skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anyone know how they estimate the market shares of various browsers?

On an average day, I'll use Firefox 3, Chrome, IE7 and sometimes Konqueror & IE8. How would that get counted?
I bet they told the handful of people who have his email address "Of you every forward a message you will no longer be able to email the President".

That would probably work well enough.
They only let him email people with iPhones. That way they fix the copy+paste hole.
Is there an online version of 'The Little Schemer" , like SICP?
In Praise of Lo-Fi
Indeed. Really all most companies want is continued support (patches). This model is crying for a subscription arrangement and MS was tripping over themselves trying to figure out how to make Windows a subscription business. It seems like it should be possible...
I am suggesting a light hand is a better approach than what we have been doing. IMO, it is much harder to try and get the government to do nothing about the economy than to get the government to take it easy.

Example of the government using a "light hand" the borders. Food safety inspections. Most pollution controls.

There are plenty of areas where the government's approach is to wait for problems and then step in. The millions of illegal immigrants in the US is not really a hard problem to stop from an enforcement standpoint, but in this case the government seems to focus on the appearance of doing stuff vs actually doing stuff.
A run down of the major security mailing lists
Free hosting services
Voice recognition and speech synthesis will only really come in to play once - if - we get some kind of a.i. going.

for the longest time I used to think that the next real breakthrough in computers would be proper speech recognition and text-to-speech conversion, but once I clued in to how slow the audio channel is I let go of that.

It seems such a natural, but language is so full of formal 'fluff' that you'd have to have a pretty good a.i. on the other side of the speech link to get any net improvement as compared to traditional input methods.

The ideal secretary would be able to interpret 'send an email to John regarding the outstanding invoices' and be done with it, before you've got a computer at that level we'll be writing 2020 or later.
Google pages are occasionally used for malicious purposes. Presumably google would shut those down however, rather than marking as malicious.
I think your answer is right there: he's a kid. Teenagers don't have a real well-developed sense of risk and danger.
Resig: The DOM is a Mess @ Yahoo
Dude what you need in your life is something like malo. It allows the simplicity and elegance of the nested tables paradigm but with out the cruft of using tables! http://code.google.com/p/malo/

Personally I have an abstraction layer which allows me to express my layouts as s-expressions and then be rendered either as "html" (tables, great for quick development) and then rendered to "xhtml" (divs + css) for when I am polishing things up.

Right now it is written in php (yes the s-expression reader and everything, and yes it caches the interpreted files so the overhead is worth it) and I plan on releasing it on googlecode when I am happy with the "interface" of required methods for each "layout adapter".

edit: I forgot to mention malo is like 9 lines of css w/out comments.
Yes, but (arguably) a better book than Simply Scheme, if you are needing something more introductory than SICP.
Most of the estimation is done by log analysis, hitlinks.com is one such party, they have a panel of several 10's of thousands of sites that they get browser information for.

If you have a large enough portfolio of sites then you can do your own analysis.

It doesn't look like you are a 'typical' user, who will use a single browser only unless they run into some kind of compatibility problem.
The people preaching 100% CSS design are purist, they're people that love design and love CSS. These are the Eric Meyers, Doug Bowman and David Shea's of the world.

The way you see beauty in "perfect" code, they see in pure designs.

But there are benefits to their methods. Usability, accessibility, SEO, increased caching and reduced page load times are all side-effects of "pure" CSS designs.

I'd suggest taking the 80/20 approach to CSS. Take the best of what works and then just get it done and move on.

Also, my time limit for CSS problems is 1 hour. After that I use the best solution instead of the perfect one.
Ask HN: Creating an image of a Macbook, to install a dev environment
Does anyone know how to create an image of a Mac?

Our development environment is a pain in the neck to install, and I would like to create an image of a Mac to get new developers up and running. I've had to do these installs a few times, and I have another one coming up that I'd like to avoid.

I've found a couple links on the internet about this, but nothing that talks about it from a developer point of view. Does anyone have a link or advice?
Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending
I'm asking a genuine question, so an answer would be more civil than a downvote.
I don't think Google codes in CL ;)
That's not how cell phone jamming works; it's not a real "jam" of all frequencies. I don't know how much detail I can get into, but essentially you pretend you're a base station and you disallow all calls to that phone.

So your trigger would have to be much more intricate than that.
While this is just one data point, it is refreshing to see a business journalist actually reporting based on first-hand experience.

I can speak from personal experience in a newsroom that surprisingly few business journalists have ever actually worked in business in any form.
as long as it works, it doesn't matter if you use CSS or tables. The end users just don't care.
You start off with an implied ad-hominem attack; just because he's a broker doesn't mean he's only looking out for himself or that doesn't know the industry works in every day.

Then you summarize the article by basically stating the exact opposite of the premise of the article which is actually closer to: "foreclosure helps home owners who are in trouble while at the same time helping the finance industry recover."

Then you state that there should be a smaller gap between the cost of ownership and renting. Fine, this is probably easy enough for everyone to agree with. But you, unlike the author of the article who talks about supply and demand equalizing the market through the foreclosure process, say that the solution is somehow for real estate professionals to "divulge their pay in dollars, not percents."

First of all realtors, by divulging the percentage they are paid of a transaction, are already divulging their pay in dollars since everyone who is a party to the transaction knows the amount of the transaction. It's simple math.

Second, someone is paying real estate professionals for a service that apparently worth what realtors and brokers charge. The market is sustaining their fees, if the service they provided wasn't valuable, someone would step in and do it cheaper.

Third, even if real estate professionals didn't make a cent off transactions, even if there were no realtors or brokers, it doesn't change the core problem or anything suggested the article's solution. They aren't the ones who control market values or financing.
I guess he means that Walmart floor employees can place products to maximize their local profit margin since they know what sells well at their store.
Sinatra Simple Example
Nearly any site using a web analytics package will collect browser statistics, even to the version number. Even better if you aggregate the statistics from a number of sites with different user demographics. For example, just the Apple site or the Mozilla site would give you skewed statistics. Most analytics packages will find unique users over a specified time period. Given that you use all your browsers at the participating sites, you would be counted as a unique user for all 5 browsers, distorting the statics somewhere off in the 6th or 7th decimal place.
I know of a possible solution for the problem. I'm going to publish a paper in a couple of months that will include my ideas on this.
Britain Seen from Above: the Outtakes
I think you would be an unusual outlier ;) As are we all ! So I guess that would end up as noise in the stats?
Passports are usually considered property of the country that issues them and some countries have pretty strict laws on modifying passports in any way, including partial destruction.
Email is like Tetris: you lose eventually
I actually had to check back to the site to make sure we were on the same website.

On my quick scan of the site, when I read "dynamic digital signage solution" it never even occurred to me that it wasn't talking about PGP document and email signing.
The request rate for 110% cash back might be similar to the rates for rebate offers. People have said rebates get returned anywhere between 2% and 60%, but it sounds like the industry average is less than 10%. So I doubt many people would ask for the 110% cash back.

And as for customers taking advantage of it, I really think the number would be less than of people who didn't take advantage of it when they weren't satisfied. Personally I know of one small rebate that I didn't end up cashing in because I never got around to it, and I would have to be really unsatisfied with a product to go through the time and hassle of asking for my money back.

Wikipedia Link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebate_(marketing)#Some_redempt...
What type of a platform? Do you have any code sketches to demonstrate the ease of doing otherwise tedious tasks, like in the Pig and Sawzall papers?
>You start off with an implied ad-hominem attack

As a side point - if in a discussion someone brings up someone elses professional background/employer/affiliation (the implication being that it undermines their authority) is that really an ad-hominem attack?
I think this email is remarkably effective in blending at least three tactics, only one of which is telling the recipient how he feels.

The second tactic is rousing the other person's sense of shame: "I think this is more a matter of respect."

The third tactic is making a credible and no-nonsense threat of retaliation: if you don't pay up now, I am unlikely to help you with work in the future.

It's the combination of these tactics -- expressing personal disappointment, shaming the recipient, and threatening sanction -- delivered in an authentic, personal, yet still professional manner, that makes it so effective.
Watch: http://kcet.org/socal/2008/09/foreclosure-alley.html

Which party is hurrying the transaction such that the owners of the belongings in the home don't even have time to move out or to coordinate efforts with an ecologically-friendly recycling charity?

The Realtors.

Everything into a landfill? Seriously? Realtors make $ by flipping properties like flipping burgers. They are the only ones who are "thriving" from such a mortgage mess. It should, for all practical purposes, be illegal.

P.S. The video starts off slow; watch until where Lisa Ling starts reporting. Take note of who is paying the dude to "paint the grass green".
It's never impossible to forward an email. Heck, you can simply take a screenshot and forward that along (or even write down the contents and re-type it). A forwarded email is just as suspect as a screenshot that can be photoshopped.

I think the way that they prevent it is that you'll get fired if you do it. People who work in the White House are usually people who a) want the sitting president to do well and b) want a career path that will get them to even better things than they're at now. A big Obama supporter isn't going to forward an email that might be embarrassing unless it's something like an order for human children to be served at a banquet. Likewise, if you want to someday become a congressperson or become a big(er) deal in DC, you don't want to get a reputation as "that guy that spews everything you don't want public".

So, really, you only need slight precautions to make sure that email isn't forwarded. The kind of precautions that would let a hacker easily bypass it, but you wouldn't accidentally forward something.
I finally switched to Vista myself. All in all, it's nice to be running an OS that's not ancient, but that's about it.

I'll switch completely to OS X as soon as I can though.
http://www.macenterprise.org/macworld-2008-slides/imaging-tr...

Found here: http://www.macenterprise.org/system/app/pages/search?q=imagi...
No, you can win e-mail tetris without cheating.

You must decide for yourself which action your e-mails require: Trash, Defer, or Action. GTD gets this right.

If you don't make those decisions as e-mail enters your box, you're effectively saying (while playing tetris) "I'm going to ignore all of the L-shaped blocks and deal with the wreckage they leave behind later." Yeah, you'll lose. You have to make a decision on _every_ piece that drops into your inbox.

Filters can do wonders, if you really do have a huge influx of mail. You don't have to read and respond to every message unless you really want to.
John Resig - Talk: The DOM is a Mess
Excellent points! One possible development is 'self hosted clouds', using the technlogy that goes in to cloud architecture but run it on your own in-house or colocated hardware.

Most privacy policies would be hard to live up to anyway storing critical data in the 'cloud', so a large portion of business-it will always be hosted locally or on hardware controlled by the corporation whose responsibility it is to safeguard the data.
Breaking the Myth of the Megapixels
I have an as-yet-unproven hypothesis about email equilibrium: that we eventually settle into the right rhythm with emails such that we just barely get through the last email every day, with our last fading bit of energy before falling into bed with exhaustion.

Here's the thinking:
1. There are too many emails to start with.
2. We try hard to keep up; fail.
3. The emailers who don't get consistent replies eventually get the message or look elsewhere for answers/action and stop emailing as often or at all.
4. The volume of emails reduces towards the level at which we can keep up.
5. If/when it overshoots, and we start to really get on top of our emails, we have more energy and time and start writing more intelligent replies, or indeed initiating more email threads, thus generating more replies back to us.
6. So we converge on a certain email equilibrium, with lack of replies correcting for when we've got too many emails, and the instigation of replies from others correcting on the low side when we've got too few.

So why doesn't email equilibrium last? Because, alas, we get burnt out running at optimum speed. A day comes along when we just get tired, say screw it, I'll take a day off, and then we fall off the hampster wheel, and the emails pile up again. If only we could just keep up, then we would indeed keep up!
Jim Collins: How great companies turn crisis into opportunity
Really? You use Photobucket and Rapidshare as examples of sites whose design examples you want to follow?

I'm certainly not a CSS purist, but I'm sure you could've found better reasoning than "all the big guys use tables, so I should too."
The full presentation and slides can be found over here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=462970
The scene of mayhem and carnage the officers expected was nowhere to be found. Neither the Bateses nor the officers knew that they were pawns in a dangerous game being played 1,200 miles away by a teenager bent on terrifying a random family of strangers.

They were victims of a new kind of telephone fraud that exploits a weakness in the way the 911 system handles calls from Internet-based phone services. The attacks _ called "swatting" because armed police SWAT teams usually respond _ are virtually unstoppable, and an Associated Press investigation found that budget-strapped 911 centers are essentially defenseless without an overhaul of their computer systems.

There's money to be made here.
This points to the original, but the item

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=462938

posted 25 minutes earlier contains a transcript.
Learn the pros and cons and then use whatever fits the job better.
If you have lots of highly qualified niche traffic -- the kinds of people that advertisers actually want to reach -- along with a solid in-house ad sales team, you can make quite a bit of money off even a moderate traffic site.

If you have tons of traffic, but you know nothing about the audience, you will get very little money for your ads. Why do you think the washingtonpost.com has to run ads for home refinancing and mesothelioma ambulance chasers? Because there aren't many advertisers willing to pay a premium to target "any schmuck reading the newspaper."

Advertisers aren't stupid. CPM rates have basically been comditized unless there's something special about your site or your advertising model/targeting.
When I see the words "clean" and "capable" to describe markets and new buyers of forclosed properties, and the word "evil" used to describe loan modification, I think that:
1) clean is the opposite of dirty. The unfettered market is clean, he says.
2) capable. Who doesn't want to be in that category? Capable! Yes. I am capable. And THAT is the reason (sigh of relief) that I am not being forclosed upon.
This article says: "loan modification is not only ineffective, it is evil."
So. If you're incapable...don't come crying to me. because it would be evil to offer help.....
"Get a job.", then.
Thanks Rupert.
Just like some people love the idea of being an author, whereas other like writing books.
A process tree is known to almost everyone who uses Unix. A forest is, in my opinion, a good name for a collection of trees.

Reflection is the ability of something to introspect. The term "self-reflection" dates back to 1652[1], so why change it? "Type information" is inaccurate because reflection can mean more than just getting information about types, like interfacing with the runtime or getting information about the language implementation.

I don't think concepts should be misnamed at the expense of accuracy.

[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/self-reflection
Ask HN:  Framing other sites has always seemed scummy to me.  Am I off-base?
One thing that never fails to tick me off is when a site frames one of my own. Seeing someone else's URL and branding atop a page that I created and filled with original research/content/thoughts makes me feel just a tad violated.

It's arguably a fuzzy area, but there's nothing fuzzy about how I feel about seeing it happen. It feels like theft.

When I first had this happen two years ago, I started adding a frame-breaker to all my blogs. Problem solved. Most people don't know how to do that however.

For a while, it seemed that only shady sites like i-am-bored were engaging in massive framing of other people's content.

However, recently I noticed, to my disappointment, that Facebook frames the destination pages for all links shared on it.

And more recently I've seen some startup called Outbrain add "related content" links to popular blogging platforms. These links lead to framed pages with a prompt at the top inviting visitors to log in to outbrain. Major newspapers are now using this outbrain garbage on their blogs.

Aside from my decidedly negative emotional response to the practice as a content creator, are there other, perhaps more tangible detriments to being framed?

Does it hurt a site's SEO and create duplicate content problems?

Could it be argued that it's a form of IP theft?

Am I off-base in my intense hatred for sites that frame others?

I want to be able to concisely explain to non-techies why this gets me so mad. To techies as well I guess.
He's not saying they have wonderful design. He's saying that most of the top sites liberally use tables, which is interesting given that they probably have some pretty great devs and an infinite budget.

I've walked the same road as the author has and currently use tables for layout and CSS for text style, paddings, margins, borders, colors, backgrounds, rollovers...
Pretty much any test is teachable. I raised my ACT scores by 3 or 4 points with some studying. Even IQ test are teachable. I believe taking the WAIS IV for a second will invalidate it if taken sooner than six months prior to the first testing date.

Wikipedia link on validity:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Validity_(psychometric)#Factors...
> Example of the government using a "light hand" the borders.

Would this be the borders where they seize laptops and randomly harass people? Or, the borders that are completely uncontrolled?

I don't think that "light" means "a random mix of hard and none".

> Food safety inspections.

I'd put that under incompetent, not light.

> Most pollution controls.

You're joking, right?

> but in this case the government seems to focus on the appearance of doing stuff vs actually doing stuff.

"in this case" suggests that focusing on appearance is the exception, not the rule. It may not be the majority, but ....
Internet Explorer’s browser market share shrinks — because IE6 is finally dying
That is just flat out wrong. Even the story states repeatedly that a foreclosure doesn't just sneak up on you. Why those people left behind all their belongings is beyond me, but it wasn't because it happened all of a sudden. Like the story mentions, they know months in advance. Everything in the story about why the stuff is left is speculation.

Even if realtors did cause foreclosures to somehow sneak up on people, it has nothing to do with what causes people to end up in foreclosure in the first place.

You're going after the wrong target.
That's a popular one, but I find it so depressing. Here you've quit your job and thrown yourself into something you believe in, and from the first day you're thinking about how you'll unload it?
nc is also awesome for quick and dirty file/directory transfer over the wire:

host1 (receiving): nc -l 6123 > tar xfz -
host2 (sending ): tar cfz - directory/ | nc host2 6123
The CSS Problem has been solved. There are a large number of people in the world who can take any arbitrary design and make it work in all browsers using compliant XHTML/CSS.

In fact, there are so many, that the rate to do such a think is between $100 and $200:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS291US...

In my mind this leaves only two defenses for not having a website done in (roughly) proper CSS + HTML:

1. You believe that it is better to layout pages in tables.

2. You can't do it personally and don't have $150
I've been collecting a number of blogs about website monetization and the consensus seems to be advertising for social networking sites, but can work very well for information destination sites. Socialites care only about their friends and ignore advertising. Information gatherers are open to anything that helps them in their search. If they are buying, they will go to sellers.

Advertising is probably worth while as a supplementary income stream, but I wouldn't make it the primary focus, if you have a good freemium model. Just get your feet wet and let advertising prove itself. (I voted for freemium.)
The "Any Competent Programmer" BS
I'm not a CSS purist by any means but I think heavy use of nested tables can be a real hassle for the visually impaired. I think if you find yourself putting a table within a table strictly for layout, you should at least consider other alternatives.

Personally, I like using tables for forms, which makes it relatively easy to line things up for both the labels and the input elements, and it also makes the css rules fairly straightforward to read. I'm sure CSS purists might disapprove, but I think it's a good tradeoff and hopefully not much of an additional hassle for screen reader users.
Facebook Could Face Cash Crunch
Do you think the 911 quotas for all the VoIP systems added together amount to more than the staff for the 911 center, in some locale? How about the number of emergency responders? Even if not, you could still DoS the VoIP service your target was using.
Original posted three days ago here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458185

No comments, 5 points.