skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's basically OK to keep older styles, but:

"(a) it works"

It does work, but when someone tries to reverse engineer
the code( say to write a spider ) its difficult to read.

"(b) it's fast"

Thats probably true for sections of the html, but nested tables are not the fast.

"(c) it runs on both new and old browsers"

But nested tables aren't required in older browsers, they work with divs. Besides, who uses a browser that is older than 2000?

"(e) in this context, seperation of content from formatting is overkill"

Why? It makes quick changes much easier. I was fiddling with HN on firebug and had a hard time finding where everything was. There were tons of in-line styles that kept overriding the basic styles from the CSS file.

It's always better to change things in the CSS file, because it makes changes easier later.

I'm not saying for people to never use tables. But I think they should be used for what they were originally made for: tabular data. Some people go overkill trying not to use tables and that's not a good idea. Tables work really well when they are used right.
The signs appear to be different manifestations of the same underlying personality [disorder].

I was able to hit 27/31, the only ones that didn't get checked would have been a "n/a" rather than a "no".
I have yet to see a language that actually cleans up after itself. Many will attempt to free memory, but what about files, db connections, windows, sockets?
There's a huge difference between sharing what people have explicitly interacted with (making a comment, clicking "like") and sharing what people have passively viewed with no explicit action on their part.
This document.domain behaviour is documented as part of the HTML spec:

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...
This is such muddled thinking there isn't much there there. You can't just drop a word like "ideological" into a debate as if there is one uniform definition. As near as I can tell, the only way to be ideologically pure for Mike Masnick would be for no money at all to be involved, but once you spell that out, it becomes obvious that this is hardly an uncontroversial definition on its own. It also means that "ideologically pure" is pretty much impossible by definition at any scale. I for one tend not to worry too much about the fact that someone has not reached a standard that was impossible to reach in the first place.

If I am wrong about what it would take to be ideologically pure according to Mike Masnick, well, chalk it up to the fact he never saw fit to spell it out.

I could pick further, but it's so mushy there's hardly any point.
HTML 5 Notifications in Mountain Lion
Have app.net people clarified if they would be okay if the service only had 10,000 users at its stabilization point?

I know you'd be okay with it but so far, we don't have much from them stating the same. The default of course is that a service that peeks at 10,000 users is headed to dead pool. This is a bit different with 10K paid users but that is still not much in terms of providing financial security to the company to not require funding or other creative ways to monetize.

So my question is simple to app.net folks: if two years from now your service has 10,000 paid subscribers AND you know that that is the peak, will you be content running the company?
"It wants money from those users, and all things being equal, those users want to keep their money. So their goals are actually diametrically opposed."

By this standard, aren't the goals of every party in a transaction where money changes hands "diametrically opposed?"
I stand corrected :). I was just reading up on STUN, it is a very interesting solution.
Why don't people who donated to app.net at least get an account to use the service? They paid $50 and they don't even get an account? In a way, by paying $50 or more, they are committing themselves to pay an unknown, perhaps greater amount to actually use app.net.

$50 is a lot of money. Why don't funders get an account?
Yes, that's the propaganda. I don't think reality has worked out that way. At least, I've never seen a site get overhauled via CSS alone on anything other than demo sites designed for that explicit purpose. Since CSS now lets you override anything and turn tables into lists and lists into tables, it hardly matters any more, and the entire concept of "semantic" is just a sick joke unless the word "context" shows up somewhere, which it never seems to in these conversations, and in particular, hasn't got much place here either.
The dangers of uniformity
Hahaha. Great point. Going to use that the next time someone brings up the Bill of Rights or the founding fathers.
This will never work for normal people.

For everyone else, there are programs like LastPass and 1Password that make this easy.
The point is that the mandatory substring is random and unique to you. The problem with using a password manager is that it implies that you're already savvy enough about the issue. Most people have no idea such thing exists. How could you enforce the usage of a password manager?
He is putting the data on the sheet for the photo file, not the photo itself.
And it's not forward compatible at all.

I know Python 2 or 3 is an ongoing debate, but there's no reason to be blatantly incompatible on a new project by using deprecated functionality like print statements instead of functions. Especially not on low hanging fruit like that.
I noticed it doesn't choke when you upload a binary to it, but sadly doesn't have `hexl-mode` to do anything useful with it.
Following the model from the article:

In the fee-based model, the needs of the following must be met: (1) the company, (2) the users.

In the ads-based model, the needs of the following must be met: (1) the company, (2) the advertisers, (3) the users.

By removing the advertisers from the equation, a lot of resources are freed up to address the needs of the other two parties. It's kind of strange to say that "the company" is a party being serviced in this manner... they're asking for cash, and people are giving it to them for a service. Yes, they have needs that require resources (think administrative assistants, HR, sales, etc), but these people all exist to help service the user. To that extent, the majority of the company is now existing to create a better experience for the user. Their argument is that this is significantly superior to the model where a significant portion of the company exists to service advertisers, and not benefit the end user.
When you think that Zagat - a world renowned service for restaurant ratings for over 30 years - was purchased for about 15% of what Instagram cost, I would say it's cheap.

I know new whiz-bang startups can generate a lot of cash (if they are lucky), but it always surprises me how low the valuation of old guard companies can be.
Great article! (The URL is http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-09-01-Iran-forged-the-w... in case anyone wonders.)

It surely gives food for thought.
The list is free? It better be, seeing how it mostly consists of nicks and cutesy taglines :P

"Silicon valley" is not "technology". It's great you like SV so much, but that doesn't make it whatever you want it to be. even if we restricted it to computers: when are Linus Torvalds or John Carmack expected to sign up? Huh.
Hacker Dojo's Katy Levinson interviewed
Introducing Spence.js: An easy way to store API data offline
Ads-based TV (networks) → fee-based TV (cable) → cord cutters

Ads-based twitter → fee-based app.net → social cord cutters
Even this is a naive understanding of how WebRTC will change the web. Resiliency and decentralization in ways we've never seen before!

For more information, check us out at http://WebP2P.org and join in #webp2p on Freenode!
Point 1 is complete hogwash. Users don't want to keep their money. Money is worthless if you don't spend it. Users want to get equivalent or better value for their money. If App.net wants the user's $50, the user wants to get at least $50 worth of value from App.net. So yes, their economic incentives are definitely aligned. If App.net wants to get more than $50 from their users in the future, then they damn well need to provide more than $50 worth of value to their users.

And Point 2 is pretty bad as well. Yes, you can't degrade the service so badly that users leave. But you can still degrade the service to a certain extent. Since the users aren't paying anything for it, they don't expect much more than $0 worth of value from the service. So you can end up with a pretty bad user experience in the name of satisfying your advertisers.
Awesome, can't wait to see integration into google maps / location based services.
Nothing is ever free. Either we are buying a product, or we are the product.

In the real world, things cost money for businesses to stay open and sustainable.

I'll say it again, in a free system, we are the product that's sold to advertisers.

If I had to pick one, I'd like to be able to pay for such an experience. It's preference and I look forward to seeing how it goes.
Programming started for me as "hey, check out what I can do with BASIC" and turned into "now defend your algorithm using the O(n) notation." There was never any time to play with the things I had learned, to fall in love with them. It became a chore. Something to put up with for a while until you became ... a paid programmer, wherein what you did had enormous consequences, and there was even less time for play.

Programming and its teaching has always felt like a culture of passionate people who refused students the passion of discovering and learning but rather decreed their own rules, learned from their own mistakes. It isn't a particular fault of programmers or educators - this is natural inclination of all of us to deny others the painful experience of learning from mistakes. But it's no fun.
It's no fun, damnit, and I want nothing to do with things that are no fun.

I would never have developed the mastery of vim that I have now had someone told me "hey, this is what you need to do. This is how you should do it. Here's a semester long course on how to effectively edit text." Everything I learned, I learned on my own, out of necessity. I now consider myself a proficient user of vim, but that would never have happened without the thousands of sequential js pressed before I discovered text objects out of a hunch that "dang it, this is slow and silly. there has to be a better way."

I want to fall in love with something, and write the stupidest possible code, and then learn why it was stupid, and be embarrassed by its stupidity 6 months down the road.

This is why Perl appealed to me. Because it allows for messy, playful, immediate gratification, tweaking fun. Perhaps I haven't the attention span to be a proper programmer.

I'd be embarrassed to admit this to most of my friends.
Good catch, I didn't notice that at all.
Ahahah so much hate, def rustled some jimmies.
Definitely will do that. Thanks for the tip.
Pentagon wants to hack into video game consoles
Any other designs you would like to use it for? :-)
>I suppose we could keep running t-tests where the null hypothesis changes from “Baskerville is the same as Comic Sans” to “Baskerville is 0.5 points better than Comic Sans” to “Baskerville is 1 point better than Comic Sans,” and get a range of probabilities. But a probability distribution like that seems more like a Bayesian outcome; I’ve never heard of such a thing in frequentist statistics.

That would essentially be a more detailed version of a confidence interval for the actual difference - and since the distribution of the "actual value" is almost certainly normal, it wouldn't really tell the reader anything more than a regular one.
5Degrees' serial recap of The Lean Startup (plus some cool infographics) 9/10
"Now, one fine day somecrappysite.com gets hacked. The next time you visit, the web page has malicious code that sends your password in plaintext to someone. There go your Paypal funds, your Facebook account, your online life."

What an optimist! somecrappysite.com was probably storing your password in plaintext to begin with and it probably got pulled from the database long before you logged in again.

Having said that, this is an absolutely terrible solution for real-world usage because it inhibits people who are already security savvy from using better solutions like Stanford pwdhash or similar methods.
Ask HN: Guidelines for organizing stats projects/analyses?
A lot of the programming that I've been exposed to has been scripting/analysis that does not necessarily need structure like, e.g. an app would. Starting with some raw data, I typically end up with a separate directory tree for each phase of preprocessing and quality control, then separate trees for each hypothesis or subset of data. It all ends up as one unholy mess of partially copied scripts, and redundant data. Could anyone recommend either a set of guidelines, or a project which showcases a sane way to layout a pipeline or analysis? Anything using R, python/numpy, or whatever language/framework you deem appropriate.

Organizing a project that can handle different data, store results and parameters of many different runs, etc, can make or break an analysis. I've searched around a bit online, but perhaps I'm not hitting the relevant terms.
As the site says, the $50 is pre-paying for an account.
The Team Slide: Investors don’t want to hear your life story
> If I forward you a link by email of something interesting but probably fake, do you get offended by me sending you something possibly fake?

Yes. You're wasting my time and making me question your ability to think critically.

I expect this sort of thing from my Grandmother. All others are held accountable.
Hold on. How do we know this article is even true?!
Yeah I meant natives from English speaking countries and not in 'last of the Mohicans' sense. Sorry, but that answer is not editable any more.
Kyle from iFixit here. I just wanted to say that we just present our perspective. The way we see things has evolved from taking apart thousands of gizmos and learning from people all around the world what goes wrong with hardware. We're constantly inspired my creative repairs.

Our goal is to help people get things fixed, and encourage designs that are long lasting.

You're certainly welcome to disagree with us. I don't think we're any more opinionated than Apple's designs are. We have a different perspective, and we share it. We back up our opinion with relevant products. People only buy them if they find them useful.

The Liberation kit was a fun way for everyone to get involved in the process. We also sell standalone Pentalobe drivers—so if you want to keep your original screws, you can do that too. Having Phillips screws on your phone is actually quite convenient—most eyeglass kits have the small Phillips drivers, so if you're in much better shape if you ever need to open your phone up to dry it out while you're on a trip. The liberation kit is effectively the same thing Apple techs use when you take it in for service and they swap out your screws for Pentalobe ones.

iFixit isn't about marketing gimmicks. We didn't build the world's largest repair manual and open source it just to sell tools. We're trying to change the world.

Repair is win-win-win. You save some money by making something work again, the manufacturer wins because their product is useful longer, and the environment wins because it didn't end up in a landfill.

I'm convinced that what the world needs now—more than ever—is a free, open source repair manual for every thing. That's what we're building, and it gets better every day.
I remember this demo from march, got me all excited :)

live streaming video to a webpage, from your phone, that's incredible

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3531958/iphone/webrtc-opera-mobile-1...
Agreed. I don't doubt that being ruthless about A/B testing pricing increases revenue, but I'm not wild about the implied attitude that customers only exist so that we can extract as much money as possible from them. The user experience should definitely be a factor as well.

I don't think it's possible to support this claim with data, but I'm convinced that being ruthless and unfriendly with pricing can have a negative impact on the business in the long term. As a customer, I much prefer usage based pricing to arbitrary plans.
yup - many people would love to shoot movies, on their phones and cam-corders like on weekends and on holidays

giving presets like you just mentioned make it even easier
I can't see how to submit stories or post comments with that API
DJ G-Mark, Summer 2012 Campaign by Diego Rios
Agreed. What I see most people using Twitter for is effectively advertising anyway, so let those people pay to keep the service running since they're clearly getting marketing value from it.
Open platforms are nice, but open standards are nicer. So yeah, open platforms win, for a while. But they're still more part of the problem than of the solution.
Loving the Nexus 7, I just wish the Android app/game quality would catch up to Apple.
Am I reading it incorrectly? It says, "You'll be committing to prepaying for a full year of 'member-level' service."

That doesn't sound like, "You get a year of service."
Right, but those people are the one percent. How do we help the vast majority?
Adding Scheduling to Twilio with IronWorker
(iFixit here.) We told every reporter we talked to that it was a fake. But we didn't get very many calls.
Wattvision: The Smart Energy Sensor
Twitter's functionality is basically email+listserv. I've often wondered why the big email players (Google in particular) didn't field a competing service simply built on top of email. You could still use your email account as usual, but using a special client you could use the same account as a Twitter clone.
Groupon misses sales estimates, drops 15% in aftermarket, stock reaches new lows
This would mean that there are two "passwords" that I have to remember - the userid and the actual password. Chances are, your site isn't worth it to remember a new uid. (I counted that only 5 out of my 150 stored account passwords are for something worth remembering anything at all.)
If you are important (say, paypal or gmail) - do two factor authentification. If you are not - don't bother me. Even creating an account is already more effort than most sites are worth.
I agree with removing tables for layout, but I think it's OK to use them for the posts.

Maybe an unordered list would work even better.

The point is, tables are good for what they are made for: tabular data.

We don't have to cheat anymore, CSS and HTML have had moved forward a lot.

Changing HN wouldn't be too much work and would help keep it with the times.
Just please either don't put them right next to each other or make the vote reversible. I've often accidentally hit the wrong arrow.
Hardly a nitpick. What are those things next to all the links on the bottom. I get them iceweasel 14 too...
Skeuomorphic Design In Action
swrve.com

A/B testing for mobile and social apps
> if two years from now your service has 10,000 paid subscribers AND you know that that is the peak, will you be content running the company?

This is entirely dependent on opportunity cost--ie, whats their take-home pay, and whats the real commitment?
I don't get why people cannot get their head around the differences between a RuntimeException and a generic Exception (which btw. are not the only types that can get thrown). What's so hard?

If my contract gives you exceptional cases that you are forced to deal with, I don't want to punish you. I throw those to help you (like an SQLException of my JDBC driver which does not affect any further operations). Of course, those "checked" exceptions must have a purpose within the contract (JDBC-Statements can fail and I tell you why). Otherwise, I use them in a wrong way (like a lot of us do) and should have thrown a RuntimeException instead (the database you're connecting me to is invalid). So a RuntimeException (unchecked exception) is just a case where I cannot serve the contract anymore because of something I failed to deal with and cannot recover from by myself.

The mistake is not the differentiation between checked and unchecked exceptions. The real mistake is the lack of documentation (2 lines at RuntimeException's head) that clearly states the purpose of those types, including examples. A lot of programs and APIs would have got this right. People need to think more about the language and the intends of words used in it. There is not much different to normal spoken language.
who would need to use QuantLib in Excel?
Taking Steve Yegge's Talk to Heart: Learning Bioinformatics
Steve Yegge gave a great talk about why we should tackle real world problems instead of building social networks. This is the first step on that path.
I wonder how this will affect Microsoft's Win 8 travel app, which seems to be using exclusively Frommer's content.
Open Letter To Recruiters: Do your job
Focus on what matters to users most, or they'll do it for you.
The problem I have with HN style by default is:

1) It is hard to tell what has changed recently (new comments, votes, changes in ranking)

2) The information is kind of crammed together and not lined up.

3) I hit refresh every few minutes

Am not a a designer, so had my son who has an eye for it help out on styling: http://hn4d.com/
"You’ve either built something worth paying money for, or you haven’t."

That should follow "Build something people want."

Brilliant!
Its assumed that thats what it means. I think a lot of people would be asking for a refund if we were wrong though.
> The point is that the mandatory substring is random and unique to you.

Ah, that's a little better. I still think the security gained is not enough to justify how much of a usability problem this could be, though. Assuming the per-user fixed substring is a secret, you're basically assigning the user's password (though giving them an option to strengthen it with their own 'root' password). If it's not secret then not much security is gained.

> How could you enforce the usage of a password manager?

I don't know of a good way. Although if every site starting assigning (part of) the password, as above, I suppose that would do it.
I think it could do with a little more spacing. Whitespace is an important part to easy skimming. Maybe 5px?
32. You are always reading the internet instead of working.
Apple Retail Stores Seeing Significant Layoffs of Recent Hires
"Through an open standards approach, WebRTC integrates browser-to-browser communications directly into the fabric of the Internet."

Why is this source credible?
What you are describing is the "free" services, not "freemium" services.

Freemium means trialing a product based on usage as opposed to trialing it based on time. Once your usage goes over a threshold you are an active user and you start paying for the service.

That's our model on JotForm and it works well for us.

One of the best examples of this model is evernote. I remember they were saying something like if the users stays active on their product for n months, they will almost certainly become a premium user.
I'm not sure why you're being down-voted, your response was on topic and adds to the discussion. Methinks some folks might need to brush up on their HN etiquette.

Anyway, my argument on its own probably isn't sufficient to justify running out and buying a $2000 robot + iPad, etc. but it is surely _part_ of bigger argument for these things.

Also, in response to your later comment about how well-recieved these units will be, I think they will be ubiquitous in a few years. I think you'll see them used in all of the areas discussed so far plus many more we haven't even though of. I could see an army of these things in stores, checking with customers, providing information at airports. The uses are nigh-endless.

Remember, just a few years ago the idea of having a _phone_ that went with you was crazy talk. Now it would be weird to _not_ have one.
This post compares that strategy with giving customers discounts (and the former wins): http://blog.asmartbear.com/discount-gambit.html