skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok, let's analyze this "burn:" Instances of "Joel on Software" on the linked page:

* Header image that states "Joel On Software" and links to the homepage. This is a common website device. One

* Another text link before the article title. Ok, this one seems extraneous. Though since the first is an image, this is more SEO friendly. Two

* Not mentioned anywhere in the article.

* The footer contains another link. Again, this isn't really irregular. Three

* The email for the author of the article. Would it satisfy you if Joel had used another domain for his email address? Four

So there are a grand total of 4 appearances on that particular page, and with the exception (maybe) of one, none are spammy.

Did you come into this discussion solely to diss the author? Joel was pointing out something inane in a wizard dialog box, and you essentially call him a hypocrite.
Oh there are quite a few different installers. There are much worse ones. I recall one that bundled the yahoo toolbar (!), and said something like:

"would you like to install the free Yahoo Toolbar with The Java". (cut of prematurely).
Zine:  Python Blogging Software
well do you mean like the flash runtime does (well on windows at least, haven't seen it work for me for other platforms).
I start hallucinating in class when I'm almost asleep. It can be kind of funny.
The Prototype this example won't work unless this is bound to the anonymous function, otherwise this is the window object.

$A(this.columns).each(function(item) {
this.buildHeader(item);
}.bind(this));
Yeah, Silverlight. No thanks.
Or pass in an object to the function that will be bound to this.

$A(self.columns).each(function(item) {
this.buildHeader(item);
}, this);

In general I prefer the technique you described as it is the most frequent use case and simplifies the implementation of the function that executes the callback.
Perhaps "O RLY?" was not witty enough?
well, the obligatory xkcd reference: http://xkcd.com/114/
Let's be clear on one thing. I didn't "essentially" call him a hypocrite, I "really" called him a hypocrite.
I don't understand why does one need to make a choice. Even comparing the two makes little sense: jQuery is smaller and DOM-focused, while Prototype is a much more comprehensive multi-file library and DOM-related stuff is just a part of it, completely isolated in its own file which you can exclude during Prototype's build process.

I use both: jQuery for HTTP and DOM traversing/manipulation plus DOM-less prototype core for everything else. This combo is awesome, conflict-free and quite compact when gzipped. Bare bone JavaScript is too weak library wise and Prototype makes an excellent "standard library" for it. I couldn't live without Prototype's extensions to enumerable, strings, arrays, hashes, etc.

And it's 100% compatible with Rails thanks to jRails project. I highly recommend it.
Now, if Hitler had written what you wrote, he would still be just as wrong. And irredeemably evil. Therefore, you are a child murderer.
Publicity is good, as long as its not "cuill" publicity.

On another topic: is there any goal quite so vacuous as "raising awareness" about something?
Sun - We're the dot in "Please wait............."
Why on earth did you restart 50 times? zeroturnaround.com?
True, but historically they've been quite liberal and up front about other things.
I'm not sure that's true. I mean, in many businesses it's true that any publicity is good publicity. But when your business is dependant on you being an authoritative source bad publicity has a real impact. What's the point of a site that reports CO2 stats if the guy has proven he can't be trusted to give accurate stats?

(The link says he claims not to have been the source for the article just for the record)

You're probably right in this instance. His startup was so small before and the fallout is so big that he may very well get more new visitors than he loses this time around. But I'll be curious to see if they make return trips or whether they assume he can't be trusted and go on their way.
XML is not S-Expressions
or you can use javascript call or apply

method.call (<object you want to be *this*>, params);
this is awesome. never knew there was a market for spaces under tables! i am completely inspired and have now decided to list the space under my desk. :)
you can cook at home by using free recipe sites as well. my point is, should we come up with business models for "premium" customers?

I'm not saying it's not a good approach. Rather I'm researching such an idea which targets premium customers who prefer personalization/customization. And that's when my friend responded that she wouldn't pay for my premium service since there are free or cheaper options available, which also "get things done".
The 50Bn and 10% numbers come from InfoTrends via itfacts (http://www.itfacts.biz/50-bln-digital-photos-taken-in-2007-6...). Yes, it probably includes throwaways but even throwaways are sharable (even if the audience might approach 1).

I always ask people what percentage of photos they share versus the number on their desktop and it's usually way less than 10%.

"no uploading" is really "no manual uploading". You do have to leave your computer (or appliance - coming soon) running and connected and we do auto-cache recent and more popular content.

Yes, the initial download, install, and picking photo/video source is work but it's a one time tax. Any photo or video that is dropped on the desktop is instantly shared and accessible.
Funny, I was referred to this magazine by a friend today as well. I agree, at a time when I do want to cook at home more, I am willing to pay the small premium to actually read quality recipes and techniques rather than free sites that provide a hack-job of recipes like allrecipes.com or cooks.com
I agree, it looks like any regular debate. He's talking over her, but every politician does that. She asked him what he'd do on terrorism and illegal immigrants, he went to answer and then she starts arguing in the middle of his reply.

How political debates are handled in the UK where I grew up and found my interest in politics are: you stand up, ask the question you've got, they reply and, I've seen this numerous times, the questioner will stand back up and say "that's not what I asked..." I remember it with Tony Blair, he did it 3 times in a row to the same guy and it was like WTF you're showing everyone on national TV that you fully ignore people when they ask a question you don't like. I believe the question was on why we entered the Iraq war after it had come out that there weren't WMD's and that (IIRC) MI5 had declared they highly doubted the existence of any WMD's in Iraq months before the war. Tony Blair basically kept saying they did it because Saddam Hussein had WMD's.

Obama in that video was asked a question, but the woman tried to stop him from answering, obviously she'd already made up her mind that whatever he said wasn't the answer she wanted because she never even listened.
From a technical perspective, the desktop is not directly addressable from the outside. All traffic flows through our p2web gateway and is encypted/authenticated.

From a non-technical perspective, I do agree security will always be a concern and a challenge for us to overcome.

Thanks for the suggestion on the graphic.
The Thing About Security (Twitter)
I will say this, use of this is very scary and requires me to look at the docs more often (need to know where in the scope chain this is being set).

In fact, I'd argue that in general seeing uses of this outside of object oriented code make me sit up and look very carefully, because its really easy to get spooky "action at a distance" type behaviour.
Did Joshua Schachter Just Land At Google?
Thanks... we slapped the site pretty quickly but are revisiting from an SEO perspective.
For commercial online enterprises, "raising awareness" is a euphemism for "getting signups."

Although I think Alex is, at heart, genuinely interested in helping the environment (he has a PhD in environmental science and is an environmental fellow at Harvard, after all). The fact that he has found a way to monetize his interest and help the environment at the same time is great. And it appears to be very profitable as well.
If using Silverlight helps you do things that would have been harder otherwise, great.

But the other reasons are silly unless someone is paying you to increase Silverlight usage.

The difference between a biz and a hobby is that biz try hard to avoid doing things that don't help the bottom line.
Personally, as a writer I have great difficulty writing when I'm trying to concentrate. It's actually quite unbelievable how much diet soda I go through, yet I write best (quality & quantity) when I'm chowing down on granola bars and candy. I think I drank an entire like uber-big gulp of coke in an hour and got out 2000 words, yet in the same amount of time I'm usually lucky if I get 500 words when I'm drinking Coke Zero.
Based on the use of "this.columns" I assume this is bound to something. Probably not the anonymous function though.
Yes - sort of... Incidentally, we also have another product called BoxCloud which is a bit like DropBox for files and folders.
It may be more true of food magazines than publishing in general, but --- leaving out Martha Stewart Living (that's like bringing O Magazine in; a magazine with a lucrative sideline in television!) --- do the line of cookbooks from these magazines come anywhere near the size of Cooks Illustrated?

CI does what looks like 5-10 a year. Does Saveur?
Thanks... I agree those bullets are painful and I'll be changing that very shortly here.
I disagree with all of you. I love that dialog. When it came on, when I was first installing Java, I had no idea what Java was. But then, I got excited about Java. YeAH!

:)
I'd like to see the plus and minus votes (or the total number of votes), not just the sum. There's a huge difference between an article/comment that only 3 people voted on vs an article that 103 people voted on.
One argument against doing both is that Prototype alters many built in classes directly. This is often risky and dangerous, and makes interactions between the two code bases possible.
Well, it has been pointed out before, but this is just too funny. I hadn't looked at joel's site for some time and I had to check some other posts to tell whether the blurbs under the real posts were there for humorous reasons or whether they were an actual part of the page template. Unfortunately the latter is true. He could just put "Joel loves developers."

What's there sounds like the same kind of marketing department cool-aid that the poor engineers at Sun are forced to put in their installers.

Now, if you are tempted to say something like "the inmates are running the asylum" in Sun's case that may very well be true: http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/santaclara/agn.htm :-)
We are currently searching for the right niche but one that seems to have some legs is the digital home market - partnering with ISPs to up sell higher bandwidth plans, and networked hard drive and appliance manufactures for value add service. We've also had some pretty good uptake with busy parents that want to share tons of photos (and videos) without a lot of work.

Thanks for the comments.
Could we actually have some real conversation about the topic?
Okay, how about I take your keyboard away, and lets see you type that on the on-screen keyboard utility's you get with Windows/OS X. Please, let me see you type an email message without a keyboard.

I agree, it's not completely useless. It's about 99.9% of the way there though.
Ask YC: Top tips between coding and launch
I've been trying to make a list of things I always forget to do when I'm preparing to launch my web project.

Stuff like register your brand on twitter, ask mechanical turkers to test the final UI, ensure you have web stats enabled, all your google alerts working, etc.

What do you do just before launching your new project?
He missed the seventh 'Java' in the title bar...
there are many cheap quad and dual-core Xeons and Opterons. I use 1.9Ghz low-power quad-core Opterons, which cost around $256 each. You pay a large premium (in power or money or both) for the last few clock cycles. If you need more ram than CPU, which is usually the case for me, you can save quite a lot.
Actually I thought that too. We should call it River's Law. (Styx's Law would presumably be something about hair bands.)
Confirmed: Delicious Founder Joshua Schachter Joins Google
What do you do just before launching your new project?

More coding.

I don't understand this idea of "time between coding and launch".
great idea, not a full-blown comment, but a small link (like "flag") that gives room for a one line description. Most typos are pretty short, and are covered by something like the below. Even if the description happened to be ambiguous, it would be enough of a heads up for the blogger to find it. I'd think it's not attractive enough to spammers to warrant a captcha.

s/just up/just shut up/
Right now it is hovering around 0C here, and our heating is all electric, so there is no real downside to running extra electronics.
CO2Stats doesn't buy carbon offsets. They buy renewable energy certificates.
Checking, yes, the same text. But as a reader, I didn't see the other one and i did see this one (maybe because it had more upvotes), so, for me, it was a good thing that this one was here. There's an element of competition for most eye-catching headline that I don't think can be administrated away.

BTW: if you state the link directly (not indented), it is automatically linkerized like so: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=431033
I expected "more testing" too :)
Point taken. Feel free to substitute a softer adjective of your choice then. ;-)

Be clear though that I was attacking the argument itself, not the poster.
I think some time ago, Microsoft used to have two different internal versions of Word, for example... the one which was better won, and was the one used by people.
Perhaps the both of you can settle your differences by reading more Joel on Software whilst experiencing the Power of Java?
Yeah, I guess they decided that some apps were actually starting to support 1.9, so they had to jump so far into the future that the newest version of Ruby wouldn't be supported for years
By bloated I mean local newspapers covering national news. When small papers have newsrooms with 60 reporters, and 40% of those reporters cover national news--that's a problem.

To see evidence of this go look at your local paper. Mine writes about (not syndicates...writes) national news all of the time.

Small to medium sized papers shouldn't be doing this anymore. They should be focusing on their local communities and dominating that market.

By bloat I mean purchasing multi-million dollar printing presses in 2005 (http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-108017775.html) when you should be investing heavily in your local and online markets.
something I always do with stuff with RSS feeds - make sure they're passed via feedburner.
Recursive make might harm some people, but FreeBSD has been using it since before FreeBSD existed, and I can't recall it ever causing problems.
Well at least they've put a Live Search bar at the top of their page. That means they 'kind of' get the web. If I was running the company, the first thing I'd do is turn Microsoft.com into something resembling Google.com - a nearly blank page with a Live search box (and a link to other products). I mean, come on, show some commitment to owning the search market (and that's half the battle since people can't actually see the underlying code)...
Well, you asked what I did. I do more coding; my users do more testing. :-)
I'm sorry, I'm in Canada and I have to suffer the crap that is American news, it even gets on the god damn news here. I even got news of several of the numerous school shootings on public news back in the UK. I'm sorry, but American kids shooting up American schools, isn't the concern of either a British or Canadian.

Okay, 90% of child kidnapping directly involves someone in the family - first thing the police should do, hunt down everyone in the family haul them in and tell them it's a crime to leave the state without court permission. Then you've only got 1 out of 10 cases where the suspect isn't already in your custody! Those cases, I'll watch on the news; I don't care when some hillbilly family starts kidnapping each others kids.
I would like to be able to select the text in the intro boxes, and pretty much anywhere else that isn't a button.

Also, I uploaded a pdf -- when looking at documents it's hard to read I'm running @ 1900X1200 and it's difficult to read; I'd work on the interface -- also, I assume you convert the pdf to an image? Why can't I select the pdf's text?

Other than that it looks like a good start, and silverlight seems like a good choice.. I recently chose flex for a project, but almost chose silverlight.
Exactly. Users don't notice "this thing is 3px offset". Users notice "this site sucks", and then they leave.
Is it known who created the progress bar?
Links aren't turned off to protect against spam, but to discourage people from submitting sites with editorial comment appended.
Only use the web on that, so you can work without distraction on your current computer.
I don't think one should underestimate Microsoft and their ability to enter new markets. They won the Office market from WordPerfect, they beat Apple in O/S wars, they slashed Netscape in browser wars, they are currently winning the console wars with Xbox etc. etc.

Stating that they aren't a web company based on their frontpage is naive. They are excellent business people with lots of money - - just look what they are doing to Yahoo.
Del.icio.us Founder Joins Google - Jobwire
Thank you for your POV. Even though you are not in the US, it's nice to read the thoughts of someone else who shares this opinion. Perhaps if enough people shared this view and let it be known, the national news might report on something of substance.
> merely thinking about the task in more concrete, specific terms makes it feel like it should be completed sooner and thus reducing procrastination

It doesn't say how they drew that conclusion from the evidence, but it seems a bit of a leap to me.

I think it's because a specific concrete task has less unknown in it, and therefore is easier to do; easier to estimate how long it will take; easier to judge your performance; and easier to know when you have completed the task - for these reasons, it is less scary.
Given that this will be set up as a home server, I promise you the next spare one I have will be donated to a person in need.

That person will most likely be a broke student entrepreneur in dire need of more computing power.
the entire population is over 20 million?

Maybe. The World Factbook says it was 11,350,111 last July.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

The Factbook also notes a population growth rate of -0.787% (despite a birth rate more than twice that of the United States), and adds:

there is an increasing flow of Zimbabweans into South Africa and Botswana in search of better economic opportunities (2008 est.)

The Factbook also says of 569,685 refugees (IDPs; Internally Displaced Persons) https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/... in the country, that they result from:

MUGABE-led political violence, human rights violations, land reform, and economic collapse

Below that, in the (Trafficking in persons) section, it notes:

large scale migration of Zimbabweans to surrounding countries - as they flee a progressively more desperate situation at home - has increased
Segway inventor reveals 'toughest question'
So because I never really read usernames while reading comments, my mental parser read this as River [Tam's] Law, which was apparently not immediately rejected as incorrect because she is a bit different in the mental department and would probably react... appropriately to the word "retarded".

As much as I appreciate river_styx's contribution to the development of River's Law, I really think my mental flight of fancy is superior. Or at the very least would make for a better motivational poster:

"Don't Say 'Retarded', Or She'll Kill You With Her Brain"
best marketing move since steorn put that ad in theeconomist!
Boxee: WebTV That Makes Sense. Is That Good or Bad for Big Cable?
Exactly what would a Presidential mobile look like?
What I really want is an iTunes for stocks and maybe some other simple securities, something that will allow the really small investor to dabble. I guess there's a whole bunch of regulatory and legal reasons that this can't happen.
I personally run TVersity for my Xbox 360. When I was looking around I couldn't see if XBMC could transcode on the fly, which is what I really needed. TVersity works great, is simple and sits quietly in the background like a good little app should. It can also do pretty heavy transcoding, like 720p to 480p (my laptop does beyond 1080p, so I've had little compunction to upgrade my TV, but I like watching things on TV at the same time as it allows me to use my laptop fully and still watch a show) and still tolerate my wife playing video games. I guess it's more a testament to dual-core processors really.
Interview with GvR: The Evolution of Python 3
He's being a wiseass. It's not even funny.
One word: Management!

...completely hearsay, but I've been told that the management culture at Microsoft is positively stifling, and all the best engineers are off working on niche projects that will probably never ship...
Microsoft still does lots of good technology, so I guess it depends on what you're interested in.
I have no idea which kind of publicity this will end up being, by the way. Environmentalism itself is so popular that it would take a pretty big screw up for CO2stats to be irreparably damaged. There is certainly a market.
5-10 cookbooks a year sounds terrifying. The QA on those must be terrible--not sure how they could afford that number of recipe testers for each title. I tend not to buy any cookbook that has a number in the title or is part of a 'series'.

Saveur does one every few years, on different themes-- Saveur Cooks Classic Italian and Saveur Cooks Classic American are still doing pretty well-- they're great references for the classics.
16 weeks to get my iPhone app approved. Guess I was doing it wrong. Here's my advice.
That's exactly what the package manager does. If you install a program that needs the JVM, it will automatically download and install it. Can you elaborate on what you mean by "another level of meta"?
Here is more of the story on the Zimbabwe refugee crisis:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbabwe#Refugee_crisis

The economic meltdown and repressive political measures in Zimbabwe have led to a flood of refugees into neighbouring countries. An estimated 3.4 million Zimbabweans, a quarter of the population, had fled abroad by mid 2007. Some 3 million of these have gone to South Africa.

Apart from the people who fled into the neighbouring countries, an estimated 570,000 people are displaced within the borders of the country, many of whom remain in transit camps and have limited access to assistance. Most of the displaced have been victims of the Operation Murambatsvina in the year 2005 and continuing evictions and violent farm seizures.

You say only as many as 3,000 of those 4 million refugees were made so by land reform. Where did you get your figure?