skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can think of few things that are more ridiculous than being offended by the phrase 'Merry Christmas'.
Is this applicable for American sports?
Hi all,

Me and my co-founder has been working on this for a while now. As both of us are moonlighting, it didn't go as fast as we wanted but anyway there we are.

this11.com is basically an online soccer tactics board, which produces a jpg file of a soccer formation. You are given a link to the jpg file a la imageshack and use it within forums, blogs or any other type of online content.

Soccer(or football as we call it) fans love discussing about tactis and formations over here in Europe. Is this the case for NFL, NBA or NHL fans? Can this concept be of any value in North America?

What do you think of our app in general?

Cheers
It looks like an 8 year old did write my code
When I was down there this summer I heard that this is how most of the Catholic schools worked in the smaller towns. I'm not claiming it's national policy.
Gosh no, guys!

It's all about market differentiation. You should ideally wish each person a holiday wish based on their unique belief and practices. Lots more karma in that than blanket statements.

It's the long tail of holiday-greeting-karma-whoring strategy. :)

Merry Christmas, all!
As Earth Warms Up, Tropical Virus Moves to Italy
The Christmas Truce
I'm assuming i'm not the only one who experienced this last night - goddamn why am I awake so early?
True, but the Grand Challenge cars had to find their own way, while roads and/or tunnels could have premarked paths. Any general use vehicles would still have to have the capability for human control, though, for reasons like the snowstorms we're getting here in Ottawa.

I would miss the thrill of driving a motorcycle, though.
A pity that just a few eccentric people can actually destroy the reputation of a programming language.
We have been working on this for a while now. As me and my co-founder is moonlighting, it took a lot longer than we anticipated. But, there it is, we have something that we can build a community on.

Soccer(or football as we Europeans call it) fans love to speak about formations and tactics. this11.com is basically an online soccer tactics board. It generates a jpg file of the formation and the user is given a link to it. The link can be used in forums, blogs or any other sort of user generated content that allows embedding images.

Is this idea applicable to North American sports like NFL, NBA or NHL?
christopher clay who made canvas paint also is the designer of startup http://soup.io/ (kinda like tumblr meets friendfeed) which recently went into beta.
I'm in Argentina and I'm getting "Si". But as the website is called "is it Christmas" I think it only makes sense if the answer is "Yes".
VC Fundraising Manual: Why VCs Conduct Due Diligence
Once a VC is excited about your company they will begin conducting due diligence. While the due diligence process varies by firm, it is an incredibly important part of the investment process for venture capitalists.

The phrase "you don't know what you don't know" is the underlying rationale...
Top 10 Startups Worth Watching in 2008 (including 37Signals, LinkedIn and PowerSet)
I never understood what so great about changing the year. We have not needed an accurate sun/earth based calendar since the last time the majority of the population were farmers in need of harvesting and seeding.

Weeks and months area also devoid of meaning, and again a need only for farmers, hunters and gatherers. Since we live in a digital age, why not celebrate periods that are a power of 2? Like 1024 ... counting my life in kilodays would relate a lot more to what I'm doing every day than the notion of the earth revolving around the sun.
Google Reader now lets all your mail contacts read your shared items
Hmmm. So he agreed to take part in deceiving the employment agency in order to get his first computer-industry job?

Frankly, I don't have much respect for this.
Sure, some months ago there was a teachers strike, they did it because the government was going to evaluate their skills, and I'm pretty sure they're scared of not passing that test.
I'm talking about public schools here, private ones generally have a much higher level of education.

Again, let me tell you that it has nothing to do with religion. It's all about politics.
Google Reader shares private data, ruins Christmas
I visit #lisp for about a year and the guys are cool. Good discussions with maintainers of some projects like Zach. I agree with PG, it's mostly imaginary.
Warning: GMail security failure
Ruby 1.9 Released
Original Gnucitizen's article on Gmail hijacking
Hacking Web 2.0, by the same guy who found that Gmail bug
Diabolially clever? At the moment companies pay to advertise on Facebook et al. With Badoo companies and customers pay for their bands/artists/self to reach the top of a list? This is just a slight alternation of the extant model not an alternative.

Although, yes, as Badoo gives users the ability to do what companies have done for years is new, but it's still advertising, something they claim they've abandoned.
37Signals is a startup? They've been around almost 10 years.

How do people here define "startup"?
Scala: First Impressions...
How To Tell If It's Really Titanium
Someone did this outside my dorm at MIT: http://aaroniba.net/misc/nerdxing.jpg
Python + Motion detection = Fweemote
"Michael wasn't as convinced, but he then asked me the question I was dying to hear: "Would you not go back to the employment agency at all, so when we hire you we don't have to pay the fee?" I was in."

Seems to me like he didn't state what his response was. He could have said "No, that would be wrong."
The word "startup" is slowly converging into the phrase "internet company."

A few years ago, all internet companies were startups. It's hard to differentiate between what is or is not a startup now that the market is growing older and startups are becoming either endups or part of Google.

This is a great list though. Dash looks very promising; it also represents a trend we'll probably start to see in 2008, which is the convergence of wireless data and portable devices (kindle and dash-type products).

23andme, while interesting, probably isn't a startup to "watch" this year, but maybe further down the road as the tools for genomic research become cheaper.

I've used FON, and while it's a great idea, I'm not sure how "everywhere" it really is. How often do you sit at a coffee shop and, by some miracle, happen to connect to a FON device someone else is using? It has never happened to me.

LinkedIn is probably a good one. Even though the interface is (or used to be) a hideous monstrosity, it's a great idea and I hope it succeeds wildly. If for no other reason than I want my professional network completely and absolutely separate from my Facebook network.
Suggested YC News CSS patch
Currently, you can use a line-leading-space to create a PRE+CODE block in a YC News story or comment. This has an intended, usually desirable effect -- the PRE+CODE text does not wrap. If the PRE+CODE text includes a long line, however, there is another usually undesirable effect -- the width of the enclosing block element grows, and then even non PRE+CODE text anywhere on the page fails to wrap. Reading even simple unrelated paragraphs/comments then requires horizontal scrolling.

Here is the above paragraph with a leading space to trigger/demonstrate the problem:

Currently, you can use a line-leading-space to create a PRE+CODE block in a YC News story or comment. This has an intended, usually desirable effect -- the PRE+CODE text does not wrap. If the PRE+CODE text includes a long line, however, there is another usually undesirable effect -- the width of the enclosing block element grows, and then even *non* PRE+CODE text anywhere on the page fails to wrap. Reading even simple unrelated paragraphs/comments then requires horizontal scrolling.

A simple fix would be be to add to the news.css stylesheet:

pre {overflow:auto}

Then, the PRE block will get its own horizontal scrollbar, when necessary.
"37Signals released version 2.0 of Ruby on Rails in December, which should give many programmers a happy new year."

As if no one else was involved
You are slating Marc Cuban, for doing whatever it took to succeed? I think you are wrong here. Audacity gets a long way.
Woah, it was released tomorrow.
I don't like the anti aliasing with the magnifying glass. The whole point of a zoom-in feature is to be able to see and edit single pixels.
Here are mine:

1. Semantic web searching will not even dent Google.

2. EVDO/UMTS/WiMAX will finally make the internet as ubiquitous as cellular phone technology. 2008 is the year of connected portable devices. Kindle, iPhone, and Dash are its origins.

3. The iPhone will gain a huge chunk of the mobile device market, and after the 3G version is introduced with a spiffy sdk, it will engulf Windows Mobile like a bear eating an ant.

4. This election will have the most informed voters in history due to the ease of research through Wikipedia. (Though the actual voting will be just as aimless.)

5. OpenID-based login systems will grow in popularity.

6. Michael Arrington will be punched repeatedly.

7. Ron Paul Graham will be elected president
Source code is here: http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/4920
Timezones... look into that one ;)
Reverse Shoplifting: Anarchists in the Aisles? Stores Provide a Stage
Always a favorite! There's also a video available:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8860158196198824415
Why Giving Away Your Code Is Not Dangerous
IBM Poopheads say LAMP Users Need to "grow up"
Business software is Messy and Ugly.
Mathematical jokes on Wikipedia
Crisis may make 1929 look a 'walk in the park'
John Conway: 70th birthday of the creator of the Game of Life
both 1 and 7 are obviously going to happen.
i don't get it. for me (safari on mac) they both go off horizontally. so it's not a problem specific to pre. and horizontal scrollbars suck anyway.
Your business model will die
One technology always replaces another despite any efforts to stop the change.
The problem IS specific to pre. The problem is that a long line in a pre makes the page wider and then the other paragraphs uses all the available space (wich is larger than the screen, and then horizontal scrollbars appear).

With the patch proposed by gojomo, a long line in a pre will not make the page wider so the other paragraphs would work correctly. Evidently, the pre line will still be long so horizontal scrollbars will be still necessary but only within the pre.
While we're at it, maybe add

a { text-decoration: underline; }

to force link underlining.

The current CSS relies on the browser for this; since the links on Hacker News are reasonably close in color to the background text, users who disable link underlining in their browsers may have trouble seeing them.
How to Give Up Coffee and Caffeine Altogether
This is how they do it on reddit, try making a long line in code mode on reddit.
An amazing article. Should be right up there. Worth anyone reading....
I just tried adding it, and in my browser the long line just gets cropped at the edge of the table; there is no scrollbar. Is there something else I need to add or change?

(Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6)
Reading such things I always wonder how much our view of reality is distorted by our job. Programming is an industry which is especially unsafe, but this trend of change seems to be extrapolated here too much.
Novelist says neuroscience is helping us understand how art works
Science writer Arthur C. Clarke lists 3 wishes on his 90th birthday
What the hell should I do? (The technologists point of view)
Planning Startup Compensation
3 Ways to Get Expert Advice
Top 7 reasons to work for a startup
Kip Thorne: The Man Who Imagined Wormholes and Schooled Hawking
Amusing to see Anna Schwartz cited echoing Keynes about the importance of expectations.
Fund raising plans of IT start-ups turn awry
The Pirate Bay: Torrents and Peers Double in 2007 | TorrentFreak
Digg NOT Buying CoRank and Meneame: Who Is?
Sneaky timezones... always up to no good... don't trust them!
Egypt 'to copyright antiquities'
set a max width maybe? This is from reddit's CSS:

.md { max-width: 60em; overflow: auto; }

http://reallystatic.reddit.com/static/reddit.css
Avoiding cross site request forgery in your web apps
GMail recently fixed a CSRF vulnerability but not before someone lost their domain name to an attacker. A very brief summary of how to avoid the same mistake in your web apps.
Amazon (AWS) question.
It appears that on Amazon, I can give someone a gift without knowing the person's shipping address, so long as the gift item is in the person's wish list. My questions are:

1) Is there a way to do this if the item is not in the person's wish list? It just seems strange that if I don't know someone's address but wish to give them a gift, the gift item would have to be in that person's wish list .

2) If 1 above is not possible then the next best thing would be to allow the giver to first add the gift item to the recipient's wish list and then give the gift. Is it possible to add items to other people's wish lists? If so can this also be enabled through AWS?
to quote nick cave & the bad seeds, "just remember that death is not the end"
Interesting. I would have paid the guy the $250, then gone after him in any way possible once my domain was back. I would imagine that would also make it easier to find out who he was.

I'm all about doing whatever I'd have to do to get that guy behind bars, but screwing yourself out of a potentially large sum over the general principle of not giving money to criminals seems kinda silly. Buy the domain back, rake in the profit you make from it, and use that to fight the douche.
How not to manage a beta release
To get Realplayer 11 beta working. Realplayer included a few features that messed with flash and windows media among others. Read the user comments below.
Yeah, that schmuck. He brought my users all sorts of goodies, and all I could give them was one lousy new feature.
I highly doubt that anyone will revisit this thread, but I wanted to post a follow up for archiving sake, and in case anyone decides they want to know how everything ended up.

So, I felt the interview on the 17th went great. I didn't have much trouble coming up with answers to questions they asked me, and my interviewers had fairly easy-going personalities, which helped me relax a bit.

That Thursday, December 20, they asked me to return for a second interview on the following day. I got to meet the entire team (all three of them :o), see the office, and see a bit of the product. They said they'd get back to me by the end of the day and, long story short, I spent most of the weekend checking my email every 15 minutes.

Then came Christmas Eve Day: I got an email from the head honcho saying I'd been given the position, outlining my duties, and asking when I could start.

Thank you everyone who replied to this thread, your advice was invaluable!
Forget Happy Holidays
I'm not into these generic greetings. We all know what day it is.

Happy Kwanzaa everybody!
Perl isn't fundamentally flawed, but it's kind of flawed in practical terms
It works ok in my browser now (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071204 Ubuntu/7.10 (gutsy) Firefox/2.0.0.11)
I have the same issue. It's bug in Firefox Mac. AFAIK there's no fix for it until FF3. You can still mouseover and scroll, but there's no scrollbar.
The nightmare before Christmas
I second this. While it is obviously distasteful to conduct business in this manner, sometimes unsavory practices are necessary to stay in business. Just the world we live in.
I would have paid by using a CC and then issued a chargeback.
I'm sorry to say it but you don't sound like someone who has used Drupal for long at all. First, Drupal isn't a CRM. It's a framework that includes a CMS. For a great CRM that integrates with Drupal, take a look at CiviCRM (http://civicrm.org).

Second, what you say about making modules work consistently doesn't make sense to me, at least not as you describe it. Drupal can be hell on earth sometimes, but it's the job of the developer to decide which third-party modules fit the needs of the project and what needs to be written from scratch. Besides, audio and video attachments are usually wrapped in a Flash player and that depends very little on what module you use.

It also seems that you aren't aware of the best practice (http://drupal.org/best-practices) of not modifying Drupal's core files in order to "customize" your site. Of course modifying Drupal will make it hard to upgrade! Instead of creating a somewhat versionless fork of Drupal you should be using custom modules or PHPtemplate overrides to achieve the functionality you want.
The page "works" (renders a scrollbar for that one element) in my Firefox 1.5 on Linux now.
Why do you advise against it?
"Coding used to be much harder than it is today. It takes much less devotion and study to make programs these days and its getting easier all the time... and programming is perpetually going to get easier. (It used to take HTML expertise to make a website, now it just takes a MySpace account)."

You all know what "code smell" means? What we have here is "essay smell": a paragraph which is so far removed from reality that you begin to doubt everything else in the essay.

The invention of MySpace and Facebook didn't make web programming easier; they just raised the state of the art.
Similarly: Cheap, quality cameras have not and will not "obsolete the craft of photography" (just as cheap, quality word processors did not kill professional writing). And equipping us all with Illustrator and the Gimp has not hurt the professional graphic designers. (Are you kidding me? Or do you actually know a talented graphic designer who is out of work? Could I have their email address?)

Also, if you think about it for five seconds, you will realize that video did not kill the radio star. (Douglas Adams. Casey Kasem. Click and Clack. Howard Stern. The frickin' Beatles, and every other Top 40 group in the history of rock, a musical form which was invented after TV.) Citing a Buggles lyric as a literal fact is another essay smell, BTW.
Thanks for applying the change!

I now see, though, that on a single-line my Firefox [Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11] for some reason only clips, rather than adding the intended scrollbar. For example:

Lorem ipsum dolor Lorem ipsum dolor Lorem ipsum dolor Lorem ipsum dolor Lorem ipsum dolor Lorem ipsum dolor Lorem ipsum dolor

As soon as there's more than one line in the PRE, the expected scrollbar appears:

Lorem ipsum dolor Lorem ipsum dolor Lorem ipsum dolor Lorem ipsum dolor Lorem ipsum dolor Lorem ipsum dolor Lorem ipsum dolor
Lorem ipsum dolor

The CSS change helps in the common multiline case but could still be improved. Tinkering a bit, I find adding a small padding helps trigger the scrollbar. Specifically, try this:

pre {overflow:auto; padding:2px}

Unsure why this is necessary, suspect a browser limitation, where only a vertical trigger causes both horizontal and vertical scrollbars to be considered.

Oh, and I also see it doesn't help at all in IE7, but at least it leaves things no worse. Can't help there, IE users are on their own.
Mike Klein, who Mark Fletcher hired as CEO of ONElist, died in a plane crash
Christmas Day Or April Fools?: Prediction That Web 2.0 Will Die in 2008 Due To Lack Of Advertising
Boston's Big Dig Finally Nearing Completion
Ha. Brilliant, though I'd guess any decent escrow service has some plan for this contingency.
I thought web 2.0 already died. Or was that Facebook? I can't ever keep them straight.
France to create $9 billion of wealth by designating new Champagne-producing land
I added the padding and now the scrollbar appears in my browser for one line examples.

I think I actually like it best with cropping instead of the scrollbar. The curious can still get at the text by widening the browser or copying and pasting. Is there any way to get just cropping?
suggestion: read innovators dilemma.
CSS property

overflow:hidden

...should just crop.

If the transition text-jump isn't too annoying, this might also be interesting:

pre {overflow:hidden; padding:2px}
pre:hover {overflow:auto}

PRE blocks would be clipped until mouseover, when a scrollbar would appear if necessary (bumping following text down).
I just added your solution (handy to have a repl in the server) and it works well. Thanks very much; this had been bugging me for a long time.
Certainly there is a liquidity problem that bad lenders/investors are paying for but I don't see this radically impacting the global growth rate. Too many increases in production and technology are happening to see a full out depression. We may see some large companies fail and a mild recession, but beyond that it's not going to be much worse than earlier in the decade or early 90s.
Well that depends on what "web 2.0" means, I'm assuming social networking integration. If so it's the heart of why the internet works, just because it has a name doesn't mean it's going away. The name might change but social networking is the single most important attribute of the internet. Maybe in 100 years, but not in 2008.
Google Reader's privacy invasion is part of a larger evil plan
This is not some random mistake by Google. Google is aggressively expanding its social apps and this is their way to force it down their users' throats. If they are not stopped now, this will be common practice for all other Google apps.
>4. Non-search advertising on the web will increase in value significantly. This will be done through a lot of innovation in the ad targeting systems (both behavioral and contextual) and new metrics being adopted by Madison Ave beyond CPC and CPM.

This was the only prediction that caught my eye. I hadn't thought about it before but it's the obvious next step and I'm not talking about viral marketing. Along this vain I think you are going to see the first big push in 2008 for advertising in and with games as well as more utilization of direct interaction with bloggers, both written and video. I predict that in 2008 we will see companies support individual youtube producers in a way that will get noticed by the major media outlets.
I found the article to be pretty bad. It made me think of Marc Andreesen's critique of the Economist predictions - this one struck me as a technologist writing about non-technology, and badly at that.
I don't know the American school system, but that kind of sounds like it here: low wage, strikes to resist strict policy changes for the better, politics driven. I guess it's not so much about education either, then.

Thanks for sharing.
European Founders Fund: Interview
I think if we have a real energy crisis, _that_ would make 1929 look 'a walk in the park'. What would happen to computers, for a start?
The Joy of Cyber-Cooking
i couldn't get that to work. firefox 2.0 here.
What do you think about newLISP, a scripting language that claims to be a LISP dialect?
I'd like to hear opinions, impressions, criticism about it. Would it be a considerable language for professional or secure programs?

For those who still don't know it: http://www.newlisp.org/
Far better read:

http://activereload.net/2007/3/6/your-requests-are-safe-with...

(and plugin attached!)
Agile/XP Critique: It's not the Code, Stupid
Linus on the value of documentation:
On Ruby 1.9: Real World Performance On Boxing Day
Converting Pi to binary: Don't do it!
13 Year Old Bill Gates (and Paul Allen)
So who are the hobbyists?
Fail2ban | bans IP's that makes too many password failures
Steve Jobs Teenage Photo
Top 10 Genetically Engineered Organisms of 2007
Don't you think it's a waste of time to pre-plan your holiday wishes to be so politically correct? You could wish me a Happy Kwanzaa and I'd get the idea that you wanted to wish me well for whatever holiday I choose to celebrate... I wouldn't immediately be offended because you didn't know which 'holiday reference' I preferred to hear.

So uh... Happy Fourth of July!