skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Looking for feedback on side-project
http://langref.net/xhtml

Short version:

This is what I envisioned as my ideal HTML reference when I was teaching myself web design. I couldn't find something close enough to what I wanted, so I made it and now wonder if anyone else would find it useful.

Longer version:

This is a side project I've been working on for a little while. The intention was originally to have a complete reference for XHTML that can be viewed as a hierarchy. Starting with a list of all elements, which can be clicked to expand the attributes and other information beneath it. Which can then be clicked to view information beneath them, and so on.

As I've gone along I've tried to keep it simple so that it could potentially be used to navigate through other hierarchical information. For example I plan to do other HTML versions and CSS as well, but with some tweaking I think it could be used for non-web design data.

It's quite basic at the moment. I have ideas for other features, like being able to resize column widths and an easy way to zoom in and out. Also, some of the descriptions I've added are a bit rushed because I just wanted to see what it would look like finished.

Would anyone else find this kind of reference useful? Or have any other thoughts/suggestions?

(Note: only tested in Firefox, Opera and IE7. IE messes up the widths.)
Number 1 rule for a website:

Never change the default UI drastically without either:

a) Offering a method to go use the old way.
b) Doing the change slowly so that users won't notice.

Everyone hates being confused, if tommorow they click something and get a different behaviour - that confuses and annoys.

For this change you are suggesting, method b) cannot be used, so it must be a), which adds complexity to an otherwise very simple site for no reason as the functionality to do this already exists.
Interesting. Do you have pointers to any papers/implementations of optimizing compilers without abstract syntax trees. Also, are you still able to implement optimizations with the same effort? I'd gladly trade 10x longer compile time for 10% faster execution time.

> We can look at specific examples if you wish.

Common Subexpression Elimination, for example. Not just syntactically equal expressions but also cases like this:

a1 = b + c
a2 = c + b // eliminated

And how do you do loop fusion & interchange?

Edit: I now realise that we may be talking about different abstract syntax trees. I thought that you meant no intermediate data structures. But you probably meant that you don't need a parse tree, you can translate to the intermediate language directly from the source. If that's the case then here's another challenge: how do you produce error messages for type errors?
How To Install Openbravo ERP On Ubuntu 8.10
There should be a vendor / company neutral symbol.
I read that argument several times, but always wonder: Shouldn't VCs factor in the subjective risk of the individual venture, like banks do (by requiring higher premiums for riskier credits)?

So for example, if a venture has a (subjective) 10% chance of success, the VC should require at least a 10x payoff, but if it has a 50% chance, a 2x payoff would suffice.
Or am I missing something here?
This isn't a CAPTCHA flaw, this is about using humans to break systems designed only for humans.

So the solution is to differentiate humans from each other.

The only thing a real user and a spammer can be differentiated on is _time_.

A human labour captcha breaker won't want to spend more than x seconds per spam as they work on a volume basis, whereas a real user will only do the registration once, and since they want to use your service, they are more willing to spend a couple extra minutes to do so.

However, that annoys new users who don't really want to go through a huge ordeal just to register on your site.

So the solution is to allow users to register without any captcha but disable their privileges on the site that could be abused for spam until either:

a) they gain enough credibility (like with karma on hacker news to unlock features)
b) they go through the actual signup form which would take about 5 minutes to fill (maybe having to identify 50 photographs, copying a passage of text etc.)

That would deter spammers, because it automatically limits them to x captchas to break per day.
Evolving a better keyboard layout
How about $2.25 a month for 250gig instead?
Very simple and easy to use, I would suggest 2 things though:

1. Remove the ajax interface, so it's possible to use the reference offline, also it means you can tell the client to cache the entire thing (as it is static).
2. Abstract the javascript code into a framework that lets you just pass in a heirarchical js array of definitions.

In fact, it's a perfect idea for a webapp, you provide the interface, and people can plug in their own 'definition' list for whatever they are working on. So if a person is developing an app, he can document the usage of it in a simple js array and plug it in to get a snazzy interface.
Twitter Automations with Python Scripts
Probably you've heard those words from many others as well, but what about spending money for annoying, non-hackerish stuff like

* Building a complete, final product with appropriate documentation, feature matrix etc.

* Building a nice and informative web page describing your product, it's features, your offerings, it's advantages/disadvantages etc.

(...or maybe you already have plans for all those after you finish beta-testing.)
I don't agree with putting Potatoes on the list. To the body glycemically they are no different than sugar. They shouldn't count as a vegetable serving - they have none of the micronutrients usually found in vegetables, they are mainly semi-complex sugars (short starches), which digest almost as fast as regular sugar.

Lentils and Beans (of any kind) should have been 1 and 2.
You should make the clickable target area larger, i.e. to select the "<a>"-tag I have to click on the little "a"; it would be much easier to just click on the gray box surrounding the "a".

Still, I'm not really happy with menus in webpages. It takes several clicks to get the needed information. Maybe you should consider making the information text beyond each tag visible all the time; I'm talking about the "This element defines an anchor..." kind of text. It's always easier just to scroll than having to click.
How to fix your image on Web
Don't worry, I plan on doing all of that stuff, too. But I don't need people to beta test a website for months and months -- so making a nice-looking website isn't a high priority while tarsnap is still in beta testing.
Logging vs. debugging
So if PHP is a commodity and price wins, why would any company NOT choose PHP as it's development environment? Cost wins in business. If PHP essentially does the same thing that Ruby and Python does, there would be no reason to pay a Ruby developer more.

There are various levels of skill within any programming language. It may take someone with no programming experience a day to write a small database app in PHP. It doesn't mean that I'd be willing to hire that person to code something worthwhile for my company.

You can't simply real world situations into easily digested bites and act like you are saying something profound. In reality, you're just omitting the layers that make the real world situations complicated.
Love (and annoying)
One of my projects use it (http://eatmycharts.com).. I'd say it removed the registration barrier, but that's about it. People will come back for the service.

I can't track which users publish to their mini feed (is there a way to tell? you ask the user's permission and there's no javascript callback to know if the user approved on publishing). Most of my users that are in my facebook network prefer not to publish to their mini feed.

I myself don't like to use my Facebook account on other websites (unless I really want to use my identity on purpose). That's why on my website, I automatically assign a nick to the user (which they can change), so their full name won't appear on public.

Overall, I don't think FC helped a lot in my case.
I can't believe so many folks are talking about how expensive it is. It's $129 per month people!!

If you're gonna launch anything that people will use you ought to be able to monetize. If you can't, what the hell are you doing in the first place?!
Agreed. And using an image associated with github, does "contribute" mean that your changes need to be merged by someone else into their _git_ repo?

I'd like to see one for people who contributed to upstream, it was merged in, production release with their change, and then their code was eventually removed, years later. :)

Good idea though, I'd like to see more of these around town.
So what do you think? Are they all OK? All terrible? One stand our more than the others? Thanks for any and all feedback.
In the U.K. we don't have air-con. It can be hard to sleep during the summer days.
Just steal ideas from the Smalltalk debuggers. You can see their source. If you make a copy of the debugger, you can probably even debug and step through the copy debugger in the debugger.
Kogan delays its Agora Android phone
I like Idea 3 in terms of "you can makes money here". Your "con" on it is genuine but if you can make a product that saves time, you can compete.

The first idea seems like a nice project but its risky as to if it will ever pay the bills. It is about time for the linux world to grow into paid software utils. I certainly wouldn't mind paying for such a tool.

The second idea is too large a market to find and educate. Good service though, I'd like to have access to it if you chose this one.
I think you can substitute google for any other >1000+ company and most of this would ring true. Managing thousands of people in getting things done quickly and where people feel productive is a very hard problem.
At 4000+ karma you start receiving Christmas cards.
Which one would you enjoy working on the most?
I have so many things to adjust to every day. This one isn't something I would like to add to the list.

It is a fine idea and your rational is solid. Just one more things to deal with though. I have to vote against it.
That's awesome. Have you ever been caught working on your side projects? What happened (if applicable)?
"Socialist Europe"? What on earth are you babbling about? It sounds like a fringe newspaper sold by scruffy types on street corners. Whatever your views, Europe is a capitalist society.

The UK's just as much a part of Europe as Belgium or any other European Union state--in fact, we're one of the few net contributors to the EU. I'm happy here and I'm not planning on going and, erm, sponging off the Belgian welfare state, so I'll respectfully ignore your request that I relocate (!)

I was never taught that going on benefits was a particularly socially acceptable thing to do. I'm glad the system is there for people who are genuinely down on their luck and can't find work, but personally I'd rather take a low-ranking supermarket job than go on jobseekers'. Having something to get up for in the morning makes all the difference, even if it's a rubbish job.
I think the $250 yearly fee might keep the "clone X for cheap" crowd at bay, but I'm not really sure how to tackle the onslaught of low outsourced bidders.
Israel declares ceasefire in Gaza
Some Startup Tips from MyBlogLog founders
I ran idea 2 with my in-house shopping expert (gf) & her first reaction was 'This is so old-fashioned, plenty of people are already doing that on bbs/forums'. So people are already doing it, how are you going to make it better? http://www.dolc.de. (in the second-hand forum / Chinese)

What about taxes? Fraud? You'll need a solid reputation system. I like the idea though.
I think number 2, whilst an interesting idea, has a lot of potential pitfalls. I wonder if this could be done in a social network sense where the community contacts the community looking for items, rather than via one centralised source. The two main barriers as I see are trust (once the money has been sent) and the legals of sending goods into other countries (ie import tax). This one would interest me the most. The Linux one could be useful, but I agree that it could be difficult to make money on it. The 3rd one is interesting on the basis that it should provide a much better service than is currently offered but your main barrier is that the larger companies prefer to deal with larger companies. You may look to sell to the likes of Capita as they could re-package what you do and they are already 'in' with these companies.

Are there any other ideas, or have you refined your ideas down to these three?
But, let me tell you, it's a _great_fucking_sandwich. It was actually so good, I'm going to register a new username: MORE_SANDWICH and climb the karma ladder again, just so PG makes me another sandwich. I need one... more.... taste...
I'd go with number 2. It's not high-tech as the other ideas, but it's a business with real cashflow, and is supposed to do better during a recession.
The article does a fine job of explaining what we all know now about CAPTCHAs: "people farms" crack them.

However, the article closes out pointing to a solution that is a very hard set of problems to solve: behavioral patterns, Bayesian filtering, keywords.
I think there's a difference between a real second-hand item and an item that legally is second hand, but has never been worn.
Idea 3 also sounds like the only one to me that may realistically roll in some money. Idea 1 is technically intriguing but more of an OSS side-project. Idea 2 calls for legal hassles, taxes will eat into your profits and especially the "high-profile" brands that sell $10 products for $500 will probably not like you sidestepping their retail chain.
I think number two is your best bet but instead of being a sort of shop overseas service, you should make storefronts focused on one of the brands at a time. Try to make your visitors feel like they have just stumbled upon something thats exclusive and secretive and they are sure to tell their friends.
I think that the other big con for idea 3 is that this is very likely to follow an enterprise sales model. Security in general is the kind of thing that is purchased relatively high up in an IT org. Not 100% clear if your idea would be in that basic mold, but if the model is that the tool runs against or sits on all servers, that would almost certainly be the case.

If you are in the "enterprise" space, that means salespeople, RFPs, support, etc and since all that costs money you are much more tied to a traditional vc model. That could be fine depending on what you want, but it feels different from the other ideas in terms of how much progress you can make on your own or with a small team.
1.

The cons here are pretty big. Your target customer is somebody who will solve most problems with google and 3 lines of bash/perl/etc scripting. The generic .NET software shop pays for this kind of software - *nix people don't.

I've written a few more paragraphs about this, and subsequently deleted them. It all really boils down to one thing: it's a bad idea. A lot of fun to write, but there's no money to be made.

2.

It's very hard to get any kind of competitive advantage here. If your idea works somebody else will do the same thing and charge less for the service. Also you will spend most of your time managing your (invariably unreliable) overseas contacts, leaving you no time to do anything else. This seems to be the kind of company that is fun in the beginning, and then turns into a nightmarish chore.

3.

I kind of like this idea. You have domain knowledge here, and already a few potential customers (or at least companies that can give you some feedback.) It's a niche, and there's still money to be made. Best idea so far.
Quantum Physics Made Relatively Simple: Three Lectures by Hans Bethe [vid]
My goals are: a business that will provide me with a reasonable income, in an interesting problem space, that will grow quickly allowing me to become self employed.

This is called a lifestyle business. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifestyle_business It is the opposite of a startup.
Please stop using the " " indenting on long lines since that breaks the wrapping of the page.
I think that jives with people's expectations when they go to work for other mega-companies though. It seems people going to Google too often assume that the rules really will be drastically different there.
"I'd be competing with some very large software companies."

I would call that an advantage.
I'm not sure it's fair to say that the ability to write php is less valuable then the ability to code other languages just because php is more popular. This may be true for contract work but if the majority of companies are using php it's probably in your best interest to know it. While it may be beneficial to know other languages, it could be detrimental not to know php, which could be considered a win for the language.
dfens, top notch! i've been looking for something more approachable than the w3c spec gooblety-gook for a while now. i've been trying to encourage the ui/html/js/css folks on my project to think about the specs. they come from varied non-engineering backgrounds, so a gentler spec navigation is crucial than scary xml (pasted below for comparison). word.

<!ENTITY % InputType
"(TEXT | PASSWORD | CHECKBOX |
RADIO | SUBMIT | RESET |
FILE | HIDDEN | IMAGE | BUTTON)"
>

<!-- attribute name required for all but submit and reset -->
<!ELEMENT INPUT - O EMPTY -- form control -->
<!ATTLIST INPUT
%attrs; -- %coreattrs, %i18n, %events --
type %InputType; TEXT -- what kind of widget is needed --
name CDATA #IMPLIED -- submit as part of form --
value CDATA #IMPLIED -- Specify for radio buttons and checkboxes --
checked (checked) #IMPLIED -- for radio buttons and check boxes --
disabled (disabled) #IMPLIED -- unavailable in this context --
readonly (readonly) #IMPLIED -- for text and passwd --
size CDATA #IMPLIED -- specific to each type of field --
maxlength NUMBER #IMPLIED -- max chars for text fields --
src %URI; #IMPLIED -- for fields with images --
alt CDATA #IMPLIED -- short description --
usemap %URI; #IMPLIED -- use client-side image map --
ismap (ismap) #IMPLIED -- use server-side image map --
tabindex NUMBER #IMPLIED -- position in tabbing order --
accesskey %Character; #IMPLIED -- accessibility key character --
onfocus %Script; #IMPLIED -- the element got the focus --
onblur %Script; #IMPLIED -- the element lost the focus --
onselect %Script; #IMPLIED -- some text was selected --
onchange %Script; #IMPLIED -- the element value was changed --
accept %ContentTypes; #IMPLIED -- list of MIME types for file upload --
>
"
The text linked to the footnote:

Nasty Little Problems

It's pretty easy to say what kinds of problems are not interesting: those where instead of solving a few big, clear, problems, you have to solve a lot of nasty little ones. One of the worst kinds of projects is writing an interface to a piece of software that's full of bugs. Another is when you have to customize something for an individual client's complex and ill-defined needs. To hackers these kinds of projects are the death of a thousand cuts.

The distinguishing feature of nasty little problems is that you don't learn anything from them. Writing a compiler is interesting because it teaches you what a compiler is. But writing an interface to a buggy piece of software doesn't teach you anything, because the bugs are random. [3]
It's an incredibly useful metaphor, though.
I ran an operation much like #2 when I was in college (1991). Made a shitload of money doing it, had I been able to reach a wider audience it could have made for a nice enterprise.

Not only are certain brands cheaper in other countries, but products/styles within those brands are not always available in the US (double-exclusive).

FWIW, one thing I did different than what you propose was that I had people who went to the country to purchase and bring stuff back. This was more so based on how this operation came into business, than via intelligent design, but it minimized the remote "friend" problem, and with some deal hunting and advance planning, the airfare can be cheap enough.
It's very easy to write a gushing/glowing review of a product without exhibiting any first-hand knowledge of said product. It's much harder to write a negative review if you've never used the thing. So, yeah, I always look for the coherent 1/2-star reviews to get a real idea of what I'm purchasing.
It's great to see the EY folks offering support for Passenger.
This is a rather useless data structure:

You can only store integers and they must be in the range of [0, n>.
The simple operations are O(1), because you can just map the positions of all integers based on their value in a second array of size n.
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> Classic military-industrial double-talk.

If you're going to claim a violation of law, surely the actual law matters. Then again, we seem to be ignoring whether said law applies to Israel and we're ignoring whether the other side bothers with such things. (Those laws also ban certain uses of civilians that Hamas does regularly.)

FWIW, I note that folks who rant about the "military-industrial" from Eisenhower's speech never seem to be concerned about the stronger warnings that he gave about "scientific-technological elite".

> WP doesn't come equipped with a non-incendiary mode.

That's like saying that metal doesn't come with a "non-hammer" mode. WP is a component. How it is packaged and what it is combined with significantly affect its effects on impact.
I don't know about it being ultimate study machine, but I predict the buddy of mine who just repackaged his language learning software for the iPhone is going to make a mint:

http://www.declan-software.com/blog/

Serious study of foreign languages skews towards college students and young professionals in the US, and the overlap between them and iPhone users is probably pretty substantial. Plus I think given the socio-political aspirational goals of many Mac users, I think it could be a good fit.

To phrase this a little more politely than Stuff White People Like did, there are a lot of people who think it is important that they are educated and cosmopolitan enough to learn a foreign language. They also tend to overlap quite a bit with Mac users.
"On filing of a plant or utility application on or after November 29, 2000, an applicant may request that the application not be published, but only if the invention has not been and will not be the subject of an application filed in a foreign country that requires publication 18 months after filing (or earlier claimed priority date) or under the Patent Cooperation Treaty. Publication occurs after the expiration of an 18-month period following the earliest effective filing date or priority date claimed by an application."

http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/doc/general/index.html#...
Test Subjects Who Call the Scientist Mom or Dad
The second idea is a cutthroat business. The competition will be fierce and they will be as agile as you are. Number 3 sounds reasonable, but have a way of reaching your customer before jumping in.

You absolutely cannot rely on friends. If your business depends on that, forget it.
Is there a big company that has solved or at least significantly reduced any or all of these problems?

They seem to come with the territory, which is one of the reasons why startups always have a chance.