skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
# aptitude install pwgen
$ pwgen --help
UNAM Geophysics Scientist: 'Little Ice Age' on Earth for next 80 years (Google Translation)
I won't (and shouldn't) go into specifics, but people in the search engine biz do a lot of comparison and contrast between search engines. They rate their own results and their competitor's results, both in a vacuum and in groups.

Yahoo!'s search was not one of the best sets of numbers I've seen. Google consistently came out on top. Particularly for longer queries, Google is notoriously good at these by comparison to other keyword search engines.

But it might be that was for our dataset bias. You can get surprising boosts in relevance for specific datasets by biasing towards them in your index and ranking algorithms.
Mozilla drags IE into the future with Canvas element plugin
I'm reminded most strongly of this statement from one of PG's essays: "...eventually the open source world won, by producing Javascript libraries that grew over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows over barbed wire."

It's amazing to see this happen for non-javascript issues as well.
That kind of stories, while HN off-topic, makes me feel better.
First lens constructed with negative refractive index
Missing YouTube founder flees facebook froth in valley, seeks next prodigy in midwest
The first few months after i started learning python can be described as "The Holly Shit Trimester"

Also when i learned that you can use paint to draw stuff(i was 8)
haha, spoiled child actor
No Problem When Apple Screws Up
Part of the problem for me, however, is that I can't assume that designers know CSS, and I can't assume that the designers will know how to use their tools to spit out CSS that's compatible with the application that it will be applied to. I have no choice but to tangle with CSS whenever I want things to work correctly - and that's my prerogative as a programmer.

Looking at the CSS3 standard, the designers seem to be making mistakes of the "more of the same" variety. For example they are proposing additions to allow for multi-column content, but nothing I can see there suggests that they will allow for an arbitrary number of columns.

Today's frustration is trying to get a textarea to fill the remainder of the page rather than specifying its size exactly. As far as I can tell that's impossible without using Javascript. Why? There's nothing unusual about my requirement - to me it seems that CSS is simply deficient.

Is there a "workaround" for this?

So, to address your criticism of "shallowness" - yes, that's probably fair; I am an occasional CSS user. But still, that's a legitimate usage pattern. Why don't I feel the same sense of crushing frustration when I work with SQL, HTML, or Javascript? I believe it is because they're better designed.

Now, I may be wrong. CSS may be brilliantly designed. If so, I have to assume that I am therefore using it incorrectly or am missing some fundamental philosophy of design that explains everything. If so, most of my "shallow" criticisms should be easy to counter. Are they?

If you just mean that my article is shallow because it doesn't really impart any new knowledge - then why aren't developers up in arms about the awfulness of CSS?
Wow, thanks for the advice everyone.

Little Schemer is on my to-read list for sure, but I saw ANSI CL and bought it on a whim.

PCL seems recommended by a few people, so maybe I shouldn't have dismissed it so quickly. I opened it up to several pages and saw large blocks of text with very few line breaks, but maybe I just happened to turn to the wrong pages. Perhaps I'll give it another chance.

Again, thanks for the advice everyone!
What kind of headroom is there for the e-ink tech to improve on the speed front?
"I can't assume that designers know CSS"

sad but true. I often forget that such a large % of web designer are kinda crap when it comes to the technology that they design for. It's like painting with out brushes. You need to know the medium you work in.
You probably picked the worst person on HN to call politically correct. I hate PC bullshit in all forms, whether it's mandated quota hiring or naively calling a black guy from London "African American".

The NOT _media-butchered_ definition of diversity:
"the quality of being diverse or different; difference or variety"

Definition of diverse: different; unlike; dissimilar; distinct

_All else equal_, I'd argue to the death that a school-less guy who grew up ice fishing in Alaska, a woman who grew up as a figure skater while taking care of two kids and a man who grew up watching his dad run his convenience store business are a lot more different than three people (black, white, indian) who went to private/prep school their entire lives and then went to an Ivy league school.

For this exact reason, we tried to have a beta testing group as diverse (my definition, not yours) as possible. It was very successful.
CSS can be hard for a programmer. It kinda should. You should be programing. I do CSS all day

Well, yeah. But that's the logic that COBOL programmers used for years and years: "it works well enough." Enough experience can make up for all sorts of design flaws. That doesn't mean that CSS isn't a flawed design.

CSS is a terrible design-by-committee disaster. Is it good to have a stylesheet language to define presentation details? Yes. Is it good to have this stylesheet language? Not so much.
"You need to know the medium you work in."

I'm not sure. Maybe you are right - but for me the problem is that the designers that I can afford who know CSS don't produce such pretty designs as the ones who don't.

Perhaps that's my error, but if CSS were easier for me to work with it wouldn't be such a problem in the first place.

So am I being stupid? Is CSS actually easy/rational and I'm just missing the big picture, or is it really kind of flakey and I'm just going to have to lump it?

I'd prefer the "Dave is ignorant" answer to be correct, to be honest, because it at least I stand a chance of rectifying it.
Daylight readable reflective/backlit hybrid screens like the one on the OLPC XO machine have all the speed needed.
The video claims that 88% of videos uploaded to YouTube are new and original content.

Is this really true? It sure doesn't look that way from where I'm sitting...
Great points.

I always cringe when I read a "CSS is awful!" article that even mentions table-based layout. The mere thought of going back to building (and more importantly, MAINTAINING) sites with nested tables makes me want to become a farmer. The article has valid points - CSS is far from perfect - but can we please collectively admit that tables are not the answer?
Eight pricing strategies
Muxtape Takes Fire from the RIAA
MRI Ruby + MySQL + Threads == Stop the world... JRuby doesn't
Thanks for sharing your stories guys, great stuff.

But when you're old and telling your respective stories to your grandkids replace dollar coin with prime rib and progressive house tune with Beethoven's 9th.

Cheers
>> Revenue per employee is largely an arbitrary number as well, hence I object to its being used as evidence for anything.

I disagree. It is a pretty good quantitative measure of how your business is setup. How much money a company has obviously affects its decisions in a big way, and it is only logical that how much money a company has to spend per empolyee affects the business decisions it makes. I am not taking a position for/against the rest of the article, but you argument that revenue per employee shouldn't be used as evidence for anything does not pass muster.
PyPy: Python implementation written in Python
For the beginning this and Practical Common Lisp will serve you well. Lisp isn't that difficult at the beginning, once you go past the parentheses. But soon you'll find yourself looking for an environment in which to do real stuff. Here, if the obvious choices don't suit you, I suggest trying out Clojure. It's a lisp, functional language, and it's 100% embedded in java - meaning it's probably as fast or faster then most lisps, and it has arguably the largest and best organized collection of libraries in existence.
Slides: Professional Frontend Engineering
at the very least this is an old argument. Dvorak said they same thing back in 2006. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,1987181,00.asp

A lot of the stuff you want to do is in the "standard" but you need 3 or 4 browsers to all implement it and do it in the same way before it counts as being truly an option.
To answer some of your direct questions:

"I'm not sure what the author's obsession with JavaScript fixes is"

Well, I'm not sure "obsessed" is the right word. But when I try to find the solution to any given CSS problem the answers seem to fall into three boxes:

a. Put markup in to manage the problem.
b. Weird hack.
c. Javascript

Of the three Javascript is the most elegant except that it stops working if (duh) Javascript is disabled. So my focus on it is more about discarding it out of hand as being unacceptable (whereas the other two options are merely, as you point out, horrible).

"What's wrong with the button element?"

Thanks for the link. It looks like I'm just wrong on this point (or maybe out of date, but that's still wrong).

"In this case, the author doesn't go far enough." (on forms)

Well, the post was getting a little log (perhaps not by Yegge's standards though) and also I worry about my blood pressure whenever I think about forms and CSS.

"Pretty sure this is what display:inline-block is for."

Ok, probably another place where I'm just wrong. The more of those the merrier from my point of view.

Thanks for the reply - there was some really helpful stuff there.
I tried, and evidently failed, to make it clear that I am not in any way advocating a return to table based layout. I'm just frustrated that CSS is so much harder than table based layout to actually implement.

When I see similar frustrations expressed elsewhere, they seem to be roundly condemned with comments of the form "no, CSS is EASY" yet any suggested workarounds for specific problems supporting that theory are of diabolic complexity.
yes it has it's faults. But it has to be designed-by-committee no matter what. While you might only count 3 or 4 browsers as "counting" there are dozens. And if they can't agree on something we will be back to the old days of IE and Netscape. that was truly torture.
Cilk Programing Language Wins Most Influential Award
Its great to see this guy try to find talent outside of SV. Minneapolis-St.Paul probably has a lot of hidden talent because of their outstanding universities. It'll be interesting to see what comes of this.
After reading this, it sounds like they both TC50 and DEMO need to take a leaf out of SeedCamp/YC's book and have (free) demo days actually geared towards startups rather than as a conference-type event focused on making them profit.
| b. Read comp.lang.lisp

For laughing or for crying? There's not much in-between...
If someone can build something like the iPod Touch, but with GPS and Wimax or EVDO, then kids will acquire it and use it. If it can take over the functionality of SMS and go beyond it, then a younger generation would use this instead of cell phones. Then a Chinese manufacturer would build units with microphones and swiveling cameras, and the cell phone carriers would be SOL.
"Answer: We'll add a phone to our MP3 player."

The beauty of Apple's approach is that rather than allowing phones to make playing music a secondary feature of phones, they have found a way to make voice calls a feature of portable tablet computers.

And while they were at it, they made playing music a secondary feature of portable tablet computers as well.
How to build search into your site with JQuery and Yahoo
Thanks for clarifying. I just think that a valid case for the shortcomings of CSS can be made without even mentioning tables. And to be honest, now that I really know CSS, it is easier than tables. Tables might be easier when you're dealing with a single page, but any site that has even a slight variation in layouts will be much easier with CSS.

It sounds like much of your frustration has to do with browser inconsistency, which isn't necessarily CSS's fault. Getting things to work on Firefox 3 is fairly easy. Getting it to work on you client's Windows 2000 desktop is not.
This story is inspiring.

Having the opportunity to apply your business & technical knowledge, after a start-up, to something that really will change the world.
iPhone owner here. Roses? Not entirely.
"Of the three Javascript is the most elegant [...]"

Oh, definitely. When I'm doing a personal project I tend to just not bother with niceties like rounded corners for IE users, and as long as the content's still accessible I'm not too bothered. This cuts down on the number of times I need to add junk markup, weird hacks or JavaScript (or, more usually, some combination of the three).

At work, we tend to try to do as much as possible with CSS and HTML, since in the end most DOM manipulations done with JS are still changing CSS-accessible properties. The other day we had a client who wanted the bottom border of several columns with different heights aligned. This isn't possible in CSS (although, of course, it was very simple with tables), at least if one is still supporting IE6, as we are, but a few lines of JavaScript sorted it out pretty sharpish.

In other words, best practice as far as I'm concerned is to leave JavaScript out of the picture as long as possible, at least where styling or layout enhancements are concerned. This means that users without JavaScript (a very small number, admittedly) will get the best possible experience, and more importantly, it means your JavaScript and your styling are as loosely coupled as possible. That's not too important for a small site, but on a big one where you have to maintain it over a number of years, it becomes absolutely vital (in this way it's no different from any other kind of programming).
i issue a challenge to this dude, ycombinator, etc...invest in something NOT WEB. don't tell me that there is nothing outside of the web for small-scale investors. the web isn't changing the world anymore than it was a year ago. if you want to be the fulcrum of real change, you need to look elsewhere. for example: look at dean kamen's ultra-cheap water purifier. classic example of world-changing non-web tech

the lot of you seed funders are DUMBING DOWN young entrepreneurs. you've got a generation of college students thinking about idiot-level non-problems like web UIs and "scaling" instead of real problems that require new thinking.
Put Android on something like the iPod Touch with GPS and advanced IM apps, and you could get middle school and high school kids hooked on this, especially if the rates could undercut cell phones by a factor of 2 or 3. (Which would be easy to do.)
An Introduction To Open Sim: the "Apache of Virtual Worlds"
All business is about adding value, so that your output is bigger than your input. The most important input in a tech company is human labor.

Google is the most efficient at this game today, as measured by how they transform their human labor into value. Revenue per employee is the best proxy for value-added per employee.
"Tables might be easier when you're dealing with a single page, but any site that has even a slight variety in layouts will be much easier with CSS."

That's a valid point. Nonetheless I think that it is also valid to consider the ease with which tables can be used to express layout as a metric for what CSS ought to aspire to.
Silicon Valley has a lot of noise, a lot of hype. People are very excited about all of the Facebook stuff, Facebook applications. It's just been a huge hype over the last year when actually ... there isn't really that much value. It's just a bubble. It's almost a distraction.

I think this is absolutely true (especially regarding fb), but I also believe that the hype & noise comes with the territory. Viable business model or not (YouTube is still struggling in that regard), SF has a significant pool of both human and fiscal resources which is critical to execution and survival.
OpenSim: BSD Licensed Virtual Worlds Server
Blockbuster CEO 'Confused by Fascination' With Netflix
can we please collectively admit that tables are not the answer?

Given that your question is sitting in html like this:

p < span < td < tr < tbody < table < td < tr < tbody < table < td < tr < tbody < table < center < body < html

... I'd say the answer has to be no.
i have no idea what that poem even said
Web 2.0's most ridiculous sites
YouNiversity Ventures - a seed fund from the third founder of YouTube
Try:

head /dev/urandom | md5
Though all I know about Jawed Karim is what I’ve read about him on the internet over the years, or what he has written, I really respect his level-headedness and disposition to hype.

The fact he is not a media-whore, went back to academia even though he could have made more $$$ going back to YouTube when things started taking off, and now actually, and I believe genuinely, wants to help other founders who may not be exposed to as much opportunity (principally due to their background and geography it seems) makes me like him more.

He used to have some good reads on his site (http://www.jawed.com/), but sadly they have all gone now (a consequence of fame, and hence too many eyeballs on his thoughts, not being in-line with his character?).
In a crowded market or where there is limited resource (VC money, media attention, etc.), people need to promote themselves. Unfortunately this often results in hype.
The Curious Case of Facebook’s Benjamin Ling & Sheryl Sandberg
Better title would be "eight pricing tricks". It would be neat to read a blog post on fundamental pricing strategies, like price points, value pricing, cost-based pricing, loss leading, and so on.

It's a fine blog post --- except for the Arby's part --- but if someone has something more substantive, I'd love to read it.
that was definitely a surprising View Source...
I'm not sure why you expected an article called "Venting on CSS" to be terribly "informational." It's a rant, duh!

That said, as a web designer, I too know the ins and outs of CSS, and how I can get it to do what I need it to. However, the fact that it can be hacked to do anything is not an argument against making it better and more intuitive. You seem to be saying that, since you know how to hack around the bugs, the fact that they're there doesn't really matter! This is not a matter of the fundamental complexity of a language like this, it's a matter of improving a kludgy way of doing things, and therefore lowering the barrier of entry so that my mom, little brother, and girlfriend can learn to code a website without having to know what "star-HTML" or "double-margin-bug" means, and I'm not really sure why you'd be against that. And yes, I know that it is being improved constantly, it's just painfully slow sometimes.

And since I'm in rant mode now, one of the things I hate about CSS is the box model... the "correct" one, not the ie6 one. The idea that the "width" of an element is not actually it's total width on the page (including border and padding), but the width of the internal content constantly pisses me off. It may be a good idea in theory, but in reality, when you're laying things out, the width of the content area is almost always far less important than the total width, and I hate having to do arithmetic every time I change padding!
Apple is definitely the worst computer company. Except for all the other ones.
"I've been frankly confused by this fascination that everybody has with Netflix," Keyes told Rafat Ali, in an interview with PaidContent.org.

Translation: "I am not qualified for my job. I know nothing about my industry, or what my customers want. I get a nice paycheck though."

I'm frankly confused as to why a CEO would think that being confused about his competition would bring him more business.
Wondering the same thing here.
Top Website Customer Satisfaction
anyone taking risks is going to have some flops.

but look at their hits - ipod and iphone. these far outweigh the failures
CEO and "confused" in the same sentence is a bad thing. If anybody should know WTF it should be that guy.
Strongly advise against hosting your own blog. The code quality on both MT and WordPress is very, very low. WordPress, for instance, is probably worth at least another 4-5 game-over security flaws in the next 6 months, and that's before you take the plugins into account. Kids scan the Internet for installations to drop with PHP zero-day.
How would you get them hooked? "Advanced IM apps"?
I don't understand how Android instantly gives you killer apps you can't get on the iPod/iPhone.
I didn't find it hard to care, nor did I find it hard to downmod your worthless comment.
css fails for me by being declarative. in cases where this fails, the css standard defaults to declarations which are totally implicit for some other external rationalization. what does "auto" mean in any declaration? whatever the implementor wants. in a real descriptive tool, you would actually define the properties that are just assumed.
I will respond to Matt Maroon's argument directly: revenue per employee is one of the most important metrics in a software company, which is about as pure human labor as you can get. The eventual business goal of every such effort, including Y Combinator (if you define "revenue" to include the proceeds of an exit, which is accurate when you consider that Y Combinator itself is an ongoing business entity) is to maximize revenue per person.

So Google's management, having tons of cash to invest in growth, faces this question "What do our next 5000 employees do?"

My argument is that even with a monopoly in two areas, Microsoft is underachieving Google in that metric today. A new competitor to Office, Exchange, Sharepoint etc. will, by definition, not be a monopoly (at least at first, perhaps for a long long time), so their revenue/profit numbers will have to be lower than the monopoly's numbers.

Then there are markets like CRM etc. where very successful incumbents make a lot less than what Google makes today.

Put all these together, and the conclusion is obvious.

(I will ignore the irrelevant tangent on English - I have nothing to prove).
Wired couldn't pick the money quote, but it's really this:

This is a hypothetical one. Would you be ever interested in buying Netflix?

Keyes: Not really. Netflix doesn’t really have or do anything that we can’t and don’t already do ourselves. So, there’s really no advantage in buying.

And the reason why Keyes won't is because BBI is worth only $288 million while NFLX is worth over $2 billion. Way to bluster through, Keyes.
Gotta say, we host our own, we're DIY, we have a designer, and this thing is still dead sexy. $25/mo is cheap cheap cheap. What's the catch?
Since he doesn't detail the nature of the problems he had with his failing Macs, I can't really say anything definitive. Personally, I've owned 4 Macs over the past few years and the worst failure I've suffered has been a hard drive crash, so maybe he just has bad luck.

I do believe his criticism of MobileMe is warranted though. I'm happy enough to play with it on my free trial but I wouldn't trust its reliability to exclusive use, nor do I want to be locked into an email address at $100/year.
This author sounds like he barely knows CSS. Most of his points are completely invalid. Bigtime fail.
I didn't get to ask all the questions but it was a really great time. I'll write it up on my blog and then post it here for people to read over.
What is Muxtape?
That's seriously to bad, muxtape inspired me a little bit on my own project.
Yes they are! It's good to hear at least one other person who agrees.
Capitalism, Democracy, and Apple?

F/OSS would fit in better with that group. But a few years ago, I decided that I was tired of fixing and tweaking Windows and Linux and said: "Okay, Steve, I'll pony up the cash, just take care of me!"

Then Ubuntu came along! Time to switch again?
Google Invests 10M in GeoThermal Technology