skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... when transporting and copying information has a cost approaching 0."

The cost is relatively approaching 0. The true cost of copying and transporting information is phenomenal, I mean I want to copy a VHS it used to cost me $400 max if I bought everything new! If I do similar for a DVD it's running me at least past $1000.

However that's the actual cost, the relative cost is in fact near zero. We all have computers/laptops now because we need them, which means the extra cost to rip a DVD now is all of about $2.99 for the rental fee from Blockbuster with an additional like $0.50 to burn copies for people.

It's also the value of the object you're ripping. It'd still be considered cost-effective if you bought a $1000 computer to use once to rip the full Adobe suite rather than actually buy the Adobe suite!

The FT shouldn't be suing a single user, it's absurd and will cost them money. They should be using a business model that forces institutions to pay. Adobe doesn't expect me to pay $2000 for CS3, they do however expect a design firm to pay probably a hell of a lot more than $2000 to kit out all of their computers.
That's different, though. You built your site with the intention of supporting multiple layouts/L&F. He's talking about refactoring a site designed one way to be laid out a different way without changing the content at all, without prior knowledge of the future layout that would be used.
I've made a similar transformation, going from 233LBS to 160LBS.

http://blog.raamdev.com/2004/03/07/changed-for-life

After losing the weight and getting in shape, my asthma and allergies disappeared, along with my eczema. Fitness has become one of the most important things in my life.

If there is one piece of advice I can give to anyone looking to get in shape it would be this: Stick with it and stay consistent. Fitness is a lifestyle, not a goal or destination (that's why diets fail).
Hi Teej,
The position is onsite and in SOMA, San Francisco
Facebook ads are trying to scam me
Here are the results for this page using the Site Information Tool extension I have in Firefox: http://www.wmtips.com/tools/info/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycom...
This is not exactly a very convincing article. For one the two examples do not display the same in FF3 (there's different amounts of white space between the three columns in the different versions), and of course, the examples looks completely different in IE 6 which is about 90% of the problem to begin with.
I think we all detected your sarcasm, but who in particular are you responding too? I haven't seen any diatribes yet, and I think that it would be best that any reactions or responses to them should be actual replies.

Just my two cents.
Agreed, and the fact of the matter is, any reasonable name will succeed, if backed by a great company.

I think a good name won't help you much, but a bad name can hurt you in tangible ways.
Yeah but you can bet your ass Google knows it's breaking every browser out there. If they wanted to make a change this big, they should have contacted the 4 major browser vendors at least 1 year in advance to give them the opportunity to implement this. It's fucking bullshit.
A special case of the Stroop Effect: Kids may not be as different as we thought
The articles I'm disagreeing with state that it's not possible, neither restrict that statement as purely an IE6 problem. The demonstration is to prove that it is possible, which it clearly is. I could tweak the positioning of the columns by one or two pixels but it wouldn't make any difference to my point, would it?
My experience with a Blackberry was that background data (polling, tcp keepalives) were the worst of the battery draining. Unfortunately that kind of stuff would work better with a notification API.

At one time UNIXes were all about time sharing and quotas. I think bringing some of that back (certainly with different controls and interfaces) would be beneficial.
Do you honestly believe that their intent is to somehow deprive you of information? How exactly is this shady?
Thanks. Another great one is DomainTools.com:
http://whois.domaintools.com/news.ycombinator.com

Domain look-up services I've got pretty well covered. Any other services you use?
So you say people have "harder times finding your site" being "mitigated by Google" and "you will have to spend five minutes explaining your name". So let's get in the wayback machine and set it for '93. Show me a dictionary with google in it or find me a member of the public who can guess it will have something to do with search.
I don't like IBM at all, but this article sounds overblown and not properly based. The original InformationWeek article sounds more realistic:

The document states that the program is limited to "satisfactory performers who have been notified of
separation from IBM U.S. or Canada and are willing to work on local terms and conditions." The latter
indicates that workers will be paid according to prevailing norms in the countries to which they
relocate. In many cases, that could be substantially less than what they earned in North America.

And that is quite a real option if they include other countries like Brazil or Argentina.
Nevar: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/9/27/95759/4240
Apparently it's CSS day on HN.
Rebase v Merge in Git
I'm really not sure what point your comment is actually meant to convey.

The relevant point which apparently needs clarification is that CSS has had "display: table" for bloody ages and "Blaming CSS for the inadequacies of MS browsers is flawed logic."

If you don't want to use CSS because of the "inadequacies of MS browsers" or because your knowledge of CSS just isn't up to it in relation to particular layout you are trying to achieve, no one is holding a gun to your head. But don't blame CSS for this.

I'm happy to come from the POV of pragmatism. I don't see myself as a CSS fanatic. But honestly, I have been using CSS so long that I actually find it harder to work with tables for layout (as I have recently found when I had to work on a legacy site that uses tables for layout). The markup is so much more verbose than what I am used to now (nested tables are evil, full stop). CSS layouts are clear and uncluttered to me in comparison.

My own experience tells me that if you put the time in, CSS will make more sense than tables for layout and will become easier, regardless of the crappy support from some browser vendors. Whether one wishes to put the time in or not, is up to them.
Do you honestly believe that people keep their browsers up to date? Do you know how old IE 6 is?
I have to barely report once a week.... but this certainly isn't BigCo as far as number of employees go.
Advertisement programmed brains.
That just looks like a recipe for drive-by management to me.
Yo dawg, I herd you like feedback...
here's a blow-by-blow of an MT fiasco ... :((
http://inboundpass.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/our-mt-media-tem...
Your first puzzle sucks: I hate registering to see things. Let us try it right now!

You really need a not-logged-in version.
I just had lunch with Peter who was as always a lovely chap to spend time with. I'm looking forward to see who Peter finds to work with.
How would they even do that if there's no query data in the referer? Set a cookie on google.com and then read it back from analytics.google.com is the only thing I can think of.
An interview with renowned mathematician Serge Lang on scientific misconduct. [pdf]
Huh? They are neither breaking browsers nor are they doing anything beyond reportedly testing this change.
Google was an accident, if you know your internet history.

The founders intended the word Googol: http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:p7kcdIwV8J0J:daily.stan...
So many broken images from your badcheese.dyndns.org it's hard for me to move around.
Keep in mind that many IBM employees are from India or China originally, so it's not a foreign country to them.
Right that would go down like hot cakes with the Etsy crowd.
I thought Urchin became GA? I remember early on in my analytics use the script mentioned urchin, and the newer one they provide doesn't anymore...
Sure I see it.

But your whole argument is on the basis points of 2 commented divs?
<!-- These extra divs/spans may be used as catch-alls to add extra imagery. -->

Add extra imagery -- it's posted at the bottom and away from the content. It's not like it's messing with what the programmer needs to develop. You could have easily have removed those tags and only the designs that decided to take use of them would get hurt -- but it is optional, not a requirement.

<!--extra div for flexibility - this list will probably be the trickiest spot you'll deal with -->
I thought we discussed that browsers incompatibilities are the reason for this.

The core of the content is listed at the top of the HTML page which is organized properly.

TBH: I would hardly call this level of adding extra markup anywhere close to other HTML where the presentation is completely ingrained.
lol - thanks Tom. Great to catch up.
Snarky, but true.

I've always wished there was an ISO standard for titles.
Or, they were pioneers in a market that didn't exist yet.
hang in there, buddy. You are on to something.
My 2 cents:

http://www.noticiaslinux.com/
http://gruporeforma.mural.com/suplementos/interfase/?plazaco... (this is a local newspaper site, some news might require subscription to read)
The original example had a top and bottom spanning all three columns, making the problem fundamentally different than you describe. I would be more interested if you could take that original example in the original post and show how CSS does not run into the problem that is described in the original post.

Further, you test it in Firefox 3. The problem that I see is that in the Real World (TM), I must make sure that the website works on Internet Explorer 6. Most of the problems I encounter with CSS layout involves cross-browser inconsistency.

I do not pretend to be a specialist in front end work; frankly, it is my least favorite part of development. However, I've made an effort to learn CSS layout systems only to go back to tables in projects that someone else isn't doing the work.
The table tag's purpose is to host tabular data. Hence the <thead>, <tfoot>, and <tbody> tags for column headers, footers, and body data respectively.

Cite: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/tables.html
HTML is not a presentation language. It has historically contained a bunch of presentational elements (<CENTER>, <FONT> and so on), but they are deprecated now, and not necessary when we have CSS.
If the GOP wants its own API, it belongs at http://api.rnc.org/

I understand that many/most are partisan and may only want to keep tabs on "their guys". But the idea of the U.S. gov paying for _any_ partisan site such as this is terrible. I find it hard to understand how its even legal.
> I doubt a single person will change their mind either way

I changed my mind (a while back). i learned about web dev and read you should use CSS not tables. so i made some layouts with css and generally believed that.

then i found some pure css vs tables arguments here. and i decided tables are fine.
Yes. Google damn well knows that no major web browser sends the #hashmark part of the URL in the referrer. They damn well know this breaks every single analytics package out there.
Market Simulation
Say you are writing an app for the intended purpose of selling products. Wouldn't it make sense to test it out with virtual items and fake money first?
Startup lessons: An interview with Carl Mercier
We Tablists* only have to point out one hole at a time to continue being right. Not restricting the statement just makes it harder to refute, since you have to cover all the ways in which CSS-for-layout is deficient, rather than just a single way.

* Table-for-layout-ists is just too long, don't you agree? ;)
Ironically Joel seems to be missing something that YUI Grids (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids) and Blueprint (http://code.google.com/p/blueprintcss) both allow you to reorder the content of a page. Sure it's not totally arbitrary, but it gives you much more freedom than tables.

Or you could just make your CSS render out tables (http://www.digital-web.com/articles/everything_you_know_abou...).
I don't see how this is relevant at all. I'm not blaming CSS for anything. Who cares whose "fault" it is?

My point is that it doesn't matter what CSS could do with the right browser. Out here in the real world, 38% of my site's traffic is IE6. If my design doesn't work perfectly in IE6, then it doesn't work period.
The original example in the original post complained about not being able to swap the center and side columns, I didn't feel that the header was relevant. However, I could create additional examples if necessary.

Ref: real world - agree totally. However, as I said earlier today ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=463712 ) you can't blame CSS for the flaws in IE.
Amazon Launches Its Casual Games Store
No, I don't believe that. Did I say that?
I seem to recognize the pattern:

Everybody seems to encourage (even in a contradictory way) the proper opinion, and refutes quite absolutely the proper change of it...

Poor humanity, if everybody thinks like this...
They say Facebook will do anything to monetize its traffic - even scam its users.

Well, they say to me that Facebook ads ain't worth squat and advertisers know it.
I like tables because I know how to use them, and they work in all browsers. Plus valign and align work. The lack of valign in CSS as well as the documentation of it appearing to be: "this but that unless this or that and then that, but you cant do that unless this, duh, know CSS," makes me want to RAAAAAGE.

I always thought CSS worked well for decorating stuff, and not for layout. But, anyway, I almost always use CSS. The exception being: I need some quick layout where floats are screwed up and I don't feel like spending a whole day figuring out why (see above statement about its documentation).

Regardless, one thing that bothers me is when people claim that it's entirely your fault if you can't use something, because you didn't bother to learn enough about it. This is always true, but surely we all can agree that things have different levels of inherent difficulties. Adding, for example, is much easier than differentiating, though they both require you to learn it before you can use it. So when people complain about how CSS is not as simple as it could be, or that all the little nuances and exceptions are ridiculous, this is due to some mixture of ignorance and inherent complexity in CSS, and is not entirely the person not knowing CSS. This also applies to situations where rather than taking a criticism in stride, the answer is: "Don't like it? GET OUT."

I guess, in short, the attitude of "that's the way it works, deal with it" as being a valid argument for "you shouldn't be complaining" really pisses me off.
I agree, you can use OpenID, it's a lot faster to register.
Who said you have to require scripting to position elements? I most certainly didn't mean to suggest that. That said, CSS is not a programming language, so by nature there are things possible in combination with JavaScript that would not otherwise be possible. I think it's worth considering when attempting to go against the grain of the language, just as it's worth considering changing direction to do something the language is better equipped to deal with.
Unless I'm way off, Google is already doing a redirection script on all outbound clicks. The endpoint url shows up in the footer of the browser on hover, but if you right-click and copy the link location, you get something like:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&...
I think it's one downside to the only-vote-up story system; once a debate spills outside the comments of one article, you end up with half a dozen submissions reflecting various viewpoints.
I registered just to see what the puzzles were. Some thoughts:

I found that you can answer the same puzzle multiple times, which you probably want to change.

For three of the puzzles, if you submit a blank form the website breaks.

You should make it more obvious how many sickles a user has. And why are they sickles anyway?

I don't know if this breaks your idea, but maybe add trivia questions as well as puzzles. That might be helpful when you're struggling to find new puzzles, and if a theme built up it might help build a community.
If you give me a new title that's closer to what's intended, I'll change the title of the link.
I threw in an override stylesheet with larger text and more contrast; append ?useoverride to any of my URLs if you need to use it.
Speaking as a fat guy who's slowly getting back into shape (after taking 2 years off and gaining a bunch of weight), I liked the article -- everything except for the picture at the end.

People, probably for a good reason, have negative feelings associated with guys/girls who spend a huge amount of time at the gym. The word narcissistic comes to mind, also vanity. I'm not saying the writer is vain, just that a bodybuilding shot can be a little put-offish to some.

But more to the point, it emphasizes this huge gulf between the totally out of shape and the totally in-shape. The thing to focus on isn't the body building contests (if you like that sort of thing, which I don't), but it's his description of the day-to-day dedication it takes to make it work. If you want to lose a thousand pounds or run a marathon or whatever, those are great goals. Forget about them for now. For somebody who hasn't done it before, an even greater goal is to get out of bed tomorrow morning and go to the gym -- even if you don't exercise more than 5 minutes. Then do that again. And again and again.

Later on you lose the 40 pounds and start weight-lifting, as he did. Or maybe you go into flexibility training, or endurance training. Then even later you run the marathon, do the body-building show, etc.

Don't try to stick all of that in your head at one time. To a great degree, this is all about doing the same little things each day over and over again. It's not about the big things. Heck, you might not even want to do any of the competition stuff. Functional health -- being able to get around easily, climb stairs, lift heavy boxes, run for a departing plane, go for a 10-mile day hike -- that's a huge thing in itself. It doesn't have to be Twinkies or the Boston Marathon. There's lots of room in-between.
Yes, for the .1% of people online that use OpenID. OpenID is a failure.
The thing I think a lot of people are missing is that I don't care whose fault it is.

As a designer, I just need my sites to work in the real world (where 1/3 of my traffic is IE6). I'm not placing any blame, but if it doesn't work in IE6 then it doesn't work for me.
New Gmail "Move to" finally fixes issue that wasn't broken in old-school e-mail
Thanks a lot for all your feedback, guys. It far outstripped my expectations. HN once again proved to be a fantastic place :)

We've addressed some of the most pressing issues, and based on what we're observing from new users, it did help a lot.

One thing I definitely learned, is that providing context in the original post would have been tremendously useful for everyone. Writing a few lines in the original post would have helped everyone involved.
I think we all detected your sarcasm, but who in particular are you responding too?

Scroll down? There are several people who made politically motivated comments. That said, perhaps the fact that they were all downvoted into oblivion is response enough.
I agree. We're paranoid about scaling right now (loading the frontpage is a massive task, even with memcache), so that's why it's login-only for right now.
Hi Fizx,
The position is for someone to lead development but also to help lead the overall strategy of a seedling product. It's a fairly unusual role.

The title of the post reflects this and is not to be misleading (after all the company has already been acquired). It's an indication of the founder-characteristics required from the position albeit with very good salary, bonus, equity and healthcare in return.
Dell Deals Exclusive to Twitter
The Horror
Yep, that's right.

Could this be a subtle move to require people use google Analytics instead of their own log file analysis?
> it's posted at the bottom and away from the content

But it's HTML, and should therefore should BE content. But it's not; it's presentation.

> I thought we discussed that browsers incompatibilities are the reason for this.

You seem to be missing my point. If CSS, as implemented NOW, worked as advertised and offered a way to separate content from presentation while retaining flexibility, then we'd have no argument. I'd happily be using it for what is intended. You just can't do that now, and I'm tired of people telling me that I can.

> I would hardly call this level of adding extra markup anywhere close to other HTML where the presentation is completely ingrained.

Of course it's not completely ingrained. But I want it to be able to be completely separated before I'm going to join your camp.
Java isn't a scripting language though so I'm guessing PHP is the winner
You got it. We didn't actually change advertising stuff at all, it's just that it only kicks in after a few days for each user. In general, advertising performs terribly in these kinda games, so our revenue model is based on transactions and premium accounts. Ads are just a way to force users to pay. It might be slightly over the top at the moment, though.
Ask HN: what would your ideal language for web-pages look like?
Recently there's been a wide discussion on HN about using css vs tables and it seemed to me that a lot of people are unhappy about both ways and choose a lesser evil. Even further, maybe they are unhappy about the languages themselves, not just their elements.

I'd like to ask you, what would your perfect markup language (or languages, a replacement for css and html) look like? Just make it whatever you want: an XML sub-language or something completely different. Code examples would be appreciated.
Originally the content after the # was only used for automatic scrolling to particular tags within a page, so there was no need to ever send it to a server. Once Ajax came around, people realized you could use javascript to read the url after the # and do arbitrary stuff based on it. So you can show different pages at

foo.com/
foo.com/#bar

but since the server doesn't treat them differently, when the user transitions from one to the other, there's no page reload. So you can move from page to page, but cut n pasting links still works.

There are libraries like RSH that let you do this to speed up your site.
My Idea to Help the Economy and the Credit Crunch
"Competent + Asshole = I'll put up with them"

I disagree here. These guys can really screw you over. Having to watch your back all the time is stressful and distracting.
"Tables should not be used purely as a means to layout document content as this may present problems when rendering to non-visual media. Additionally, when used with graphics, these tables may force users to scroll horizontally to view a table designed on a system with a larger display. To minimize these problems, authors should use style sheets to control layout rather than tables."

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/tables.html#h-11.2.1
Given that the point of the entry is to show off the position independent examples rather than insult any one individual's abilities, something like "Order-Independent CSS Layout Examples" would probably be more appropriate.

I assume I could change it myself (the edit link is there)...