's guide @ http://code.google.com/apis/v8/embed.html. Thanks for the link nonetheless!
> some early elevator systems

E.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster
I use MatLab mostly for statistical purposes, together with EViews (statistical software geared towards econometrics). This could certainly ease the transition towards R and replace both aforementioned tools.
Fred Wilson: What Makes a Web App Successful? (2010)
> I think the priors actually really become a moot point after you tack on the utility function.

Why? It seems that both are essential?
Just group all the related managers in a single shared office. This is what my husband's company does - he shares a large private office with the two other leads on his project. Confidential info has not been an problem. If shared space is really advantageous, this should be the best of both worlds.
Humility And Hubris
lwhi - sure, I'm more comfortable doing back end dev work (and try to focus on it). But that doesn't change my opinion that CSS is a half assed solution that doesn't solve my problems. Tables do. And the counter-arguments against using a table based structure all tap into situations that haven't affected my specific context.

So tell me again why I should use CSS based layouts? For me, they frustrate me and prohibit me from accomplishing my tasks. Tables don't do this. And all the downside to using tables? Not particularly relevant for my goals.
1. They're jumping on hot topics like the Koch brothers.

2. They're bringing up politically salient points like the "clause would allow the sale of publicly owned utility plants in Wisconsin to private parties (specifically, Koch Industries) at any price, no matter how low, without a public bidding process."

3. Their writing sounds populist and they're boldly declaring attacks against powerful opponents which gives them a David v. Goliath story which is easy for the public to get behind.

4. Colbert did a story on them so their name is growing.

5. I'm not saying they're good or bad. But, whatever their ideology, they're becoming a stronger presence and they're getting better at diplomacy.
I voted Probably - if you explain your project first. So yeah, if you feel like telling us more about what this is for, I'm very likely game; as long as the project is anything reasonably interesting. I'm guessing some sort of HN meta-analysis of what stories get saved, or why, or when or something?
It's serving as a reminder that HN is changing.
s/than/then/

> the whole world drools

So, lots of room to explore, but can you turn a profit? Imagine doing this systematically with 3G. The wireless companies pay big money for this kind of data in GIS systems. Imagine adding "street view" to critical areas.
I concur. I'm a big fan of Ohanian and what he's trying to do with Hipmunk, but as of now there is no disruption, more like a cult following.

One thing to point out on their efforts is that they managed to work out a deal with AA while AA removed themselves from Orbitz, Expedia, and the lot. I'd consider that progress towards disruption.
Really? I'm an asshole. That's absurd.

I'm saying that he did something wrong and he's paying for it. Do you disagree? Do you think they should just let this slide? He didn't follow their TOS, so they should just say "whatever" and let it go? Wolfram has a responsibility to uphold their TOS so that it doesn't get abused.

My point is that I see a lot of posts around here where people go on rants about how they got screwed by a TOS, but the BOTTOM LINE is that they weren't thorough. They didn't do their due-dilligence. They didn't read the TOS, they didn't contact the company who's systems they are using, or some other small detail was missed. Rarely do we see a legitimate reason why someone is RIGHT after they got hit by a company for not complying with a TOS.

Look at companies trying to sell "market" apps in the Android Market, or everyone who is complaining about having to give Apple a cut of their SaaS revenues. The TERMS in the TOS agreements didn't change in most of these cases, but people are complaining when all of a sudden they have to pay the price for not reading, missing, misinterpreting, or ignoring the rules.

But hey, I get get downvoted for having a legitimate opinion, and you can get up votes for calling me an asshole.

It used to be fun here. I used to be able to have an opinion and people would praise the fact that I can look at something from another angle, be the devils advocate. But now, if I don't have a hive mind I'm an asshole.
I would be surprised if there were not points in your life where you "had" to do things you didn't want to do. Surely there was some required course you weren't interested in doing the assignments for or something similar.

I am also considering the possibility that mine is a case of burnout. I'm in graduate school and after classes and homework all day, it may just not be feasible... not sure.
I'd argue that what's bizarre about it is the uncompetitive nature of the bidding. Sure, jettison anything that's losing money right now (as short-sighted as it seems) but at least get top dollar for it. As is, it seems a little shady - no?