skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love CSS2 just the way it is. Developers seem to have a knack of forcing object-oriented thinking on CSS. They want to dictate what CSS should do different, when browser vendors still have trouble deciding what specification-valid CSS should do.

Dynamic CSS to me is an abomination. CSS is not a programming language and I doubt treating it like one will enhance portability and suddenly inspire the OP to invent the "holy grail" of CSS layouts: A simple variable height multi-column design with a header and a footer.

Come on, give the web and the front-end community a little respect. Don't use javascript for essential design/layout work, you don't need it, never needed it for years. You don't need hacks or CSS3 to build a fantastic website. You can float and use absolute positioning to your hearts content. You can keep your stylesheet organized and even support mobile and print media with it.

@cletus Vertical-align:middle does work differently on block-display elements. Use it in conjunction with display: table-cell or look at http://phrogz.net/css/vertical-align/index.html

I consider the OP post a little flame-batish and uninformed. I could say this about Lisp in an exaggerated manner: I hate it, because it does support labda, though it has its drawbacks and all those brackets look silly and confusing. I haven't really studied Lisp, but it could benefit from listening to my problems (which are real).
Why not to write it in a much simplier way? Like this:

function bar(n) {
// still has dependency on q, r, s
}
foo(..., bar);
The Gap
I didn't realize how well the invite-only nature of the site would lend itself to attracting an audience. The hope was to merely keep the quality high by making it invite-only, but I have found it's a great incentive to join and to even has a viral edge as people like to give out invites and say they are on Talentopoly in tweets, etc. Also, just being really involved in the site myself everyday making sure that new posts were going up and things other posted were getting commented on. Now that it's starting to take on more of a life of its own I don't have to chime in on everything on the site, though my involvement is still very high throughout the day.
Nope. I agree with what you are saying; and would like my research presented as summary statistics under different models (of which the p-value is one) for sciency stuff, and expected utility values under different utility functions and priors for decision making. I think the priors actually really become a moot point after you tack on the utility function.
Studious readers may note that what's good for the giant meganational corporation is also good for the individual: you don't get something if you don't ask for it.

This is the root of that whole 'rejection therapy' business that was so cool a few weeks ago.
Thousands of Gmail accounts accidentally wiped
Infographic for new and aspiring Graphic Designers
VoIP patent lawsuit names several telecom carriers
We link to respected news sources, a paper in Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry, and our competitors. This isn't fearmongering. It's true.

I handle a lot of receipts running a business and so do a lot of other entrepreneurs. If you don't care, that's fine. Other people might.

Also, your argument that all things are equally toxic in enough quantity is nonsensical.
After doing front-end development for 10 years, I have come to the conclusion that 97.3% of all my annoyances with CSS would disappear if IE and Opera adopted the Flexible Box Model (http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-flexbox/): vertical centering, scaling based on available space, constraints-based scaling, etc.

This is basic layout behaviours that I keep spending hours implementing in JS, which is slow and brittle, because you need fallbacks, etc.
The discussion concerns the behavior of the Tolkien estate. Your 'so?' will only be interpreted as concerning that behavior. We aren't psychically empowered to understand you are expressing a sentiment about the sentiment expressed by the button that triggered the behavior of the Tolkien estate.
Me too! SciPy has been my main reason for not switching for a lot of work I do. I'll see if I can switch soon now :) I just need Django to work and I'll be set to completely leave 2.x behind!
Why? Is there something special about using 555's that I don't know about? A 2 bit full adder is a really simple circuit...
Plug computers as low-profile security intrusion tools
I can't say much about ads. I don't know anything about how it works or what their policies are.
We just had our 700th member sign up! http://talentopoly.com/users/861
Step one, stop reading Hacker News.
Step two, go do something.
Is there any modern serious OS that does not provide bash?

By default? Windows (heh). And most Unix servers don't come with bash by default. Though I think you can install it on most anything, it is not a good idea to change the default root shell on Unix servers.

That being said, OSX and Linux have Bash as the default shell. If that's all you deal with then go ahead and learn Bash (and the other GNU utilities) instead of POSIX sh. Unless you're an admin there's no point in being so pedantic.
Faking It - When is Two Factor Authentication Not?
Yea! Kitties! I like it.

cf: http://xkcd.com/231/
How does the designer benefit from helping? I would imagine that "design" help in open source comes after the fact. The designer "pretties" things up with some gradients and rounded corners - basically decoration. Problem is, real design doesn't work like that so you're going to have a hard time getting a real designer involved in a community they're probably not active in, for free. Real design begins before a single line of code is written, they want to be part of driving decisions and solving problems.
Gaikai Beta goes Live
It feels so strange to upvote a link to kitten images on HN and actually have it be on topic.
Also, if you're using @font-face for links, you may get some weirdness with hover states etc. You can use the same trick, but you'll need to tweak the blur for each state to get rid of any artefacts that stick around.
That sure sounds plausible, but is there any evidence that this was actually the case? I'm always looking for excuses to dress extravagantly and not shave.
For those interested in keeping up with the posts on Talentopoly you can find the RSS feed at http://talentopoly.com/posts/all.rss
RStudio's binary is named 'rdesktop'. Oops! Although it's not in the default PATH, so it could be worse :)
Nah, you fit the null hypothesis, and if it fails you reject it. You never, ever accept the null hypothesis; there might just not be enough power in the test.
A link to a PDF of a research document with an obtuse abstract, versus a quick, readable summary published on one of the industry's leading tech publications?

I'll take the latter, thank you.
By the way, I created a nice helper to track how forks are going on the GitHub, using RSS feed reader: https://github.com/svetlyak40wt/forkfeed
Why isn't SSL turned on by default for all websites?
The sense of perspective in these is mind-bending. Look at the lady passenger, and imagine her taking a couple of steps 'away' from the viewer, to approach the green walkway.

By then she has to be short enough to fit under the wing, and after walking over the gangway, she has to be small enough to get in the Alice-in-Wonderland door, under the wing with no headroom, into a box so small the coachman-pilot would barely squash into it.

The walkway is on top of a building high enough to have an elevator, but the handrail varies Escher style from shin-height to shoulder-height along it's ~two meter length. (And if it is shin height like the steps side suggests, then it's of no use, and if it's shoulder height like the door side suggests then she would fall between the railings, and the gap to the door is a circus acrobat's leap!).

Then the wings, which are about the height of the pilot, but also about thrice the height of the door - not to mention it's a winged vehicle which hovers.

"In the year 2000" the unshielded outside light bulb would be a health and safety violation, let alone all the other aerial acrobatic bits!
You break the rules, you pay the consequences. Ignorance is NOT an excuse.

He's "in his situation" (edit) with Wolfram because he didn't do his due-diligence and contact them first before linking to them in his app.

EDIT: He seems to understand this, and admits that he "goofed", yes.
I'll have to check out hackerbuddy.com, hadn't heard of that site before. I've been a big fan of Heroku so far. There's a reason why others are mimicking their hosting strategy. That said, it stinks when there's downtime or the grid slows down for whatever reason. So you are more prone to those sort of outages. But to get started, it's easy and free. I'd highly recommend it.
How test-driven development works
I wrote the whole article, just not the headlines/subheads. My editor always tweaks a few words here and there, but I always review prior to publication. So I'd say it's a 9.9.
I wish I had a video of what I was doing a year ago!
The Dissertation Writing Process
The writing of a dissertation is a time consuming task. There are many elements which need to be considered in order to make a successful dissertation. Therefore, students are requested to learn the entire process of dissertation writing in order to submit a well written dissertation.
Nice, tiny suggestion for improvement. Allow links to end in .jpg.

There are some cases where that's a nice to have. Otherwise, hilariously useful.
"Try sitting down with someone who has never..."

sorry, are you saying that this frustration is most prevalent in people who don't have a strong grasp on css? isn't that exactly my point?

what precisely are you trying to argue? that floats and columns aren't perfect? allow me to reiterate a few of my concessions: "that's not to say css couldn't be improved", "it has it's quirks", and "admittedly a bit clumsy".

with all due respect, perhaps you're either suffering the effects of mere exposure or self-victimization.
A funny and unorthodox way to encourage strong passwords
It also means I miss out on the embarrassment of having my Solaris box blare a train whistle over the onboard speaker for the entire department to hear, regardless of what my volume settings are, or whether I have headphones plugged in...
For me it is:

1. Google

2. RTFM

3. Think

4. Coworkers

5. StackOverflow
There is a keen difference between "modern serious OS" and "serious production OS".
Well, it has a mouse, so it's more like an X terminal than a plain old serial terminal like a VT220.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal -- notice the mouse; working on one of these was "almost" indistinguishable from having a display/kbd/mouse connected directly to the server.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT220 -- no graphics or mouse here, just CURSES.

Back in the 90's X terminals were considered perfectly adequate for most desktop computing tasks (short of CAD, I guess) provided the server was powerful enough. I guess the proliferation of cheap Intel/ Windows boxes was what did them in.
One of my co-founders quit during the past recession, when our sales dipped to zero in no time -- we actually had zero sales for 9 months straight.

I think he simply couldn't accept the failure, even while it obviously wasn't anything wrong from ourselves. He started resenting any minor annoyance as an act of sabotage. If I came late to the office (I've always, always came late for the past 20 years; I hardly pass the door before 11AM if not for a serious reason), if the sales guy failed to close a sale (well, good luck with that...), he lived that as a personal offence and a deliberate attempt to annihilate his own efforts.

What the article didn't mention is that this emotional burden can alter relationships and literally make the atmosphere poisonous. It's quite incredible, but an 8 persons group can be filled with petty politics, resent and conspirational talks. As a result we had a near complete reset (the team went from 8 to 2, then back to 8 in 6 to 9 months).
Is this incredibly slow for anyone else?
I expect they are. In retrospect, I should have asked first.

It something like going to a dinner party and having the host throw you out for placing your fork to the left of the plate, because they put them on the right at their house. Runs contrary to expectations.

--agiletortoise
Where does it say he's mad at them? All he's saying is that this policy isn't very web-friendly.
I heard Wired did a whole issue on how this is the future.
From the journal article linked:

> "If this BPA ends up in the human metabolism, exposure of a person repeatedly touching thermal printer paper for 10 h/day, such as at a cash register, could reach 71 μg/day, which is 42 times less than the present tolerable daily intake (TDI)."

Dose is everything in toxicology. That's why I mentioned water. Literally everything is toxic in the right dose, but I never said that all things are equally toxic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication

It's not an issue of caring or not caring, it's an issue of hyping a threat that doesn't seem to be present, and asking people to contact lawmakers about it. You may have a very fine product. This is not, in my medical opinion, a reasonable way to go about promoting it.
> industry's leading tech publications

I hope you're joking. Sometimes, sure, they're good. But that article is ... I'll hold my tongue. They're making it out to be some amazing feat. While I don't want to take away from the authors who I'm sure are great researchers, this is nothing new. And then there's the part where they suggest RSA fix it, and that's just something else.
...and the way to encourage research into SCA is to make sure most people that suffer from it are unable to pay for whatever treatment gets developed, by denying them healthcare? You've made the point that some diseases disproportionately affect minorities, but the step that gets us from "unaffordable healthcare"=>"treating more minorities" seems lacking.
That's quite a torrent. How about best-of-hour and best-of-day feeds? Each would get just one new post every interval, which makes for predictable volume in my feedreader.
i can't help but feel that this kind of hatred is only derived from a lack of understanding of css.

The problem of element layout is a relatively simple one. It should not require some kind of in-depth "understanding" and extensive research. That's pretty much the point of the article, and I tend to agree.

CSS does layouts badly, and it should include dedicated tools to deal with the common issues. Right now, it pretty much relies on a bunch of hacks. The problem with those hacks is that they don’t allow for easy modification or code reuse. Nesting one complex layout inside of another is most likely to break both of them.

It always seemed to me that the people who defend CSS as "good enough" simply stick with a couple of mostly-working solutions and never try to design their websites exactly as they see it. That’s where the real pain starts. Something that takes five minutes with tables + css takes hours of reading and experiments with a "pure" layout. The sheer amout of articles about multi-column layousts is tribute to how complex the problem is.
Kent Beck Revises the Agile Manifesto for startups
I have a love/hate relationship with lesswrong. Every time I read one of their articles I pop open 5 links to other lesswrong articles that are being referenced. This has the potential to increase my to-read list exponentially.
Mark here, I threw placekitten.com together this weekend after a journey on a train in which I could not access placehold.it and few weeks of jokes about the concept with colleagues.

I was not planning on posting to HN, as I thought that a kitten-meme related site might not be the most appropriate (looks like the wisdom of the crowd has decided otherwise).

I can't claim that the server will stand up, so I would refrain from using the site for anything critical (not sure why you would need/want to), or that caching is entirely correct (I'm sending far-future expires, but I'm sure that I could improve given some time).

Glad that the internet likes kittens though. Confirmed a suspicion I had.
These ToS clauses protect their paid iPhone app from being replicated in the browser, which is pretty much exactly what you did. So it is effectively you who didn't get it :)
And according to the weather report, it's snowing in hell right now. Looks like the week's off to a good start!
Agreed with this. Ask HN threads can contain excellent information, but is no longer a match for a good Quora thread.

However, is there really a need for a "Quora for startups"? Wouldn't that be...Quora?
You've observed that when some people get to force others to their will, that works best? And when was the free market tried consistently and failed?

We have a mixed economy in the US. Observing its failings doesn't prove that a free economy is wrong.
I thought Quora was the "Quora for Startups."
We don't have robotic arms in consumer products yet (I believe this will change in the next 10 years)

Why do you believe that?

The best use I've come up with for them is for disabled people - a *plegic with a robot arm on a desk able to manipulate post, or on wheels able to be an avatar in the real world.

But that's the sort of profitable insurance-funded medical use which still isn't around. Currently they only exist in consumer space in the arm-for-amputees sense, and in the Lego Technics sense, and I expect that to continue, but where else would they start appearing for consumer products?
Looks like there's a bug report already http://bit.ly/epH9kt
1) CSS is great the way it is

2) CSS makes "a simple variable height multi-column design with a header and footer" require so many contortions to achieve that it's considered a "holy grail" and not "a basic layout"

?????
Glad I didn't live in that future. As has been said by others, predictions of the future often tell you more about the society making the prediction than what will actually come to pass.
I'm sorry, but this article really lacks context, and is grossly overgeneralising (see http://swombat.com/2011/1/20/how-to-write-good-startup-advic... )...

Most of those would be good pieces of advice given the right amount of context, but they are blown up into universal advice and, even worse, a "how to" (yes, I know the title of the original article doesn't say "How to", but it was posted to HN by its author, jason, and so he chose both titles!). This is not a "how to" for disruption. A better how-to for that topic would be this one: http://swombat.com/2011/2/18/how-to-develop-disruptive-ideas by someone who's written a book about the topic after spending much time studying it, and so has had the chance to develop a generic method.

Instead, this article is a collection of potentially good pieces of advice that can be deadly if used without being properly understood.

Anyway, so my point is, I think you can do much better than this, Jason, given your skill at writing and your breadth of knowledge of startups.
I'm with those that think these were supposed to be comical.

BTW, related: the 1905 French time-warp house

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/02/18/france.timewa...
Hipmunk has an amazing interface. It is simply revolutionarily better than existing flight sites. I don't fly much, but boy howdy, I don't plan to move away from Hipmunk.

I don't think they disrupted the online travel industry, however. (yet?) I'd like to see them become the flight search portal.
Except for videophone operator, and pill waiter, and record butler.

I love the way the futuristic technology is placed into a 1910 social context!
The robot surgeon is just an interface for the real surgeon, providing some smooth, precise motion and access into small places (where a human surgeon would have to cut his way through). Hair is on the outside of the body and quite accessible. There is yet no technology that can replace the human hand (yet).
Are you also aware of the famous painting "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" by Magritte?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/René_Magritte

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/René_Magritte#Philosophical_and...
Get matplotlib working and I'm there!
How does it compare to membase?
I'm very happy to see that this blog's author finally decided to reduce the over-the-top header he used to have on his site...

only to discover that he completely hijacked the header link to not work with Ctrl or Middle Mouse clicks.

If the author is reading this: the content of your articles (and this e-book) are typically great. I enjoy reading them and encourage others to look into them as well. But failing at the basics on your own website makes me die a little inside.
"The problem of element layout is a relatively simple one. It should not require some kind of in-depth "understanding" and extensive research. That's pretty much the point of the article, and I tend to agree."

maybe my comment was ill addressed, then. i agree with this. my sole intention was to express that once you get over it's issues, you can write css just as fluently as anything else.

perhaps what confused me is that the article is expressing a sentiment that's been common for nearly a decade.
Profile Driven Performance Optimization
> Since you didn't complain about the foreigner who was just as condescending yet wrong, I've got an unknown.

There is absolutely no condescension in eftpotrm's post. He (she) only talks about the impression he's gotten. He doesn't mention how he came about this impression. You assume it comes solely from the media; I on the other hand know that it's perfectly possible to form an impression about America by conversing with Americans, visiting America, etc.

> Do you only complain about condescending when it's from a foreigner or when it's by someone who is correct?

I dunno, mu? "Foreign" and "correct" are not mutually exclusive. (My best guess is that you're trying to expose me as an evil hypocrite, but I seriously don't understand the question.)

> I'm sure that there are some foreigners who knows things about the US that aren't in the mass media.

"Some" foreigners? Good gracious. Foreigners who've participated in discussions with Americans on the internet know things about America which aren't in the mass media. The same goes for foreigners who've visited America. Etc etc. It's an awful lot of foreigners, not just some.

> That's why I wait until after a foreigner demonstrates that she isn't in that group before I do my rant.

But how did you decide that eftpotrm belonged to the group of foreigners who only get their impressions of America from the media? Because eftpotrm certainly didn't WRITE that. You just assumed it and went on a condescending rant.
The End of the 13" MacBook Pro
MP3 players, etc. seem far beyond what the futurists of the last century were imagining.

Yes; the servant carrying a wax cylinder for the gramophone device was a huge miss.

It missed electronic amplification and loudspeakers, it missed miniaturisation of audio players, it missed room sized personal libraries of vinyl/tapes/CDs, and of course it missed digitisation of music and electronic or wireless transfer of information, and it potentially missed the ubiquity of cheap music such that he's more likely to have music playing in the background while doing something else than to sit down and listen to it as an activity in itself.

(and now that I think of it, why do they have robot builders, robot barbers, robot makeup machines, but still a servant to carry a song to him on a silver platter?)
Is a followup to Silk next, with 1,000 strokably-soft kittens?

(I'm kidding. I love Silk, thanks for making it.)
It's fun to watch the evolution of Star Trek series.
It also appears that I should have taken that extra couple of hours to host the site somewhere other than a small mediatemple server, you're all hitting HTTP client limits at the moment.