skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know they were joking, but as a dour paper advocate I felt the need to respond:

Limited availability. You don't always have a pad of paper with you to write new things.

So they're saying you always have a phone with you?

Not ubiquitous. If you leave a piece of paper in one pair of jeans, you can't access it from the other jeans you're currently wearing.

On the other hand, the entry level for paper is much cheaper than the entry level for a device that uses Gmail.

Difficult to organize. Eventually turns into a giant mess on your desk.

I think if you have as many Gmail notes as you have paper notes, you'll get just as big a mess. The fact that Gmail isn't as messy is a testament to the fact that I can't doodle, can't quickly sketch out a melody to a song, or anything similar.
I upvoted you, but it's probably because you're insulting them. For better or worse, deaths tend to make people particularly on edge.

The word "hero", like the words "unique" and "expert" do not really mean anything anymore because they're so overused. And while I would not consider him a hero, it's always cool to see stories about people who are flat out really good at what they do.
I know that it exists, I just can't imagine that it is really fun for an extended period of time.
EtherPad out of private beta
Wow, I just saw him this past Saturday; it's going to be strange to walk into that market and not see him any more.
I think ning got social networks right.
A related argument against table-based layouts, which I don't see any discussion about yet, is that "it's important to maintain a high ratio of content to markup for SEO purposes."

In my view, a complicated div-based layout is just about as markup-heavy as a table layout, given separate CSS files in both cases. So I would think the point is moot. And my suspicion is it's just SEO firms blowing smoke in an effort to figure out things to sell.

So, is this at all a substantiative claim?
"Nine times out of ten, the first impression someone gives you is exactly who they are. We choose not to see it because we need the money, or we want the situation to be different."

That reminds me of the worst job I ever had.

I went into the interview really, really wanting the position (from the outside, they looked like they were doing some amazing things).

I got there, was underwhelmed by the person I talked to, and despite my misgivings, took the job exactly because I wanted it to be something it was not.

Huge mistake.
I still don't get this debate. Before, it definitely used to be easier to just use tables, but now there are so many examples and frameworks out there that I never spend more than 20 minutes or so with CSS, even on very complex layouts. What am I missing?
Until the patent troll shows up. While it's slightly cheaper to just disclose the idea, filing a patent helps the patent office avoid granting a patent on the same idea.
For better or worse, deaths tend to make people particularly on edge.

I know what you mean, and to an extent these posts are a little testing, a little spiteful, to see how knee-jerk people's reactions are really going to be. You might say I'm daring the HN community to behave better than it seems to be behaving. It might cost a little karma. Oh well.

I have little respect for taboo subjects, I'm afraid. In fact, the opposite: I believe that everything should be discussable in a civil manner. I feel that taboos don't help society, and that sheeple responses to taboo subjects is one of the more despicable aspects of human nature. I have not made any statements in this thread that I believe should be considered offensive by a civilised person, and I stand behind those statements as I would if anyone else had made them.
hehe, ok, in that case you get a free pass :)
Nifty. Pity there aren't more syntax options (just JS)

Here's a test URL to toy with: http://etherpad.com/qtUr4Iw3mr
* If one could grow corn in a 100 story building, what would stop one from running an automated "Grain/hay/straw-fed" dairy cow operation, or automated beef or veal-calf operations, in a 100 story building?*

1) The relative costs of land urban vs rural. Around here usable farmland land is a relatively expensive $8.5-10k/acre. What's it cost in Manhattan? SF? Boston?

2) The costs of removing animal waste and supplying animals with food: instead of shipping beef in, you're shipping feed in and manure out. Yeah, I know: just put the manure in a digester and run the operation from the resulting methane gas: digester takes up expensive space too and just reduces, not eliminates the waste.

3) How much corn can you grow in that 100 story building? What's the opportunity cost of using the building to grow corn instead of housing an insurance company?

4) I'd really like to know what the financial company across the road from say, a pig farm (mmmm. big manure lagoons) thinks of the lovely midsummer scent.

Don't get me wrong: I'm all for local sourcing of food and reducing energy cost where possible. Hell, when I lived in the city, I dug up most of my back lawn to put in fruit & vegetable gardens because grass carpets are a waste of space. But local sourcing only works in small amounts in urban areas for the simple reason that land is so expensive and while sunlight is free, even very high-efficiency lighting costs money. Like the other poster said, theres a reason (actually, reasonS) why farms are in rural areas and it's not just because "that's the way it's always been done." If anything, increasing "efficiency" of food animal operations is going the wrong way: the eggs I get from my chickens every day taste and look infinitely better than the ones I buy at the supermarket from a 10,000 hen operation.
Fuel from CO2 and water
Looks like a good way to strip accelerationistas with too much money of their excess burden. 25K for a 9-week course is absurd, in my opinion.
Ah. I went to Google with this search:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=Vestergaard-Frand...

The top link gives my the same URL, but now I don't need a login. I wonder if NYT checks the referrer, and since mine was Google it let me read the entire article.

Apologies for any inconvenience or confusion. If you click the Google search link above and follow the reference it may well work for you. In future I'll extract the link and open it in a clean browser just to be sure.

Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
mpowerplayer from the previous round got $2.5M in September from New Atlantic Ventures.
Wow. They even have tons of foreign languages. This would have been extremely useful when I was learning how to pronounce words in Dutch (still might be ;) ).
Moreover, if a company copied them to gain similar legal immunity, who would they sue for patent infringement?
You could also argue that that's merely cutthroat business. If Walmart gets its way, small businesses suffer, but employees are suddenly at an advantage. And Walmart, which is large enough to afford that, is fine with helping its employees when it also means removing competition.
Well, at first, I wasn't starting a start-up back when I started applying this successfully.

During the period when I worked on my start-up on the side of my full-time job, I only had time for cardio, no weight building.

Finally, now, I work from home on my own start-up, so it's a lot easier to control my lifestyle.
...flat-out don't know how to write CSS very well...

Sounds a bit like an ad hominem attack to me
JQuery on Whitehouse.gov - A Closer in depth look
For people like me, who missed the previous discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=378852

Considering there were only 14 posts on this article, I don't think "HN Salesmanship hero" is in any way accurate... Perhaps he's the posters hero, or some subset of HN, but I don't think it's useful to assume all of HN thinks a certain way.

He certainly has a very good technique though, and I imagine was great to watch.
Sure, and if it supported "display: hologram" we'd be able to surf the web in 3D. But it doesn't, and we can't
LinkedIn Goes Down, Can’t Get Up
It was very common for those on the American frontier to defend themselves. I think that is a reasonable precedent.

Some of the only laws I would pass on an island would be outlawing violence and establishing mechanisms to enforce this, especially from outside attacks. There are certainly private forces that could get the job done, and I can even imagine a libertarian society decreeing that the government must contract out to multiple competing parties to enforce the laws.

The note about MAD is interesting because it is so easy to destroy a village size seastead.
"to an extent these posts are a little testing, a little spiteful, to see how knee-jerk people's reactions are really going to be"

Isn't that kind of the definition of trolling? It seems like you're kind of bringing it on yourself if what you're saying here is true.
My good friend from high school who was not rich nor poor enlisted in the military because college simply wasn't the right place (he was not 'an academic'). Our military is not only for the poor and maybe grad school isn't just for rich kids putting off adulthood.
I wish the article proper had treated fields other than mathematics.

(Though that won't keep me from exclaiming: Woohoo! Go Geology! I still have a chance!)
Unfortunately, there are still other companies that would be happy to take Google's slice of the market in their absence. I'm sure Microsoft wouldn't mind taking over search services, and there are plenty of user-generated content sites that would be willing to risk an unlikely extradition in exchange for Italy's YouTube users.
Ask UK YC: Have any England startups been able to get an EFG loan?
Hi everyone,

We are considering applying for an EFG loan to finance expansion for our startup. The EFG scheme is part of Gordon Brown's magic business bailout package. It seems to only be available for England, and replaces the small firms loan guarantee. This handy URL partially explains it, but not very well:

http://www.berr.gov.uk/whatwedo/enterprise/enterprisesmes/info-business-owners/access-to-finance/sflg/page37607.html

Our thoughts are that if the government is prepared to 75% an unsecured loan, and we're going to put in 25% cash to mitigate the bank's risk entirely, the bank should snap our hand off.

Are we right? Or is this a huge waste of time?

Has anyone had success applying for one of these to fund a business based on just a business plan?
Certain IT skills in demand despite economy
Uncertainty in chip market 'unprecedented'
Microsoft prepares for Windows 7, Windows Server upgrade
"Multiple IBM staffers have written in to SAI to claim the company has a program in place of demanding deliberately difficult relocations, with the company saying anyone who refuses to move will be considered a "voluntary departure" and denied severance benefits."

If companies can legitimately do that, what keeps them from just throwing in the paycut to drive workers away without the potential hassle of relocating people?
One of the most compelling arguments for css is to use it rearrange the content of your webpage so the most relevant content appears earlier in the data. Apparently this can have a significant effect on your search engine optimization.
Turning smartphones into desktops on the go
No, I don't think it qualifies as trolling if you're defending your beliefs. Trolling is when you make a statement that you know to be wrong for the purpose of eliciting excited responses.

The New Hacker's Dictionary defines trolling as:

[From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames. Derives from the phrase "trolling for newbies" which in turn comes from mainstream "trolling", a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite. The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.

Some people claim that the troll is properly a narrower category than flame bait, that a troll is categorized by containing some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial.

(from http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon_35.html#SEC42 )

I don't think I'm doing that.
a lot of this advice should read as "don't _pay_ for grad school in a recession" and feels more directed toward arts & sciences than technical pursuits.

anyway, lots of free rides are available in interesting programs. go to grad school if you want to. it's a fun way to explore your interests for a couple years. write papers and travel the world on the school's dime. meet co-founders. work on self indulgent projects that could never exist in the real world.

i was half-baked after my undergrad... the extra time to bounce ideas off smart people in grad school was invaluable.
That's a good point. But how would you explain that to your average non-technical taxpayer?
"Code reading requires its own set of skills, and the ability to determine which technique to use when is crucial. In this indispensable book, Diomidis Spinellis uses more than 600 real-world examples to show you how to identify good (and bad) code: how to read it, what to look for, and how to use this knowledge to improve your own code.

Fact: If you make a habit of reading good code, you will write better code yourself."

Check out this next time you are in the bookstore:

http://www.spinellis.gr/codereading/
Words versus Icons
Here's the criteria I used, courtesy of a Sam Altman post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95883):

"If no new or current users/advertisers/customers/etc care about what you're doing, and no one in the company has a plan (or, more commonly I think, a desire) to fix it, you are probably in bad shape."
May I recommend proxifier for mac.

I had a slightly different problem the other day. I'm abroad, and wanted to watch Hulu, but it's blocked from outside the US. SOCKS to the rescue, right? I'll just use a friends box back home.

Well, opening an ssh connection and telling firefox/safari to use a SOCKS proxy sort of worked, but hulu uses flash's RTMP to ignore the proxy settings of the browser and connect on a different port. Bastards.

That's when I found proxifier. I can tell it to route ALL safari traffic over my little ssh connection back to the states. Worked like a charm.
I like the interface. I downloaded several ToDo apps from the iPhone App store when it first went online and many suffered from the problem that they required more than one screen touch to create a new item. For example, you might press "+" and then press again to get the focus of the text entry field. (I'm sure not all were like this, but it seemed that many I tried were.) The gmail tasklist only requires a single touch. I also like that "New Task" is the top row of the task list, as opposed to being a "+" located at the bottom of the screen. YMMV.
I agree, so I read a bit further after looking at the page (which is, conceded, not exactly a high point in design), here is an interesting bit of information about the author:

http://sitereservation.com/xooglers/index.cfm?entryid=16
Oh wow, you're right, not letting Italians see some content is exactly like imprisoning people.
"My underlying html structure doesn't need to be in any particular order in order to achieve the layout that I want."

Sorry but in my experience you do need to tweak your document order to achieve the layout you want.

As an example, I made a (unreleased) site where I have "navboxes" floating on the left and right, and content in the middle. I had to put the floated divs before the content so that the top of the navboxes were aligned with the top of the content instead of having the content and then the navboxes below.

That worked fine but I wanted to have the content first in the document because if someone accesses the page with, say, lynx (yeah, I know) I deem the content more worthy of being at the top than the navigation (that took a lot of space).

Finally I decided to use absolute positioning for the floats I think (there were bad interactions when I put floats in my content), it's fortunate that I had this choice so I could get the document order I wanted.
one can simply POST into mordor. huh!
It feels like we're talking about two different things in your two posts. In the first, I thought you were saying "people have been assholes to me before but I learned to deal with it because they were giving me feedback that I ultimately appreciated even though they left me feeling angry and humiliated."

My point above was that being able to give constructive criticism is a strength, but giving people feedback that makes them feel "angry and humiliated" is not. There are lots of people that give feedback and do it in a constructive way without being an asshole, and it's not that hard to do.

Your second post above seems to be more about people who can't take criticism regardless of how it's given and your friend's boss, the micro-manager.

I certainly agree that you can't always be direct and constructive without offending some people. Some people are just not ready to to hear what they need to hear, and in some cases the criticism might be unjustified.

In either case, you're better off giving your feedback in a way that doesn't belittle the other person. The other person may not agree with what you are telling them, but at least you haven't added insult to injury by humiliating them in the process.
Yeah right, that is a good thought, you are normally not going from 0 to 100. You need some kind of adoption rate.
Is this like chat reimagined or am i just crazy?
Great idea! What distinguishes this from the 'Notes' app that comes with the iPhone is that now your tasks are editable in gmail as well.

For those who don't know, go to settings->labs in gmail, and you can activate tasks. Then a tasks link will show up under your regular mail 'folder' links.
No and no. Chat is linear. EtherPad bends the space time continuum.
I just finished listening to the Design View podcast yesterday. Andy covers this topic in a few of the shows. Unfortunately he only did 8 shows in 2007, but they are all quite good.

http://show.andyrutledge.com/
Fashion Accessories 
Flaunt Boutique provides Women's Fashion Clothing wherein the client can purchase designer clothing including fashion accessories with assortment of styles and designs, at reasonable prices.
The markup on CSS Zen Garden makes use of things like layers of wrapper divs to achieve what it does in terms of design. And this means the HTML is being used for more than just content, which is a direct controversion of CSS's goals. The site is actually a good example of what is wrong with the subset of CSS that is currently practical to use.
Profile of entrepreneur Simon Duffy who started Bulldog - his own line of male cosmetics.
Profile of entrepreneur Simon Duffy who started Bulldog - his own line of male cosmetics.
To add to that here are a couple things I've done to stay active in non-traditional ways:

Rock/Tree climbing (With a harness and proper training)

Paintball/Airsoft -If you can play someplace with no field fee so you can spend a couple hours at it, it can be a good cardio workout. It is also very much a tactical/thinking activity so it engages your brain.
Kanji aren't that bad; it just takes time to memorize them, and once you get over a certain threshold (probably around a thousand characters or so), you can generally understand most directions and signposts... anywhere in Japan, Taiwan, or China. Even though they all use different writing systems, a knowledge of any of the three is pretty valuable.

I'd never go as far as to say that I appreciate kanji/hanzi for its efficiency, because there isn't any, but there is a certain poetry to them that I do like.
Yeah, I guess it really depends on what your product is. I am merely thinking SaaS in my posts, but I could see a lot of other applications (and have purchased some myself) that take a different route.

For instance, ExpressionEngine or the Torque Gaming Engine. When you purchase a license you are only purchasing a license for free updates to that version (let's say the 1.0 branch). When EE 2.0 comes out, you will have to pay an upgrade fee to use the new version (albeit, heavily discounted, compared to purchasing a completely new license).

It all comes down to what your product is, who your target market is, and what the trends within that niche are. Obviously you would take vastly differing approaches between building the next Backpack or selling an Enterprise grade Help Desk system to the Department of Defense. :D
That's a really good idea - I may have to look into doing that.

I don't place ideas in Backpack to keep them in the "walled garden" - it's just the most web-accessible, easy to use area I have for information of that nature (I keep losing sticky notes).
I've also had a TON of fun cross-country skiing. If you dress for the weather it is a FANTASTIC workout.
The auto-expanding equal height three column layout is such a standard layout on the web, and ways to do it are so often requested that it is referred to as the "holy grail" by the CSS community. So I find your critique and accusation of trolling to be rather misplaced.
FT.com sues company for sharing single subscription account
Another hackerly exercise page: http://www.shovelglove.com/
Does anyone have a link to the "green venture fund" discribed as organized on facebook, where individuals contribute as little as $100 ?

It sounds like it could be something like Prosper, but more focused on small startups, which would be pretty interesting.
Why I don't use tables for layout
I think the point isn't so much that the VCs are running away, but that they were gobbling them up to begin with.

Everyone saw it coming even as social media tools argued otherwise.
w3schools overestimates the firefox share because there are far more web designer/developers going to their site. The actual breakdown is more like 66% IE6/IE7 and 33% FF/Opera/Safari. Opera and Safari are a couple percentage points each.
The actual device that Obama is using is from Certified Digital, and I've been looking but haven't been able to find anywhere that it says it is using the blackberry network (aside from all the reports that say 'Obama's Blackberry).

I'm wondering if this is just a poor naming convention by the press. Like saying 'he grabbed a kleenex' when grabbing a tissue.
How 20 mbps Internet can be slower than 8 mbps
I'm interested to know if HN can think of a technical solution to this problem ? (one that must be common to many sites).

It seems you could filter access based on IP address but that could be problematic if users were all coming out of the same company network.
Is EtherPad out of beta functionally equivalent to EtherPad in beta?