skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry PG: I had to scratch this
I had to hack PG's Essays. Sort of.

Why?

First of all, I'm new to HN (and YC/PG for that matters) so I'm sorry if a better solution already exists. I'm having fun anyway!

- I wanted Essays to be displayed in the middle of the screen.

- ...needed a nice serif font for reading even if I'm a long time Verdana fan

- ...needed a bigger font and Verdana doens't "scale" well for me

- ...wanted pagination!

So What?

- I retrieve RSS feed with YQL and build a menu

- ...load a frame for every essay to hit an impression on paulgraham.com

- ...retrieve essay's html content with YQL

- ...parse raw html and re-style it applying Google Web Fonts on top

- ...use CSS3 columns to easily "paginate" content

So it's pretty much it, have a look at http://tilt2k.github.com/ressays/ or fork here https://github.com/tilt2k/ressays/

It's still a "beta" (incomplete) but enough to scratch my itch!

Have fun!

Credits/Tools:

- Meyer CSS Reset

- jQuery

- Yahoo! Query Language

- Google Web Fonts

- HN for renewing my will to learn!

- My time (yeah, I mean it, nothing comes for free)

Disclaimer:

I don't think code is worth much but before you dig into it too much, I'm no hacker/coder whatsoever so sorry if it isn't pretty, clean and optimized.

Known Issues:

- Doesn't work on IE!

- Doesn't fallback from unsupported CSS3 columns but there is a "Full View" option

- Lot of bugs listed in the code
http://tilt2k.github.com/ressays/

https://github.com/tilt2k/ressays
This topic is covered on a somewhat regular basis in The Economist - usnder different guises. One memorable comparison between Europe and the USA was that Americans work more so they can spend the occasional weekend on their expensive boat while Europeans are happier taking longer vacations on canoe trips.
Downvotes are not informative.

Do people really disagree that huge, non-OO scripts were the dominant style back in the 1990's? Or that people tried to solve problems with huge data structures instead of classes? And that these practices gave Perl a less than stellar reputation?

Or is it that people don't realize that Perl apps are virtually always written in clean, well-factored OO these days?
Why Jive Will Win in the Enterprise
Sure, that was true of my grandparents also, but they didn't think it was a good thing; they worked constantly with no breaks because they were poor and had no choice. They actively hoped that an outcome of their hard work would be that they could launch their kids into a better life, not the same life that they had had. And it worked; my dad went to college and got a better-paying job with better working conditions, such as more reasonable working hours and a few weeks vacation per year.
IMHO - 3D on an IMAX screen is a completely different experience. I'm fortunate to have an IMAX screen in my town and it's much better than the "standard" 3D films. I'm thinking it's due to 1) the bigger screen, and 2) the larger glasses. (seriously - the IMAX glasses are comically large). The movie fills your entire field of vision and you aren't as distracted by the edges of your field of vision.

I could just be imagining this though. 8*D
No, I'm pretty sure that he doesn't.
You should consider having something like Less[1] embedded into Opa :-).

[1] http://lesscss.org/
I think the same sorts of tricks for dealing with procrastination apply here. The problem is that everyone has their own things which work.

For me, set the timer to concentrate on work for 10 minutes. After banging out that first 10 then I'm off to the races. If not, then do another 10. If I absolutely can't concentrate then I need to get away from the computer and other distractions for a while and then try again later (rinse, repeat as needed,) otherwise I just spin my wheels.
I'm worried you may have missed Patrick's point. He's stipulating that you're using your skills. He's not accusing you of trying to sell sympathy. He's saying, the way you're positioning yourself professionally is going to damage your income.

If you are going to write a blog denominated in 92 days, anything other than "92 days of riveting new success stories from my clients" is a waste of your energy.

In particular, do not tell the rags-to-riches story. Prospective clients, like it or not, will see the "rags" and discount your bill rate 35%.
I'm sure Time Warner Cable and Verizon will start using their profits to start upgrading our local network infrastructure any day now...
Marissa Mayer at 2011 Harvey Mudd Commencement
Why don't you require this unpaid vacations before signing the contract? Probably you will have a lower salary, but more time for rest.
Meta: He's being downvoted because people disagree with him, which is wrong. Downvoting should only be used for posts that don't contribute to the conversation. This is a valid discussion, even if you disagree with the assertion.

On to the actual point of the discussion. I disagree that click-to-flash is an "ideal" way of handling this. Is it pragmatic? Yes. Is it ideal? No way.

Click-to-flash is a kludge; plain and simple. This isn't Flash's fault though. It's laziness on the part of content producers. Maybe laziness is a bit unfair, but it stems from a desire to "build once, run anywhere". The internet graveyard has more than one resident whose stated goal was exactly that. The desire to "build once" is a cost concern. It's not cheap to build content for every platform in existence. Content producers aren't interested in platforms, they're interested in audiences. Relevant questions for content producers are:

* How many eyes are there on a given platform?

* What revenue can I expect to generate from those eyes?

If a content producer can move in to a new market (platform) at zero cost, they'll always take that deal. That's the deal that Flash promises. The trouble is, that's a false promise.

There's a terrible epidemic of myopia plaguing the industry. If you went to an "old school" media person and told them you wanted to take the content from a tri-fold brochure, scale it down, and mail it on a post card, they'd laugh you out of the room. Then they'd lecture you about how your message must fit the medium if you expect it to generate results. Sound familiar?

You can't simply cram Flash applications designed for a desktop on to a tablet and expect the transition to go well. Designing for a tablet is a change in medium that requires consideration from the outset. Anything less is a sub-par experience.
Did you read the rest of the article?
Multitasking in iOS 5 [Concept Video]
The corporate overlords don't have time for us to enjoy ourselves. Is there any other explanation?
I do respect your work ethic, but it really depends on what you do as to wether this is good advice or not.

As a creative type, I really wish I could just sit down and "Get idea's" and then create them. But the reality is that it just doesn't work that way.

If you are taking in the same sights, doing the same routine day in day out, you simply won't be as creative as a person who adds as much variety in their life as possible.

Even if you are not the creative type, please see also my other post here entitled "Sharpen the Saw."

With respect to your father, spending 4 hours in the car each day during your family vacation time together seems like a poor use of time. It sounds like he deserved a break.
The problem is that encoding in multiple codecs is prohibitively expensive, and it's an ongoing cost that businesses smaller than Youtube don't want to pay. Therefore the most cost effective solution is to use Flash since you can't deliver high quality video in a single codec to all PC users without it.

You lose iPad, but at least the codec you're using allows you to deliver HTML5 video there fairly easily. The point is your stuck with Flash unless you want to incur a cost per video of encoding multiple codecs, and in many cases this can't even be automated effectively without a human being involved.
Flash on my Viewsonic G-Tablet running Cyanogenmod 7, is fine.
Should Groupon Acquire Foursquare?
It may be different if you're building a business for yourself, but if you're building something for your family you better make sure you still have some time to spend with them!

I'm from the UK, but my wife and I live in the US. I get barely enough time to spend with her, let alone the rest of my family, who I get to see once every year if I'm lucky.

Perhaps in a few years' time all my hard work will have paid off, and I'll be wealthy enough to live across two continents. Realistically, it's dangerous to depend on this; you never know what's going to happen.
Actually, we can essentially do that in Opa already, for many (but not all) CSS properties. It's not officially on our feature list, though, because we have many ideas that we haven't had time to implement.
Cash flow transparency works for MicroISV-types, most of whose customers uniformly don't read their blogs.

I'm gravely concerned that it will not work for professional services. Clients hold preconceived notions about the value of an hour of work. And it's blissfully unencumbered from any of the risk factors that produce true (2-3x FTE) consulting bill rates.

More importantly, very few --- maybe none! --- consultancies are surefooted enough to have a consistent bill rate established across all their clients. Contract rates happen on a case-by-case basis. As the dynamics of your business change, so will your rates. Publishing your cash flows just invites drama.

And who, exactly, is it helping? Other people with 92 days to dig themselves out of a hole? Get yourself out of the hole first.
Research universities do lots of teaching. But teaching is a secondary task for most of the faculty. That we could say "teaching college" with a straight face is what hurts. It should be redundant - after all, college is a place people go to learn so it should follow that teaching is a focus, but it was not.

Teaching was hit-or-miss at my undergrad university as well. That may also be true at teaching colleges, but professors at teaching colleges are hired primarily to teach. They are expected to spend most of their time teaching or preparing for it.

I really don't have enough experience with teaching colleges to say what opportunities the students have.
you decided to "disconnect" for the holidays.

But no fear ! You log in to a familiar, already configured Orion workspace

Anyone else see the contradiction?

If you need to disturb people's holidays to have them firefight software problems, the manager manager needs to be fired for allowing such a knowledge bottleneck to form.
Designers: How to Be Inspired
My wife has freelanced for over 15 years (before I knew her) precisely because of this. She saved up a big stash of cash, set automatic bill pays for her rent and utilities and took a two-month trip to Paris.

You have to keep your expenses low (both at home and abroad) but at least you're not at work.
The top 10 signs you've found a stellar creative professional
"I don't believe that:"

I don't either, but I think that the reasons that would occur are themselves second-order effects of what I cited, rather than the root cause. The offer would be unstable and tend to collapse back into the usual workweek, which is rather close to what has been established as the maximum amount you can work at a job sustainably. The way in which it would probably collapse is that the employer would get an offer from somebody to work the full normal workweek and the employer would tend to take it. It's difficult in a conventional employee/employer to buck the trend precisely because it comes from something fundamental to human psychology that no amount of tech is going to solve.
I've done this, though I didn't realize what I was doing at the time.

I was working for Sun Microsystems, which gave me two weeks of vacation time. Sun was doing a forced shutdown over the week of the 4th of July, which burned 4 days, and then there was the inevitable "shutdown" over christmas break, which burned another three days. This left me with 3 days of "elective" vacation time. A wedding took care of those.

I quit Sun, and deliberately took off 4 weeks before my next job started. Funny, when the 4 weeks were over, I was ready to go back to Sun. The job I had left was better than the one I was taking. I realized that I had just been terminally burned out. Maybe I should have called Sun back, we were still on good terms, but at the time, I didn't really realize this was an option... and this was the deep tech recession of the early 2000s (which accounts for the forced shut down in the summer), so they were trying to shed employees.

I wasn't a rock star, but I'm pretty sure I was valuable to the company. I'd spent almost three years writing code, learning the structure of sun's data warehouse, getting to know supply analysts, people in sales, people in manufacturing, and understanding the issues in logistics and how to write analytical apps to support these functions. Even if my hard skills could be replaced (they certainly could, by any Industrial Engineering major with intermediate programming ability), the new person would still take years to acquire all that domain and institutional knowledge.

This is why I do agree that it's nuts for companies to be so stingy with vacation time. An extra week or two a year would probably have kept me at Sun. I think the reason this inefficiency persists is that employers just don't see the connection. I didn't even see the connection, and I was the one who quit my job.

It could be that I'm more prone to burnout than most. Maybe so, but I don't think I'm an extreme outlier on this. I suspect lots of job-hopping and burnout does result from such low vacation allotments.
That would be awsome a node.js framework which helped to make this kind of single page apps. I've been thinking about that since I discovered backbone.js.

I'd love to define models just once and that they would work server side (using a ODM like mongoose) and client side (using backbonejs).

Is there something like this out there? If not maybe I'll try to make it this summer (having final exams at the moment).
What high quality codec can I encode into such that all common browsers will be able to view HTML5 video right now?

Also, YouTube doesn't default to HTML5 video for browsers that support Flash. Why is this?
How Netflix Destroyed Blockbuster [infographic]
Show HN: Briquette, a Mac OS X client for 37signal's Campfire app
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That would be a violation of the DNS specification, and won't work with DNS servers that are compliant to the specification (i.e. BIND). Section 2.4 of 1912:

2.4 CNAME records

A CNAME record is not allowed to coexist with any other data. In
other words, if suzy.podunk.xx is an alias for sue.podunk.xx, you
can't also have an MX record for suzy.podunk.edu, or an A record, or
even a TXT record. Especially do not try to combine CNAMEs and NS
records like this!:

podunk.xx. IN NS ns1
IN NS ns2
IN CNAME mary
mary IN A 1.2.3.4

This is often attempted by inexperienced administrators as an obvious
way to allow your domain name to also be a host. However, DNS
servers like BIND will see the CNAME and refuse to add any other
resources for that name. Since no other records are allowed to
coexist with a CNAME, the NS entries are ignored. Therefore all the
hosts in the podunk.xx domain are ignored as well!
The guy who wrote that article is a millionaire.
Sandy Bridge Graphics Disappoints
Who to blame for K = 1024?
Ask HN: Challengein, the Angry Birds of the board games. Agree?
It's an iPhone app. Download it here http://challengein.com

Yes, it's a product that we've created.
We've tried to reinvent the board games as we were Rovio.
Short one player matches, where you play over and over trying to do the high-score and win badges.

Can you tell me if you agree?
Thanks guys
PS: any feedback is welcome
I don't think anyone's ever complained about technology related articles. It's the stuff like TSA, Gay Marriage, and so on.

The problem with these topics is they can't be debated rationally since their underlying issues are ones of judgment (In the case of the TSA the judgment is how much a person is willing to be violated for the possibility of being safer and in the case of Gay Marriage it's what level of equality people are entitled to).

So these discussions will inevitably devolve into emotive bickering which is unproductive and adds a level of unpleasantness to the enviornment
No, it is a DNS RFC standard behavior: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3829966/cname-for-top-lev...
are you making all your android income from those 7 apps listed on your site? Can you give a breakdown of income per app ?
Devil's Advocate.

Perhaps it isn't you that needs a vacation; it's your family. Or perhaps you've been enjoying your work a litte too much and your wife is lonely because you've been gone 60+ hours a week. Many people hit a plateau where building their nest egg begins to take precedence over the wants and needs of their own family. Wouldn't that contradict the purpose of building a nest egg in the first place?

You should relish on life experiences and memories. Don't let time pass you by. I take vacation because I enjoy it. I enjoy spending time with my family more than work.
Just checked your profile. How the heck did you get remix.com! ?
It's no better in Canada the usual vacation time is two weeks with that increasing to three after maybe five years then after ten years it may go to four weeks but that's it it's extremely rare to see more than five weeks.

The years of service are calculated for full-time positions so if you worked at a company part-time for five years and then became full-time only then does the clock start to tick towards more vacation time.

In my job the summer is a busy time and vacations are blacked out from July to August the best times to go in a snowy country. The rest of the year the quiet time is used for projects which also mean no vacation.

Over six years each year I managed to get a week or two in, barely, but I've got 210 hours of vacation and 200+ hours of sick time (maxed out) that I can't use because I can never get time off. And I'm not allowed to take two weeks in a row either. Time to move on!
The thing I find most interesting about this discussion is that we have not yet seen anyone from the US proudly claiming that by working harder they are more productive than the rest of us. I have seen similar conversations several times on various on-line forums in the past, and there was always a defensive/proud mindset from a significant group, even as those of us outside the US wondered if they realised how much their employers were abusing them.

Since the financial mess of the past couple of years showed that US productivity figures that seemed too good to be true really were just an illusion, I'm hoping that the mindset of the average US worker has become a bit more realistic and a bit less willing to accept (by international standards) abusively long hours and short vacations. It will be good for the workers, and I expect for their employers as well in the long run, since working with better rested and happier employees is one of the surest ways to improve productivity known to man.
I think he's scrappy, and I love how a man can pull himself up by whatever boot straps he can find.

He might not be making a killing (yet) or making anything you care about (yet), but he's making stuff by himself and making money. How many can say the same?
The girlfriend mentions seemed irrelevant and out of place. I've noticed lately that more and more technical bloggers try to inject this fictional writing style to draw in readers. Most of the time it's so out of place that I immediately stop reading. My preference though is terse articles for technical discussions.
Eternal September happened. There aren't enough old-timers hanging on and flagging off political stories to keep up with the newcomers.

And, there's a tier of "newcomer", 100-200 days old, that has started vociferously defending political stories by creating tenuous connections to technology or entrepreneurship. "What? No stories about the TSA? Well: business travel! So there!".

The trend is towards more political stuff on HN. It's going to amplify and not attenuate unless some concrete intervention is made to deal with it.

The sad thing is, I really think the only thing that needs to happen here is for 'pg to firm up the guideline. He could rewrite one sentence and we'd have an easier time stamping these pointless threads out. Instead, we're obsessing about flag weights and sub-HNs and whatever other geeky solutions we can think of.
I'd consider his apps novelty apps, but I don't see why that's a problem. You can buy smiling rocks and fart scented candles in stores, and nobody cries fowl. Many apparently find his apps rather delightful, and though they aren't for everyone, there appears to be a niche.

His posts get upvoted because he quit his day job and he's following a dream. It's inspirational at its core, not to mention he's being transparent and vocal about it.

I don't know what's in his ebook. That's my only hesitation when replying.
Please consider reporting the bug so that we can fix the problem:

https://bugs.webkit.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=WebKit

We have a large number of tests, but sometimes we miss things. :(
Really? Downvoting? Please comment on why you think this is frontpage material while you are at it.

The apps are crummy, there's no denying that. How does that fit in with typical HN content of trying to build good, no, great, products?

And an ebook on how to do it? sigh
I'm not talking about their tactics as much as I am about the products they've featured lately.

I don't read the emails or the landing page copy. I usually see which product is being offered, find their real product page, and read that. If it's something I want, then I buy it.

Marketing is marketing, and I'll never begrudge a company for it, but copywriting techniques are just part of increasing conversions. The bigger part is knowing your audience.
There isn't really much that she could do here. The bill has already passed with the 2/3rds necessary to make her veto useless.

She took the most politically savvy position possible. It wouldn't have made any sense to lose political capital on a battle that was already lost.
They might as well call this article Why is America the 'no-union nation'?
I honestly don't understand how a group of people who so often invoke the phrase "the plural of anecdote is not data" can be voting this comment up. It's prattle -- pure American Exceptionalism and John Wayne Work Ethic -- designed to make people feel guilty for not working like dogs.

So, your grandparents worked very hard. Well, so did mine -- on the other side of the management/labor divide. My grandfather did long days at an auto plant for most of his life. He lost his hearing from the factory noise, slipped discs in his back from lifting, and started his days at 4AM for the entire time I knew him. Thankfully for his family, his union felt that vacation time was not an option.

So by all means, work as hard as you like. Avoid vacations if you want to, dedicate your life to grabbing the brass ring by whatever means you feel appropriate. But that's your choice. When people no longer have the luxury to choose not to live like that, we've gone far off the rails.

And not for nothing: I'll wager that your grandparents didn't work hard with the intention that their grandchildren would have to spend their lives working for a company that never gave them time off.
Sony Music != Sony Pictures != Sony Computer (PlayStation) != Sony Electronics (TVs, etc.)