skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The only conclusion I would take from this article is that a dull and low paying Wal-Mart job is not too bad when you're there mainly to satisfy your curiosity about the place and you can go back to
your regular job as the section editor of a magazine whenever you feel like.
I have a big hunch that design decisions at 75% of Alexa's top 20 sites aren't really based on CSS idealogical purity, scalability, algorithmic complexity or back-end html generation issues. I think those decisions are based on plain and simple expediency and frustration. Much like my decision to go ahead and use tables.

I think that's what guided Google's decision in 1998, and I still think that's what guides their decisions now.
I understand what you're saying, because that is part of what suckered me into reading it ;-)

After reading it, I think professional flattery among colleagues is one thing and a true "revolutionary introduction to computer science" is another. I just really don't think it is the latter. Maybe you will...? You might save time by just watching the online Harvey videos. They cover much of the same territory in lecture format.

If you're going to read Simply Scheme, then HTDP and The Little Schemer should probably come before it, not after. Don't get me wrong, I don't think Simply Scheme is a horrible book or anything...it's actually pretty good. I just have a limited amount of time for that kind of reading, and I wish I had read something else instead of it. Most of the other Scheme/CL books I've read have been either more enlightening or more practical than Simply Scheme. I think some of the constructs the authors come up with for pedagogical reasons are simply not necessary (and could potentially be confusing if you go on to actually work in Scheme.)
I have to admit I have limited familiarity with Pig and Sawzall (just added "Learn more about Pig and Sawzall" to my to-do list :D), but our platform is designed to save developers from having to think about clusters, parallelization, etc.

The two basic functions you would interact with as a developer are a select() and a do(). The select() specifies what content you want. The do() specifies what you want to do with that content. The backend infrastructure is supposed to handle everything else.

I don't have any code examples right now, but we plan to provide some with or during the beta release.
I must be naive, why is $50k a poor starting salary when there are families who get by on $50k-$55k?
"A salary spread of $50k to $100k is too much for the same job, and I never noticed older teachers being much more effective than teachers with five years of experience."

First, there are similar margins in engineering as well. It is not unique to teaching.

Second, as to your effectiveness claim, anecdotes != data. I would have a tendency to believe the contrary and would need to see evidence otherwise to be convinced.

Third, part of the pay differential is probably due to the turnover rate in teaching. Why pay someone top dollar when something like 1/2 teachers leave before their fifth year (in the US)?
How does this compare to the oxbridge tutorial method? I haven't actually experienced it; others are probably more knowledgeable in this regard.

Basically, the way I understand it is that while the students do attend lectures, the focus of their education is in "tutorials". In these tutorials, the students are assigned reading, which they then write a paper on, and debate about with their tutor and maybe one other student. Now I never thought this would scale that well, but that seems to be what the article is about. Obviously the large class discussions are less personal, but more doable in a university without the bottomless endowments of Oxford and Cambridge.
>Second, the unions have convinced teachers that any measurement of quality will be inaccurate, arbitrary, and a front for administrators' political and personal animosity.

But this is true. How do you suggest measuring performance? Standardized testing is not an acceptable answer.
First of all, you need to figure out whether or not you're building a consumer or business product.

"Would I give this to somebody as a gift?"

If Yes, you have a consumer product. If No, you probably have a business product.

For business products you want to think in terms of expense accounts. You can bet that ~$20-$30 is super easy on up to ~$300-$500. The problem with subscriptions is that it can scare some people off who only need to use the product once.

For consumer products, I have no idea. I just know that consumers are generally more discretionary with how they throw their money around.

Education customers will just give you a lot of buzz but not much money (from my experience).
Yes, in theory you could do something similar with AWS. However, you'd have to put in the work to handle all the complexities of parallel-computing and web crawling. We do that for you. And yes, our service is cheaper.

We'd love to see developers using our platform to build some very interesting indexes based on innovative concepts.
The risk is obviously much bigger on an oil rig, but fire at sea is a very real problem, and something that haunts all sailors.

The problem is twofold:

1) You have to put the fire out yourself, the fire department or coast guard won't be able to reach you before it's too late.

2) You have nowhere to go.
When this can be confirmed with reasonable certainty, web developers the world over need to organize some sort of celebration. Proposals?
Hey brandnewlow - I'm the founder of outbrain... thought I'd drop by your conversation here.
The recommendations we make in the outbrain widget are based on how readers rate blog posts. Therefore it is important to give readers the rating functionality (which is why we keep the frame). We don't promote our brand in the frame and did our best to keep the functionality and UI to the absolute minimum.
Furthermore - when a reader clicks on a link to a page where our widget is installed, we don't show the frame at all as the rating functionality is already available on the page. So a good way to prevent the outbrain frame from showing up would be to install our widget on your site... ;-)
(http://www.outbrain.com/get/ratings)

We don't really like frames either, and are doing whatever we can to reduce the use and minimize the UI intrusion when we do use them... but in some cases there ain't much better ways to do this... I'd appreciate any ideas for improvement.
Target isn't as big as Walmart. When making a book or movie I expect a person to attack the largest company to make their point.
developers will be running back to web based apps!
Return of The Mux
Open Source NG Databases (mailing list summary)
Open letter to XHEO: That is not a good way to do business
Enjoys watching as Snow Crash converges with reality
Japan is a lot safer than almost anywhere else in the world, so you get preteen kids from Yokohama going to hang out in Tokyo. That'd be a bit like some 12 year old American kids going to "hang out in Manhattan" - with no detailed plan, supervision, etc.

But largely socially emancipated at six years old? I don't think so. Maybe somewhere between 8 and 12, which is a few years younger than a lot of places, but nothing crazy.
Information Age: Congress Approves Broadband to Nowhere
Is this just a price thing, then? Or, perhaps, something more?

If Basecamp/Freskbooks were $25/year, would you rather pay for the entire year up front, or would you continue to pay monthly?

If you'd pay for the entire year up front, at what price do you consider it to be too much? Where's the crossover point for you?
You should read both of these items that make a case for going with a monthly charge instead of annual.

http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/blog/annual-credit-...

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/753-ask-37signals-how-do-...
In theory it does. And for simple things, it works great. I often find (and like the author, I assume this is because of my poor CSS skills) that I end up putting a div in a div in a div to achieve the look I'm going for; it's not in a table, but I've added presentation logic to my content, and would have saved 30 min just using a table.
...also - as far as legal action goes - that won't be needed. We only use frames on traffic we send to your site in order to maintain the user experience of our service. The frames allows us to hand you this traffic, to the original site without altering it, without affecting the ads that you serve, and without scraping any parts of it. We believe that's a very fair tradeoff, but if you still find the frames unacceptable just let us know and we'll promptly stop placing recommended links pointing to your site. Just drop me a note to galai [at] outbrain [dot] com and let me know.
Migration has, over thousands of years, been the most effective antipoverty program.

So yes, if you "can barely make ends meet" in a cold expensive place with no jobs, you should move to a warmer cheaper place with jobs. Steal bus fare, if you must.
To the best of my knowledge, such a salary spread in engineering would span different jobs with different job titles. Inside software engineering, you don't get promoted from Junior Software Developer to Architect by seniority. Heck, being a senior citizen doesn't even guarantee you a promotion to Senior Software Engineer. Outside of software engineering, only about 5% of people earning engineering degrees end up doing design work at all, so the work roles of different engineers can be very different.

You have a good point about retention in the early years, which is why I mentioned five years of experience. I also believe that the best teachers just keep getting better. However, among average teachers I couldn't tell much difference between the thirty-year-olds and the sixty-year-olds, except that the thirty-year-olds were better-looking and told better jokes. I had dozens of teachers and cared deeply about the performance of each one (me: valedictorian, mathlete, AP whore) so I expect I would have noticed the pattern if older teachers tended to be significantly better than younger ones.
My point is precisely that most state employees are not free to interpret law as they see fit. The rules defining hiring, retention, pay raises, etc., are written quite precisely across the board, not just for teachers. Trying to game the system is a breach of ethics, if not an outright crime.

I'm not trying to defend the public-sector model -- there are obvious inefficiencies, and many of the best potential hires would never even consider a government job for many of the same reasons you suggested. I'm just not sure how better to balance the need to be accountable to the taxpayers with the desire of administrators to pay their staff according to ability, not just seniority.
isn't Google covered by precedents, or at least their terms of service?
When I was landscaping, I offered a yearly rate which was a 10% discount. 15% of my customers took me up on it which gave me the money I needed my first year to buy equipment plus a little extra capital.

Just be sure to have a cancellation policy in place and cash on hand to not piss off already unhappy users.
Six Rules for Presidents
As an Italian who has left Italy in disgust several years ago, I have a hard time considering my country of origin to be a first world nation. Companies should be weary of doing business in Italy until the draconian laws there are revoked.
I worked in the electronics department of the Walmart in Moscow, ID one summer during college. I liked it much better than my previous (and first) job as a box boy at Albertsons. The pay was reasonable for someone of my age and ability, and helped to fund my college education.
Thanks for dropping by and joining in.

A few questions:

1. Do you request the content creator's permission before framing their site? I checked out Outbrain.com but it doesn't appear that you have any sort of submission form. I'm assuming you just index whatever sites you choose. I don't see any sort of opt-out form on your site either.

2. I understand that your model is based on getting recommendations from your users, and that you get those recommendations by framing people's sites so you can make the rating interface impossible to ignore. That's a decision on your end, not my problem as a content creator. You do not promote the brand you say, but you do promote your service and its ends.

3. As your model is based on a practice I find distasteful, I'm not sure why I'd want to install your widget.

4. What is your business model? Will you eventually sell advertising on the frames across the top of these sites once your widget is getting enough use?

5. Can you really not find a better way to engage users other than framing other people's content? Your reasoning here seems to boil down to "We can't think of a better way to do this."

I appreciate you coming in here and look forward to your responses. I don't see how a business based on framing other people's content is defensible though but I'm sure there's enough framers out there ready to prove me wrong.
As Alex mentions, unit sales is usually the best way to do this.

Have you benchmarked sales figures for similar products as a possible baseline?
RSA Encryption and Sign (by hand)
Yeah, sometimes people just miss it, or something... too bad, would have loved to see a discussion. Maybe I'll post it on my own blog to get it started - I had some thoughts about how this applies to high-level programming methodologies, like Agile Programming.
What guided Google's decision back in '98 was to deliver the most kickass search engine ever, the sooner the better (I guess). From that point to now it's a matter of perfectioning every single aspect of their creature, to ensure a great UX (therfore fidelization).

What makes a great UX? A clean UI, a fast service and possibly no hiccups (to make it very short). The UI has changed a lot from 98 to now (check out web.archive.org) and so did their HTML code. A single line HTML page is obviously a conscious decision and so is the inline CSS.

I don't know you, so I have no idea on your experience in this field, but when you get to deal with I'm not saying huge, but decent amount of users you simply have to deal with scalability under every single aspect. If you don't, chances are you end up delivering a crappy service OR you spend WAY more money (bandwidth, cpu power, etc) than you actually need to.

EDIT: google is obviously more than html and css, and if you really want to have an idea on how they are paranoid with performances you should check out their google app engine documentation.
"Hey aaron, what do you think of this comment on HN?" Sorry, I can't read it until tomorrow =/
I've not seen any of my links on your widget. I'm speaking in the hypothetical with the legal issues. I've yet to see a fast-growing service on the web that wasn't aggressively/cleverly taking advantage of other people's content. The legal issues around this are interesting to me, which is why I raise them. I've got no interest in suing anyone at the moment, merely hearing how people justify their practices.
This is exactly what puzzles me. I live in Minnesota and there is a TON of cheap land out there. A house on 10-20 acres of land for < $300k is pretty normal out in the country. In the 'burbs, you can buy a condo/townhome and pay for it on a waitress's salary & tips.

Hell, you can probably move to the middle of a desert in the Southwest and get more land cheaper. Just build your house underground.

There is simply no way you can get seaborne property cheaper than you can on dry land once you factor in building and maintenance costs.

[edit] You're right about the allodial title, but mortgages can be paid off quickly and taxes are actually useful for some things. Unless you're going to live by yourself on the ocean, there's going to be some form of "taxation" to handle common expenses...like protection from pirates as mentioned.
I'd add that 24 feels a bit old to me for the american number. I've been living on my own since I'm 18, and I started taking the city bus by myself to go around when I was 13 or so. This isn't exceptional at all among the people around me (Quebec).
list and dict are used for completely different reasons and have difference performance. are you perhaps a php programmer?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=463234
I'm sorry but I don't see how you can write an article comparing Tables to CSS and not mention Internet Explorer...not even once! In my experience, the only reason I've resorted to tables for layout is when I need to worry about IE compatibility (well, that and when I actually want a table).

This is also why the author's argument doesn't interest me in the slightest. Claiming that "all the popular sites" use tables is nothing more than an appeal to authority. Furthermore, it's a blind appeal since the author doesn't even consider the backwards compatibility logic in using tables.

If you're going to tell me why tables are better than CSS, then tell me why tables are better than CSS. Don't just show up to the argument with a bigger gun...
When I visited Japan, I remember these very young school kids getting on the subway by themselves. They were all wearing school uniforms with bright yellow hats and were holding hands when they went on the subway together. One of them also had this "emergency" alarm she could pull if something went wrong.
UberVu on you - monitoring social networks
Agreed, but you forgot a 4th sentence to summarize:

"CSS is floating DIV tags, that's it."

The author ought to take the time to discover why tables are not used for anything but data display by the so-called "purists".
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet not for some raging group of evangelists pushing the "right" way to do something. The movement that utilizes this tool is about implementing standards, following rules, and building a more semantic web. DIV is not semantic. Regardless of if you are a designer or developer, first understand XHTML/HTML... certainly before you write about it.

Beyond that, why let the big guys be your standard. iGoogle is no modern marvel of web design or development.
I'm guessing the same guy who built the backend of Google finance was tasked with the front; logically he/she would approach that in the fastest way they know. Also note that tables are intended for data. What's finance? Data. They'd better be using tables... just not for layout.
See, I'd be annoyed if I saw that on one of my sites.

And I understand I could be in the minority here with this discussion. It's good to hear the counter-argument from people who organize, scrape, and aggregate other people's content.

And I ask in part because my main project right now is an aggregator. There are a whole host of practices that would help from a business standpoint that I have questions about, like framing.
Age 24?!?

Urban teens in the US often take public transit on their own to school or other destinations. Suburban teens (~16+) often drive themselves wherever they want to go, sometimes in a car they effectively own themselves.

Even younger children sometimes also take unaccompanied public transit trips, especially in smaller, more family-oriented cities and towns, or in groups. Children under 10 in many places walk or ride bicycles on their own to school, stores, and events.
Apparently one of Google's lawyers was arrested in Italy.
https://www.privacyassociation.org/index.php?option=com_cont...
Just hope you don't lose (or lose access to) the university textbook :)
The same as in any other job: we rely on the honesty, skill, and self-interest of their bosses and peers. Honest and accurate evalution of performance is the signal, stupidity and bias is the noise. Somehow, though it's pretty frickin' amazing when you think about it, people who are chosen, guided, and evaluated by biased, flawed, mostly stupid human beings manage to treat disease, build bridges, publish newspapers, maintain sewage systems, and do everything else required to keep society going.

I mean, I work in a vast and faceless corporate bureaucracy driven by the most idiotic politics imaginable, but when I think back to my favorite teachers from high school, they got a raw deal compared to me. Even though I got laid off my first job because of the dot-com bust. Even though I left my last job because of an abusive boss. Even though my review process is cookie-cutter and somewhat divorced from reality. It would have been better than having no opportunity to differentiate themselves from the stupid, lazy, coasting teachers who climbed right up the pay scale with them. Heroic, good, average, bad, and sleepwalking, they all have the same job title and same pay all the way to retirement -- it's no wonder teaching isn't respected as a profession.
I grew up in Moscow, Russia, and was taking the bus and subway by myself from quite an early age; I left there at 10, so it must have been several years before then.

(I know it's not Japan, but wanted to point out that this was done even in what some might consider to be a western-yet-scary part of the world.)
Are Tweets Crashing Web Sites?
I think the sad thing is that there are spoiled teenagers in America who don't truly become independent until well into their twenties. But that's like rumors of America's obesity - yes, there may be a problem there, but we aren't literally drowning in basement-dwelling twenty year olds or other people's flab.
Arrested? They aren't talking about any arrest on that article
He references Google finance. Google finance only uses tables for tabular data, not layout which goes against his own point....

I completely think this is cheer leading for anti-CSS trolls.
Paris rejects 'Obama-style' stimulus program
In some of those cases, the practice is just as shady. In others, not as much.

I don't use an RSS reader personally and never will. I visit the sites I like so they can recoup advertising views from me reading the stories they paid real money to professionals to write.

I also don't like how RSS readers make every story look the same no matter where it comes from. It loses personality.

I think newspapers are partly in their current situation because they didn't sue the pants off Google or charge for their sites to be spidered 10 years ago, before the public grew comfortable with the practice. Google got all their data for free.

If I'm expected to pay Twitter for use of their API, surely I could have been expected to pay the NYTimes to spider their site and store local copies of all their content.
Still waiting on a URL detailing how...
just when my new startup is starting to look for capital :-)
There is more than one axis on which coffee shops compete,

Absolutely. I live about 7 miles from the nearest town, 30 miles or so from the nearest big city (Minneapolis). I would love a quiet, sit-down coffeeshop that had good coffee, tea, (and yes, cocoa :-) and pastries along with WiFi. I have no problem paying a small hourly fee for the WiFi or better yet an hourly drink minimum.

It's nice living on a farm in the middle of nature, but sometimes I want a different environment and I don't want to go all the way into the city or large suburb to find it. I'm sure there are many around here with a similar wish.
Well, yes, there are anti-cancer medications that have been used in clinical trials with great results, but fail the novelty test. If something is an OTC generic with an expired patent, its a little hard to get the genie out of the bottle. As long as they're not strictly encouraging the purpose of drug purchase to treat the "novel" discover, its legal, even if they copy your "applicator", dosage information, etc.

The big scramble to re-purpose drugs is while they're still patented by one manufacturer. Once someone like Mylan is manufacturing it as a generic, doing research for "novel" forms is only helping your competition.
Ask HN: How do you determine which project you should work on?
I normally do the classic pro/con list (sometimes only to ignore the result and do whatever pleases me the most) but i would like to know the approach(es) other people take.