skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to spell check HTML pages?
Is there a way to enable a web browser's built in spell checker to run on the entire page as opposed to just a form element? I'm specifically looking for a way to pull up an HTML document that I've created and see if there are any spelling errors on the page. I've seen some sites that will parse your page and give you a report, but that seems overly complicated. I'm looking for something like a bookmarklet or grease script.

What methods do you use to spell check pages that have mixed code and content (i.e. web templates)
you should def fix it so http://webnodes.org doesn't throw a fatal server not found error
i use bookmarklets. however, the occasional social bookmarking icon will make me think to share the thing using my bookmarklets.
I'm the author of jsonlib, and I registered specifically to post this message. Please, please, please do not use cjson!

First, it is unmaintained. The latest version available was posted on August 24, 2007. When you encounter one of its myriad bugs, you'll either have to patch it yourself or pick another JSON library. Just skip the intermediate step and use another library to begin with.

Second, it is buggy. In some cases, parsing text it just generated will return a different value from what you passed in! It's almost entirely ignorant of Unicode, and what little it tries to parse it gets wrong.

Third, it's exceedingly non-compliant. The text it parses and generates bears only a passing resemblance to JSON. There are varying degrees of conformance to the spec between libraries, based on personal preference of the authors -- I prefer strict conformance, others less strict -- but cjson is so different as to be simply unusable.

Yes, it's fast. I know. I wrote jsonlib partly because I was unsatisfied with simplejson's performance, and one goal (never truly achieved) was always to surpass cjson. However, speed isn't everything. As the saying goes, "if I want my math performed fast and wrong I'll ask my cat".

In my opinion, the only Python JSON libraries worth considering are:

* simplejson -- it's in the standard library, and should therefore be considered first and most thoroughly.

* jsonlib -- it's fast, well-tested, and standards-compliant.

* demjson -- has several options for reliable parsing of invalid input.

Last time I checked, jsonlib and simplejson's C extensions are neck-and-neck performance-wise. In some quick, unscientific tests, jsonlib reads faster and simplejson writes faster. However, simplejson's extensions are only used for certain subsets of input -- if you want to use an uncommon feature, performance will degrade. jsonlib has an implementation in pure C, which avoids this problem at the cost of complexity.

Apologies for the brain-dump, but even if you skip right over it, please remember: don't use cjson.
++ for Airplane reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-xHPU6NulM
The people who use IE don't care about launches. They change when:

- Windows Update downloads it for them

- Coporate IT depts get enough validation that it will be a safe download

The early adopter crowd is for the most part using Firefox.
In a way you're right. But I do know what Stallman stands for and respect what he's done. I was just hoping he would lay off the web.

The web is open, by definition. Anybody can view a javascript file in the browser cache, and it's not hard to work out how it works even if it is minified/obfuscated.

I just don't see the need to start blocking scripts because the developer doesn't subscribe to his radical views.

In the unlikely event of his idea taking off, it could dampen innovation rather than encourage it.
That's not assured: phds are almost always paid significantly more and tend to be more involved in R&D projects than day-to-day code grinds, and depending on how short sighted the company is, R&D is often the first group to see cutbacks.

It's not all that uncommon for a company to simply look through their rosters and pick off the highest paid non-essential personnel (for certain values of "essential," which usually put middle management above R&D) to get rid of.

Of course this largely depends what kind of work you're doing, so YMMV.
Is computer-related but I read @codinghorror tweets about a SO for sysadmins.

I just imagined a SO for the medicine field, I'll read it everyday!, imagine a doctor asking for help to another doctor?, and not only that, a doctor asking for feedback on a research... wow
First few jobs it can certainly help, but really once you have a couple years of experience you don't need it. I've been doing fine for the last 10 years. So latch onto a small shop and get good ;)
Ask HN: How to promote an API contest?
The company I work for (as community manager) is running an API contest. We're having difficulty getting the word out to people who might be interested in entering (i.e., people like those in the HN community).

We think we're giving away pretty good prizes, we've gotten listed in contest section at ProgrammableWeb, and we've blogged about it on the company blog and tweeted about it on the company Twitter account as well as on our own.

Yet, we don't have any entries yet (or any API key applications indicating they're for the contest). So what else can we do to get the word out?
Check http://www.grammarr.us ... just kidding-coming soon...
You're right. I'll get right on that. For now, please use http://www.webnodes.org/
A large part of the problem and solution relies on the field we're talking about. There are law forums, but unfortunately, the law is incredibly specific and varies wildly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. There would have to be a LawOverflow for every county. Medicine is incredibly situational as well, and that doesn't include the doctor patient confidentiality clause, which means the doctor needs permissions even to ask general questions. Now, if you were talking about students, then the style still wouldn't work, because the answers are in the textbooks, not in other people.
Cars and home improvements have the best chance, but as was mentioned, The people answering the questions have to be spending a lot of time at the computer, rather than spending their doing work on cars, or doing construction work on a house.

The reason StackOverflow works is that computers work based on their code, and so a certain compiler will interpret C# code in a certain predictable way, so the people answering the questions don't have to be anywhere near you. And they are able to answer in a relevant way. The same is not true for other fields.
Identifying the cause of CCD is far from identifying the solution.
Neutron tracks revive hopes for cold fusion
Ah. Maybe it should have been done in hex?

%w[1.8 1.9 1.A].sort #=> ["1.8", "1.9", "1.A"]
Ruby script to backup MySQL DB with Subversion
You might get up-voted if you explain why you hate twitter with a passion.

There's a great deal about twitter that is a celebration of the banal, but there are ways of using it that are quite valuable.

It's like ambient conversation in a crowded room, but you have control over who's in the crowd.
Supporting students in open source software development
I don't have a lot of time this afternoon -- if anyone else does, would you kindly post a succinct explanation of the real reason why the honeybees were disappearing, where they were disappearing to, and how the problem being prevented? I'd appreciate it. :)
Nobel Economist: Now Is No Time to Give Up on Markets
a good place to start might be a link so that we could take a look, either to participate or give input based on what you're doing :)
Wozniak on startup scenes (1984 Interview)[video]
Sorta, kinda:
http://spellbound.sourceforge.net/requests
(search for bookmarklet)

The steps seem to be:

1) Install Spellbound

2) Hit the bookmarklet to set the whole page to designMode

3) Start SpellBound
OpenCog: Open-Source Artificial General Intelligence for Virtual Worlds
I think starting something small, making money and having success is how you decide whether to grow that project bigger or taking the money and pushing it into something else.

When you don't have the advantage of resources or time to devote to a home run, it seems hitting lots of singles could have a much better effect and while the results are the same, the ways to accomplish your goal are more attainable.

I've found trying to go after "big" projects without building small ones successfully is too much of a gamble. Small successes + networking + revenue generation = the opportunity to seek out something bigger when the time is right.

Otherwise, you're probably wasting your time.
Why are they all activated on mouseover? That doesn't make any sense to me. IMO I think that mouseovers are only good for displaying tooltips or something along those lines.

What's wrong with a click?
http://chneukirchen.org/repos/coset/
I wasn't talking about zipping up your files on a CD and putting them in a draw. There are companies like IronMountain, which give you off-site physical storage.

I am sure the deletion protection Jungle Disk provides is good but what if somebody internally deletes a S3 file or directory of files they are gone for ever. This isn't an S3 problem just a issue with the strategy.
you've written more code to make the machine do less

Not really: if you're improving the program's memory access behavior, the machine really is "doing more": by removing a memory stall, you're replacing a situation in which the processor was idling with a situation in which the processor is doing useful work. Prefetching and speculative execution are other examples of the "do more work, spend less time idling" theme.
Turning gold into cash should be the last thing people do.

Unlike the US dollars, gold can't simply be mined fast enough to reduce its values. Whereas with the US dollar, the US federal reserve can just print it, literally.

Gold is the money of the future, especially when the economic system finally collapse. Gold has been money for thousand of years for good reason.

Unless there are better form of money in a free market, gold is the best choice. Horde some of it.(Of course, don't convert your entire saving into gold, that's stupid.) It may leave you one of the last guy with real wealth after an economic collapse. It is the cork that float in an ocean of economic uncertainly.

This is of course, assuming that the government managed to outrun our economic productive capacity.
Ask HN: What's your process for generating startup ideas?
I always try to keep an open mind to both software and hardware related ideas and of course, if you work on a project that's, for example, very software intensive, you tend to get tunnel vision and are less likely to think about other potentially great ideas.

What steps do you take to think outside the box and generate ideas that don't necessarily pertain to what you work on or do day in and day out
To whoever downvoted this: this was a JOKE, a quote from 'Office Space'.
Firefox New Tab Page: Cognitive Shield
The successful approach seems to be what Tcl (and Perl, I hear) do: one interpreter per thread, with message passing/shared memory.
Ask HN: If you could build a power company...
Electric utilities are the biggest monopolies in the world. Today's changes in technology and market design present the one chance to fundamentally redesign the electricity industry and our relation to it.

In an ideal world, what would a power company look like? What would it do?

How do you think technology and the social web can bust the monopolies that touch almost every aspect of our lives?
Was anyone really expecting a big percentage change less than a week after IE8 launched?
Someone at Iron Mountain or Fedex could lose your backups too (accidentally or maliciously). Neither is too likely, nor is someone internally deleting data at S3.
That said, if you have data you can't ever take a chance to lose, don't store it in only one place ever - not just on S3, not just on a USB drive, not just in off-site physical storage. Keep at least two copies, maybe more.
One of the things we're working on is allowing you to backup to multiple cloud providers - so even in the unlikely event of a catastrophic cloud failure you'd have other copies available.
I am trying to think of a joke involving Hans Solo frozen in Carbonite ...
You have a good point. I'm honestly not sure what version it was. The company always used old software(5 year old Vignette cms). That probably has unfairly influenced my views of Mantis. I still recommend Fogbugz but try Mantis too
NS seems like a tabloid to me. Actual article: http://www.springerlink.com/content/022501181p3h764l/
Also goods tips here to extract for entrepreneurs looking to raise angel money.
Your free online movie collection: veedemus has launched
>Having sat in long, single lane stop and go traffic I can >anecdotally suggest it's irrelevant.

They're suggesting that no overtaking prevents the bottleneck in the first place, not that it gets you out of an existing one.

Seems like this would prevent drivers behind overtakers from having to slow down which propagates back causing a bottleneck.

How about multi-lane highways with tolls for each lane priced dynamically based on traffic conditions.
I have a degree, just not one in computer science. I'm self-taught, and although I've been doing this for a long time, I still occasionally freak myself out when I start to think about what I might have missed.
RSA closed the Factoring Challenge. Did they stop believing the money is safe?
The overall positive sentiment towards [semi-traditional] ad-based business models in this conversation is very alarming.

The game isn't "improving advertising"; it's "reinventing communication between buyers and sellers".

Those two things are way different.

Think about it this way: the less we all focus on making ads better, the more polluted the mediascape becomes, shrinking the pie for everyone ...instead of growing it.

(that last insight via @umairh)
The Way Facebook is Made
The Firefox 4 beta uses Windows font aliasing. And tries to use the default windows theme, with not so great results.
Actually they sold a record amount of ad revenue ($206m), so no they weren't going for super cheap. They had a few last minute cheaper spots, but we're still talking the $2.4m range.
I think the old fashioned way - a will - can cover it as well.
Mostly it seems to be a virus, called IAPV, which attacks colonies weakened by poor nutrition, stress, and (possibly) pesticides. But it's actually much more complicated than that, you'd have to RTFA...
The article makes several good points but I'd have to disagree with the no overtaking rule. Taking the human out of the equation, vis a vis 'IRobot' style, where road travel is managed by computer seems like a more viable option in the long term. There have been several advances in this technology, from MIT especially (Google 'Self driving car', do you really expect me to divert from this tab for you?)

I work in Highway Engineering and Management, the company i work for manages quite a few of the UK's motorways. I wonder if I could wing this point into a meeting. Another Gem HN, thanks.
Success is a Ponzi scheme:

Everyone thinks that to be Successful Guy they have to work really hard. Successful Guy takes responsibility for their work and becomes more successful. Everyone works harder since Successful Guy is even further beyond their reach. Successful Guy works even less since everyone else is working even harder. Rinse and repeat. Eventually, Successful Guy appears magical and has the ability to rise to the top of any organization.
> Requiring a degree in CS, SE, or EE (I don't see the point of requiring a degree if it's not directly related to the field) does exactly this.

But it doesn't. There are plenty of people with CS or SE degrees that lack a minimal level of understanding. Even with a terribly lenient definition of minimal.

I'm talking about people who get through 4 years of a decent CS program and would vehemently insist that "array" is an exact synonym for "linked list".

I'd say that the benefit of a CS degree is weaker -- just that it brings forced exposure to important topics, so if you have two people who are smart, the one with a CS degree is going to be more well-rounded. The thing is, you usually don't get to decide between two smart people when hiring. And the CS degrees that are around don't seem to reduce the risk of bugmaking.
I don’t do errors, and my name isn’t Google
If the system is already broken, and someone taking advantage of it is making things better, I say let him take advantage of it.
that's an argument i've heard in favor of them (serves as a reminder). good to know that it has that effect for you.
If I click on something like that, I'm expecting a page reload, not a menu.
I'd expect IE is filter through for the next year as corporations and consumers update.

More importantly, education. Millions of PCs will get this browser, and as Firefox continues it's long hike towards being resource intensive and leaky, Google Chrome and others will seem an even better idea.
I really think that as soon we see it in Windows Update, IE7 will leave room for IE8. The people who is running IE6 won't care.
The contest looks to be these guys:
http://www.dandyid.org

What, exactly, are you offering with your API? A quick look around makes me think you are trying a two-sided sale.
First side: get users to create a DandyID to use with all the DandyID enabled sites.
Second side: get websites to use your API to let all those users who have created a DandyID sign-up to their site more easily.

From the users perspective it looks like there is exactly one application - a wordpress plugin - so why should I trust some random site with my credentials? So I can then install a wordpress plugin of unknown quality on my server?

From the website side I would guess after you subtract all your test accounts the number of live DandyIDs is in the dozens.

A two sided sale like this is very tough.

At first I thought you were offering the ability to look through all the sites you have aggregated (scraped?) by username - that could be useful. When I saw the need for a DandyID account before the API was useful I realized the API was not very useful.

To your original question: "Apply for an API key" is a little off-putting. If I am cool enough maybe you will give me one? And when you click on the link:

http://www.dandyid.org/beta/apiprofile

you get this:

Whowzers! Lets try that login again.
You must be logged in to do that!

I guess if I clicked on that signup link, gave up who knows what kind of info, I could then "Apply" (oh please, please let me in)

but at this point I am gone.

You are essentially asking developers to work for you for free. The developers are doing you a huge favor - you have to have that attitude.
I just didn't want to sound spammy and keep the discussion high level. But since you asked... ;)

http://www.dandyid.org/beta/apicontest
'Chaos Scenario' Has Arrived for Media, Marketing
I couldn't find one when I implemented drop downs a few months ago, but the hover intent plugin was very useful for rolling my own.
I miss Screensavers from the ZDTV era. Tech was ok, G4 is unwatchable.
Contingency planning makes all the difference in the world. When OPEC oil crisis hit in the 70's, only Shell Oil had done contingency planning for such an event, and it was the only major oil company who had a backup.

So my feeling is: have a contingency plan. It doesn't have to be elaborate and it doesn't have to be time-consuming or expensive. Just do a thought experiment about what you would do and make sure there are no barriers in that plan.

For example, have some water and food that won't spoil. It's not hard to do, and it's generally a good idea. Things like that.

No one thinks society will really collapse. But companies like Shell Oil know that a tiny amount of planning for any contingency is just smart.
Agreed, now let's go back to hacker news, not economics/politics.
You're right, but a tag cloud does offer a very obvious visual cue. There's nothing in an ordered list that suggests visually that the top item has the highest reference count.
I found a post where a guy is using a simple javascript call to place the page in designMode and in the latest version of FF the spell checker is invoked. The only catch is you have to visually scan down the page to find your errors (which is tedious if there is lots of text. Would be nice to have a sidebar or floating menu to assist.

Also, the design mode adds in some formatting which is not so great if you're saving it back to the original source.

"javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true';%20document.designMode='on';%20void%200"
> gold can't simply be mined fast enough to reduce its values

No, but people's DESIRE for gold can change quite quickly.

Gold can lose value very very fast if people decide that a given national currency is going to be inflation-free - they would rather have their wealth in a liquid form, and sell the gold for cash, thus driving down the price of gold.

Why did housing prices crash over the last year? Was it because so many houses were created in 12 months? No, it was because people's estimation of the value of houses went down, due to new and better information.

Gold is certainly not immune to such effects.
I think you described most of the male population.
yeah, they at least serve some purpose.

i feel like a better implementation of them would be something similar to how the digg button works. create some sort of widget that determines what networks you're logged into, and only display those buttons. that way, its not a wall of buttons, but a custom menu of the sites you're at least making use of as a registered user.
I think the reason the glorification of failure is (and ought to be) popular is because there are more smart people with good ideas not starting companies for fear of failure than there are people starting companies aiming to fail.

Even that number comparison aside, for VC's, I think the cost of people starting a company which fails is far less than the benefit of people starting successful companies that wouldn't have been started if the founders didn't overcome their fear of failure.
"Aside: should the guys who drive an armored car that carries millions of dollars in bonds get paid more than the guys that drive an armored car that only carries thousands of dollars in cash? Does the amount of money handled change the difficult of the work?"

Potentially yes.

I disagree that a person should be paid by the difficulty of their work. Who decides that? One job might be more difficult to one person than another. I think programming is pretty easy, and construction work is a lot of effort - should I get paid less for programming than a construction worker?

So what SHOULD one's pay be based on? The value of their labor - the value their labor provides. This is very similar to how businesses work, which is why is it sound from a game theoretic sense. Businesses (typically) charge an amount that is based on what their product is worth. You buy the item because it provides more value than the cost of giving them that money. This way, both the business is incented to charge somewhere around that amount (because they get value from the sale) and the consumer gets value as well (cost - value to them).
I think when Eric talks about taking out Google Adwords for testing, he means to do it in the way that "The 4 Hour Work Week" by Timothy Ferriss uses it. He uses Google Adwords as a mechanism to test his ideas and lays out certain criteria to measure success.

37 Signals already had a product when they bought the adwords. These guys are talking about buying a small amount of adwords and using a fake signup page to test a need, before the product even exists.
Inside AdSense: Answers to your interest-based advertising questions
This post from Tim Ferris is amazing and outlines some ways to prepare to be a fugitive: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/03/03/how-to-be-ja...