skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I meant this by reading http://www.csszengarden.com/zengarden-sample.html not reading the html markup

But you started that part of you message with

> The HTML won't make any sense if you start reversing it

?

> If CSS Zen Garden was truly mixing presentation with content, you wouldn't be able to read that link above as easily as you can.

I'm sorry, but using wrapper divs for purely presentational purposes is mixing presentation and content. The whole concept has to do with how the code is written.
Sometimes the invisible hand gives you the finger; I'm willing to wager that in a lot of these cases you end up with massive barriers to entry, and so once a company gets shuttered or pushed out competitively it will take years and years before a suitable replacement appears.

Not that I have any good ideas on how to make the subject better.
Someone on my local craigslist is selling MSI Wind netbooks with a dual boot, windows/OS X install.

So they may be on to something.

I suspect it's the iPhone effect at work; you get an iPhone and then you discover that you need a Mac to get the most out of it; macs cost a fair bit of actual cash, a hackintosh can be built in an evening. The only major cost is your ethical values.
TweetValue - How much is your Twitter profile worth?
You obviously didn't look at the API. It's just factual information (comittees, voting history, etc.) about Republican congress members. Failing technical errors, that will be accurate.

I'm anything but a Republican, but I hate when there's a seriously cool effort made by the Republicans that everyone here immediately jumps into a negative tone and tries to find things wrong with it. That's even pettier than the stuff about trying to read policy into a robots.txt file. I'd love to see the parties battling each other out on information openness.
You don't know what you're talking about. "center_column" illustrates that. You're still pretending that floats are tables, which they are not and never were intended to be. That's my point, and it went way over your head.
Saying "CSS is a better solution than Tables for reasons [X,Y,Z] but it is at the cost of a higher learning curve," is much different than saying "CSS is a better solution than Tables for reasons [X,Y,Z] but you're too incompetent to understand."

CSS layout problems are not why so many people use Flash. Flash has popularity because for pure designers working in a GUI on a canvas where you can pixel place every item with drag-and-drop is natural and taught in school.

As for examples, the article calls out the canonical CSS layout example site made specifically for this purpose years ago: http://csszengarden.com/
I'll be first to comment on this.

Seems pretty lame... must be a straight metric of followers and followees, right? What is the point of websites like this? Just a giant advert? How much money do you reckon "Jonas Lejon" has made from that big banner at the top?
500 Rupees is $10, not $100: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&...
Does this extend to not selling your product to, or marketing to, assholes? I can see "don't have assholes as repeat/contract-based clients" as obvious, but what about "don't have assholes as one-time customers?" If you never have to deal with them again, does it matter?
Not really. People who see technology as one tool in a toolbox full of tools.

When all you have is a hammer, and all that...
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/upa-woos-young-voters-with-rs-500...
This Thing Is Better Than That Other Thing
New iPhone handsets in June, background tasks, and more
I was hoping that the article would be "build your own ladder" or something.
"the palace"

Heh.

I can't agree more with your characterization. I work for a company whose main office is overseas, and almost every single dealing with the central office (especially if any work on their part is involved) is encountered with a "let them eat cake" attitude. You get used to the idea that they don't think any of the satellite offices exist.
The violent reaction has largely been to the reflexive downmodding. I could understand that comment being at -1 or -2, but it was at -10 soon after my second response - that seems fairly unreasonable, so I deduced there was some of what you called "reflexive downvoting" going on.

I call it lynch mob behaviour and I despise it. I'm quite happy to make it my personal crusade to fight that sort of group behaviour, which brings out the worst in all of us.

For the record, I would have had the same reaction if it wasn't me that had made the first couple of heavily downvoted posts (in fact, I have in the past).
Insightful (non-trolling) criticism of Linux
Ask HN: How do I write a software license?
I need to choose (or write) a license for a piece of commercial software. I wonder if anyone here have some experience, ressources or good advice?

Are there some commmon boilerplate licenses I can find and copy, or do I need to write one from scratch? Can I write one myself, or do I need a lawyer to do it? Can I just write something in plain language, or do it have to be WITH CAPITAL LETTERS AND IN UNREADABLE LEGALESE to be valid?

The conditions I need are fairly ordinary - the software is licensed per user, but I want it to be freely usable for tryout and educational purposes.
Easy!

dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1M count=1024 | pv | dd of=1GB.bin
> I realize that css isn't the best language in the world. But if it was intuitive to write css forwards and backwards regardless of document flow -- this wouldn't be a discussion topic. The question is the amount of time invested to learn it.

Quite right. The argument, as I see it, is that it's much more practical to use the best cross-platform tool for the job, which in many cases is tables and not CSS. He's arguing that it's not worth the time.

> at least one follows a clear stated goal -- html describes the content, css draws the presentation.

This isn't even close to CSS Zen Garden's stated goal. Its goal is to show what is possible to do using CSS. It's goal is to be "A demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based design." There's nothing about content/presentation separation anywhere on the site.

> but at least at the core we can see that HTML is purely being used to describe the content

That's certainly not what I see at all, especially at CSS Zen Garden, if that's what you're still referring to here.

> Allowing _enough_ separation required for programmers to be nearly clueless of a designer's job.

If you mean programmer == HTML, and designer == CSS, then this is simply wrong.
"It's all TCP/IP", really?

http://blogmaverick.com/2009/01/27/the-great-internet-video-...
A Google referrer doesn't do the trick. It's a cookie thing. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460294
> Look at the headings. They're really beautiful. How do I do that in CSS? I can't. They are images.

But really, the whole point is that they _are_ doing that in CSS. The images are defined in CSS; no "img" tags here. Browsers (and bots) that don't have that CSS support gracefully degrade to indexable text.

The headings are also nothing special. Just the "Zapfino" font pre-rendered. You could use CSS today and get it to work on every computer that has that font installed (every Mac and iPhone, to name a few), or if the browser has more experimental CSS support, you can render any custom font (with an open license) by specifying a path to the font online. But alas, most browsers do not support this, and we developers use sIFR instead.

> To really demonstrate CSS you'd need to take all those style sheets and apply them to a different HTML document and see if they still looked good. No one has done that experiment (and I suspect no one will) but I predict the results would not look nearly as good.

That's not the point of CSS.
So what you're saying is that the headline was misleading. It led you into expecting to be misled, but since it was not misleading, your expectation never realised - so you were misled.
The Intelligent File Format: Bootstrapping, Self Documenting, Portable Files
They are actually not that easier to use. More intuitive perhaps, but they have enough quirks on their own.

I briefly taught a web design class and I remember students struggling with their table-based layouts. Layouts would be inconsistent from one page to the next because of content stretching the cells, and they could never figure out why dimensions set on a table or cell would be ignored by the browser.
I suggest you to go for the lawyer, a good and skilled lawyer who understands software licensing issues.
Does it scale well past 2 people talking? Seems like that could get difficult to show on screen.

It's certainly quite fun, but not sure if it's more useful.
The History of Python: Early Language Design and Development
Just wow. I'm really starting to anti-trust Google.
IBM is the Walmart of the consulting world - they'll do anything to ensure their prices are the lowest. In a few years, they're going to consist of one guy in New York forwarding mail to the other hundred thousand in India.
Reminds me of H-B situational leadership theory (with the client analogous to one's "followers", and "willingness to perform" analogous to assholery; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hersey-Blanchard_situational_th...) You want a client in the R4 or R2 performance readiness level, are willing to put up with an R3, and don't want to deal with R1s (no one does; unlike R1 employees, R1 clients aren't worth the investment.)
Ask HN: Whats the most popular web scripting language?
A recent discussion with one of my coworkers inspired me to do some research about what is the most used language for building web sites. My claim was that there are more web sites out there right now written in PHP than any other single language. I haven't been able to find any evidence or comparisons on just programming languages and the web though.

Does anyone have any good links to research? Does anyone know the answer? I have $1 riding on PHP and I'm looking to collect!
I actually don't think they'll beat me, but their established user base does create just yet another set of obstacles for my company. Fortunately, I have a solid business model where they appear to have none at all. As an early stage startup, I can't see them being able to weather the economic storm for long without any clear revenue stream.
wtf? Vagina hacking?
> CssZenGarden also shows that refactoring a CSS-driven site is easier since you can do it without changing your templates.

In my experience, this just doesn't happen in the real world.
very good solution thanks! anyone knows of something similar for Windows ?
Sharpening Your Skills: Career & Life Balance
The Verizon fios phone service also dies if the electricity goes out.

Old fashioned land lines often continue to work when the power is out.
For some reason, the "if your peeler ever breaks" sentiment feels attached to the "made of ... plastic" one. It would never occur to me to worry about a "scrap metal" peeler breaking.
Corporate versions with security and active directory authentication.
Rich text, images, spreadsheets in a paid-for version.
Branded versions to include in your own site.

Since it generally requires at least two people who need to communicate then at least one of them is likely to be prepared to pay.It's not just an eyeballs=advert web2.0 thing.
Clickpass (acquired) recruiting salaried "co-founder" to build Clickpass II
I can think of two exceptions that support the rule:

Very impersonal transactions: say you're running a kiosk, and a guy comes up to buy a candy bar, and you recognize him from college, but know he's an asshole. You can still sell him that candy bar.

Smaller of two assholes: there will be times when you will have to deal with an asshole to avoid an even bigger asshole. Then it's fine; it's a life skill to be able to deal with difficult people.
It just sits there saying "connecting..."
So does that mean no other user online, or my Javascript is broken, or my net connections is down, or they are slashdotted, or what?
Let me try a different class name and a more thorough example.

<div class="article">
<div class="author">
John Q. Public
</div>
<div class="text">
Some text goes here.
</div>
<div class="date">
February 3rd, 2009
</div>
</div>

To me, this looks like an abstract thing. It says that an article consists of an author, text, and a date. The stylesheet should take care of rendering these elements in any layout the designer implemented inside that sheet. If the rendering breaks just because author goes to the end of the list, the abstraction leaks. It means that (author, text, date) is an article, but (text, date, author) is not.
Ask YC: Feedback for our new startup
The site is bidboxr.com

We're getting ready to launch and since I've enjoyed so many of the articles posted here I thought it would be great to get some feedback from the YC community.

Bidboxr.com is a unique blend of online advertising and online auctions. Instead of simply providing a site where sellers list items and bidders bid on those items, we've created an interactive ad banner that bring auctions to the bidders.

One of our major goals when we created bidboxr.com was to provide online entrepreneurs/startups with a profitable source of revenue. Think of it like Google's adwords/adsense model, but we're using interactive auctions instead of static ads. The auctions are relevant to the content of the page, so it's designed to draw users who are interested in that particular content. Imagine reading a blog post about a digital camera and looking at an ad on the side of the page showing an image of the exact same camera on sale and closing in 10 minutes for $50 with a big 'BID NOW' button beneath it. If you're interested in running an ad on your site simply sign up, add a few lines of code and when someone bids from your site you earn money.

I've started to do a few "pre-launch" marketing tests to see which method would bring in the most users - so we've already started to see some sellers listing items. If you have anything you'd like to list or know anyone who might want to list some items - I'll remove all listing fees from anyone that list anything over the next few days.

Thanx!
Really? I mean how much should they hold themselves back in order to maintain support for other products?

I know they're huge, but it's still a free product/service, they shouldn't have to retard their progress to avoid breaking other products. If they decided to stop supporting IE (while potentially bad business) I'd support their right to do so.

What exactly do they owe you?
If this is true, then the CSS spec is bad. You should not have to require scripting to position elements. Period. If you do, then it shouldn't be called CSS, it should be called CSS/JS or some other merged acronym.

I've spent many hours tweaking a design with CSS and javascript to replicate what would have been a simple table layout. There are just somethings that CSS isn't good at, for example, it's bad a fluid column layouts. Particularly where you want to have a vertical alignment of a block line up with the bottom of the longest column. (I probably didn't explain that well...) I'm not aware of any CSS that can handle this well w/o javascript.
Thanks for the great advice. Its easy to lose sight of this simple fact when you're juggling so much at once, but this absolutely makes sense.
No, they're not. It's not like they're deliberately obfuscating the information in order to shut everybody else out. They've made a technology decision which will probably significantly speed up searches and result in increased revenues for them. Google shouldn't be beholden to other people's business models.

That said, given the amount of referrals that Google generates, and how important referral information is for a lot of things online, as a courtesy Google should probably communicate this to the web-at-large before rolling it out on a massive scale. However, they're not "cutting off" other search analytic packages. At worst they're forcing a rushed bugfix.
Seems like a direct response to the Obama election team and administration's use of the Internet and technology over recent months. In the short-term it's not going to win them any votes, but it's good for the GOP brand and setting up infrastructure and increasing awareness for later higher-profile campaigns in an area where the Democrats are seen to dominate them.

It's amazing how much competition stimulates progress.
The one thing, I don't understand. You say "Think of us as Getsatisfaction/UserVoice for small businesses."

But small businesses are all over Getsatisfaction.

So what's different about FeedbackJar?
I never thought of that, good point. The recursiveness of this whole thing is giving me a headache. No more self-referential headlines!
These show Java as being more popular than PHP, but it's not limited to the web:

http://langpop.com/

In any case, though, it's very likely one of those two. If you're just looking at the number of sites rather than how big each one is, I'd put my money on PHP too. Then I'd go buy a Rails book with my earnings:-)
It took me all of 5 minutes to learn how to use tables back in oh... '94 or so, I remember the tutorial by some lady working for the fledgling netscape corporation.

To this date - and I don't think I qualify as stupid - I haven't fully grokked the css way of doing layout, there is always the little 'clear' or some other detail that keeps me from getting it right in one go. CSS works, but it is harder than it should be, the idea of something new superceding something older is that it is better and easier to use at the same time.

If CSS was really that great we wouldn't be having these debates, people would have switched en masse years ago and the 'table' tag would have been deprecated. I think any such attempt by w3c would be met with a fairly serious revolt.
CSS frameworks are great way to get the job done quickly, with no need to worry about the different browsers and their issues.

CSS extermists will tell you how using those frameworks is evil, lame, etc. I think the problem is that web developers feel threatened of loosing their jobs (gigs), since regular Joe Sixpack can now go and create a decent looking website in XHTML/CSS with minimal effort.
I particularly like that the first one uses a single table for layout.

If you're reading the page's source, you'll also find this eternal wisdom: "Fact: Chuck Norris hates layout tables!"
This probably means there's an incompatibility with your browser/ISP/firewall combination. If you click the "reconnect" button, it will submit diagnostic info to help us debug, or you can mail support @ etherpad.com for help.
I think it was Wozniak in Founders at Work who described the proper way to cut personnel costs, as Hewlett-Packard used to do. Everyone (including the CEO) took at 10% pay cut, and got alternate Fridays off.
>But you started that part of you message with
> The HTML won't make any sense if you start reversing it
>?

I thought what I written was clear, but I guess it's coming off as vague. When you view an html page without presentation the logical flow of all the information should be based on the content. Therefore the tags and what is written you would never reverse the order, because the content will no longer make sense right?

So when you're doing something like
div #header
div #col left
div #col middle
div #col right
div #footer

You've grouped content in the form of header, left, middle right, footer. You can't reverse it, it's stuck because of the way it's been written. Every site redesign will require an HTML redesign each and every time.

If you grouped your content in the form of (like csszengarden has done)
Introduction
About the site
Site Navigation
Sub Menu
Content
Corporate Info

Then ONLY the CSS needs to change. Which is why there are 300+ different and dramatic css layouts on csszengarden, and yet only 1 html. If presentation was truly mixed in there, something would have locked them all into looking a certain way - but as you can see, all the designs are different.
A lot of the commenters, and the writer of the article, seem to miss the major point here. We are talking about BLACKSTONE, whose founder paid millions of dollars to have Rod Stewart sing at his 60th birthday, among other ridiculous displays of tacky financial dick-swinging. The company that paid 40-something billion for Equity Office, and 20-something billion for Hilton Hotels. This is the LAST company you'd allow to get away with this sort of ridiculous, cheap behavior.

And for those spouting the usual information wants to be free nonsense, you're probably not in the demographic of those reading the Financial Times. The FT and WSJ are two publications that tend to have exclusive, market-moving information that is extremely critical to the careers of many people (for example, the interview with Wen Jiabao of China this week had a lot of people involved in the Treasury market talking). This information is NOT available all over the web. If a blogger were to obtain just a single day's worth of FT scoops, he/she would be considered a genius.
Talk to a lawyer, but I recommend looking at existing licenses (especially free software licenses) first and putting together a draft based on those. Lawyers almost never write anything from scratch; instead, they re-use boilerplate. If you turn up at your lawyer's office with a collection of boilerplate and say "here's what I've put together, here's what I think it means, can you see anything wrong with this" you'll end up paying far less than if you ask him to write everything for you.
If you don't use a contract, you have no protection when a client refuses to pay. Also, legally, the client does not own your work until you assign it to them. A contract covers both parties.
Front-end/Web design has evolved into a discipline of its own.

If you come from a different field, say programming, I can see how CSS looks like a bad solution to an already solved problem. So you're incentive is to stick to what you know and use tables for everything.

However, there's much more to front-end design that just having text and images show up where you want: user-agent targeting, SEO, accessibility, typography, graphic design, etc... There's a lot to learn, and CSS is just a small part of it.
That is not about RabbitMQ, unless I am reading things wrong. The discussion group is defined "AMQP client implementation in Ruby/EventMachine" (since AMQP is specified to the wire level, this should be a client to any AMQP broker, not just to RabbitMQ).
But you can't search for by location on getsatisfaction.
Plus, we're focusing on the small business vertical market like restaurants and cafes.
the standard is the referrer being in the HTTP headers, not specifically that if the referrer is google, that it must include the search terms used in their search

we seem to be putting more reliance on these flimsy things... in the future will i create an outage because i @somebody instead of #something on twitter?
Resident Evil 5 Game Preview
I notice all the methods use POST. Shouldn't they use GET instead, on the ground that each access doesn't change the state of the server? http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/whenToUseGet.html