skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My mind has change!

I was Div-only and now I think mixing Tables and Div can be good, even preferable.

"One of the problems with criticising CSS is that it's very hard to write good CSS, so pointing out problems with CSS begs the question of whether this is an indictment of CSS or one's coding ability. The problem is particularly pernicious for layout. (One indication of this is how many CSS layout tutorials there are on the web.)"

This sealed it. The tool should the servant, not a thing that always trying to learn more about. Anything that really is inherently hard to use is bad, plain bad. There's no excuse. Things that are until you learn something can be great.

I've done complicate layout in CSS and the process of trying to make it work never got easier or clearer. At a certain point, you have to say "this is just a bad way to do things".

It would be nice if CSS/html somehow added objects which had the virtues of both Divs and tables. BUT I now realize that design mantra "never use tables, always use divs" was just ideological nonesense. Not that I would always use a table but I will certainly consider both options from now on

I realize now that one of the truly evil aspect of divs is that they keep you from having localized object on your page. Want to guarantee that you will have three column on your page, good friggin' luck.
> I hope the Democrats will follow suit, or that Congress will put up a general API.

The worst thing would be if the Dems followed suit, but using a different API. Yuck.
The transition that I went through was a team of 4 dev team + 4 leadership folks blow up into 18 tech + 5 leadership. It was more than 400% growth and happened in a matter of 20 days.

This was a team within a larger company but highly focused and close-knit, pretty much like an independent start-up. The 4 ppl team had existed pretty much from the beginning as long as 18 months and working 12-16 hrs and with a great attitude for a game changing concept within the company known for its culture.

When things had just started getting stable and these 4 ppl were looking for an advancement and not really keen on a more balanced life, the leadership decided to bring 18 more ppl into the team: few freshers and many managers/tech folks from another team whose business had just got shut down.

Worse the initial 4 ppl were made to report to these new ppl who had not even transitioned well into the business and team dynamics. Worse they turned out into bad managers - micro managing or may be we felt so as we knew more than them at that point of time.

3/4 of the initial team quit in a span of next 3 months. 50% of the new team too felt highly uncomfortable and moved on elsewhere. A huge code base, business knowledge and a great culture was taken down all in a span of 3-4 months. It took them many more months to get back in shape.

During my last week (the second one to quit, by now the team size too had come down to 10 tech + 4 leadership), the top leadership involved themselves to reason out:

- Growth should never be sudden, it should give enough time and resources for the team to ramp up the new member and the new member to get into the skin of the team.

- When people stop growing (not the growth in numbers), the organization stops growing. This was referring to the initial 4 people being bogged down by managers who were inserted into the ladder and who couldn't deliver. As much as possible grow your own people first.

- Leadership team had stopped connecting with the initial team suddenly. This disconnect created a sense of distrust and pseudo-hatred against the management (and kiddish enough against few of the new team members too.) Essentially the team was not prepared mentally for this growth and leadership did little help.

edit: added another reason
Have you tried Ritalin?
My summation of the american economy and workplace in general: The worst elements of centralized communism cross-bred with the worst elements of half-baked capitalism. Both of his stories illustrate this point.

Right now we need something akin to the futurist spirit of italy (minus the fascism) to drive us forward and rid ourselves of the past (and probably minus the part where we throw out everything old merely because it is old so really I digress entirely. not really.).

On a positive note I find a lot of that spirit in the startup/hacker community which is why I stick around despite working for a corporation in hopes of one day "starting up".
You're missing the point. Yes, it's a common case in that it occurs frequently, but it is not a typical case in that it is characteristic of the whole set.

That is my problem with it, as stated for the third time. His conclusion reaches far beyond what his carefully selected evidence supports.
That is the most pungent bullshit I've read in months.
So, if I get it right you've crossed 'adwords/adsense' with 'ebay' ? Interesting!

I'm quite curious how high the effective CPM is of your usage of screen real estate vs other advertising networks. Since the items are 'relevant' it could be quite high, but initially you might be left with more inventory than you can sell.

Shipping seems to be USA only, you may want to limit your 'ads' to the region that the seller is willing to ship to.
Mod up parent
This gives the best critique of divs I've read. And till this morning, I favored divs as an approach
Being the only or being the first of a type is a minor factor in ultimate success. If the idea/market is good, it will support multiple offerings.

So whenever discovering a real or potential competitor, learn from what they do well if you can, but don't be discouraged.
Yes they are cutting off other search analytic packages. If there is no tracking of the search term in the referring url then the analytics package has no way to determine what keywords were used to bring a user to the page.

Since google provides one of the most commonly used analytics packages, Google Analytics, and owns another, Urchin, I would think that they would be the last ones to try this.
Yeah...eventually ill will catches up with you because even the judges think you're an asshole. Don't shit where you eat.
I would recommend "The IT/Digital Legal Companion", which discusses the things to think about and provides some sample licenses:

http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Legal-Companion-Comprehensive-...

...followed by a review by a real lawyer. :)
I'm actually refactoring our marketing site, and most of the the work is done in CSS stylesheets. I sometime edit the markup to change classes or add the occasional <div>.

What I gain from CSS is that I can easily play with the layout and get a feel of what works best.

I also code by hand. I guess table-base layout would be easier to experiment with using a wysiwyg editor.
Hmmm. I'm not seeing this new "feature" when I search Google. I've turned on Javascript, I'm accepting Google cookies, I've even logged in. And I still see the usual http://www.google.com/search?q=ajax+crap results URL. I'm running Firefox 3.0.5.

Anyone know what triggers the new search results?
Help Stop Copyright Madness on Youtube
In Motorola Earnings, Signs of Industry in Change
Programmer == backend html // designer = AI/PS/CSS cutter, and css writer

When I view source csszengarden this is what I see:
<div id="intro">
<div id="pageHeader">
<h1>
<h2><acronym>

<div id="quickSummary">
<p class="p1"><acronym>
<p class="p2">
<div id="premable">
<h3>
<p class="p1">
<p class="p2">
<p class="p3">

<div id="supportingText">
etc etc. And it goes on.

All I see are information grouped by content. The ids, and class tags describe the information. The paragraphs are ordered p1,p2,p3, because for them to make sense they have to be in that order.

Page header, quick summary and preamble are all items that belong to an introduction.

I think it's great.
We are just getting ready to launch so I'm not sure what the "effective CPM" will be vs other ad networks but I hope it will be high:) That's a good point about shipping. thanx
That's good news. Anyone who doesn't have competitors isn't in a very good market.

My start-up has a dozen competitors, ranging from start-ups to billion dollar conglomerates.
Since when does IBM have low prices?
Yes they have the right. No they don't owe me anything (save the service I pay them to provide, which is moot to this discussion).

But it is my trust and they can still lose it. The fact is that I believe this to be shady, and for a company whose motto is "Don't be evil", they raise the standard for trusting them. A standard which I don't believe they are meeting.
Yea, I'm a co-founder for the site. It's an "auction ads" site that is self-contained (doesn't use ebay auctions or other auction data). We've got multiple sizes for ads (like adsense) and we're using a highly-cached architecture to serve up the auction ads (typical for ad-serving sites). We use linux servers, memcache for avoiding DB calls, apache, php, mysql, ... The normal stuff. :) We also crawl websites on demand for finding context-sensitive auctions to serve-up similar to adwords. Most of the crawling and text analysis stuff is done in perl.
See how there's a hash mark # in there now, and the "q=test" is after it? The problem is that web browsers don't send anything after the # in the referrer string.

I wonder why they don't send it in referrer string. Are there any technical or security reasons?
Founders really need to stop using misspellings for the name of their companies.

Number 1, people are going to have a harder times finding your site. This is somewhat mitigated by Google's technology around suggesting seatch terms, but not totally.

Number 2, you will have to spend five minutes explaining your name to every potential investor, customer, and even your friends, just so they know what your proper name is. That doesn't leave any time for what you should be delivering - your elevator pitch.

Number 3, it suggests you aren't very creative. Saying that all the good domain names are taken just isn't true. I've bought a number of good domain names in the past couple of years, none of which have been misspellings.

Use real words people.
...disputed claim that people who deny the suitability of CSS for layout are just invariably incompetent. That's an excuse.

It's worse than an excuse. It's ignoring one basic fact. One of the best things of HTML as it was understood ten or fifteen years ago was that a lot of people (to say "everyone" would be an exageration) could write it even with a text editor. This is a part of the "democracy" of the Internet.

I think that a steep learning curve or 500+ pages standards are not a good idea for this medium.

The guy of the story about Mathematica was right in one thing: it's not good that writing graphics stuff is so difficult and "beaurocratic". There is a bunch of aficionados that take every chance to create what now is still reserved to programmers or designers because the tools have a shitty usability.
And yet, somehow, with the worst of all possible economic systems, we have created the richest country on the planet.

Strange, that.
They aren't obfuscating the information, they're removing it altogether. As an analytics provider, you cannot 'bugfix' a lack of information. You're just hosed.

Probably what would have to happen is for the browsers to allow for passing data after # symbols the same way they do after ? symbols. That means updating every major browser to support this. At the speed of browser development, many analytics providers may be out of business by the time that happens.
Ahh, I stand corrected. This is what I get for only reading half the article.

Yeah, sucky problem. I guess we'll have to wait for Firefox 5 and IE 10 to have support for hashtags in referrals.

EDIT: My point still stands that Google shouldn't be beholden to others for their technological/business decisions. Though of if it's deliberate it certainly tightrope-walks the "Don't be Evil" line.
We have bought some other domains that we've mapped to the site, but of all of the ones we bought, bidboxr.com seems to be the most popular by informal surveys. others that map to the site are: powrads.com, compelature.com, bidboxr.net, bidboxr.org
That's not true. One of the products my team has built is a "white-label" syndication system for our content. We built that driven by CSS because it's the only way to drastically change the look and feel without touching the JSPs. We currently have at least 30 or so different looks for the same outputted HTML. As long as you attach classes/IDs everywhere and do it intelligently you can do all sorts of funky overrides (learn selectors!) to change the way the pages render and seriously never touch the HTML.

You can't radically change the flow of the pages but that's not the point.

The other area where CSS driven design makes things easier is debugging or experimenting with the look and feel of the page using Firebug. It's alot easier if all of your positioning and layout is set via IDs and CSS classes because I can go in and modify properties, add properties, etc. without needing to change CSS files or edit the document inline (it's much easier to modify CSS than inline style settings). Tables make this harder to do because tables are a pain in CSS with regard to which elements take specific CSS elements.

I'm not a CSS zealot but once you learn CSS properly (and it seriously doesn't take much time if you just focus on it a bit and find someone good to mentor with a bit) it makes things so much easier, especially if you're using the same generated code across different sites requiring different look and feels.
I love writing, I don't necessarily love the concept of being an author. Book tours, having to pay 100% of everything from my own benefits to my own pension, etc.

I want to get published, not because I love the job but because I love writing. I spend hours a day writing, and then when I'm doing other things it's still running through my mind and I'll end up writing notes down or grabbing a pad at 2am and writing down an idea I had while sat on the toilet.

I'm sure most coders on here do their job because they love to code not necessarily because they love their job.
Don't Blame CSS For Your Incompetence
This might actually be more useful in the long run. To me this says that Republicans are trying to show their tech saavy and trying to capture some of the good karma that the Democrats have doned of late in their gestures towards technology and open information.

Having the parties competing on this would be wonderful. It'd be like market effects on the web-ization of government information. Were this just a single political initiative coming from whatever agency it'd be a surefire bitrot target, but if the Republicans and Democrats start trying to one-up each other for political ends, we might see things evolve in a more interesting direction.

Politics seems to be most effective when it's trying to win something. ;-)
In the case of web browsers, we don't even SEE the stuff that comes after the #

So it's not like putting "@someone" instead of "#someone" but rather like putting "" instead of "#someone"

See the difference+
Typical IBM - always promises, never delivers!
Google Internet Bus brings Internet experience to offline Indian communities
When you say "small business" I think you mean "small local retail business". My (theoretical) small, virtual consulting business is not who you're targeting.
Domains are expensive... it is a shame. But I do agree that sometimes misspellings are hard. Kinda reminds me of when FaceBook was TheFaceBook.com... boy that was annoying.
They don't owe you that information, sure it's nice I guess...

In any event, the only way I can think to do this with an ajax search is to pass every outgoing link click through a redirection script, so that the referrer is rewritten to something useful.

However, whilst improving things for webmasters, that would seriously negate the point of using ajax, and be a pain for end users.

Google are serving their end users. I don't think trust comes into it TBH.

What would you rather google do? not progress and use ajax search, or use a redirection and make a worse experience for end users?
Google is a business who wants you to use their analytical service over others. They have no obligation to you send you the information their users are using to find your site.
Normalized evil? Sounds like one of the databases I have to interface with...
> So they're saying you always have a phone with you?

If my phone isn't in my hand, it's in my pants. If I'm not wearing pants, it's on the end-table of my bed, where I assumably am as well. So yes.
It changed my mind too. As for only now realising that tables really are the only easy way to do it, I guess partly we've come to accept that the web is broken thanks to IE, so it doesn't stand out as odd that layout is hard with CSS.
I read the whole interesting article before noticing that the author is currently affiliated with MIT.
i hope this comment speaks for most.

In a perfect world, CSS is awesome.

tables are good, except when it comes to a point when you have to start nesting tables within each other to format your your layout.

explanation is below:
---------------------------

people who love tables would switch over to CSS if it did what everyone(and standards) makes it out to be and actually worked and/or rendered the same in ALL browsers (css hacks don't count as css)

but no matter what you say about CSS....(and i'm all for CSS) ...CSS can't solve all design issues...and if it can...it takes way to long to figure out... and if only a 10 year veteran/css master can implement flawless layouts then CSS isn't a practical language.

in theory is CSS is awesome!

i use tables for tables (tabular data)
and i use CSS to layouts and comesic design.

think about it...if CSS rendered the same way in every browser abiding by CSS standards ...even developers who are pro tables...would switch over.

the reason why there is such conflict between tables and CSS is because many of people have tried CSS countless number of times and hours trying to make their template/layout work...however they've came across so many road blocks ...they give up.

i'm not saying tables are the ultimate design language...and i think people agree....they just use it because it works. in ALL browers!

but me say ONE LAST THING!

its not CSS the language that is problem....is the number of browsers that choose not to render CSS properly.
I used to work at a major financial institution that spent $300 million/year on IT projects. It had money to throw at every technical problem (until recently), but ultimately many of the challenges were never solved because of the mismatch between the finance areas and the IT organizations. Basically the "culture" of each side of the company was completely different: technology people didn't know finance and finance guys didn't understand the technology.

So it seems one of the biggest culture challenges is figuring out a way to meld together people with different occupational backgrounds. If the executives at the company knew that, they might have been able to find a way to get each side to respect the skills of their counterparts.
You're always welcome to create an account =)
The reason people make a big deal out of it, is that people are claiming that you can use CSS to separate semantic content from the presentation, when that is not 100% possible with current design of HTML/CSS. It's not really an argument about what floats were designed to do, it's a reaction to the purist argument that layout shouldn't be in the HTML. Perhaps that's a bit of straw man, since, as you say, it's obviously false. However, there is a bit of confusion out there resulting from people arguing HTML can be kinda like XML, and CSS can handle all of the layout. It's not a good position to argue, because HTML is a primarily a presentation language, in addition to offering a few opportunities to sneak in some semantic metadata.

At least people aren't using JS to move everything around on the page any more. That really sucked.
thanks that is the feedback i needed; it seems when an online community resonates with you this misleads you to think they would get anything you say. its a kind of projected myopia.
Executive Editor of NYTimes on business models, etc
Just a note: there's no indication as to location or onsite/offsite. Those things are both pretty important.
The following quote made me decide to post to HN:

"A lot of people in the news business, myself included, don't buy as a matter of theology that information "wants to be free." Really good information, often extracted from reluctant sources, truth-tested, organized and explained — that stuff wants to be paid for."
thanks - i think im gonna cry

:>
The problem with the Linux community is those who write LHB off as a troll... Pretty much everything he (or she!) says is bang on.
This is a great idea, and has the potential to take off very quickly. One thing you might want to do is seed your site with a bunch of merchandise. Find an interested party with some cheap stuff to unload (like woot.com) and offer to help them move inventory.

You need to get scale first, and you need lots of sources before you'll get lots of products. At then end of the day you are selling affiliate revenue to website owners, so I would focus your message on that, and attempt to stuff the product pipeline with some choice partnerships, until you get enough affiliate sites to drive product.
Hopefully they will cap processor utilization of background apps so they still work without sucking power.
I tend to be the same way, and I think that simply having an awareness that you're dominating the conversation is a big first step. What are some techniques that you use to stop yourself from stomping over everybody else, at least verbally?
I'm pro-CSS as well, but the OP made a great point. There are many important bugs in the implementation that stop us from completely separating content from presentation, yet it's the platform with largest userbase, and all that causes. Loads of viewers competing against each other, add-ons, Javascript, tons of different technologies with the same purpose, and it gets really hard to standardize anything in this environment.
I believe in the W3C. I think we need a better way to separate content from presentation, and we need less permissive standards, but that also make it easy for less techy people to use the Web. And the most used browser is incredibly buggy. So it's a mess.
I would like to use CSS instead of tables, but CSS is not quite perfect yet.
Many of the comments seem to assume that websites are entitled to know what I searched for. I think that it would be a great step to give millions of people a little more privacy, even if it's just an accidental side effect of a change to Ajax.
It seems odd that you would redesign the logo and homepage of an online store without considering any quantitative measurement. For example, how does changing the background to purple and showing less content "above the fold" affect conversion rates? Instead, the only criterion for success this author mentions is that "the client loved it".

Here's an alternative... rather than hiring one expensive artist who will make something pretty, get several cheap logos from a site like 99designs, and A/B test to see what actually works.
One thing I noticed that I think is really cool is that the first bid starts the auction clock. Not sure if the other "big boys" do that, because I don't use them, but great idea nonetheless.

Something else I noticed though is that in the satisfaction guarantee, you mention that you, Bidboxr, will refund the purchase price if it's not what they expected. I see that lasting about two weeks before you run out of money. If you really want to set yourselves apart with a satisfaction guarantee, you may want to look at some sort of escrow service instead.

Just my two cents.
A New Way to Watch the Recovery
Unfortunately there are very few real words or even real word combinations that are not registered.

Clever misspellings have been a solution to that problem.

What do you propose as an alternate solution?
Creative Ways to Use a Server (Asterisk, HPC, and other)