skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes that's the dogma. Alas, it's completely lost on me. I fail to understand how tables are more "semantic" than nested divs. Tables only have semantics within the context of some formalism that defines their semantic meaning. Outside of such a context they can be anything, so why not a way of laying out information on a page?

I don't see how swaths of divs, some of them used for semantics (according to some metadata standard), some of them used for purely presentational purposes, improve anything.

CSS people (or should I say modern web developers) are completely anal about not using tables for layout whilst at the same time the whole notion of document structure is so utterly destroyed in any JavaScript heavy app.

These priorities make no sense to me. Laying out web pages with divs and CSS is a black art. It's fragile. It breaks in all kinds of nasty ways. It reduces the productivity of UI development to pre 90s levels and leads ot entire pages done in Flash.
TortoiseGit 0.1
yup, and also for companies whose stock prices are depressed (all of them), this is one of the only meaningful things they can do for investors in a recession. and frankly they can rehire people later for lower wages...i see a huge wave of salary resets going through the valley. developer wages were out of control, at one point last year i wouldn't even look at anything under $150k. now i have a lot of experience, but even i found these salaries absurd for developers. thats going to change.
I've read Simon Peyton Jones's Beautiful Code excerpt (http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1964 for those who need it), and it's very nice.

I would be interested in the "too much overhead" article -- can you track it down? I've been researching STM for a while and seen a lot of papers focused on performance and such, so I'd be surprised if whatever the article claims are the problems are not fixable in the long term.

(STM can be nearly reduced to "taking locks", especially if you are compiling, so it really shouldn't be worse than lock-based synchronization, and it's much easier to reason about.)
No promises about tracking down the article, but I'll make sure you get it if I do.
Learn Merb
Should go nicely with that 2,000 year old computer...
Hmm, that's unfortunate. If successful, haskell's STM would really put it on the map.
> You should read this

Thats a good place to stop the sentence. Transmetropolitan is one of those things that everyone should try at least once.
Startup Interview: LootStreet – Every price is negotiable
Javascript has copy-to-clipboard functions available in most modern browsers.
This is a completely different thing than Scribd.

Scribd is a document uploading and management service that converts .pdfs, .docs, .xls, everything under the sun.

This is an extremely nice way to view PDFs linked to from google search and gmail.
You realize, of course, that to sit in modern Germany alive and well (and being able to speak freely) is the result of two world wars, a cold war, a dozen or so continental wars (including ones that gave you religious freedom) countless invasions and counterinvasions by various tribes, the Romans seeking to pacify the Germanic tribes -- the limit of this list is simply the limits of our written record. Most all of these conflicts were fought "wrongly" according to your standards, because they involved torture and mass killings.

Your supposition is that somehow modern life would have come about without all of this dirty armed conflict. Since it did, in fact, happen the other way, the onus is on you to explain how all of this magic would work. I'm simply reporting to you that by your own standards you should still be living in a tribe in the woods somewhere.

Wars in many cases have different outcomes than the victors imagine. That's a non-sequiter, however, in that as 3-dimensional beings we are forced to make our best judgments and go forward. I'm not making an "ends justify the means" argument. I'm stating that the means must take into consideration what the ultimate ends will be for the human race, not just dither around about aspects of violence. Sometimes we get it wrong, sure, but that doesn't relieve us of our responsibility to think for more than just ourselves.

My personal morals say that I should never torture or kill. But I have a greater obligation to mankind than to myself. If forced, I have an obligation to my species that overrules the obligation I have to my conscience. It is better to die than violate one's personal morals, but it is better to violate one's personal morals than to let mankind perish. I am not the center of the moral universe.

That's some hard logic. Thanks for your response.
The sad reality is that more or less all jobs have some component of tedium to them.
I track conversations I'm involved in through the Threads link at the top (which is quite useful). I'd like to be able to have a one click add-this-conversation-I'm-not-involved-in-to-my-Threads-list button.

1 point by emmett 1 hour ago | link | parent |edit | flag | track
Hi there--please email me your contact info to: nick_hudson22@yahoo.com. We can carry a conversation from there :)
Though the real problem was that the sick cows were signed off as fighting fit.
Nokia 6233 Lcd Display Ic Jumper Ways
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Plenty of people have written payment processor interfaces in the web space; this product isn't going to sustain the $45 price point, because it isn't defensible.

It's a great idea, though.
For any advanced techie, the three main reasons (Backup, sync, sharing) for using DropBox are irrelevant. For ordinary users: sure! It sounds like a great solution. Let me explain.

I don't think anyone with valuable data would trust their only backup with an external "in-the-cloud" source. On top of that, most people's upload capacity is severely limited.

Syncing is accomplished with rsync or a network share on your home network. Most geeks will SSH into their home computers, etc.

Sharing via drop box cannot be any better than a personally managed web server. GIT/SVN on your server offers much more than drop box can.

On the other hand, maybe I just like to hack and get my hands dirty creating my own solutions.
Wrong.... It's a foundational method for proxy based estimation. PHB usage is giving out bonuses based on SLOC counts.
Explanation fail. This works perfectly well so long as you know how diseased the cows are, and the odds of any one cow dying are independent from the next. It's called math.

The actual problem with CDOs is that the cows were all more diseased than the historical track record suggested (because after they started putting together CDOs, a flawed incentive structure created a new motive to buy sicker cows) and that the probability of one cow dying wasn't independent of the next cow dying.
I generally use Construx Surveyor for counting...
It's not that "only we programmers make so much noise all the time", you have to remember that the internet is the domain of the programmer.

It seems like we make so much noise because we are the feudal lords of the online fiefdom. If you were to spend all your time in wood shops for example, you'd wonder why carpenters complain so much.
Let me see a page showing the most recent comments on every thread that I upvoted, commented on, or voted on the comments of.
My grief is not the problem. This world is the problem.
IStyle iPod 4G Leather Case (Black) by Speck 
The iStyle features quality leather construction, offers a great fit, allows easy access to the song controls, headphone, & fireware jacks, and an included plastic shield protects the iPod screen.
You're right about the on the other hand. :)

All of Dawdle.com's documents are up in the clouds thanks to Dropbox. I use it because it's easier than Parallel's Shared Folders functionality. How's that for buying something I don't need?
This post and the video sickened me. I think everyone had good points, but the panel (people we're supposed to respect?) would yell and change topics when someone made an actual valid point.

The one comment about 'Americans need to appreciate life and Europeans need to work better' is the best argument in the entire video and it was looked over. Arrington is blind to say the Americans had the best stage presence. Le Meur was the most reasonable I think through the whole thing and he was cast aside. Why? Because he's french.

Seems to me the American panelists (Feldman aside) only see the world how they want to. There are great people everywhere, and the mentality they exhibited-focusing purely on winning and being efficient-shows their lack of comprehension into what matters most, both in life and business.

No matter how efficient you are or how much you want to win, it's important to have a level head to be able to step back and appreciate the things around you. Shoving your face in your work 12+ hours a day will make you miss half your life. I don't know about most of you guys, but I learn the most living life as compared to reading blogs and business articles.
FP is actually more widespread than OOP, so much so that we don't even notice it (or call it FP) any more. If a language has functions, then it is somewhat functional.
You ever heard of a one-hit wonder? There countless of them. There are also numerous examples of extremely popular bands releasing an album that is panned by critics, fans, or both (read: Metallica). I agree with your parent post, every discipline involving art and talent is complex and difficult if you're interested in it and delve deep enough into it. It's just that programming gets a lot of attention on the Internet, especially Hacker News, but that's no surprise, is it?
Export your Facebook phonebook (legal and working)
Shirky on Coase, Collaboration and Here Comes Everybody
Authorize.net lets you do this from their website already... It would only be cool in tandem with an accessory credit card reader.
The $50 Billion Ponzi Scheme
The FBI complaint states that Mr Madoff told his sons that he believed the losses from his scheme could exceed $50 billion. If that is the case, his fraud would be far greater than past Ponzi schemes and easily the greatest swindle blamed on a single individual.

Wow
Update Twitter / Friendfeed From the Command Line with wget and cURL
"... a start-up that wants to make it easier for you to find what it is that you are looking for on the Internet.
... quicker and easier for people to find what they want on the Internet."

Sure uses a lot of words to write a lot of words.
Blu-Ray DRM "Resealed", Disks Again Unrippable
"I'm simply reporting to you that by your own standards you should still be living in a tribe in the woods somewhere"

I'm afraid that's not "simply" reporting. That's a pretty far reaching and (in my view) far fetched assumption. Most atrocities were not committed in the name of anything that got us out of the woods. Quite the contrary. And those atrocities that were committed with that aim may not have been necessary to get us out of the woods after all. At least that's not the kind of certainty you make it out to be.

"My personal morals say that I should never torture or kill. But I have a greater obligation to mankind than to myself. If forced, I have an obligation to my species that overrules the obligation I have to my conscience"

I'm not rejecting this idea outright, but I will say that most of the time the uncertainties of a complex world are so vast that I could never be so convinced of the righteousness of my cause that I would torture or kill indiscriminately. What if I'm wrong? What if my torturing and killing causes more torturing and killing instead of less? Your argument is very popular among all kinds of extremists by the way (which doesn't mean I'm assuming you are one of them of course)
I've read Dreaming in Code, and I don't think you can draw many conclusions from it. The project was especially undisciplined, and given that Kapor started it, I think he has to take most of the blame.
Your argument is indistinguishable from the arguments people used to make in the 1970s about how life was better in the Soviet Union than the US. Sure, their GNP per capita was lower, but they had more leisure time; their lives were not merely devoted to piling up possessions; society had more compassion.

The actual fact, in hindsight, is that life in the Soviet Union was pretty grim for the average person. It was only good for the guys who ran everything. And that is pretty much the case in France, though on a smaller scale.

Once you leave the big tourist areas, France is pretty grubby. The median French citizen does not live some kind of charmed, stylish life in his ample free time. Nor is he so high-minded that he is above buying cheap crap. Everyday life in France for the average person is much like it is for the average person in the US, just a little poorer.
Ask YC: How do you track down the key person at a Yahoo-swallowed company?
How do you track down the key person at a Yahoo-swallowed company to do some five-minute job that they're supposed to do anyway? I'm desperate to get a flickr Comm'l API key which I applied for in Oct.
There's an important distinction. The US is racially much more heterogenous than "Europe", but culturally fairly homogenous, because the vast majority of immigrants want to be Americans.

To have a Silicon Valley, you've got to attract a disproportionate share of talented and ambitious people. You need a critical mass. That's much easier to attain in a culturally semi-homogenous country full of nomads than in the EU, which has its people segregated into over 20 different nations. This is also why the US has better universities. If the same linguistic and cultural barriers existed between Montana and Massachusetts (which are culturally very similar places, on the European scale) as do between Russia and Great Britain, we probably wouldn't have a Silicon Valley.

By the way, European investment bankers work the same egregiously long hours as American bankers do, and middle-of-the-road Americans would gladly take the lives of average Europeans. There isn't a huge difference in the distributions of drive; what differs is the level of effort expected from the rank-and-file. Arguably, however, Americans get less from them, and the rank-and-file are so unproductive (compared to startup founders) that this difference is inconsequential at the big-picture level.
Google might be doing more than making us stupid
Books for learning Objective-C for iPhone
I have basic C programming skills and want to learn Objective-C 2.0 for the iPhone. Any suggestions for good books? Sorry if this has already been asked and answered but I couldn't find anything.
That's as much as you make in one day. If he's as picky of an artist as I am, he spends several days on a design. Then there's the fact his skill set is highly specialized, thus providing the luxury of a higher price per project.

When you care enough about your new startup looking as good as it can be, a few thousand to have new icons made to make your site more usable and unique or your app more visible is worth the effort--or in this case, the capital.

A good designer is well worth his price. it's just a shame there is an overabundance of bad designers; they're each worth nothing more than 5 headaches, a poor end product, and a delayed project. But hey, you saved $500 in the process.
Ethnic Conflict
Honestly, I think that it'd be a lot better for American entrepreneurs for the US to learn from the European model. Small businesses will benefit enormously from universal healthcare, for example. More vacation wouldn't hurt either. I'm going to go out on a limb and assert that productivity is probably maximized, per hour, at 9-10 weeks' vacation, and in gross, at 4-5. It makes sense for the most ambitious 1% to work 50+ hour weeks, during the highest-energy decade of their life... but it doesn't make sense for everyone to be working that much.
Can you blame them? I wouldn't want to eat British food either.
Cool. I was 1998 (Toronto) and '99 (Seattle).
I'm not sure what your point is. Is your point that we shouldn't worry about rendering pages with JS because someday in the future google will be able to index it equally well?

If so your livelyhood clearly doesn't depend on SEO. I'm not gambling mine on what is currently vaporware.

Btw, people made this exact point about flash a few years ago and your pages will not rank nearly as well if you do them in flash.
Living abroad is a great eye opener: you see the good and bad in another system and way of doing things, and you get some perspective on your own country, too.
Strangely enough, I'd say Iron Man. A lot of people I've talked to about the movie were more into Tony Stark's smart home tech than they were into the suit. I distinctly remember one female friend of mine who despises tech talk, asking me all about whether it would be possible to engineer those self-dimming window displays.

Maybe it's not as realistically grounded as others, but it definitely shows people why we do what we do: we like building cool stuff.
Awk is one of my favourite software tool language, but some of these one-liner scripts can be done better with sed and tr.
Apple have a pretty good guide that describes Objective C (sorry, don't have the name of the doc at hand, but it's about 300 pages long, if memory serves you right - it's in the "getting started" part of Apple Developers Connection...

But if you just want to get right in and start programming, do what everyone else does, and get your hands on the Hillegass book 'Cocoa Programming for Mac'. Yes, I know, you want to program the iPhone, not a Mac, but this will teach you the idioms of Cocoa programming, as well as give you a good introduction to the tools (XCode, Interface Builder etc)
After that... well, there are some books coming out specifically for iPhone programming, but the word from the Cocoa Developer's list seems to be that most people are able to get along just fine with the Apple reference documentation (which is excellent, by the way), provided they already know Cocoa.

I've started programming my iPhone, having started programming the Mac about 18 months ago, and it's been a fairly smooth transition, even without having a book to hold my hand.
Anyone else have NoScript alert on this page to a potential XSS condition?
Which state and what's in subsection b?
Where was the SEC in Bernard Madoff Fraud
You Can't Get Different Results Doing The Same Thing
Facebook Programming Environment Contest
oh, is that what this is about?

http://www.dilbert.com/fast/2008-12-12/
His sons turned him in. There must be a hell of a background story.
Arizona, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Montana, and Vermont all have very restrictive gaming/sweepstakes laws. You'll notice nobody who does fantasy sports or skill games for money (cbssportsline.com, worldwinner.com, etc.) allows customers from those states.

I'm really not sure if this auction system would qualify. I would really check with a lawyer versed in online gaming and sweepstakes if I were doing something like this. If you need, I can recommend the firm that almost every American who runs a casino or poker site uses.
Some people are buying the product at a good price though.
Have you tried DropBox? The app is so damn easy to use it's ridiculous. Sure there are other ways to do it, but the absolute lack of headaches makes DropBox way better than those other techniques you suggested.
Depending on how basic your C skills are, you might want to check out "Become an XCoder" by Bert Altenberg, Alex Clarke, and Philippe Mougin. It's more of a intro guide to using XCode / Objective-C (~70 pages; there have been a couple of posts on news.yc about it. You can get a free PDF copy of it here:

http://pmougin.wordpress.com/2008/03/26/become-an-xcoder-leo...
I'm confused, couldn't you do this with iPhone's browser and have paypal open? Or probably go to Authorize.net's website?
I think my point was pretty adequately captured by "So that's why Google is developing a speedy JS interpreter", although I have done you the favor of re-emphasizing the subject for you.

I don't care about SEO. I think Google wants to see into those sites, and I don't think they much care about SEO either.
> Question: lol - I just looked at the email I sent you and realized that I meant to write "re-sent" and yet I wrote "resent" lol.

> I read this email from you and I was like, "Wow - why is he talking about resentment?"

what are you, 14?
I have a little request, if possible.

For code blocks, instead of "two-spacing", could you implement a delimiter, e.g. [code][/code]? For something more elegant than BBCode, maybe ##...## could delimit code.
No. This auction system is no more random than chess. In chess, your opponent can just blunder and give you a win. Bobby Fisher once lost to a newspaper reporter. But just as in chess, this auction system determines a result based solely on the actions of the participant. There is no roll of a die, turn of a card, or reading of a number from an RNG. Legally you need something like that to be considered gambling.

You're right of course that slot machines aren't truly random in the sense that they use a pseudo random number generator. I don't think they have any hardware in them that reads thermal noise or anything like that. But that's sufficiently close to the roll of a die to qualify.

Philosophically I tend to agree with you since I believe the universe is deterministic, and nothing is truly random. But I'm pretty sure that legally this would not be gambling or sweepstakes in at least most states.
This is, again, the whole idea behind Blu-Ray's BD+ DRM scheme, which was designed by some of the same people who successfully locked down the satellite TV systems. Unlike prior DVD DRM schemes, BD+ can be reprogrammed without updating the players.
From that page: "you only pay when you send an email campaign to more than 5 people".
Hmm, seems I was wrong, organized games of skill for money (i.e. chess tournaments) are legal only by permit in some states. Yet WorldWinner.com operates in some of those.

See, that's why you ask a lawyer. And not me.
You can avoid this infinity crap by asking the OP how much debt he would saddle his wife and kids, or society in general, with to extend his life by an hour. If the value of his life in infinite, presumably he would leave his family destitute and bankrupt for the slightest increase in his lifespan.
How Madoff Made People Look Dumb
I knew a guy who was being ignored by a Big East-Coast Technology Company before email was commonplace (no need to say "Who"). After getting no response to his pleas for a similar 5-minute job that they were contractually obligated to do, he sent the manager of the department a brand-new art deco trash can. And a note saying, "Since so many of my requests have ended up in your trash can, I thought maybe you could use a new one." It worked.
Make that into a funny comic. I only learn from things spoken in a rectangular bubble.
Ping me privately in the meantime if you need urgent advice.