skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> and then you wanted col 2 to be on the left of col 1, you'd write the css differently then you would the forward method.

At the cost of a lot of flexibility. Most people, when faced with a change in design like this, simply reorder their HTML. So perhaps "demand" was hyperbole, but CSS does still push developers to rewrite their HTML when design changes happen.

> Well look at it this way <html><body><div container><stuff><div container></body></html>

The container is providing a hook for layout information that the body tag cannot. For instance, if I wanted the body background color to be blue and the container's background to be white. Also, if you want your content to be restricted in width, it's a lot easier to wrap it with a div than deal with the lack of the > operator in IE 6.

> CSS Zen Garden reads perfectly and logically without css.

I didn't say that it's hard to read. I said that by the standards community's definition it is not good HTML, because it mixes content and presentation.

Just to be clear, I think that "bad HTML" is pretty much the only practical way to go right now. So, I don't have a problem with the way CSS Zen Garden uses wrappers, nor do I have a problem with the wrappers in this blog post. But you are criticizing one and making excuses for the other.
Maybe HN needs an API to help detect sarcasm . . .
Wow, ever the master of the non-sequitur. Even when he's being serious.
You should read my reply to the other guy for a fuller treatment, but here's what I said about this to him, 'perhaps "demand" was hyperbole, but CSS does still push developers to rewrite their HTML when design changes happen.' The cost in flexibility to do it any other way is simply too high. This is sufficiently close to demanding to justify the hyperbole, in my mind.

edit: Furthermore, you speak as if the author is criticizing floats, but he is not. He is criticizing the attitude that tables are to be avoided for layout at all costs, when there simply is not a simple, implemented, cross browser way to replace them. Floats are simple the closest thing we can practically use, so he uses them for comparison.
too late :(
I half-expected this to go to something unrelated to the headline, then I remembered that this isn't Digg or Reddit and I relaxed and clicked the link to a nice, informative article.
only if it's your neighbors...
The jury is not still out on whether tables are suboptimal. They're easier, that's their only advantage.

The rule of getting something working quickly should not increase the cost of doing it right in the future.
Making CSS a lot more useful for many layouts
A lot of the CSS layouts you see around the Web are gross hacks, break on edge cases, and are indeed difficult to get right.

This is what's needed to fix it.
Quote: "Abraham Lincoln is the only president to hold a patent for an invention. He invented a tool to lift riverboats stuck on sandbars." No one ever manufactured it, however.
A lot of the CSS layouts you see around the Web are gross hacks, break on edge cases, and are indeed difficult to get right.

This is what's needed to fix it.
I don't understand why people keep trumpeting this like it's a big revelation.

Because the dependency on entry order makes the div's class semantically meaningless. Yes, the order in tables makes a difference, but in a table, that makes sense. With CSS, however, if I add a div with a class name like "center_column", then I expect to be able to put it anywhere in its enclosing context, and it should render in the center of that context.

CSS as an abstraction leaks, and it leaks blood. It seems that CSS-supporting designers (on this thread and elsewhere) accept this far more readily than hackers. A table is a table is a table: you expect its order to matter, so no one blinks when this turns out to be the case. CSS looks superficially like it provides a higher level of abstraction, but it (1) does not, and (2) requires considerably more effort to get right.
and http://etherpad.com/ljwzgV6xks
An HN submission that tries to be more even handed:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=464342

http://www.newmediacampaigns.com/page/why-css-should-be-used...
You're not building applications? I hope you are referring to your specific case - Those of us who are dealing with a significant JS layer need to use every feature CSS and HTML5 have to offer us.
Thanks for the tip. I was completely unaware of that when I wrote my original post.

That's why I posted a long political diatribe, rather than a short snarky emulation of people who use a post like this as an excuse to launch into long irrelevant political diatribes.
I like HN and the GOP. It’s good to see that there is some civility here to keep me from leaving.
hehe ... $10 laptop .. tat's funny to say the least .. knowing India, I am almost sure that this is only an election gimmick to boost voting and the govt is basically subsidizing the prices.. nothing more , nothing less !
I can't believe it's Javascript !!!

Seriuosly - Excelent job!
No ads yet; the purpose of this exercise was to find out what to focus the copy on the site. Ads will follow... maybe...
You can keep tabs on what half the government claims they are doing. Without another, independent source, preferably also with an API, verification will be hard to do.
Hopefully we'll all get this CSS vs. Table debate stuff out of our systems today and tomorrow we can all move on with our lives.
How to Manage People in 15 Minutes a Day
As sleezy as it seems to craft your site in a way to increase its pagerank, that's the system we've got and to ignore it is to miss out on a major traffic source.

We had a phrase in college... "Shut up and color" :)
Ow! My eyes!

Seriously, hire a designer to smooth out your site, it's well worth it.
True, it hasn't changed my mind away from being pro-CSS. It has however, made me realize how much of a learning curve CSS must be for many programmers compared to tables, much more than I thought, so I'm less likely to debate the finer points with coders that use tables and just stick to enjoying the benefits of stylesheets for myself.
there's subethaedit as others mentioned, and there's also gobby:

http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/
I like the idea, but I don't think you need the big explanation box at the top. You built a very intuitive site.

The only thing that needs an explanation is how to post. So I suggest having a button that says "post" and when it's pressed, show the different methods.
Just now, yes. For volume:

available URLs - 320
available website - 2600
available websites - 1000
available website names - 1000

So, not bad (a lot better than unregistered), but not as good as the ones that contain the word "domain" too.
KTM to Mass-Produce Zero Emission Electric Motorcycle in 2010
Better with the original headline: Microsoft's Other Strategy: Raise Google's Costs

Not much substance to this article, just one small snippet of information about how MS inflicted damage to themselves in order to hurt Google.
The amount of time it takes, and how suboptimal the result is depends on the design. There is no reason you can't create a decent design in a few hours using either.
+1

I have never cycled in London, but I'd imagine it is similar to the US. There is no need to be excessively afraid of cabs and busses -- if those people hit you, their life is ruined. (Don't take this as an invitation to drive stupidly, though. Stay predictable.)

It's the dumbasses from the suburbs that I find to be the problem. They have never seen anyone riding a bike before, so they don't know how to act properly. If I had a nickel for every time I was almost hit from behind by someone with non-Chicago stickers... (Hint to these people: if there are 3 lanes, you don't have to drive so close to the right side that you clip the mirrors off parked cars.)
Nah, not overlooked.

Domain Pigeon lists domain names, but it doesn't let you register them for free, which is what I think "free domain" refers to. That's why I didn't consider them much.

Also, I'm afraid of the competition for those terms... "Available domain names" seems like a better fight.
Yes, good points -- thank you.
Agreed. If you are exercising, it is hard to stay cool even when it is -10 outside. (Layers are your friend. Cotton is your enemy.)
This reminds me of Jack Welch's dictum to make every interaction with an employee an opportunity for evaluation. In quiet, implicit ways, a manager should always be evaluating his or her people, he says. The flip side suggested by this piece is that every interaction could be an opportunity for feedback and coaching also.
Bloomberg uses biometric authentication in their terminals, which makes it fairly difficult to easily share credentials. However, they control the hardware in that case, which is not possible for most places.
Is MIT Obsolete?
Ask HN: I need feedback for my feedback site
www.FeedbackJar.com

Just need some feedback before we launch. Thanks HN!

Think of us as Getsatisfaction/UserVoice for small businesses.

For Customers:

Post a Question, Suggestion, Praise, Discussion, or Issue

Discuss with business employees and customers

Share ideas on improving products and services

For Small Businesses:

Receive, respond, and manage feedback

Increase customer satisfaction and business

Build and retain loyal customer relationships

Also, let me know if you have any launch ideas?
This argument is why the entire css/html/javascript client paradigm is broken.

Someone fix it, please.
>At the cost of a lot of flexibility. Most people, when faced with a change in design like this, simply reorder their HTML. So perhaps "demand" was hyperbole, but CSS does still push developers to rewrite their HTML when design changes happen.

I don't doubt that cost/time is a factor. As programmers, we would all love to do without the additional overhead of coding practices, and for an unlimited number of reasons.

I realize that css isn't the best language in the world. But if it was intuitive to write css forwards and backwards regardless of document flow -- this wouldn't be a discussion topic. The question is the amount of time invested to learn it.

>The container is providing a hook for layout information that the body tag cannot. For instance, if I wanted the body background color to be blue and the container's background to be white. Also, if you want your content to be restricted in width, it's a lot easier to wrap it with a div than deal with the lack of the > operator in IE 6.

This is true. I was looking purely from layout perspective, but yea, body bleeds background-color and image everywhere regardless of limiting the width.

>Just to be clear, I think that "bad HTML" is pretty much the only practical way to go right now. So, I don't have a problem with the way CSS Zen Garden uses wrappers, nor do I have a problem with the wrappers in this blog post. But you are criticizing one and making excuses for the other.

Practical -- yes I don't disagree. With the way browsers interpret things differently, it's just about the only way you can get compatibility across the board.

Though you are right that I criticizing one and making excuses for the other: at least one follows a clear stated goal -- html describes the content, css draws the presentation. Provided items are added to make do with incompatibility issues, but at least at the core we can see that HTML is purely being used to describe the content. Allowing _enough_ separation required for programmers to be nearly clueless of a designer's job.

The other has no such goal; creating a massive grey area between the programmers and the designers.
I did not say it was uncommon, I said his choice was misleading. It's a trick: it allows him to demonstrate a problem with one kind of layout using floats (which by definition do not behave like tables) but then claim it is generally applicable to all layouts and CSS in general. It is not.

I stand by my statement that his title is a "trollish overstatement". It was chosen for the sake of continuing argument, not reflecting the content, educating, or informing.
Sounds like good advice to me. Life's too short....

One minor bit that got me wondering though. He talks about a "bullet proof contract", anyone else here doing freelancing use a contract? I've not ever used one and wouldn't really feel right doing so. Also I wonder how possible it is to get one that really is bullet proof... Anyone with experiences to share?
Scientific evidence that our economy troubles of today stem from people's fearful minds and not some great imbalance or wrong path.
Online message queuing providers may not thrive against SaaS integrators ?
It's not about the learning curve. In my view, it's about the productivity of competent web developers and designers. Referring to the learning curve is just repeating the disputed claim that people who deny the suitability of CSS for layout are just invariably incompetent. That's an excuse.

And I don't agree with ejs. I think it's an important debate because CSS layout problems are a major reason why so many people use Flash. My own opinion about this matter is not cast in stone. I may change my mind based on good examples of CSS layouts that don't break and actually make maintainance easier.
Great! I think the internets would be a better place if more people embraced "be quiet and enjoy it for myself". If other people are missing out, oh well. That's a competitive advantage.

It seems like people on both sides of this debate are seeking validation rather than trying to help people.
Dennis McClendon makes some seriously cool maps
ESPN Insider? If so, you caught me.
By all mean, do what you feel more comfortable with, but working with CSS is not necessarily slower than using table layouts. You just need to get over the learning curve.

[edited]
Partisanship has benefits, and I hope people aren't being quiet and enjoying awesome things that I don't know about.

Fight for what you think is right!

(Disclaimer: I'm not advocating for senseless opposition; rather for reasoned partisanship and against "be quiet and enjoy it for myself".)
Dawn of the Twitter Effect
It's fun to hear people complain, but Plan 9 has implemented an ftpfs that seems to have no problem accessing both Unix and VMS servers (I can't test it for Windows because honestly, who runs a ftp server on windows?). The source is about 2800 lines, total, including the mkfile.

Edit: don't take this to mean FTP is good; it's insecure and should have been ditched long ago for something like 9p.
Why is that bad?

(Honestly curious...)

And no, I wouldn't mind if that happened to me. I'd be glad someone else found my code useful.
I believe the OP is talking about stationary wireless, as used in rural areas.
There's also quite a few css frameworks out there that take the hard part out of laying out a page: Blueprint, YUI grid. See also: http://www.contentwithstyle.co.uk/content/a-css-framework
http://cydia.hackulo.us is not a site, it is a repository for the iPhone's package management system (Cydia). The site it links (http://hackulo.us/) has a redirect to http://hackulo.us/forums/.
Props to the Republicans for doing this; I'm a confirmed liberal Democrat but I don't mind seeing both parties pandering for the geek vote. :-)
I hear they have a very good MRS degree :)
Lessons Microsoft learned from too many Vista versions resulted in...6 Win7 editions
Guess we're two different people then :-)

I'd prefer credit where credit is due - especially at such a high profile site.
As a counterpoint, I seems to me that the ML field is too heavy on theory. A lot of the theoretical papers are proposed with weak or no experimental tests. There are very few people doing thorough experimental work. What I have in mind is something like Chen and Goodman's comparison of different language models - this is a great paper and I'd love to see more like it.

The obvious example of this is boosting where the theory lagged far behind the experiment - everyone wanted to invent a theory to explain why boosting was so effective.

hey industrialists out there - publish!
> From the article: "It's more of a vehicle for people who want to expand their life experience by working somewhere else," said [an IBM] spokesman. "A lot of people want to work in India."

A lot of people want to move to a foreign country to make less money? IBM is either lying, or the people they hire aren't very smart.
By putting presentational info into a class name, you break the abstraction.
Opinion: The Normalization of Evil
This is a potentially huge problem. Google is effectively cutting off all other search analytic packages from their information.
At my last job, we had biweekly status meetings that sometimes slipped to once a month?
Good Culture, Bad Culture, or No Culture at All
We try to spend a lot of time talking to startups and startup folks, and I've recently heard an increasing number of stories about "broken" company cultures. What experiences or resources can you share about working in a company with a great culture, a bad culture, or a lack of "culture" altogether? Books, articles & posts help, but I'd also love to hear any personal experiences and insights that you're willing to share.

It seems that one of the most dangerous times for companies is as they transition between growth phases - from 10 to 30 people, for example, or from 50 to 100. Have you left a job because you hated what had happened to your company? Have you been in a situation where growth was extremely well managed? Seen or been a part of a cultural turnaround?

So: what happened, and why?
Official Gmail Blog: New ways to label with "Move to" and auto-complete
CSS vs Tables: You’re Doing It Wrong
Canon vs. Nikon ;)
Ask HN: Existing startup directly competes with mine, now what?
I have been working on my latest startup project for a few months now. During this time, I have been researching the market heavily, but never found a company that did more or less the same thing as me. Now I have the option to completely revamp my product, or tweak it to cover the weaknesses of this existing startup. What would you do in this situation?
I hereby propose api.gov, where your fancy little JSON structures lets you decide what you think is relevant.
The 10th time out of 10 is the guy who doesn't seem like an asshole, but probably is.
Ow! My eyes!

Please design a new favicon. The current one looks like an ode to mid-nineties shareware sites.
Dell Starts Offering Exclusive Discounts Through Twitter
Good thread on how to use rails with RabbitMQ
Yep, you're definitely doing it. You're resorting to the definition of the word, you've admitted it, you're now denying it only to gain more of a reaction.
If the market is big enough, there should be room for them to be Coke and for you to be Pepsi. Or preferably, vice versa.

If the market isn't big enough, there should be room for one of you to be Microsoft. Preferably you and not them.

Why do you think they'll beat you?
I've heard of startups (in particular) losing everyone from key technical architects to entire engineering teams to smart, great people in more average roles.

The most common answer I've heard for people leaving is that they don't feel like they're making a difference (or "being heard") anymore.
>I didn't say that it's hard to read. I said that by the standards community's definition it is not good HTML, because it mixes content and presentation.

I meant this by reading
http://www.csszengarden.com/zengarden-sample.html

not reading the html markup, but what the markup gets converted to when there is no css involved. Even the earliest of mobile devices can read this web page because the information still makes sense just reading it from top to bottom.

If CSS Zen Garden was truly mixing presentation with content, you wouldn't be able to read that link above as easily as you can.
How is this a non-sequitur? The two stories have a lot in common, and both are anecdotal evidence of his underlying point.
It would just weird me out. I'd arrange everything so that communal bills are paid proportionally, i.e. you make twice as much as your spouse, you pay 75% of the rent, and everything else stays separate.
COROT discovers smallest exoplanet yet, with a surface to walk on
there is a better thank-you from using their library on an official site?
>> "It seems self-evident to me that if a man is using porn heavily for self-gratification, he's not going to view a randomly-met woman as a whole person (and vice versa? I don't really know), but instead will be judging her based on how "hot" she appears to him, or how she might feed his fantasies. (That's the "just body parts" in my original quip.)"

Sorry, but the majority of men in my experience do that anyway. So either they're all 'using porn heavily for self-gratification', or they're just red blooded males who like the way women are put together.

I hate to say it, but I think you should lighten up a bit...
Gotcha. Yeah, that's certainly valid.
Focus on your users.

Listen, iterate, and build something that at least a few of them LOVE. I'd say that startups don't have the luxury of focusing on their competition.
You said it was misleading that he implied it was "typical", which is a synonym for "common". You can take issue with his conclusions, but illustrating your thesis with a common case can in no way be construed as a trick.
You can contact them, talk about what you're doing, and see if there's a possibility of partnership. If you're both startups in a true sense of the word, you might benefit more from such collaboration rather than competition.
I talked with David Goodstein at Caltech once about the youth legend in physics. His basic view was that people took two data points---Newton and Einstein---and over-extrapolated. He pointed to Feynman (among others) who continued to make major contributions throughout their careers. Of course, a couple counterexamples isn't enough to disprove a trend, but it does seem like the legend is build on a rather flimsy foundation.

N.B. I found myself quite enjoying the writing in this article, and I realized that the author was a colleague of mine from college. Lila Guterman was a writer for the Harvard Science Review when I was its editor-in-chief. I particularly recall a bang-up article she wrote on naked mole rats. Glad to see she's keeping up the good work!
Like in the old unix talk :-)

I used to prefer this mode, but some of my friends hated it.
Fake Crackulous "scammer" actually a pissed off iPhone dev
In graph theory, a collection of disjoint trees is called a forest.
Have you considered calisthenics? (I think it's called something else outside the US.)

I've been interested in this book, I prefer the idea of using your own body weight. And I don't like the idea of going to the gym by myself. I'm not interested in looking like a bodybuilder, with everyone being overweight simply being fit is quite enough.

http://www.amazon.com/Pushing-Yourself-Power-Ultimate-Transf...
You could get smart people to move to Third World countries for 50-70 cents on the dollar. Plus two round-trip plane tickets per year, 6 weeks of vacation (with a guarantee that this perk persists upon return to the US), increased leadership responsibilities and creative control, spousal job placement, and a guarantee of the option to return to the US with at pre-cut pay, plus 25 percent, in 5 years (when the economy has improved). This might actually be a very smart way of cutting personnel expenses in the short-term while giving people an opportunity they'll enjoy.

If you don't offer such a package, your talent is going to vanish and you'll only be able to send utter mediocrities overseas. No one with options is going to move to another country while remaining a subordinate code monkey doing grunt work for "the palace" an ocean away (which happens in branch offices of many multinational companies). Which means that your New Delhi office will be trained by the cast of Dumb and Dumber. Epic fail.
You could look at the html source of csszengarden. I'm guessing it uses a bit less markup and is a bit more readable than an equivalent table based layout.

CssZenGarden also shows that refactoring a CSS-driven site is easier since you can do it without changing your templates.