skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personal I would have gone to Standford on an athletic scholarship that paid less than full tuition. Few collage players can compete in the MBA and there is not a lot of paths for people with that level of skill to may any money from their sport. Few people complain that doctors need to do an internship before they make the "big bucks" because even if they are paid less than they are "worth" they are still gaining non monetary compensation.
True. There's a long way to go before India can be called developed. However, the good thing about the moon mission is that it is a testament to the quality of the engineering talent at ISRO. Given that ISRO is significantly behind other options as a career for Indian engineers, the fact these engineers themselves are so competent is good news for the engineering ecosystem in India.
Boalt presents at BarCamp DC 2008
I use both NameCheap and GoDaddy. I would have switched off GoDaddy completely but actually GoDaddy is the cheapest (around $7/yr) when using coupons...

One more tip, hosting with the registrar is usually a bad idea.
Forget the exclusivity, what we're talking about is the summum bonum: the ultimate goal according to which values and principles are established.

A person whose summum bonum is maximum comfort and security will have a very different life than if they had instead pursued creativity, justice, progress, etc. above all else.

We're not talking about the abolishment of comfort and security, but rather their subjugation to what is greater.
Why stop there?

"meihem in ce klasrum": http://www.english-zone.com/index.php?page=1114&pid=81
There are countries where all of the largest expenditures (except oil) are for products produced domestically by the non-poor classes.

Even here in the US. The only significant things that I, personally, spend money on that are significantly made overseas are my car, oil, and computer. Even if the price of those all doubled, it would still be only a small part of my budget.

The outsourcing epidemic is somewhat overstated.
Is down :(
The answer is 'as quickly as possible' - especially when you think about support as pre-sales and marketing.
Having just gotten technology from half a century ago isn't a very good metric for labeling a country developed.
In my current venture, we're not yet to the point where we have very many support questions, we're mostly still in "Friends and Family" testing. However, prior to this venture I worked on some other projects, specifically in gaming / gaming server management and for some small hosting companies. With them, responding to support "tickets" if you will was one of our top priorities. However, rather than using an e-mail support system we relied mostly on forums and, for the game, in-game support message systems.

Every company is different and for most of these we were just a bunch of hackers running free communities (with the exception of the web host provider - which was free with premium memberships). However, the importance of answering support quickly was still the same. In terms of the free service, when things didn't work right or we wern't able to instantly respond we were able to write it off as "we're not paid to be here." That didn't always stick though. You might also consider making sure people know what times you guys are generally available. Letting people know that you're not available from midnight to 6am in your local time is a good thing for your users to know.

Depending on what it is you're offering, looking at a message board / forum as a means of technical support might not be such a bad idea. It allows not only you and your team to answer questions (and quickly from almost anywhere you have net access) but it also gives your other users ways to contribute as well. Most importantly, it's an active way to build a knowledgebase, if done correctly. It also saves you from having to necessarily answer the same e-mail's over and over. Even with an e-mail contact available, you could easily put in an auto-responder that lets them know you got it and gives them a link to your support forum for them to browse for a solution in the mean time.

Note: If you use forums, make sure you find some method of making your support posts easy to manage and your official team members easy to spot.
Users don't care if you use tables for layout.
Sure, if you're nesting tables deeply then maybe it's an issue, but this "avoid tables at all costs" is a bit silly. Especially when the equivalent css is longer, more complex and far less compatible. Try doing some complex colspan/rowspan type things in css, with unknown cell widths etc.

There are more important things to work on :)
"The mission is expected to cost 3.8bn rupees (£45m; $78m)."

Wow. That's amazingly cheap!
In fairness, writing articles like this is his job.
Great, now we just have to wait until every IE6 and IE7 user has upgraded to IE8. By then, we'll be on to new browser technologies completely.
lisp was introduced to me as follows: Lots of Irritating Superfluous Paraentheses

also: most game boy games were written in lisp. true story.
I have used Gandi for 3-4 years now, and I have no complaints whatsoever. I suppose it could be cheaper, but there is such a thing as too cheap.

Before that: NetSol who are crap, JumpDomain who were worse than crap, and Joker who were OK enough.
Google Gears Geolocation API Gets WiFi
this is exactly what i needed to make my day. i like the unicorn one a bit better though.
the other way around, without question. I'd much rather see this resolved by opening up other fields, rather than closing off high tech.

that said, it will be a cold day in hell when the US legal system opens up to international competition, and the imbalance itself is destructive. If my goal were to use government policy to discourage americans from engineering/science and encourage them to study law or medicine, I would probably design something very similar to what we have now. The US government goes out of its way to insulate lawyers from competition from overseas. It goes out of its way to subject us-based engineers to increased job competition from overseas.

So we have our young people more interested in law than engineering. Why do our wise policy makers scratch their heads about this? They created this situation.
How to Develop a Thicker Skin
Networking is a key to success for women in the business world
SVN doesn't do anything to stop people from committing a bunch of boneheaded changes to the repository either. Maybe its a harder to do by accident, but in practice I don't see that as much of a problem. Also, if if someone does commit a bad branch to the repository in git it can easily be rolled back.
This sounds like a lot of fun, till someone gets hurt. Even in Honduras that would spell trouble.

I would probably take the risk though.
Ask YC: Does Facebook Publish App Statistics?
After a cantankerous client, a few godsend clients, hiring (and then firing) my brother (there's a funny story to this, trust me), we've finally got the infrastructure, the personnel, and most importantly the TIME to roll out our own internal project.

I wont say too much about it other than it involves Facebook, and if the upside-down blogosphere has taught me anything, if you say "We're developing for Facebook" in a blog you're going to get Dugg, Slashdotted, and subsequently 404'd out of your own site in hours.

So I wont.

I will ask this though, does Facebook publish app statistics that are easily accessible? I'd like to see how a certain sector of the app field is doing, and develop a forecast model for the team to look at so we can go over a few things.

Thanks
I disagree - this is a great example of promoting your product on the cheap.
but the interface is sweet, fast, and very easy to do domain locking/unlocking, nameservers, multiple edits, etc.

That's weird, I use GoDaddy, and the interface drives me nuts because of how slow it is. It does let me do pretty much anything I need to, and GoDaddy is probably as cheap as it gets - but "fast" has never been a word I associate with them.
I use AIT domains and godaddy. Don't love either.
Nice post. I love the analogy - very creative and spot on.
That's within the budget of many Silicon Valley duders. I would suspect that figure belies some costs they aren't taking into account.
True. That he can make a living from it baffles me, though. Fair play to him for managing it.
French President Falls for Phishing Scam
I, like many of those who commented in the article, think the guy is pretty smart. I mean he did build his own submarine from scratch and furthermore made it profitable. However, I also agree that the bull headed and risky approach he has with the whole thing is a bit... unnecessary. I would like to see him approach it not thinking he's better than everyone and that he can simply get around the law. For as many dumb laws there are there are at least half as many good ones. Not allowing people to take other people to dangerous places without being certified and having insurance is one of those good ones.
Rubbish - that's classic Jobsian misdirection. I'd put a tenner on Apple coming out with a netbook-esque device in the next 9 months.
With the exception of some software, like behemoth Adobe installations, OS X already works this way.

It is common practice in OS X to unpack a zip or DMG file and then simply double click to run the application.
Airlines Latest to Be Exploited By Spammers
Why I like netbooks
True also, of course, no point in being fundamentalist :). In the end it basically depends on what you want; If you want flexibility to change everything in your site in regular intervals, then I wouldn't advise relying on tables a lot :)
FriendFeed's new realtime API
This is why I love Hacker News. I had never even heard of gandi and then it gets four positive reviews from four people I trust. Will use it for one of our sister sites (to test before moving over everything) - thanks guys.
On other projects, yeah, but not on this one. Or actually, this one had a staging site (which I tested changes on first), but its data was about 8 months out of date and its configuration didn't exactly match the production site. Volunteer project, limited resources.
The flexibility and ease of use offered by not-installed software is what makes projects like http://portableapps.com/ so popular.

The possibility that installing an application may splat arbitrary files across my system has always been unnerving to me.
Seeing as how many novice computer users can't bring themselves to organize their pictures/files/music, I can't see this non-install movement as a good thing.

Just think of your average Windows/OSX desktop, it's usually cluttered with shortcuts, downloaded files, music, photos etc.

Now imagine that with 10-20 application folders (which by the way if you mess with will cause your app to stop working)

We need to help users logically organize their content first, before we can attempt to allow them to pick where their applications reside.

Most don't even have a concept of file structure.
The point he made was that the certification would have cost him more than the sub. He is barely profitable as it is.

There are a whole set of laws in the first world that create an absurdly high barrier to entry for certain activities. Instead of making the activities safer, as intended, they simply make them impossible/unprofitable/implausible.

A soup kitchen that fed the homeless near me was forced to close because they could not afford to install a centralized halon fire extinguisher system to meet commercial kitchen code. Instead of making the volunteers and the homeless marginally safer, the volunteers went home to watch TV and the homeless were SOL. Law->Fail.

Different cultures experience risk/reward in different ways. Safety above ALL else is a distinctly first-world/western notion.
Side note: The inventor of rebol was also the engineer behind the original AmigaOS.
I'd recommend live chat similar to http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Live+Chat
My major complaint with a table based layout isn't a semantic one, it is a pragmatic one.

Put a colspan or rowspan in your html and you've coupled your design/layout to your markup. Still though, it is often easier to make this compromise.

The hope here is that we ultimately get the best of all worlds. Easy grid layouts AND markup/presendation decoupling AND strong semantics.

jQuery's John Ressig may speed up the day that comes:
http://github.com/jeresig/sizzle/tree/master
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/10/22/javascript-will...
Ask HN: What if I don't have an idea?
Ask HN: What if I don't have an idea?

I have,

Time: I recently left my job. (in this economy?! yup)
Skill: I'm proficient in Django, system administration, a bit of scaling, but not so much front-end / design.
Money: I'm not talking retirement fund here, but my expenses are "tiny" and savings (for my age) are "high".

(I really don't want to imply I have a _lot_ of the above. I don't think I'm a "Rockstar" [I hate that as much as you do]. I'm not trying to say I have all the time and cash in the world. I just want to explain my situation.)

I don't have,

An idea I'm passionate about
Someone else to work with
A better physical location (I'm in Dallas right now, but that also helps the money part above)

I've been out of school and doing Django development for ~3 years, the development was fun but the app/idea itself was never my passion (I was just an employee, by the way). My plan when I left my job ~3 weeks ago was to do self-study and decide what I wanted to do (by which I probably mean: who I wanted to work for). I've given myself until March, where I figured I could find some leads at PyCon. I've been catching up on books, blogs, projects I wanted to look into - but I haven't found anything to work on that really takes my time. Nothing that keeps me up at night.

I can certainly fill my time until March just doing the self-study thing with no specific goal in mind, but I feel like I'm missing an opportunity. Especially reading about the other guys here who saved to a specific goal so they could quit and do their thing. I'm there already, and time is ticking down.

I guess one easy-mode answer is: "Find another startup you could be passionate about". I agree, I'm in a perfect situation to take a dive with other people, except for my location. Anything is possible, I guess, but lets just say that I'd like to stay in Dallas for the next few months. How are my options affected in that case?

Is this too vague? Whiney? Should I be sad/ashamed that I don't have a list of ideas I want to work on?

I'm just sort of confused, and seeking your advice.
Initially switching to table-less design is harder. CSS has its own quirks in every browser that can drive a developer mad.

That being said there's a few very good reasons to use a pure CSS design.

More accessible: Specifically I'm thinking mobile phones and alternative stylesheets where "turning off" a table cell completely breaks the design. This is a breeze with pure CSS

Smaller File Size: Generally speaking, a site designed with CSS is smaller than a site designed with tables

Efficient Caching: External stylesheets will cache speeding up response time for the user. For an eCommerce site every second is key.

SEO: Some may argue with this, but presenting important content first is just one of the many factors involved with on-page SEO. This is accomplished quite easy with CSS and absolute positioning.

Faster Updates: I find updating a CSS design to be much quicker than a design nested with tables. Want to completely change the look of your site? Modifying only the CSS you can get some impressive results (http://www.csszengarden.com/).

For a programmer the time spent ironing out the initial kinks can be spent better elsewhere. But for designers its necessary in this day and age to use and understand table-less designs.
>The fact that Prostitutes are banned but Hookers are not seems odd.

A hooker is a rugby position. The hooker is in the middle of a bunch of dudes (said bunch is called the "scrum") and has to bend over forwards and push the other dudes to "hook" the ball with his feet and kick it back so his teammates can get it.

I don't get why this sport is considered so masculine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(rugby)#Rugby_league
wait till you get one
I have also been using NameCheap for many years. They are a little more expensive than other registrar's ($9.69) and are actually just a reseller of eNom, but they do a great job.

I've never had any issues and their customer service has always been very quick, helpful and friendly.

I also like how they keep their checkout system clean and consistent--I just want to order domains, not buy web hosting, email forwarding, domain parking, etc... (GoDaddy I'm looking your direction).
Also, the "private domains" feature is reasonably priced on namecheap. On godaddy, it just isn't.
I'm not saying they all work out I'm saying that some are good. In your example of the soup kitchen closed because it couldn't install some fancy-pancy fire extinguisher system, yeah, that's a bad law and a bit of an overkill. Telling someone that they can't legally take other people 700 feet below the water in a sub that isn't certified is a bit of a different story.

He may have barely have been making a profit but the fact of the matter is it would've cost him $100,000 to get papers/certified but he instead spent $200,000 on a new sub. It just seems like the kind of thing that would actually be considered an investment because it could make you more profitable and definitely adds more credibility.
Microsoft described as 'biggest hacker in China'
Form.Check: Great Form Validation for MooTools
1.

Yes, absolutely. When somebody else makes the same mistakes I do I can see exactly what's wrong. If that person were to explain the same thing I would probably not understand. Or I would understand, but then it wouldn't have a lasting impact. Being indirectly confronted with your own stupidity/flaws is remarkably effective. It has that "damn, I can't believe I'm such an idiot" feel to it, which overrules the normal reaction to any statement: quiet skepticism "really, hmm, you could be right, but..." and you don't really change. Even if you're convinced what you're doing is wrong, it doesn't shock you, so it doesn't stick.

2.

People are horrendously bad at introspection. Every person believes he's more introspective than most other people, and less likely to adopt opinions based on feelings instead of facts. Logically impossible, as not everybody is equally introspective there must be many people who incorrectly deem themselves introspective. In essence, you are a poor judge of your own ability to introspect. Because there are so many stupid opinions on the internet it's easy to feel superior to others. Stupidity is much louder on the internet than anywhere else. Partially because any statement sounds stupid when you don't make an effort to understand which point the author is trying to make. Suddenly it's about -your- interpretation of somebody's opinion, and no longer about -understanding- the opinion and the merits thereof. So, reading stupid opinions leads to feelings of superiority, which leads to narcissism, which leads to easy dismissal of sensible opinions (less effort), which leads to more narcissism.

3.

So forums like these are, I feel, part of the problem. Here I am, spending far more time writing this reply than I spent on reading your original message. In fact, I started writing this before I fully understood which point you were trying to make. I had to rewrite the beginning of this all just to make what I'm writing -remotely- relevant.

My point? There isn't any. I'm just writing this to feed my narcissism.
as if you need a REASON to grow a giant beard...!
As it has been said elsewhere, you'll know when you have the right idea (it will start burning inside you).

However, there is absolutely no guarantee that you'll find the idea in the next 6 months.

If you don't want to start working again for somone, my advice would be to go on a trip, preferably abroad.
That's one way to do it. The only thing to keep in mind is that the trigger has already been pulled. Money (and thus time) have been decreasing every day starting 3 weeks ago.

I'm not implying you're saying this, but I hope I can nip the whole "you're an idiot for quitting without an idea" in the bud. I'm alright with just doing self-study and going to work in a "normal" place come next Spring, I just wonder if I could make even better use of this time.
Do consulting, and you'll probably come across a lot of client problems that are amenable to general solutions.
Or make games. The world always needs more games.
I don't mind working for someone, I just don't want to go work for X-Large-Corp, which is most of what Dallas has to offer. Hence the self-study and bettering myself so I can apply somewhere more interesting AND/OR do my own thing.

"go on a trip, preferably abroad"

Yeah, I really need to do this.
That seems to be an overly pessimistic estimate.

IE7 Was released almost exactly two years ago and it already has 45% market share (compared to 25% for IE6). Next year it is likely that over 50% of users will have either IE7 or IE8. I think a slight majority of users will probably have IE8 in 2010, and a significant majority will have it in 2011. I expect Microsoft to push IE8 more vigorously than IE7 because IE8 is significantly more secure (on paper, at least) than IE6 and IE7.
The way I see it is: magazine writers can make money from writing articles for papers. Gruber does something like that, except he self-publishes. He makes money the same way - advertising - he creates a gorgeous aesthetic to his site to convince people to read his stuff... he's like a one-man magazine.
Table layouts are tougher on users with screen readers. Aside from that I can't disagree with your points.
I'd love to think it'll happen that fast. I do think it's a possibility - especially considering Asus reports having helped Apple develop a netbook.
To put it in perspective, this is less than what Microsoft paid for PowerSet ($100 million for a search engine), Farecast ($112 million for a airfare pricing comparision tool) or less than what Google paid for FeedBurner ($100 million for a RSS reader).

The satellite plans to do a detailed mapping of the entire lunar surface. If a web startup built an application in the lines of Google Maps using these mappings that would probably sell for more than $78 million, more than the whole cost of the Moon mission. Bit if an exaggeration but you get the point.
Mingle's advertising web sites are all hilarious. I love the fact that this is how the team gets their word out. It's such a brilliant marketing plan.