skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can downvote comments after a certain karma threshold but not stories. At least not that I know of, or at least at a different level than comment downmodding.
People don't seem to like something about this article, and I can see that - it's not fun to speculate about someone's health when there's a potentially serious illness involved.

But let's turn this around: how would you cover it?

There are billions of dollars riding on Jobs' health, and any news about it.
Personally I'd say it saves me a few hours a month: A little by not constantly fumbling around switching apps, and (much more significantly) it makes fixing some bugs easier because you can see the effects of your code and your code at the same time, so there's no need to mentally 'flip' from 'coding' mode to 'web site evaluating' mode. And with three monitors editing an image->uploading the image->updating html/css->viewing the web page becomes one seamless workflow.

I think that I'm probably on the extreme end, but when I can I code with three monitors, a 22" widescreen for code & ftp or versioning, 22" widescreen for photoshop or illustrator, and 'normal' 19" for browsers (since it's much closer to the average use).

Newegg.com currently sells a nice 22" LCD for under $200, so if it saves a programmer at normal US wages 2-6 hours lifetime, it's paid for. It strikes me as a no brainer.
Mysqladmin host blocked because of many connection errors
PHPrimer.com
Well, its exactly this mentality that got us the web as we have it today (for better or worse). Clearly there are upsides to all this (some of which are covered in this article), but there are also many real downsides that the author completely misses.

For starters, it is now prohibitively difficult to create a brand new browser from scratch because you have to check against the millions of existing pages on the web, instead of simply implementing a standard. This is also partially why the web moves so slowly: I can tell you first hand from working on a browser that a lot of time that could have been spent implementing new features is instead spent "making things work like IE". Thanks to this, we now have a web where valid things don't work (huge pieces of HTML 4 and CSS 3 are generally missing), while crazy invalid things do work. There is limited time to work on things, and it is generally considered more important to emulate someone else's bugs so that the user won't go back to IE than implement things that have been in the standard since forever. Essentially what we have is the Parser's Prisoner's Dilemma.

One of the key features in our product (280Slides's PPT import/export) would have probably not been possible had Microsoft decided to accept any willy nilly OOXML. But, since they only read strict versions of files, as long as we conform to the spec we will be able to open (and compete) with PowerPoint.

Of course, all this misses the main point, which is that all this is really about is humand-editable file formats vs program-editable file formats. Most file formats (.doc .rtf .psd .ppt etc etc) don't have these strange problems with accepting bad input, and that's because they aren't written by hand. HTML is very much a hand written language and thus requires this. Many times XML does not have this same constraint. A lot of time it is applications that are generating XML, and so it is not so ridiculous to expect for it to be correct. So a good rule of thumb should be whether you expect the incoming data to be "machine generated" or "human generated".

The end "side note" that rendering on the web is different SOLELY due to implementation details and not at all due to parsing is also just plain false. Browsers are designed to accept all forms of tag soup, and when you have a web page with all open tags and absolutely no closing tags, guess what, your guesses as to what on earth it means is probably going to be different than that of some other browsers', and it will lead to different rendering.

This brings us to a problem that actually hurts users: part of the reason I have to check against every browser when I make a web page instead of just one is that it is not enough to see whether something is correct in one browser, because that browser may just be "being nice" to me. So, since correct rendering is not a sign of correct HTML, I must now test every browser to see whether it renders correctly as well. Thanks to this, we get the introduction of even MORE technologies, such as "strict" rendering, so the standard becomes even more convoluted.
I'd agree in cases where the 'Great Powers' are really staying out of the dispute. Often enough though, they do intercede, and want to ignore important information when doing so. Imagine if the principal suspends both the bully and the bullied - is that going to achieve the principal's long term goals?
Middletown Pontiac Dealer
Middletown Pontiac is the preferred source for Pontiac vehicles in The Hudson Valley.
I think a much bigger problem is Wikipedia. It's a much quieter but much stronger monopoly, and the people who run it are known to be prone to cliques, drama and manipulation. Google is professional, and for the time being, not dangerous. Wikipedia is still somewhat unprofessional, and is rapidly becoming the world's source for encyclopedic knowledge.
What happened to the Gig board at 37signals?
I used to be of your thought pattern. The thing about the mac os as it stands is that you can leverage all the power of the *nix os with the nice gui that just works. (Seriously though... try unplugging the monitor with your laptop to see what I mean.)
Sing it. Then play the notes that match what you're singing.
Why do we need to spell correctly? Why can't we use "u" for "you"? Why do we need to end sentences with periods? Why do we have to use the correct grammar?

1) It's simpler for humans to read. The purpose of XML was to be somewhat human readable and quotes help with that.
2) It makes possible for people to throw together a basic parser if for some reason they don't have access to the libraries (embedded, new language, etc)
3) Life would be a lot simpler if everyone followed the law (or specs).
'Pirates of the Amazon' does the same thing to Amazon.com.

IIRC the site was shut down recently, but i think the extension still works
ASUS is considering Android-based Eee PCs
I like Feynman's phraseology: "Obviously your idea is crazy. All good ideas are crazy. The question is whether your idea is crazy enough."
Very little to the article, but an interesting idea.
Honestly, the VCs would just throw the money at their existing portfolio companies.

If you were going to give away $20 billion, you'd be better off at doing it through SBA grants. You'd be a lot closer to the proverbial Main Street nationally, not concentrated on the coasts.
Hey, dag from above mentioned VideoSift here. We have seen about a 50% reduction from our network supplied ads.
I disagree. Postel's Law can be harmful. It's nice in theory, and if everyone was "conservative in what [they] send" or "liberal in what [they] accept" in the same way, it would work well.

But it's a slippery slope. If one implementation accepts some obscure edge case, and someone relies on it, from then on every implementation must go out of it's way to handle it in the same way. This leads to complex and bloated software.
Interesting approach, but i am not sure how feasible it is. You can't ask for donations every month.

I am not in this business, but i think i would go the flickr route for video sharing. As in, offer a paid account which you can opt to make private or just allow some people to see(like family videos). Make the payment terms easy(so yearly or per GB stored or something). Also, offer some kind of export mechanism to make customers feel more easy about their data in case something wrong happens. So aside from the digital export, offer a Blu-ray mailing option or something similar.

As for amateur remixes, i would offer affiliate links to content used(just like youtube did) and also offer a tip-if-you-like-this option which i will take a small part of.

So again, i am not in this business and monetizing video sharing websites without premium content like movies and video clips is difficult, but this is what i would do.
This qualified opinion should have been your original comment.
Python makes everything easy :-)
I just sent an e-mail to Friedman telling him more or less the same thing. As usual, his head appears to be somewhere in the clouds. Venture capitalists aren't going to be part of the solution until they stop being part of the problem.
Hmm...I am writing this on a XP-powered EEE - which problem will Android solve for me? And, which office suite can I use?
Secret agent moth
Agreed. Furthermore, there's a big difference between what HTML and XML are typically used for. HTML is usually used to present some data to a human. It doesn't matter too much if it looks slightly different in different browsers as long as it conveys the same information. But XML is used for storing and exchanging data. If different consumers interpret ambiguous cases (such as missing closing tags) differently, that could be a huge problem.
Sync contacts/calendar/tasks with linux and the iphone
PIM solution for linux & iphone users
You should blog the process ... so the next person only has to spend 20 hours
Inferiority/Superiority would imply a difference.
Can you explain what you think is causing the reduction? Could you make the space more attractive for advertisers (e.g. decrease cost, increase space etc)?
That was an awesome hack. What moved you to do this?
The definition sounds like "scientist", but applied mainly to artifacts. Reminds me of this passage from ZatAoMM:

After a while you may find that the nibbles you get are more interesting than your original purpose of fixing the machine. When that happens you've reached a kind of point of arrival. Then you're no longer strictly a motorcycle mechanic, you're also a motorcycle scientist, and you've completely conquered the gumption trap of value rigidity. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper2/Zen/Zen%20and%20the%20Art...
At risk of criticizing an industry legend, "If they don't make money today, they easily could," rings false. My guess would be that Facebook will acquire Ning long before this happens.
Having its own site will help non programmers to find your product. These people normally will need setup assistance so you could also charge extra money for this.
So I should escape characters that are already inside of double quotes.. great. And the fact that all browsers support unescaped HREFs means nothing in the face of the almighty "Look! I validated!" claim.

ALT attributes provide descriptive text and are replacements for missing images. Great! Now, why are they required? Not to mention, any use of any attribute not on the list will get you unvalidated. Suppose I want to include some extra data for JS, like "_droptype" or "_isDraggable". Sorry! It's not on W3C's list of acceptable attributes so you fail validation, even though all browsers ignore attributes they don't know about.

An empty tag... why do I have one? Well, maybe because inside the tag I have server generate text.. .and instead of doing;

if ($text) echo "<tr>$text</tr>"

I do

echo "<tr>$text</tr>"

Would it be so hard to make the standard: "If theres nothing in the tag, treat it like it doesn't exist"? No.

Furthermore, I have blank DIVs to take up width/height sometimes. Then again, I'm sure there's some clever way to wrap 20 DIVs and put browser specific hacks so it actually validates... but I prefer to do it the way that works.

Major browsers are nice enough to allow me to not care. So show me errors that I need to care about. W3C validation, to me, is like saying "I memorized every little gotcha that W3C implemented... and still, everything works! Aren't you impressed? Five years from now, the site should still work! Forward validation! Yay!"
I use nginx to serve files, to provide some hotlinking control for my PDFs and to do split tests on my free trial executables. (I should write about that some time -- fun, fun stuff, but rather harder than web page split testing.)

To save anyone else doing Rails/nginx some pain, I copy/pasted the important bits to a pastie. Feel free to use them. In particular note the Content-Disposition header: if you forget it, you will regret it, particularly if you're a fan of urls /that/do/not/have/extensions.

http://pastie.org/396525
Raising the Bus Number
This is great! I wish more people did analyses like these.

One nitpick: intuitively, I'm not comfortable with the idea that a 20% chance for each nominated movie is a reasonable prior. There is a ranking of the 5 nominations implied by the voting process (http://tr.im/gEYg). However, not being very familiar with Academy Award voting, I'm not sure if this data is ever publicly released. Anyone?
Try pitching this idea ($20b to VC's instead of detroit) to the public. I can't help but postulate their response: "So my tax dollars go to some yuppie 25 year olds making some website with cute icons... meanwhile my buddy in Detroit is out a job! He's got a family to feed... a family!!! These people must hate America, and everything she stands for!"

My point is the majority of people do not have any vision. They do and think whatever everyone around them does, which comes from TV or their parents. If anything you pitch to them requires an explanation, you've already lost.
Update: I don't see myself having time to set-up a situation where IE lags... I've got so much stuff on my plate -- trying to launch in a week. Sorry John!
Get rich quick
Namecheap for domains: http://www.namecheap.com
Media Temple for hosting: http://mediatemple.net
I don't run an ad supported site either, but I buy space on them. Google will tell you how much you paid for ads on a per-site basis, and I just ran reports for the last 30 days and the same days for 2008.

Here's what happened to the three sites who made most from me last year. All three are names you'd recognize. [Edit for clarity: these are the CPMs paid Google. The sites probably get substantially less than 60% of these.]

Site A: Effective CPM has declined from $3.20 to $.80, spend declined 66%

Site B: Effective CPM has declined from $3.80 to $1.90, spend modestly increased (impressions obviously quite up)

Site C: Effective CPM has declined from $8.84 to $3.50, spend flat (impressions obviously quite up)

The kicker: I'm one of the few advertisers practically begging for traffic -- there are a few hundred bucks of slack in my budget, so if they've got it for sale I should be buying it. Its just the cratering CPM prices that are keeping my spend that low. My guess is this means that the other advertisers are sharply reducing spending, which means I win the "auction" easier and get the clicks for cheaper (thus decreasing effective CPMs).
What "web 2.0" really means -- and why "web 3.0" will never come
I'm not sure who this author is, but it seems to me he's overlooking the enormous benefit that when a strict xml parser barfs on a file, it's immediately and unequivocally clear which party in a multi party business process is causing a problem and should fix things at their end.

If it weren't for xml, endless (and therefore costly) discussions would ensue instead.

Also, on the more technical side, a barfing xml parser saves you from having to spend hours hunting for subtle bugs introduced by a permissive parser that is permissive in ways no one really understands fully.
Hm, so you're saying that arguably the most popular language today has failed to become mainstream? Sorry, lost me at that assertion...
Too bad we don't use s-expressions.
Every web browser can zoom in on documents. I set default zoom to 150%. dpreview.com looks fine.

PS. Windows 7 has a proper scalable interface. I don't or use like Windows, but I tried it and it works well. You don't even need to restart the entire OS to change the setting anymore either.
Rating iPhone apps
No, "killer app" is only used in reference to spreadsheets! :-) Learn your history and think VisiCalc. http://hubpages.com/hub/VisiCalc--the-First-Killer-App-of-th...
Joe, you've been around longer than I have, but I still feel like it's worth saying: nobody likes these OS dick-waving contests. I'm a Mac user, and I'm in love with my computer, and to me, using it feels like the most magical experience in the world. Like, I just got Quicksilver at long last, and suddenly ever hour I figure something out with it that blows my mind. But that's me. I like the things that OS X provides. You like Linux because it gives you some stuff that you really like. Elsewhere, some guy is using Windows because he really likes the stuff that that does for him.

I understand the sniping elsewhere, but on Hacker News it's unnecessary, and I and other users would really like to see people stop saying stupid stuff like this, and that means people on all sides. We're here because we love talking about stuff and having debates, and there's no debate here, because everybody sees their computer in different ways. So can we go back to saying useful, intelligent things rather than provoking the people on both sides? (For the record, I'm one of these people: when people get antiMac I flip out, and that's not a good thing, and I'm trying to stop getting so involved.)
Notice the problems that're being stated about hardware failure. You don't get that on Macs because Apple controls exactly what hardware gets used on their computer. That means that their developers can focus on other cool things instead.

In the end, Apple chooses whether or not we have a choice. With their product the best choices are they ones they allow. Outside of that, the choice is between Mac and some other operating system.
Joking, folks. Seriously.
I learned from the article that cooking "denatures proteins." I happen to be very allergic to all raw produce except grapes, apples, onions, lettuce, and spinach. Everything else needs to be cooked. No crudités or fresh orange juice for me. People look at me funny and ask why cooking would make a difference. I say, "I dunno, but it must break down my allergy molecules so that I don't react to them." Then they (idiots all!) say, "No, that doesn't make sense." Now I can confidently snow people with "denatured proteins," whether or not that's the true reason for cooking solving my produce allergy problem. Confidently bowl people over with scientific jargon, and they believe you.
Hey Apologetic - interesting sentiment mate. Two thoughts on writing:

1. You've got some really interesting points, but there's some rambling around them. Edit like your life depends on it - cut words, cut words, cut tangential themes, cut sentences, cut, cut, cut. Favor less over more. Kill the weakest links in your piece. They won't be pissed.

You started with:

"* Thesis presentation
* Examples
* Reasons explaining why
* Summary

Hello.
I'll start off by stating that one of my pets died a couple of days ago, and I'm probably sucking half the energy required to write this blog post from the recent event's anguish."

Cool - lots of great writers start with just whatever to get going, and the good stuff follows. Then remember to cut it in the first round of edits, otherwise you risk losing a lot of readers out of the gate.

2. The more you use profanity, the less effective it gets. If you hold your profanity in reserve, you can really drive a sentiment home when you need to.
Doesn't seem to include MobWrite - I've checked the "GoogleDocs" section and it doesn't seem to be there.
OS X wobbles along on the much slower PPC machines, though.
Richard Pryor Died Date and Biography
Videosift used to charge for a premium account that would enable you to have more community options. Perhaps they should make the premium account cheaper to drive up volume and get more.

They don't pay for video bandwidth, so it's kind of weird how they have such high costs.
We use a couple of big networks for CPM, one starts with a "Gl" the other has the initials TF. Traditionally the CPM revenue has been fine with these and more than paid the bills - in January it just dropped off into hell. The cause is that advertisers have slashed their budget and are no longer shelling out for CPM ads.
If it gets too bad it can be simply forked. And see Wikipedia getting better, not worse.
But we do. Today they're called XML. :-)
Option 4

Bob produces invalid XML file and gives it to Avery. Avery's permissive parser that he wrote in an afternoon reads it MOSTLY fine, but gets a few things wrong. Avery goes on with his work not realizing some of the data is incorrect, and Bob doesn't need to pay a contractor.
I would hope that anyone writing a rails app that involves file downloads knows this by now....
also: why in the world go that extra step, when Ubuntu is way better?
My favorite thing about browsers is that they sniff content that is sent to them to see what it is. For several different cases such as when the web server does not sent the content type or to see if what was sent is probably a gif or javascript or maybe xml even if you say it is something else. The amount of sniffing and guessing is really amazing. The spec requires you must specify a content type. Guessing what a file is just seems like a world of hurt and pain in the long run.
agree. but I'm not sure that merging Yahoo! Search and Live Search would be much of an improvement...
Neuroscience of gambling
Thanks patrick, it's great to see some numbers instead of anecdote.
To see if it was possible, which apparently it is.
Blockshopper bullied into settling over web links
Stallman refers to "exploring the roofs and tunnels of the MIT campus" in the 1960s and 1970s as hacking. FWIW, we used to ride on top of elevators (and sometimes their counterweights) at RPI in the 1970s and call it hacking. So, yes, I can relate to the article, man, whether or not hacking goes back to the 1920s or the Renaissance or ancient Greece.
I'm a hacker and I'm okay
I play all night and I sleep all day
What to do with thousands of cores
Introduction to Starcraft and Competitive Gaming Lecture (video)
Peter Norvig: Lieberman, Egg, Sausage and Lieberman
Better solution: do both.
It's a serious question. His health affects a lot of people, from Apple employees to stockholders, so, like Cringely argues, it is important to more than just him. On the other hand, it's no fun to talk about someone's health. How do you think journalists ought to balance those conflicts?

No coverage at all means rumors are all people have to go on, and when that much money is at stake, act on them they will. Or, as froo mentions above, it's easy to start them - even more so when there is no official news. And with that much money at stake... you get the point.

Also... markets are a fantastic way of organizing things - by letting thousands of people collaborate to create and distribute stuff, they are undoubtedly the best way of organizing an economy. However, that impersonal nature (everyone acting in their own self interest, and in many cases, not even knowing one another), occasionally shows itself, as in this case. As kind humans, our instincts would be to leave the guy alone and wish him well. However, many people have a rational self-interest in knowing about Jobs' health, or, in the case of journalists who are information producers/gatherers, to obtain information that their competition does not have.
>And the consumption of a cooked meal in the evening, usually in the company of family and friends, is normal in every known society.

In Germany peope have their cooked meal at noon (or at least most still have). Until recently (i.e. a few decades ago), this was also the case in Scandinavia.
Their premium options are here: http://www.videosift.com/upgrade

At first thought the lengths they have chosen make it seem more expensive than it is. There is something psychologically odd about the base 10 numbers chosen. 30 days/90 days/180 days feels better, I think.
If one vertically oriented monitor is good, are two better?

http://is.gd/kqNA