skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right. Although. I find the central terminal box soothing, because I tend to use green on black myself - but the white on green isn't so good and the default white of the page blares out at me when I'm trying to read the snippets.

I think possibly the answer is you've got two colour schemes there and want to split them - provide a "normal" black on white or grey on white or whatever for the people that prefer that, and one that's pure green on black (or purple/amber on black, probably pretty easy to supply all three once you've done one :) and a cookie to switch between 'em.

Of course, I'm not a designer at all but I'd happily accept a cookie to have everything in soothing black with green text - and it sounds like others probably would to make things more "normal" looking. I'm expressing no opinion whatsoever about which should be the default though ...
Sweet, sweet irony. It's not every day that you see a post titled "You're Doing It Wrong" that's, well, doing it wrong.

I've worked on plenty of sites of varying complexity. If your templates have anything more than trivial logic in them, You're Doing It Wrong!

Adding complex programming constructs back into the templating language is NOT the way forward. It's the way BACKWARDS. It's where we came from. Templating languages are intentionally simple because you're NOT supposed to have lots of complex logic in your template. Sure, you might have a little bit of if/then/else and a bit of looping, but beyond that, if you need anything more than that, you're doing it Very Wrong.

As for ending up with huge templates - again, Jeff is Doing It Wrong. To avoid having monster spaghetti templates, you're supposed to break down your templates into their elements, much like you break down your large pieces of functionality into classes and methods.
Kiva.org launches open-source API platform
I'd like to have a setting on the users page to ignore all non-link submissions. I enjoy more of the news / discussion aspect of news.yc than the emerging message board aspect.
When (or should I say if) JustinTV grows much bigger and hires a lot more programmers this whole unit tests are not useful thing will come back to bite them.

But I can see how right now it seems their time is better spent on other things.
I was just on GoDaddy this morning trying to change some DNS settings for one of my domains. I made the changes and clicked 'submit' only to find they pushed an up-sell ad in there and made me click another 'submit' button to make the changes. On a freakin' settings page!

What'd you end up switching to?
Startup Climate
I think that it would lead to HN becoming quite insular and elitist.
More pragmatically, I think discussion would suffer if we judged new entrants solely by whether or not 'good' contributors vetted them. This might inadvertently weed out people with differing viewpoints.
sneak attack auto-renew? what's that?
Sorry, incase it was not obvious meant the final buttons in the article not the ones they actually use in production (which he says you have to reverse engineer yourself) as per his comment http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/02/04/recreating-the-butt...
Happily, it appears that with my setup (vista on high contrast black theme and FF3) everybody's just blue. Not that I think I'd actually care if they were different colours; I suspect quite a few of us on here have the personality trait / social dysfunction / whatever of not giving a flying fsck about externally determined rank, and being much more interested in whether a person has earned -our- respect directly.
That's rather a sensationalist way of putting it. Different people watch football for different reasons. Yes, psychologically sports exist as a way of channelling male aggression (which is a fascinating subject besides) but people don't watch it as an alternative to watching war. There's an element to entertainment like the Superbowl that nothing else has.

Also, it's an old adage that America's fine with violence but hates breasts and naughty language. See South Park/every anti-censorship comedy ever made in America.

Also also, it;s fair enough to say you don't want to deal with a domain host because they think the best way to advertise services is to wave tits in your face. I'm regretting that I use it to register domains, because frankly I'd like to hold companies to a slightly higher level of self-respect.
Agreed, I'm surprised they decided to use a non-standard attribute. But it is a simple and elegant technique if you want to save the server from doing extra work it doesn't need to.
Sugar Beyond the XO Laptop: Walter Bender on OLPC, Sucrose 0.84, and 'Sugar on a Stick'
They can take their money wherever they want. That's not what they are doing, though. Rather, they would have GoDaddy adhere to their moral standards.
if you are open to explore, whats stopping you from learning all those things on your own? If you want to learn, you can get some books from the library or hit the net and learn it on your own. You don't need to get into debt up to your eyeballs to achieve that.

You are taking only 12 college credits..do you really think you can't spend 12 hours a week to learn that stuff on your own?

If you are learning on your own, you could have "taken" all your major classes in 1 year. Gotten a job. And then while working, could learn all that "extra" in your spare time, while being debt free.
I'd pay $5/yr for HN.
That's funny, cause I practice something I'll start calling "cost-free unit testing".

Step 1: If you're thinking about how a code api should act, sketch it out inside a test.

Step 2: If you're about to jump into a repl and poke at your code, open a unit test instead.

Now you've simply replaced other activites at no net cost to you. My core takeaway is that everyone tests their code somehow. You're best off if you can automate that process. Don't obsess over it (I almost never test my html/views), but try to find opportunity.
Why were you watching tv/sports on sunday anyway? Has the 8th commandment been changed?
it's not so much the grey as it's ON GREY BACKGROUND as well

looks like the same color as the link text so maybe it was just something that fell through and never got addressed
One month living with OpenSolaris
Exactly. The post does not include a single year-over-year comparison. Because of seasonal variations, year-over-year is the only valid revenue comparison in most industries. Do the writers at TC not remember that little consumer tradition of holiday gift giving?

Either they chose to ignore YOY so they could use contrarian (optimistic) headlines to get attention or they are utterly clueless. In the first case, that's blatantly unethical reporting.
This is absolutely true for me as well - since working from home in Nov, I've noticed the quality of my work has gone up even more than the quantity because I can concentrate on just the output rather than being self-conscious about looking like I'm working during the runup to the output.

As a designer, for example, I've hit stumbling blocks with certain layouts and now that I think about how I've often solved the problem, I'd probably get tossed to the curb as a weirdo from even the trendiest of open plan offices - I'll list all the UI elements on a sheet of paper, then go lie on the couch for an hour or so and mull them over in my head to let it marinate, maybe go to the corner coffeeshop to read the paper to get my mind off of the gig but with index cards and sharpies by my side in case an idea occurs. I can't isolate when or why, but sometimes that's way more productive than just staring at an empty screen or trolling through CSS gallery sites.
i was about to post a snarky comment about how it doesn't work with ruby, but the last line of the post points to a ruby-specific version of the plugin that is needed.
Light gray text is a DTD (designer-transmitted disease) that's rapidly infecting sites across the Internet.

(When it's really light, I use Firebug to modify the CSS.)
I have to say, I don't like it either. I don't like the limiting of downvotes too. So someone can get say, +100 votes on a comment but, if they say something incredibly stupid, or harmful/bigoted/whathaveyou, it'll take a systematic effort over multiple comments to hit their karma.

Making it virtually impossible to 'punish' idiots.
I would pay and I think it might be a good idea.
"That's not what they are doing, though."

Yes, that is precisely what they are doing.
I'm much more likely to read and upvote longer comments, especially when there's lots of comments in a thread, because my eye catches on them and I generally think that if someone wrote a long comment they must have put in some effort.

So if enough people are like me, it won't be the one-liners that benefit.
You mean http://dotfiles.org

(dotfiles.com hasn't been updated since 2006!)
I'm taking 16 credits, actually.

Off the top of my head: college gives me people to discuss with, parties to go to, a place to live on my own, a DC++ hub for me to access pretty much anything I want to, and a bunch of professors that I can talk to directly and discuss things with. Plus, it's public school, so if I go the four years I leave with no debt.

I'm not going to college just for classes. Partly I'm here for the social environment. I'm also applying to YC, which I'm hoping means I'll get to spend a year or two doing meaningful stuff, then return to college much wiser and certain of what I want to do.

The funny thing is, when it comes to my major I'm nearly all covered. I've been writing for 6 years, designing for 4, I've used Photoshop and Premiere extensively, and I've worked in teams before. So in classes, I spend most of my time talking directly to the professor about things, I get my work out of the way, and the things I do expect to learn won't strictly be my major. (I'm shoddy at designing with images, for instance.)
I don't believe this is the forum for that discussion, but the Jewish Sabbath was never on Sunday. Sabbath means 7 (and rest), and Sunday has never been the 7th day of the week.
It is extremely difficult to get an undergrad education without going into some debt even if you go to a public instituion. I went to a very cheap state school in a low cost of living area and even with a full scholarship I barely escaped without any debt from simply paying for room and board. I held a part-time job but at $7.50/hr it didn't go that far.
sigh. really sorry. i really need to write a greasemonkey script that integrates searchyc into submission posting. i fill out the info and then five minute later check back for if it found anything. otherwise i lose patience while searching, especially since it's not always clear what search terms to use.

thanks for the link!!
DSLs - Are people losing their faith?
Is the DSL hype beginning to fade?
I find ads for E.D. treatments much more uncomfortable than GoDaddy's.

You are certainly not the only one. Sports fan friends with kids mentioned E.D. ads on sports games over the holidays. They like to watch games as a family, but the ads make them think twice. I can't say I blame them.

I see this as part of a larger problem that the only way we currently have to control the ads we see is to just turn off or change the channel.
If you use firefox, you might want to look into STYLISH or GREASEMONKEY.

Both provide ways to change the look of any website.
Summer Doctoral Programme Application @ Oxford Internet Institute
This article needs to explicitly state:

1) education is valuable

2) education has become too expensive (implicitly stated)

3) the "hoax" is that of how our credit/debt system works, not about the collegiate system

Already people on this thread are jumping the gun and stating that college sucks and you don't need it. But this is a subjective view and should be taken as such. The only fact that I can get from this article is that college is becoming a financial burden - not that the education obtained is worthless.

There needs to be a way to make education accessible to all. Instead, the cost of getting an education is becoming yet another factor in further dividing the wealthy from the debt-laden.
The default setting on their domain registrations is to auto-renew them at the end of each year. Both good and bad parts but it certainly doesnt hurt their bottom line
Then limit the size of the textarea or something like that. It's bad usage, and saying that "it's a feature, not a bug" doesn't help.
By the way, for those that want to learn more, the CTO of Fusion-IO will be discussing the nitty-gritty in Santa Clara on the 17th:

http://www.californiaconsultants.org/Events.cfm/item/109/ran...
Excellent. Thanks very much. I've made them black and will now set about fixing some of the other poor colour decisions, e.g. the body of the top post of a thread being an unreadable gray which puts me off reading it through no fault of the author.
name.com 9 bucks and free private registration combined with a simple interface wins for me
This was textbook destruction of a poorly argued line of reasoning. Hope to see a lot more of you around here, the BS needs to be called out on the regular.
The thing with starting a startup is that VCs look for trust. It doesn't matter if they like your idea or not, if they don't trust you, you aren't going to get your hands on their pot of money. Perhaps YC just felt that you couldn't pull it off that well, and then when the next team came along with apparently the same model, they felt the opposite this time around.

You could also be dealing with a case of having an idea that's too early for its time. Look at how much of a hard time Google had getting angel investors. If you feel that you have a solid idea, do it anyways. If it's as solid as you think it is, and you pull it off well enough, they'll come knocking on your door later on down the line.

Creating a startup is all about taking risks, and if you aren't willing to take a risk then don't travel down that path.
That's why I stopped for a while. Then I discovered BDD style testing (or context/specification, or...).

Whatever it's called, it's not quite as fine grained as a unit test and it's not as large in scope as integration testing. It's at the level of your business specs. So the only time you'll break your tests is if you've jacked up a spec.

Honestly, if my changes cause new behavior in the system but the people paying me won't care, then I don't care either.
Er; Updated. Thanks.
I liked this post, and I think it speaks to a major problem in areas of software development that involve a lot of logic but are considered "not programming." A lot of effort is put into technologies that allow "non-programmers" to work with these tiers of app development, and I think they generally backfire.

The most common one is tag libraries in place of scripting. The Java world is probably the biggest offender here. The JSTL started out as a way to create cleaner looking pages - and maybe it has - but the spec got to the point where they were recreating the entire Java language as a separate set of tags. Supposedly, these tags are easier for "non-programmers" to use, but by the time you're setting properties for objects and using conditionals and loops, you may as well admit you're a programmer.

I'm no big fan of long jsp pages, but I prefer Rails's approach to scripting: if a task requires programming logic, use a programming language.

Ultimately, I found the "you're doing it wrong if you include scripting in a view" to be very unconvincing, especially if the tags you replace it with end up recreating the programming language you're not supposed to be using in the first place.
I'm not the OP, but I switched to namecheap and never looked back. They usually have a coupon for discounted transfers, if you decide to go for them. (Try RetailMeNot or just google "namecheap coupon february 2009")
I second that. The designers I work with have this fetish for low contrast designs that may be super mod and hip, but seem to lower usability to me.

In general I agree that black on white might be a little harsh, but when you have squint to make out the text it's over the top.
actually, i read the code first. i have a computer science bachelors and masters from mit, which means i have wonderful memories from writing in scheme and list. reading the code is a joy for me.

after working on numerous projects with a wide variety of skills, many not being programming, i have to say that english is often a better answer than code. not everyone reads code. it annoys me that people want my status report rather than reading my repo commit messages and diffs, but at this i can empathize with their perspective. if you really get into alternate education, which i think is a wonderful way to understand multiple perspectives and find respect for a wide range of abilities, you'll find that communication is more about being flexible on the means.

that said, i did just post about using puzzles to get comment scrip (-;
why not let people pick their own color schemes? Like we do with the top bar.
Isn't this type of site an ideal usage for a SlinkSet or a Sub-Reddit?

Regardless, I like it... and it looks like you have a hit! I'd suggest a "flag as dangerous" link... and I think "example output" should be required upon submission.

Great work!
Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, Jonathan Ive, Eddy Cue. Four people who are each reputed to be just as strict and important to Apple culture as Jobs. Cook in particular is said to be far more intense than Jobs when it comes to operating and getting things produced.
Oh, it's hard, no doubt. I wasn't so smart back then and went to a private school and took out huge loans because my parents told me that was how it was done. (It's all paid for now, though.) My wife was smarter. She went 5 years at a state school with zero debt by working crap fast food jobs, lab assistant, food service, etc. She'd never even owned a car. She had grants and stuff to help her out. By her last year we were married, so my income made it possible to pay cash for the final stretch which a lot of her grants wouldn't cover. So yeah - I'm not saying it's easy - but it can be done.
I've found that much of my karma has come from commenting on stories on the New page. Yeah, many don't make it to the front page - but the ones that do haven't been seen by many people, and so when they do, everyone reads your comment and hopefully upvotes it.

It's much like startups. Many of them fail, but the ones that succeed tend to succeed big.
yes, I would pay $5/yr
Bookmarklet:

javascript:var%20l=document.getElementsByTagName("TD");for(var%20i=0;i<l.length;i++)%20l[i].style.color='#000'
Scala also has in-line XML literals.

Pretty much every Lisp has a way to express markup directly as S-expressions.
See, I'm really anti-censorship, and pro-consumer activism, which is why I keep coming back to this thread. Usually I don't care about terms being wrong, but censorship's an important topic, so it's worth being pedantic about the semantics.

Let's pretend this isn't about commercials and boobies, but about companies employing sweat shop workers, companies serving meat from animals that were fed growth hormones, a company treating its employees poorly, etc.

If I'm morally opposed to cows being fed growth hormones and tell some friends and write in my blog that I'm not going to buy hamburgers from McWendy's or whatever, is that censorship in your book? Is me holding the companies I patronize to some set of moral standards wrong?

Now, if this were a controversial news story, and back-room pressure from an influential advertiser, I might be more opposed to the exertion of economic pressure. But it's not. It's a commercial trying to get you to buy domains with low-brow boobie jokes. And for some customers, rather than making them want to purchase the product, it made them want to avoid the product, and they're now voicing that. There's nothing scandalous going down here.
How to control a herd of humans
Is watching sports labor of some sort?

The sabbath (whatever day you observe it) is for resting from work. Sometimes I rest by watching sports, sometimes I sit in my hammock, sometimes I go snowboarding. And, yes, if one of my servers crashed on the sabbath, I will work on it.

This explains it better than I can: http://tinyurl.com/cjqf2q
I would do the exact same thing. His "Last Lecture" was so touching and made me rethink life a little
Question - is there anything other than PayFlow Pro that allows checkout to happen on my site? FPS, Google Checkout, PayPal proper all have checkout on their sites as far as I can tell.
Thanks; do we do enough to tell people what principles and values we support?
Docs expands to complete offline access
Docs has expanded its features, resolving some of the problems people have had with it. Namely complete offline access, I've already been using it.

The rest of their improvements are here: http://www.google.com/google-d-s/whatsnew.html
> a bachelor's degree in history

Strike one.

> took out $60,000 in student loans

Strike two.

College isn't a bad idea. Majoring in subjects that lead to careers with more job seekers than jobs and taking out student loans is are bad ideas.
Some people, like me, prefer single-page over multi-page.
> If something is an OTC generic with an expired patent, its a little hard to get the genie out of the bottle.

Umm, that's an argument against regulation. Regulation is imposing a cost that can't be recovered.

Note that the initial testing established "safe" (for some definition of "safe"), so any regulation-required testing is mostly for efficacy.
If lost billable time is spent on Hacker News, then how is paying $5/yr for a subscription going to change anything? Your clients will, apparently, still be losing money.
Sure, but it's just as easy for the server to output a javascript structure with the data in really. eg

<script>
var data = {time1: "Nov 5, 1955", time2: "Jan 1, 1970"};

function init() {
// Update the spans with the "ago"s
}
</script>

<span id=time1></span>

Using the DOM to store program data just doesn't seem nice to me.
Sorry, I don't get your point. Do you mind elaborating?
Ask HN: If you got this assignment back, what would you do?
Hey HN, I just got back this homework assignment:
http://bayimg.com/image/danjkaabg.jpg

It would have been a 150%, but the grander marked me down to a 70% because I typed it instead of writing it by hand. I showed all my work. A friend of mine literally wrote down everything I did in pen and got full credit. I'm a computer science major, and my handwriting is illegible.

Do I:

* Talk to the prof, who marks me as a troublemaker for the next ~7 months I'll be in his class?

* Print out all my homework in a font of my handwriting (almost legible, few points knocked off for neatness, somewhat "dishonest")

* Actually write everything out (quality varies greatly, points knocked off for neatness)

* Appeal to some higher power

As a reference point, I have about a 95% average in the non-homework grades in this class. This type of homework is worth about 15% of the final grade, which would push me down a letter grade.
The Complicated Case of magicJack
The idea is great, and I actually don't mind the terminal look. I could see where some people might be annoyed by it though, so making it optional would probably be a good idea. What I do not like is the min/max/close icons in the top right of the terminal window that have no functionality.

Another little thing is search. Before I submitted my command which was

svn st | grep "^\?" | awk "{print \$2}" | xargs svn add $1

I searched for it and came up with no results. After browsing the popular page though I found

svn status |grep '\?' |awk '{print $2}'| xargs svn add

Also I noticed that commands that have no whitespace after the | are not being picked up and added to the tags. For example, that last command only xargs would be listed but not grep and awk.

Here are links to the examples:

http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/153/add-all-unver...

http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/36/add-all-files-...