skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
CSS was originally intended as a text formatting language and it serves that purpose adequately.. not exceptionally but adequately. This is why box widths are internal: it was assumed that the content of a box is more important than its position on the page.

The great tragedy was overloading CSS as a layout language, a purpose for which it is laughably ill-suited. The most trivial layout tasks are so difficult that their implementations must be crafted by master alchemists, named and disseminated to the helpless masses. Even layout tasks that don't require ridiculous hacks must often misuse the language e.g. using float to create horizontal stacks.

The intuitive way to express a layout is something of this sort:

"Box A expands horizontally to fill the page with a maximum width of ### and minimum width of ###. Box A and B both expand vertically to contain their content and the shorter one expands so it's bottom bound is equal to the longer one. Box C is horizontally and vertically centered in box B and has 1/2 its width."

There is absolutely no reason that a formal layout language should not allow you to express yourself this simply. A constraint based language does exactly that. A grid based engine requires more translation effort but is still intuitive and complete. This model is used by most GUI toolkits.

Why do we accept the pathetically underpowered CSS as progress? Perhaps it is the geek tendency to create mental challenges.. or the human tendency to associate suffering with doing good.. or just the job security instinct.

I have a friend who is not technically savvy but has enough of a grasp of tables to make web pages with them, which she used to do quite a bit. Now, she doesn't make sites because CSS layout is beyond her abilities and she feels that the stigma of tables is too opressive. I try to convince her that she is being paranoid but I can't deny that there are many out there who do indeed feel that she should not contribute to the web at all if she can't do it with CSS. This seems to violate the open, inclusive spirit of the web and leaves me sad and frustrated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_dad#Criticism

It's an entertaining read, but nothing more.
Platform Selection and Successful Software
Oh don't get me wrong, jQuery is my js library of choice when doing client side development (and server side in my own little side project), but the javascript he refers to is much deeper than manipulating DOM. Like he says "Learn JavaScript. Like, for real."
Math, Engineering and Origami
rather than get my pc with xp out of my briefcase, i picked up my wifes mac air and with outlook web access i can grab email and with mionews.com i can read friendfeed and news. biggest difference left is instant on...and of course IM which requires a thick client to be good.
I can think of lots of things I could build for myself that I would love that few if any other people would find useful - I would rather spend my side projects on things I love and a lot of other people would love.
10 Promising Web Platforms
I had the pleasure of meeting Chris at eRubyCon last weekend in Columbus, OH. He is a great speaker, and very smart.

I loved this keynote. I guess just do what makes you tick, scratch your own itch, and most importantly, find the time sinks in your life and let go of them.

Thank you Chris...
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LSD as therapeutic tool
1) "imagery of...corpulation[sic]" (more properly "corpulence") would be something like the average American, shirtless. I think you were looking for "imagery of copulation."

2) Swearing is certainly an oratory or rhetorical technique. Its cheapness or sophistication depends on how it's used. I'm not pointing to this as the zenith of eloquent profanity, but phrases like "Jesus H. tap-dancing Christ," from the movie Blues Brothers, have had as much lasting impact on colloquial speech as Virgil or Homer did, in their day.
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For the same reason no one will be able to beat wikipedia. It's a LOVED company. People will flock to craigslist till it turns on it's users. Case in point ebay.
Just curious: Why do you say that Ayn Rand may not be popular around here?
Jott Leaves Beta, Continues To Do One Thing Awesome
Predicting the next 5000 days of the web
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Ugh. As someone with an EE degree, this is a nice allegory explaining why anyone with a CS degree coming in an job interview at my company has to demonstrate that they've overcome their deficiencies introduced by the CS program.

Usually a few questions involving pointers does the trick quite nicely.

In fact, I'm almost at the point where I'm rejecting applicants with CS degrees out of hand. I've had too many problems with architecture astronauts and the Java-solves-all-problems crowd.
> I meant all thinking is a physical process that ends at death, same as the individual tree's cells stop working when you burn them.

So the bit about "treeness" was just rhetoric and not meant to do more than suggest an analogy.

It seems to me that when discussing Plato it doesn't make sense to gratuitously trash an idea related to Platonic thought if you have no intention of backing up that attack.
The wolf cry that attracted the wolf?
Small fix: On your homepage, fix the spelling of organisations to - Organizations. Other than that, on an outside as a consumer its looks great!
The post initially contained a sentence or two with no verbs, which made the post rather hard to understand. My comment was a gentle request for clarification and a nod to Hofstadter / self reference. While the post contained the error, it got upvoted to about 4. After the error was fixed, my comment was as low as -4 (because at that point it made no sense). Hence the "chill with the hate" comment.
I think it's all about craigslist's ease of use. there is no 'required' information that you have to input. Take cars for example.. you don't have to spend 20 mins filling out a huge form that contains a bunch of [possibly] superfluous information. you just post whatever you want to post and that's it.

try to make anything "better" than craigslist almost requires that you force people to provide more information and make it less likely for them to use your service
Array.prototype.slice vs manual array creation
I see your number one as reiterating what I was saying, not disagreeing.

A personal code of conduct is not "a load of crap." It has a limited but useful role in framing and shaping behavior. Like any system of guidance, it exists to provide the default and usual path. Each programming language culture has its own code of conduct, encouraging some behavior and discouraging other behavior, that stems from the culture's principals. Of course, there are exceptions and we should be vigilant in knowing what justifies an exception. However, just because there are exceptions does not mean that learning the code of conduct of a language is useless or that documents thereof are loads of crap.

What do you mean, "you'll be a better person"?

I never said that refraining from swearing was a core principal, in fact it is far from a core principal. I find cursing with abandon to be a petty indulgence and unbecoming. However, being raised to appreciate why things are inappropriate is better than not passing along our cultural heritage of propriety and respect.

I understand that it is more popular to refrain from instilling a strong sense of what is appropriate and inappropriate in children these days because of the influences of moral relativism. I believe this is a disservice and negligent parenting. I do not presume that my sense of right and wrong should be the sense that others must accept. Nor do I believe that my views on what constitutes correct behavior at such a fine level of granularity as word choice make me superior to anyone else in any absolute sense.

Within the context of word choice, being more precise, informative and salient is better than talking about excrement, fornication or damnation.
In case anyone is interested... http://rubyhoedown2008.confreaks.com/08-chris-wanstrath-keyn...
A Deeply Skeptical Look at C++0x
I like the concept of Ignighter, reminds me of this quote:

"What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."

http://tumblr.iamdanw.com/post/25864804/what-should-young-pe...
Well, was it fixed? Why is it that that script still works?
Great work by Microsoft, has to be one of the very good products of 2008.
Apparently, you fail to understand the difference between denotation and connotation.
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Inside every blogger is an aspiring author
Does the article take them to an extreme, or is the article accurately reflecting an extreme case?
Correction: Queen's English, unless Charles, heaven forbid, has just taken the throne...
What does "subjective" mean? This question is not so straightforward as you (may) think. This is a microcosm of my point.

What is value? How do we determine the relative values of our life decisions descriptively? How do we do so prescriptively?

My claim is not that my understanding of the subjects is great - it's that your understanding of them (from what you've said in the comments) is shallow. Subjects do not exist independent of semantics - math and economics are only "useful" if we can transform our observations into their abstractions and vice versa (1 apple and 1 apple -> 1 + 1 = 2 -> 2 apples).

Philosophy can give us tools for performing those transformations. It's very difficult to say what is of value in life (is a family of value? food? shelter? what are their relative worths?) and so is correspondingly difficult to use our abstract tools (math, economics, game theory) on the components of our observation (money, time, etc.)

I'm not saying that chapter 23 is great, but I can motivate its use in -normal people's- lives. Normal people can't understand game theory, but that doesn't mean that they -should- or that they -need to- in order to survive or think about how they want to structure their lives.

My real point is just that it seems very arrogant to me to assert that some hack Yale professors ideas validate your "prejudices" re: philosophy. It's better to say honestly that you don't understand philosophy. Maybe you don't want to. That's fine. I don't care. My point is that you shouldn't rail against it if you don't understand it. No one cares about your personal preferences, so you conflate them with moral high-ground and assert them in a public sphere.

Good luck with everything :)
The magnificent painting, I think from Michelangelo? Of god and man almost touching their index finger.
Using C# to Generate VHDL
Of course, Windows only...
"Find a customer" now means "Find a customer within a customer".
Yes, it only runs on 90% of desktops.
Is Nortel Sneaking up on Cisco?
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Why Is Paypal Always Down These Days?
Updated! Sorry about that.
"A user being impeded would have Internet speeds equivalent to ``a really good DSL experience,''
=======================
i was going to call this the money quote, but it's really a funny quote:
A 2+ year old article by Bruce Schneier that has nothing to do with coding?

HN is now officially Reddit.
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> Okay, it needs to be said. C++0x is an astoundingly terrible name. People have named projects and initiatives poorly before, but this takes the cake: it looks like an automatically-generated password. Only two of its five characters are alphabetica, and it doesn’t even make sense - what is a hexadecimal prefix doing at the end?

Somebody missed the point of the name... C99 was C9x before it was officially accepted in 1999; C++0x will likely end up as C++ 09 when it (perhaps) gets accepted next year.
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Start-up Stumbling Points
Don't think about it. Do it. See what happens.

Worst case is they are poorly attended and fail. In which case, learn, reset, and try again. Use a different approach (free beer & pizza generally works, or some sort of interactive/engaging/competitive experience).

Building momentum and traction becomes easier with each iteration. If you can stay alive long enough, good things can happen. Output is a function of input.

It may be worth doing a presentation at BarCamp Berlin (http://barcampberlin3.mixxt.org/, 13 October 2008) to launch the endeavour and get going. Better still, you can do an event ahead of BarCamp and talk about what you have done and are doing, not what you will do.

Lastly, there are many talented groups/people in and around Germany who will be interested, appreciate, and attend such an event. London does/should not have the European monopoly.
Charles Murray argues too many equate college, success
Gotta know when to hold 'em, when to fold 'em
There might be an opportunity here. The facilities of flexiscale and amazon EC2/EBS are now comparable. A service that sat on top of the two and offered geographical redundancy could be a real winner.
Tragedy of the commons is a prisoner's dilemma type of situation but is indeed a better analogy here.
know when to walk away know when to run?
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Some complexity is inherent to the problem and you can't get rid of it. You can only manage it through abstractions.
The really impressive thing about Photosynth is how far it has come in the last year. It used to take hours to weeks to create synths from hundreds of pictures. The processing time is dominated by

1. Keypoint detection (SIFT or a similar algorithm)

2. Keypoint matching for each pair of images with
approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search on kd-trees

3. Structure from motion to recover rotation and the relative location of photos
A major philosophical problem with death is that its character changes dramatically depending on what happens afterward, and nobody knows what does happen, which makes the whole topic rather difficult to evaluate. The best we can do is to study how death's approach affects our lives, which has more to do with our attitudes toward it and what we think will happen.

If there's no afterlife, death is to be hated intensely, but not feared at all, because no unpleasant experience will come from death itself, though the prelude may be terrible. In fact, the great casualty of materialism is not death but aging. Death becomes neutral, while aging becomes terrible, pointless, and ultimately disgusting. The fact that we're aging from the first moment of life makes materialism especially horrifying. No offense to the atheist materialists here, but I'd become severely depressed if I thought materialism were the case, because the omnipresence and inevitability of eventual bodily failure are rarely far from my mind.

If there is an afterlife, death is not to be hated, and possibly to be loved, but it is to be feared, because it marks a transition into a sort of existence we know nothing about. Many atheists who have near-death experiences describe an initial, liminal point of awareness, surprise, and fear. They anticipated eternal sleep in death, and yet experience a moment of awareness while being "dead", and this is shocking to them.

So it seems like exactly one of these two attitudes-- hatred, fear-- is appropriate for death. It seems like very few people can sustain the sort of metaphysical confidence that would prevent them from having one of these two attitudes; I think it's psychologically difficult to keep perfect faith. Death could be hated and feared by a person who anticipated a negative afterlife, but few people anticipate such a fate for themselves, and indeed this scenario seems far more unlikely than any of the alternatives (namely, a positive afterlife such as heaven, a neutral-positive one such as rebirth, or the dismal but ultimately neutral scenario of annihilation).
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Apparently getting reviewed on Techcrunch == $20
in a day? that's too short
Amazon announces persistent storage for EC2
The article makes quite a few good points. Then again, thats not very hard with C++.
A collection of records can itself be a record. Browse is just Read for a set of records.

Gah, I hate this suggestion.
Mind blowing. The end sounded creepily religious.
Check In Early, Check In Often
New Guidelines Would Give F.B.I. Broader Powers
Some Thoughts on Amazon's Elastic Block Store
OMG! Someone found the ??? between launch site and profit! MAKE TECHCRUNCH! You don't even need to have a business model anymore.

1. Launch site.

2. Make TechCrunch

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Sheer genius. And to think, all these years we were wondering.
Obviously you don't usually read Seth Godin. He is against advertisement as we know it. Marketing is more than advertisement. Take a look at his main posts and his Wikipedia page.
You're assuming a limit on password length won't apply. In that case, I may as well print it in binary and just have 0 and 1 ASCII characters in my password.
I launched JustHackIt.com last night. I'm really enjoying managing the site but didn't expect the huge amount of traffic and don't quite know how to manage a community site like this.

FAIL!!

How lame.
"What is value? How do we determine the relative values of our life decisions descriptively? How do we do so prescriptively?"

I am convinced that there is no possible external measurement for value, and therefore philosophy is doomed if it tries to find it. That is what annoys me about the lecture, it is pointless.

As I described elsewhere, the best we can hope for is get a better idea of the implications of our actions (the result of our life), so that we can assign our own, subjective value to them. But that is the realm of economics and mathematics. So economics would be much more worthwhile than philosophy in that context.

It's great that the guy is a professor. I am not. But there are also professors for "catholic religion" and other nonsense (I assume those people study "the will of god", studying religion as a cultural phenomenon is of course valid). There are whole conferences on "Consciousness" (which is complete nonsense in my opinion - the people going to those conferences can not even give a clear definition of what "consciousness" is supposed to be). Just because something is a subject at university doesn't imply that it makes sense.

I have a maths degree myself, and I had 35 years of a life to think about things. You can call me arrogant, but I think I am entitled to have an opinion about things even if I am not a professor. One thing I took away from studying maths is the desire to always strip away the noise and the irrelevant facts, and get to the heart of what matters. If I can "shorten away" something, it is a great relief, it makes life simpler - forever. That is the great thing about maths, it is absolute. Sorry if it irks you when I call something irrelevant, but some things are.

Edit: OK, I can't resist. You said

"Normal people can't understand game theory, but that doesn't mean that they -should- or that they -need to- in order to survive or think about how they want to structure their lives"

So you admit that philosophy is for the people who are not intelligent (or dedicated) enough to do maths or something real? That is why I say it is snake oil - it pretends to be important, when really the philosophers are only taking the easy way out, making a lot of words instead of aiming for precision.
Oh, wow, it might be a server issue. Who would have thunk it?
I think that is an unfair characterization. People from reputable CS programs don't think this way. The problem is watered down schools giving CS a bad name.
This year so far coolest for at least 5 years: WMO
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Having complete freedom to spend one's own time would be great, but I still felt somehow sad about the article.

One has a normal job where one can contribute to something useful (like Amazon, they run an online shop, which is useful for society), and then one day the person trades it for "pursuing your passion", in other words she will now spend her day for wellness, blogging or other hobbies. But I don't want to say anything bad about her, but generally, what do you guys think about such an attitude? What's so honorable about that?
Your original statement:

Exceptional circumstances do not invalidate codes of conduct.

This statement clearly defines a "code of conduct" as a rigid set of rules that should always apply. Now you say:

[a code of conduct] has a limited but useful role in framing and shaping behavior.

That contradicts the previous statement. I'm glad you changed your mind, but why not admit you did?

Within the context of word choice, being more precise, informative and salient is better than talking about excrement, fornication or damnation.

I don't disagree with that. I don't swear for no reason - at least not in writing. I merely disagreed with your apparent sense of superiority. Since you've relinquished that too, I guess we're in agreement.

PS: Btw, it's "Principle". "Principal" is an official rank. Principle is a guideline.
Exactly - 99% of what DHH and 37s says is profanity-free, but in the few weeks since I watched the Startup School talk, the phrase that keeps ringing in my head is "Zappos sells f------ shoes!"
Could you explain it further?
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Why the link to the comments anchor?
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"The durability of your volume depends both on the size of your volume and the percentage of the data that has changed since your last snapshot. As an example, volumes that operate with 20 GB or less of modified data since their most recent Amazon EBS snapshot can expect an annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1% - 0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume. This compares with commodity hard disks that will typically fail with an AFR of around 4%, making EBS volumes 10 times more reliable than typical commodity disk drives."

Sorry, this is unacceptable.
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Slightly edited:

Next year's El Bulli menu will be in every respect different from this year's. 'If not,' says Adrià, as he shows me around, 'why bother?'