skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The jquery plugins are young, and you can usually find answers to all these things in #jquery on freenode. I'm surprised they break your IE, because jquery is one of the few libraries that does some very extensive optimization for IE, unlike some of the other top dogs.

I think a common paradigm is to develop for firefox (because it's convenient to debug with firebug, etc.) and then test in IE and figure out where IE's issues are. You'll learn things that IE doesn't like and avoid them in the future. IE doesn't have some of Gecko's js features, like generators and array comprehensions, so don't touch those. Also, in IE, a trailing comma in an inline object declaration is a syntax error:

var x={0,};
//i find this syntax convenient, so that always pisses me off

The event object disappears if your event handler invokes something to be done on a fresh callstack, even if you still have a reference to the object itself:

function someHandler(e){ setTimeout(function(){alert(e);},0); }
//only lost when called via event invocation, and i'm not sure how widespread this problem is

Some DOM properties/attributes may be different/present/absent, but if you use jquery that'll be abstracted away. The event model in IE is lame (level 2 stuff), allowing you to attach only one listener per event per object, but jquery abstracts that away as well. What else... IE is known for leaking memory because each DOM element is actually a COM object, and cyclical references between the js engine and COM are undetected. There's a young tool called sIEve (currently v0.0.8) that can help you detect what leaked. anything else you want to know?
Building Mashup-Friendly Sites in Rails
also, with the value of the dollar plunging below even the canadian dollar, the US stock market prices in terms of euros, for example, haven't been climbing that much, iirc (might even be declining?). someone can probably point to a graph of US stock prices in euros, but it's interesting, as i recall.
Google's Brian Grant discusses the problems of parallelism
This is just silly, their top 5 (Yahoo, Facebook, MySpace, Google, and YouTube), just happen to be 5 of THE most trafficked websites on the Web (all in the top 7, according to Alexa). This smells like linkbait.

Though I do agree that MySpace is pure evil.
Hmmm. Diamond Age didn't do it for me for some reason. I liked it but not nearly as much as Cryptonomicon. But I have had several people tell me the same thing that you did wrt DA, so it just must be me.
Edsger Dijkstra - Discipline in Thought [video]
My position is large in that it questions Pythagoras and so, everything that follows him. All phillosophy today is still Pythagorean in that it implies agreement with his subjective stance. The Greek miracle is in fact the discovery of objectivity (reasoned argument) based on the integration of ordinal and cardinal numbers, or concretes and abstractions, which is the same thing. Pythagoras confused numbers which are abstractions with their concrete instances. This has the effect of reversing the Thalean integration and re-establishes the mind/body dichotomy as the norm, making objectivity impossible.
never had an IE-only jquery problem, but I only use the core lib.
Myths about the arrow of time
iPhone Gives Mobile a Badly Needed Kick in the Ass
iPhone continues to rock the world.
I do, and didn't notice any IE issues (though our JQuery usage has gone up significantly since the last time I tested with IE...)

It's quite possible that UI has issues though - it's not really a 1.0-quality release, more like an alpha release that they put out in public. I had to write 3 patches for UI Slider to even work, and much necessary functionality is either undocumented or unimplemented. There's supposedly going to be a release in mid-December to fix some of the outstanding bugs.

I haven't really noticed IE issues in general - I use CSS and portable libraries like JQuery and code to standards, and just do a single pass before release to fix any outstanding IE issues. Last time I did a release, it took less than a day to fix everything.
What worries me is how long it'll take to get the HTML5 Bandpass filter and how frustrating it'll be for the first 5 years after adoption writing the same site twice.
Edit your photos! On Flickr!
New hypothesis for origin of life proposed
Confessions of an Economic Hitman,
The Wealth of Nations,
The Great Gatsby,
See No Evil,
Hannibal
Why are so many charities ineffective?
When cruft creeps in
Check your CSS.

When I first used jQuery it wasn't working as I had expected it to. The stylesheets were invalid and apparently causing problems. Since then I haven't run into any issues with IE or otherwise.
Definitely an interesting theory. I could absolutely see life forming there, though some of her arguments are a little over the top:

"RNA plays an important part in translating the genetic code, and is composed of nitrogenous bases, sugar, and phosphates. RNA and many proteins and lipids in our cells have negative charges like mica. RNA's phosphate groups are spaced one half nanometer apart, just like the negative charges on mica."

This is coincidence and nothing more. Lots of things have a negative charge. In fact, half of all things with a charge must be negative. The same with the phosphate groups. I assume she means the distance between the phosphate group in subsequent ribonucleotides, since in the chain each ribonucleotide has only one phosphate group. However, I believe this distance can change based on how the RNA is folded (it's never in a straight chain like it's drawn unless it's bound to its complimentary strand).

I hope more research is done on this though, because it would solve some problems with the primordial soup hypothesis.
This Perfect Day by Ira Levin (out of print, yet much more worthwhile in my opinion than other dystopic novels)
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
The Books of the Fey by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer
The Deathgate Cycle by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis
No, I just was thinking in some Lisp implementation that didn't require to install the JVM, but that could use the bytecode of a lighter language, like Python. Also because I suppose if a Lisp implementation is generating code for a specific platform, its documentation will refer to such platform, and I'd prefer to read about Python bytecode than about JVM.

But maybe I'm wrong and it's just useless prejudice of my part.
Gregory Chaitin's The limits of mathematics (full book online)
How to be a Mathematician: interview with Greg Chaitin
"An Invitation to Algorithmic Information Theory" (using Lisp), by Greg Chaitin
I would definitely call that the exception rather than the rule.
Arguing over semantics is not ridiculous at all. Semantic misunderstanding is at the root of many disagreements.

In this case, the video uses the term bubble specifically as it was used to describe the tech bubble in the late 90s. The video offers a number of cues to suggest this is the intended meaning of the word.

There will always be overvaluations and undervaluations in the stock market. That's the nature of investment risk. What's missing here is a widespread pattern. This is like worrying that Xerox was overvalued for their Palo Alto Research lab-- a valid concern for Xerox stockholders maybe, but no concern at all for the rest of the world.
I just wanted to mention that was a serious comment. If you currently own a software company and are interested in hiring college graduates, it might be wise to take some notes rather than bashing Fog Creek, its products, or Joel's elitism.
it's a little late... MT's Grid has never really been stable nor has it's performance been any good; I've been a customer for a few months when I was still new to ruby on rails.

On the bright side it is a fast way of getting a public rails site up with minimal sys admin skills...
Increasing CS enrollment through deception on Facebook
One can increase CS enrollment by increasing the number of high school students who have a rewarding experience with programming.

I believe that the latter can be achieved using deception by giving high school students some idea of what it's like to build a successful application -- without actually having them build one (as they don't know programming yet).

For example, they could use my deceptive Mindrosia Facebook app for this purpose:

http://www.allfacebook.com/2007/11/mindrosia-app-ideas-gener...

Once they brainstorm ideas that are likely to attract many users as determined by Mindrosia, then they have an incentive to learn programming to pursue those ideas while in high school.

And that in turn can lead them to a computer science degree.
Don't take advice about server infrastructure from to ex-lawyer bloggers:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/10/17/media-temple-crushes-sh...

I would find this action by Media Temple more convincing if the word "sorry" appeared somewhere in the post. Instead they used the weasely "We apologize" thing, which always rubs me the wrong way.
Consult this PDF:

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/webauth:tr.pdf

In general, dont ever send passwords over an unencrypted channel. People reuse passwords. The credentials they are using for your site could be the same for their bank.

Oh, and make sure to hash the passwords in your database. BCrypt is good for this task. Best not to try rolling your own methods (as has been pointed out here on YC news before).
I'm glad to see this project working out. I saw Negroponte give a presentation about the OLPC at UCLA a year ago, and it was amazing how genuinely enthusiastic he was about it.
Pondering Exit Strategies
As a follow-up to the post regarding an acquisition as your exit strategy (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85913) - I had bookmarked long ago the following post on Dick Costolo's Blog:

http://www.burningdoor.com/askthewizard/2007/09/no_exit.html

I have to agree with Dick on a lot of the points he covers, but most importantly, he discusses that he (and other early stage VCs) are more interested in growing successful businesses.

While you may want to consider what your exit could be - is it really what you want to focus on? Is your only milestone reaching a level where the acquisition is worthwhile?
I'll go with anything written by Vonnegut. Feynman books too.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience

William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying &amp; The Sound and the Fury

Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Peter Medawar's The Art of the Soluable

Designed by Peter Saville

Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols

Bloom County Babylon
ReDesignMe: Lets You Post Bad Design and Your Solution to It (Don't use Flash Ver)
More satanic trickery! Again the devil fools the nonbelievers.

In all seriousness though, more posts like this please. There should be hacker news for non-computer science nerds like me.
Fiction:

- The Time Machine (still holds up very well, and seems strangely eerie and prescient in places)... (H. G. Wells)

- Dune (Frank Herbert)

- The Hobbit (and LotR) (Tolkien)

- Neuromancer (William Gibson)

- Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties (I picked up Idoru first, so I haven't yet read Virtual Light) (also Gibson)

- The Difference Engine (Gibson, Sterling)

- Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson)

- Cryptonomicon (" ")

- Circuit of Heaven, End of Days (Dennis Danvers)

- All of the "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser" stories and novels. (Fritz Leiber)

- The Earthsea trilogy (Ursula K. LeGuin)

- 'salem's Lot (Stephen King)

- Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)

- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain)

- the Coldfire trilogy (C. S. Friedman)

- various Cory Doctorow short stories

- Kamikaze L'Amour (Richard Kadrey)

- Lightpaths (Howard V. Hendrix)

- A Canticle For Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller, Jr.)

- Moonwar, Venus (Ben Bova)

- the Stainless Steel Rat series (Harry Harrison)

- Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)

- Ringworld (Larry Niven)

- Cthon (Piers Anthony) -- Trippiness level approaching Philip Jose Farmer ;-)

- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series (Douglas Adams)

- The Black Company (Glen Cook)

- there's one particularly good post-cyberpunk series that takes place in a world in which Canada emerged as a major world power, but for the life of me I can't rememeber the title.

- the 1632 series (Eric Flint)... see also S. M. Stirling's Nantucket series ("Island in the Sea of Time", et al.), and H. Beam Piper's novel Kalvan of Otherwhen

Non-fiction:

- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume)

- the surviving words and works of Epicurus, and Diogenes the Cynic

- Freakonomics (Levitt, Dubner)

- The Gay Science (Nietzsche)

- The Jefferson Bible (Christ, Jefferson (ed.))

- The Devil's Dictionary (Bierce)

- Brain Droppings (George Carlin)

- anything by P. J. O'Rourke

- anything by Dave Barry
The creative process
Seeing as how AT&T forces you into a data plan with the iPhone, these statistics make sense.
I agree, I wonder how many origin-of-life hypotheses are created each day sometimes...

Formula for OOL Hypothesis:

1) Find extremely old rock layer / ocean bed, etc that contains materials that are components of today's living organisms

2) Take High-res microscopic pictures of gel or bubbly substance, toss in a few arrows

3) Throw in a few words about positive/negative charges to satisfy the amino acid creation requirement

4) Make up a source of heat -- i.e. sun through magnified glass, earthquake, volcanic activity, etc.

5) Release theory!
The part that intrigued me the most about the video was the contrast between Mozart's style of composing and Beethoven's. Web startups are a monument to the iterative style of composing, where the respectable way to test programs and businesses is to simply try them and see if the output is as expected. What sort of balance should we strike between hastily attempting every idea versus a more thoughtful approach?
I do know that when I am impatient trying to solve problems, I tend to do more harm than good because my code often degenerates into an unmaintainable mess.
thanks for posting this

sadly, I didn't start at UT until a few years after he passed away. Must have been amazing to learn from this legend. All my professors had nothing but great things to say about him as a person and as a teacher.
One thing from the article I found interesting is that a very detailed spec is equivalent to the program. That is, I found it interesting when I "discovered" it a few years ago.

Let's try a little poll: if you found that interesting and already knew it, upvote this comment. If you found it interesting but didn't know it, downvote it. If you didn't find that interesting, don't vote.
Yeah I just submitted two patches for the UI Dialog. I guess I'll just have to sit down some day on a windows machine and deal with IE, even if I hate it. I suspect it's in the UI code, like you said.
And my boss!

(My boss is your CS professor...)
All excellent pointers... thanks for the insight.

I have to admit I'm a total js newbie. jQuery makes it seem easy to pick up, but I know that if I had to do much outside of it I'd be lost.

I'm actually really surprised how powerful it seems. All that passing around of functions as data makes it fun to work with.
No it doesn't mean that, blackjack too has an even smaller number of knowledge state (based on cards already dealt/hand/dealers card). There is a finite and small number of cards dealt and in a shoe and simple probabilistic calculation can be made to determine the absolutely correct action.

Poker is not finite, at least the wagering part of it, the interaction between the players. Even in the exact same situation as defined by the mechanics of the round, the correct answer might be different, depending on a host of psychological factors.
Ask YC: What's your startup going to change?
What's your startup going to change that breaks up business as usual?
I'd say you can in terms of how knowledge plays a role in the game. In chess, the computer can calculate the best move given a situation. It doesn't need to know anything about the opponents strategy. In poker, it is pretty much the opposite. Your move depends partially on purely deterministic criteria, what people likely have, but more so on what you think everyone else thinks. Here you enter a realm I'd say computers are inherently bad at.

This, I think, is what mattmaroon is getting at.
Killer robots from Silicon Valley could replace soldiers
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers" -- Pablo Picasso(?)
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers" -- Pablo Picasso(?)

What you fellows think about this?
Xobni's goal is to "become the Google of personal information"
The tagging makes it the best. The whole low-resolution thing makes artistic photos not work out too well, but for pictures containing people, Facebook really is the best. Especially if you're in college, in which case nearly everyone has a fb account.
yes, they are too cheap, especially when they can find something else for free. People nowadays think that they're always entitled to digital things for free for some reason.
Patent Troll: $360M Patent Suit Over iPhone Voicemail
As far as I've ever seen/sensed, "I apologize" and "I'm sorry" are equivalent. I've never previously seen the suggestion that 'apologize' is 'weaselly'.

"I regret" is weaselly if not paired with some form of 'sorry' or 'apologize'. "I take full responsibility" can be weaselly as well, if given only as a macho platitude, unaccompanied by other apologies and remedial action.

(My humble opinion as a native english speaker.)
Bruce Schneier Answers Freakonomics' Questions
Top Ten Search Terms on Yahoo & Google
The SEO motherlode.
xkcd - Python
A copy of news.yc RSS that works with Google Reader
The <comments> element isn't recognized by Google Reader, so the link should go into the <description> element. Just a little time saver.
I've heard the idea of life forming on mineral surfaces before; see for example from 1998:

http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/98/980331.origin.of.li...

My money's on extraterrestrial origin, aka 'exogenesis', and probably 'panspermia' as well. (We'll eventually find life almost everywhere.) See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
What I meant was you can't really compare the "easiness" of the two for humans based how well a computer would do. Computers are theoretically good at chess, and theoretically bad at poker, but that says nothing about how easy or hard the two are for humans.

You can't say that A is easier than B for humans just because a computer can do A well but not B. For example, computers are excellent at doing large calculations very fast but terrible at recognizing objects in a scene visually, but humans are the exact opposite.
John and Genesis.

Genesis is a necessary read for anyone, regardless of religious affiliation.
The actual quote is "We apologize" and "Media Temple would like to apologize" both seem like obvious distancing language to me. It's as if the CEO blames the engineers and so doesn't want to just flat out say "I'm sorry". Not a big deal, just the kind of thing I'm somewhat sensitive to.
I don't know... delivering 50 pound bags of dog food in the mail just seems like a bad idea...
(shameless self-promotion)

Try Feedity - http://www.feedity.com for custom RSS web feeds.

E.g. New Links RSS: http://www.feedity.com/?xccH2xIG%252bIhCywXfu149J8ltp3V3aMhk...
Python was my second language - and after Java as a first, this comic seems pretty accurate.
Google Pre-Launches New iPhone Interface
That's just silly. Honorary degrees are just that, honorary, to honor someone. You don't hear people talking about how they received "their degree" from some university when in fact it was actually an honorary degree.

I don't feel like my degree is somehow cheapened because my university gives honorary degrees to people who didn't "earn it".
One should be careful about proclaiming oneself the "Google of X". Somebody might eventually expect you to deliver. (I'm not picking on Xobni, in particular...it's just become a pretty common thing. There have been rumblings about Facebook being "the next Google", for example...but it's not at all apparent they have anything remotely approaching the capability to deliver Google-style revenue, and every day of healthy but moderate growth is evidence that they've failed to deliver the explosive growth that "the next Google" would deliver.)
PDF Is Now ISO 32000
aha, shame but there are some cool elements on that list. datagrids etc
Webkinz?
I agree, however I'm still suspicious about the data.

I don't know how many iPhones have been sold, 10M? This would mean that iPhone uswers are 100 times more likely to surf the net than S60 users.

Could be, I am not sure what kind of marketing Nokia globally has for the S60 and browsing, and how aware people generally are of it.

It is easy to get a biased picture based on people around you. Me and a few of my friends surf train timetables/TV programs etc. almost daily on their S60 devices. And there aren't that many iPhones in Finland yet.
(Spammers) Take Advantage of Death in Boston
Many businesses still keep a tremendous amount of important information in spreadsheets. Yet spreadsheets haven't really evolved since their inception. We're changing that, and by doing so, we hope to free companies up from just being reactive and trying to keep pace with day-to-day activities, and allow them instead to push towards new models and new ways of doing business.
While the actual title is silly fear mongering based the other meaning of "hacker" (and with the Times, I'm unsure if an editor or an author writes the blog titles), this is more interesting to me for the tactics being used. Amazing really (on many levels - shocking to technical) that they fine tune these pages based on obituary notices. More troublesome, for the pay-for-content sites, is that users take advantage of these things.
Researchers Fighting fat Software
Yes that kind of mental-masturbation excites me too ;)

from reading other posts (comments) I've remembered another good book, sort of on the same flavor as the "biological" parts in GEB:

-"Investigations", by Stuart Kauffman

exciting lecture too
yeah, actually that whole thing was fascinating to watch. The process actually worked. I think there is a bit much weight put on the process though, lets face it, the people involved were brilliant. They could have started with a wet towel and got something great out of it.

That reminds me, there was a DVD - anyone watch that? I have been meaning to buy it.
Actually I didn't really mind the wasabi thing. Odd, yes, but hey, they already had it all working in asp.
Facebook is the New Friendster
Visiting Twitter!
the point he was trying to make is that its the human that comes up with the question, which is by far the most important thing. Bad question means you will always get a bad answer.
Learn to Tango With D (Apress Book)
I use jQuery (with thickbox and wymeditor plugins) it seems to work fine in IE, but safari is a mess for me.
"investors are looking for two things: what's the market size? And who are you and the people you have working with you?"

Since market size is almost always a wild ass guess at this point, then it's just a beauty contest, huh?
I used jQuery once as a very quick drop-in to replace some inline js on an internal reporting site. It was fantastic.

The changeover doesn't work in IE, though. I haven't had time to look at the problem in detail, but we're using XSLT to display the report in the browser, and $(document).ready() isn't firing.