skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The posts that had -20 karma totalled 7 lines of text - hardly a "sheer waste of screen space". The first one was a single line. I reacted to that. If those had had -1 - -3 karma, I would not have. I created all this waste of space, as you call it, in response to the excessive downmodding of these short posts. Creating the waste of space actually raised my karma on the whole, since after justifying myself enough the karma trend on those two posts reversed, and I got upvotes for some of the later posts.

On the other hand, if I'd left the initial two posts as they were, chances are they'd be at -30, -50, maybe -80 by now, and perhaps there'd be some huge righteously offended response like there has been in other cases where someone made a slightly caustic comment on a thread like this (I think we can both recall one case where this happened).

Lynch mob behaviour is real on this site. I fought vehemently it then and I'll fight it now.
Totally agree on this one ... anything can be said about vague things like this topic, for and against, but whatever you do, always try to learn, from your mistakes or from your successes.
The Myth of "Free" (Joel Postman)
I would like to also say that the failure of CSS/Div is kind-of discouraging. Within the history of html, tables were intended for tabular data. The ideal of divs is to have an element that is specific to layout rather a tag for tabular data that one just happens to use for tabular.

Html, in general, is a messy. Html is one of the most amazing programming success stories, in the sense that it is the widely programming language by non-programmers. SIMPLE html created the web. Html that is that was so simple that the friggin w3c standards would never accept it now.

And the "progress of standards" has essentially only made this mircle lousier. You could blame corporations but it really seems like simple bureaucracy was just as much to blame.
1) here.

2) jobs.freelanceswitch.com

3) any of the boards aggregated here: http://joblighted.com/
My bzr workflow Or Version control for the lone programmer
Why Doing Things Half Right Gives You the Best Results
I found trustico to be the cheapest so far. Their service is decent too.
Am I the only one who gets scope creep on rethorics like this? And we joke about clueless project managers... :)

Afaik, the exact challenge you're proposing can be done with something like:

.a,.b,.c {position:absolute;}
.a {left:0;width:200px;}
.b {left:200px;right:200px;}
.c {right:0;width:200px;}

Before anyone adds new requirements, consider these ones: it has to be emailed and in the printout, the columns should look like tabs above the midle area.

In all seriousness, sometimes requirements are inane, pointless and unreasonable and you just have to push back and say it can't be done.

I think CSS detractors tend to obsess over specific points that tables can handle normally, but often leave out real life situations where obsessive alignment is not necessarily the biggest of the problems. Bias (in this case towards css vs tables, as opposed to web dev in general) is an interesting phenomenon.
heh those were probably my ads
"Hobbyists and non-designers don't realize what designing with tables was really like."

Uh, designers might not realize that programmers have to generate and modified HTML, not just hand-craft it.

I do really do appreciate that Div/CSS have many, many aspects that are a step forward.

But the limitation that have been incorporated into CSS are just worse the "imperfect", they have screwed the ability to produce exact, reproducible results.

The ultimate solution is something beyond both present CSS and tables.

"Try fixing the width of one column in a table and then predicting the width of each of the remaining columns."
-- Yeah, but I can predict that each item on the row will be on the same line. Divs are harder than that.

Well, we can go on but I swear I've learned something and I was a div proponent till today.
Try out Nutch - http://lucene.apache.org/nutch/
or the one archive.org uses Heretix - http://crawler.archive.org/
This strikes me as the type of thing that comes from people groomed in the corporate world. Companies with huge customer bases and revenues can't afford to do anything less than move mountains, because mountainous results are the only thing that matters.

Personally I've always worked on smaller things. I've never had an interest in being a cog in a giant machine. As a result I've always had the luxury of an agile team and rapid feedback cycles.

When it comes to startups, sure I want mine to be huge... but the way I see it, most huge companies were small companies once (maybe I'm wrong). Given the odds of creating a $500,000, $5,000,000 or $50,000,000 company, doesn't it make sense to aim for early success and use real revenues as a launchpad to the next level, and just sell the company if the potential ends up not being there?

I know some ideas are either huge or nothing (eg. electric cars), but I don't think most web startups fall into that category. Being the next Google is sure appealing, but can it be manufactured? Where does aiming high hit diminishing returns?
On the flip side, I imagine failure is much more common than success. So even if there is less to learn and its harder, there's many more opportunities to be had.
Xkcd - Boyfriend - Statistically Significant Other
Sorry - if we can all take our clever cloggs hats off for a second...

Usually as a developer, its a common courtesy to credit any piece of code that you re-use that someone else wrote within your code. It is also usually required by the GPL or whatever other license the code/plugin is distributed under.

I couldn't give 2 tickles who coded the actual site, and not asking for a credit on the site UI. I do care about external people getting their credit though within the code, as that is only fair.
Download the internet!

Or, at least, whatever doesn't block robots. :/
Google Latitude: Friend Finding Maps on Smartphones and PCs
It'd be extremely important to keep physical inventory levels low. To do this we'd keep inventory at maybe 50 items per product cycle.

To keep customer's attention we'd "introduce," or post, new and established products frequently. Perhaps multiple times a day.

I've think brick-and-mortar companies are unable to sell a lot of their product, especially upscale fashion retailers, because the price is too high. (Many are still considered successful, though.) And I'm confident retailers and suppliers will sell these "neglected" products at a certain price. And I'm determined to negotiate hard (but with integrity) on this.

I think this market has not been fully captured. There are some companies that focus on a niche (whiskey militia comes to mind), which has worked well for them. But I think there are many markets that are still untouched. But it'd be important to think and focus locally to build a great brand and company.

And given the current economy, people are focused on savings. I think right now, perhaps more than ever, people want to save anywhere they can. And if you combine savings with great taste, style, and reputable brands, I think you provide customers with a lot of value. I think this is what people want.

I think I have multiple skills to offer, though none are "technical" in nature, which is why a technical co-founder is instrumental. It'd be important to strike a relationship with vendors to be able to purchase these products. This is where my personality and skills come in. I'm a product/people guy, by passion. I enjoy going out and talking to others. I'm an obsessive doer who pays particular attention to the intracacies of peoples' individual personalities, as well as their common characteristics.

At the same time, I have considerable respect for technical people. For hackers. I think a great product guy and a great hacker would be a natural match for something like this. They'd both be dependent upon each other. They'd both drive and motivate each other to do what they love and are best at.
"My prediction is, in a few months, you'll be thanking Google for the much better search results."

I don't really think this is going to change anything. How is this going to affect SEO? I doubt any of them use referrers logs - waste of time. They scrape the SERPs. The old SERPs are still available. They can tell when a rank goes up or down.

How is this going to change that?
How to Win in the Obama Green Economy
The article wouldn't have its swarmy "contrarian" quality if they called it "learn from your successes ALSO". That's good advice. Indeed, the changes are your failures are things you're not so good at and your successes have been things your good at. Improving the things you're already good might just be a way of becoming great. Cool thought but we didn't need that "contrarian" bit.
Online News Rack
It sucks to have your life's work strawmanned like this by pop programmer podcast banter. I hope Joel addresses it professionally.

XP/Agile/TDD (like any movement) is filled with rabid fanboys who misapply the principles and try to ram them down everyone's throat, but it's rarely the case that the inventors of popular methodologies are filled with the same blind zeal. After all, their ideas were originally informed by first-hand experience.
You have a point, but then again, I don't think it's the best use of the CEO's time (or the company's money) to fly somewhere just to talk to people (some of whom have also flown there) when there are things like video conferences, emails and IM.
Oops, yes, fixed, thanks.
Disclaimer: I work at Google.

This is not about analytics. This is just an experiment to test if using ajax instead of the typical form submit can make the result page load faster.

Here's an official statement -

We’re continually testing new interfaces and features to enhance the user experience.
We are currently experimenting with a javascript enhanced result page because we believe
that it may ultimately provide a faster experience for our users. At this time only a
small percentage of users will see this experiment. It is not our intention to disrupt
referrer tracking, and we are continuing to iterate on this project.

http://searchengineland.com/google-ajax-search-results-death...
Microsoft Denies Windows 7 UAC Vulnerability
Microsoft is denying that there is a security hole in the User Account Control (UAC) feature of Windows 7 after a blogger reported it last week and posted what he said was a fix for it.
Gout Relief Home Remedies
Gout is an acute form of arthritis. Experiencing an attack of gout causes a burning pain, stiffness, and swelling in joints, usually starting with a big toe but commonly settling in other joints such as elbows, ankles, and knees.
I honestly don't think it matters too much. You can get certs from $15-$20, and, while most of them will try to upsell you to a more "secure" version to "give your visitors confidence", 90% of your visitors probably won't know who issued your certificate. As long as it's trusted in MSIE, Firefox, and Opera you'll be fine.
If you want to be rich, first stop being so frightened
You’ll be suggesting next that it will improve my sex life.

People who grow rich almost always improve their sex life. More people want to have sex with them. That’s just the way human beings work. Money is power. Power is an aphrodisiac. Money did not make me happy. But it definitely improved my sex life.
if an MBA speaks nonsense and there's no one there to hear it, is it still as useless?
I would even support this argument if google wasn't evil and wouldn't store personalized search logs themselves. Then this would indeed be a privacy win.
The way things are now this smells suspiciously like an attempt to further monopolize useful data that were available to webmasters before and kicking out competitors in the web analytics space. You might argue (with good reasons) that these data should have remained private from the beginning, but then google should stop logging them first and only then remove them from the results. The other way round it's "do as we say, not as we do."
Actively considering using Digicert here so your info is appreciated.

We can work around the primary domain not matching because our landing page has no real need for SSL, however, we do very much need iPhone support on the subdomains.

Would you happen to know if Digicert Wildcard SSL certs work on the iPhone? Thanks
Break the cycle of broken builds
I'm mostly writing these blog posts for myself. They help me to solidify my opinions and grant me an opportunity to hone my writing skills.

Some small part of me is writing this for others to read, but that part of me just greedily seeks feedback. I figure that I might as well continue to submit them here. If anyone can provide constructive criticism, it is the HN community.
That is probably the most intelligently written description of why Hulu will not destroy broadcast television I have read. Why do so many people not understand the attention-grabbing quality of "liveness" with broadcast television?

When will broadcast television be streamed over the internet into my computer/phone/tv? That is the question.
Quick Weight Loss Diet strategy | Quick Weight Loss Diet Treatment
The weight loss diet requires a vast amount of willpower and self-discipline.The idea behind the diet is that it means eating less carbohydrates and this causes weight loss at a fairly rapid speed.
Google's Chief Economist on how the Web challenges managers
Official website of the Executive Branch. There can be no official website of the United States unless Congress passed and the President signed a bill to the effect.
Innovation During the Great Depression
classy response from kent beck
(Tested only in Firefox 3 ...)

Ay, there's the rub, /
For what in that tests of compatibility for bugs may come /
When we have shuffled aroud this horrible mess of browser code /
Must give us pause.
Here's a transcript of the podcast I believe Kent is referring to. Judge for yourself whether Joel "makes comments that make clear his lack of knowledge".

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/01/31.html

I'd like to see Kent respond to Joel's specific points. E.g:

The real problem with unit tests as I've discovered is that the type of changes
that you tend to make as code evolves tend to break a constant percentage
of your unit tests....
So the end result is that, as your project gets bigger and bigger, if you
really have a lot of unit tests, the amount of investment you'll have to make
in maintaining those unit tests, keeping them up-to-date and keeping them
passing, starts to become disproportional to the amount of benefit that you
get out of them.
Should You Pay For Tweetdeck?
Is it ethical to donate? Or should people be forced to pay? I don't think anyone wants ads.
Indeed. Why fly, when one can instantly Halo? http://www.hp.com/halo/pdf/Halo_Collaboration_White_Paper_3_... [PDF]

Travel almost immediately declines, which is why many believe that the decline in travel costs alone constitutes Halo’s return on investment. [...]

While Halo has proven to reduce travel costs, it is also reported to bring new levels of group productivity. As informal social networks begin to meet in Halo rooms, they accelerate innovation, problem solving and project completion. [...] Face-to-face interactions that occurred quarterly or semi-annually now occur on a daily basis allowing informal social networks to flourish. Travel time and its physical effects on individual productivity are eliminated. Finally, loss of productivity from being away from the home office is avoided, while improved quality of life is realized, both of which contribute to productivity on the job.
But what happens when you stick inventor of popular methodology A against inventor of popular methodology B? Is the disagreement blind zeal or professional opinions originally informed by first-hand experience?

Or is the whole thing just like duct-taping buttered toast to the back of a cat and then pushing it off a high surface?

(Toast always ends buttered side down. Cats always land feet first. Thus, if either lands, the universe implodes. I don't even want to consider what happens if the push-cat-off-ledge-or-not decision is made based on whether a radioactive isotope decays or not.)
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=955999&cid=2490...
Native iPhone Console for EC2 on the way
Customers usually want to meet the person they are going to do millions of dollars of business with face to face.
In this sort of situation test coverage is actively harmful. You want to write lots of tests at a fine grain, and only test 'happy paths' above that level of abstraction.

When I layer my tests I rarely end up with thrashing tests. Multiple tests often fail, but it's easy to figure out which test to focus on. And fixing the right test case fixes them all.

Even if it makes sense to write a test for menu placement, it rarely makes sense to write more than one.
govtrack is amazing, rsync mirrors of their full database for your own use. A wonderfully useful website, I've even got rss feeds for what my congresspeople are up to.
I suppose http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity
will be good for America.
You found the peers through DHT. Randomly adding trackers doesn't really do much to help the torrent. Not unless others have added the tracker as well. Which is unlikely if you added it on your own.
I've generally had some antipathy to Joel Spolsky, seeing him as more management oriented than programmer oriented. But I have to say that he seems both right and honest here.

TDD is great if you use it appropriate along with good design - but "tests for everything" is just ideology. As he says, it's like the old OO schema, where you created these ridiculous inheritance trees and unnecessarily complex diagrams and such.
Nokia 6085 Blue Lcd Display Problem
6085, 6085 blue lcd, 6085 display problem, 6085 display ways, 6085 lcd problem, 6085 lcd ways, Nokia
I had a bad experience where a customer trying to save a buck who got one of the $15 dollar startech certs offered by GoDaddy was screaming at me because their customers were getting errors and invalid certificate warnings. It worked fine in the his browser because the first time you visited the issuing website it offered to install the intermediate cert in your browser. It didn't work for J. Random Shopper and the merchant in question didn't find out about this problem until he was helping his sister purchase something from the store.

Thus my antipathy to GoDaddy; they made $15 bucks off that merchant, but I will recommend against them, because it's pretty sleazy to play that kind of game on people.
If Spolsky is going after "tests for everything", his target is Robert Martin, not Kent Beck. Beck freely admits that he doesn't test everything. Pulling Beck into the argument feels like a cheap debate trick.
Mathematica home edition, finally. $300.
Does "classy" mean a rant with no or little content and the only remarkable thing about it is a famous author?
Regardless of how I feel about the current state of copyright law, there's no madness on youtube, simply the following of the law.

There's long held exceptions to copyright, namely parody. Weird Al doesn't have copyright problems (I mean he'd get upwards of 5 lawsuits per song, that's like over 50 cases per album) because he doesn't copy them.

I truly hope I never get busted for pirating, but until the law allows it I'm not going to complain it's absurd if I do. I wouldn't mind a law being passed allowing me to shoot rappers, however I'm not going to complain it's unfair if I get arrested for murder because I took down 50 Cent with a .50 cal rifle!

The law isn't very obtuse on things like this. Everyone posting copies of videos on youtube or videos of them singing it or anything like that, it is illegal even if it is stupid.
I recommend http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
In this case, I think Kent's right. Joel's doing it wrong.

You should never have 10% of your unit tests depend upon the location of a menu. You should have one unit test that depends upon the location of the menu, and everything else should be isolated by stubs, shunts, mocks, whatever. Otherwise, they aren't really unit tests, because they're testing more than a unit.

I didn't realize how wrong I was doing it until I got to Google. (Then again, a lot of Google's best programmers are doing it wrong too.) Perhaps this is because doing the right thing - mocking out your dependencies and testing only one feature per test - is often harder in the short term than just running all your code when you test the topmost layer. But I think the point needs to be hammered home: most programmers who're doing "unit" testing are not doing unit testing, and their code would be much less brittle if they took the time to stub out lower layers.
I believe they're running out of ideas... unless they learnt from their mistake of learning from their mistakes.
You need two certs:

1. CN=example.com

2. CN=*.example.com

If all you are using the secondary cert for is to provide a TLS signing token you can get away with just a cert for the domain. You have to play some tricks with DNS and hostnames, if you are spreading services between different machines (and it's hokey to do it that way if you want to be a service provider) but it can be made to work.
Who cares.

Wish GOP sock-puppets would stop posting this stuff on HN.
At the Internet Archive we've created Heritrix for 'archival quality' crawling -- especially when you want to get every media type, and sites to complete/arbitrary depth, in large but polite crawls. (It's possible, but not usual for us, to configure it to only collect textual content.)

The Nutch crawler is also reasonable for broad survey crawls. HTTrack is also reasonable for 'mirroring' large groups of sites to a filesystem directory tree.
I've always thought that that was a benefit of unit testing and high code coverage - knowing when a change has broken some other piece of code.
Guru fight! Which one is right? Neither!
I get a lot of bizarre adverts on FB. I'm listed as married and I get ads for dating services, also I get ads asking if I want to make $80/hr and crap like that. Ironically I never got any diet pill adverts and I'm possibly their perfect market right now since I gained a lot of holiday weight.
I think I agree with everything Joel said in that post.

These crazy rules people come up with for "proper object oriented" programming remind me of extreme religious rituals. You have to observe all these stupid little rules or else your code will become impure you and will spend an eternity in code maintenance hell.

I'll make a somewhat heretical claim even: Unit test are 20% useful engineering, and 80% fad. They are great for tricky code with well defined behavior (like a parser), but wasteful for most code.
Are you sure that Linkscape use the submitted organisations bot? I agree that it could just be promotional - as they are only giving access to some of their content (around 10% at my calc) but I'm not sure we're talking about the same bot in this instance
SNI is not supported by IE6 or earlier, and probably not feasible if you're trying to reach older mobile browsers (or even current ones, iPhone does not support it).

Which really sucks because it is an elegant solution to a very real problem.
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