skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Abstract: You have those options
* Design for better browsers, then design alternative solutions to handle IE6 bugs
* Write a remedial IE6 stylesheet to address layout issue
* Use JavaScript to bootstrap CSS support in IE
* Make your site look exactly the same in IE6 as in any other browse
* Develop to better browsers and spend no development time or testing for IE
* Block IE6 users from seeing your site's styles

Or you can just use one style for IE6 for all of your different web sites. (Example: http://forabeautifulweb.com/demo/2009/05/21/forabeautifulweb...)

I don’t like it. Using the same style for IE6 on all pages? Come on. I think CSS frameworks are the answer.
The airlines have services for that (see Delta Dash) without needing to use airline passengers. :)
There doesn't seem to be that much raw data available yet. A search for all data across all agencies at data.gov only produces 47 results.

Seems like over 50% of that data is also NSGS or NWS data which I believe was previously available in structured format.
Yes, this is along the lines I was thinking. Computers need to get better at integrating into our lives in a way that makes them part of the background and doesn't prevent us from interacting with the real world. In fact I'm convinced that, if we get it right, technology can enhance those real world interactions rather than detracting from them.
If you find mainstream coffee enjoyable, by all means stay with it!

Homebrewed (lit.) coffee will definitely teach you to taste deficiencies in everything from restaurants to Starbucks, but if you don't already think they're there then it's definitely either cheaper or easier to just stay innocent.

My experience was out of frustration with what I felt was watery or burnt or too sugary. Homebrew fits the bill perfectly. YMMV, yeah?
As stated in the comments of the actual article, the demo for text doesn't really do the technique justice.

Check out the Image demo: http://demos.digg.com/stream/imageDemo.html
Ironically, the page is ridiculously bugged on a current browser - Chrome 1.0.154.65.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infosys_BPO

http://www.infosys.com/BPO-services/default.asp

Infosys is not a call center. But its not a "pure" software company either.
I was just pointing out that he had an arbitrary cutoff line for the technology allowed.

I pointed out 3 functional differences in the grandparent post. The cutoff line is not arbitrary -- it's at interactivity, which is about as fundamental as you can get. As a cutoff, it's continental-shelf sized.

Five hundred years ago, one family went on a trip. The rule was: no printed books. Just scrolls.

No functional difference for the reader between writing on papyrus and printing on paper. Where's the cleverness? (Yeah, you hold it differently -- that's pretty silly, though.)
It's true that everyone enjoys a compliment now and then, but it's very easy to come across as manipulative and insincere when using a compliment as a way to strike up a conversation.

It is, in fact, manipulative -- the compliment was chosen as a way to get the person to engage in a conversation, and the assumption was made that the woman is vain enough to take the bait. I'd say it's doubly insulting more often than it's sincerely flattering.

There are occasionally exceptions when compliments are sincerely flattering to the recipient, but those are not usually times when the compliment is being used as the first step in a guy trying to get laid :) If they work, he'd already won her over in spite of the comment, not because of it.
Tell HN NYC: Hackers & Founders Meetup next Thursday, 6-8PM
What blows my mind is that no company I have worked at has ever set performance goals on day 1. It doesn't make sense. We set goals at annual reviews so why not on day 1? Why blindside an employee during the first annual review?

I talk to everyone on my team 3 times a year to make sure I'm giving them what they need from me and vice versa. The informal manner helps in keeping the whole process relaxed and the feedback genuine. The 4 month period in between gives ample time to improve things without stretching it out for a whole year. Iterate, get feedback, iterate, get feedback. It works for startup business plans so why wouldn't it work for self development?
Nice and useful project. It shows a lot of potential.
Skimmed through the code and it seems easy enough to build a simple app, even for Python beginners like me.
19W though, unless I misunderstand the spec. Fit PC 2 takes 10W and is more powerful (though it is more expensive and doesn't have the form factor).
Regional Keyword Placeholder
Thanks for submitting my blog article to HN, I have to admit I was momentarily shocked when I ran across it on the 'new' page.

The post documents my nascent exploration of functional languages as a long time Java developer. If anyone out there who is curious about doing the same thing, or has made the switch themselves, has any questions or ideas for followup posts I would love to hear them!
Interesting, but the occupant is probably already aware of the collision before the two cars touch.
Another good account: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/magazine/23Netflix-t.html?...
There is more to it than being information-rich or information-poor. A pile of junk is information-rich, but it's not beautiful. It comes down to style and taste.

The house looks organic. Like it has been grown instead of built. Gaudi's buildings have the same style. I think there is a lot of appeal in the organic style, it's a pity it's so rare.

The computational properties of style are explored in Douglas Hofstadter's book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" (I recommend it to any hacker interested in aesthetics or cognitive science, but it is not an easy read):

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465024750?ie=UTF8&tag=...

Interestingly, computers can eventually make an assembly line produce unique stylish (organic or otherwise) things. Fractal images are, after all, beautiful, even being totally regular. Certain amount of randomness can do wonders.

Of course computers are similarly supposed to enable mass customization for physical things which is probably more important economically, and it hasn't happened yet.
This is an idea older than enterprise software. I've heard it told as a joke about a glasses salesman: "$200... for the lenses... each".
This article feels like it was taken out of 7 Habits - Think Win/Win. Recurring performance reviews certainly cause unnecessary competition and fear among employees, breaking up their "team" ability. I just wish the article had addressed the deeper question of how to tell an employee they're doing poorly without such a review.
While interesting, I think that as a product, I'd personally be more interested in Ubiquiti's routerstation pro, which has 4 GigE ports, POE, slower processor, more ram, 3 mini pci slots, and depending on what you do with the mini pci slots, less power consumption. And the routerstation pro is cheaper too.
There's a slight bump when you get into something esoteric for the first time, but afterwards, you just kind of naturally lose touch.

Not only have I been doing Irish Trad for 20 years, I've also taught it in a music school and competed overseas in it. Thanks for letting a newbie like me know what it's like to get into something esoteric for the first time.
My girlfriend is a Ph.D. student in industrial organizational psychology. She had this to say:

I think this view is unnecessarily extreme. I think the correct way it should have been presented is that performance reviews should be done in a more useful way. Not all performance reviews are for the purpose of rationalizing bonuses. I think feedback on one's performance accompanied with goal setting of specific behaviors is fundamental in sustaining good work and motivation in employees.

I do think that ranking employees doesn't work most of the time because it not only creates competition but discourages those who have been performing well, but just not so much as others who could potentially be ass-kissers as what the article says.

The bottom line is that , w/o a review/feedback on your on-going performance, you wouldn't have an idea of what you should work towards to and u cant assume that all employees are intrinsically motivated to do better.

Heuristically, people lose their sense of engagement about 5 months after they are hired and this can keep deteriorating if immediate supervisors don't provide the support/encouragement/feedback.

One last thing, research has repeatedly shown that regular performance feedback increases motivation and performance in the long-run. what's important really is how the feedback is given.
It assumes that free software means unpaid developers.

The idea that free software tends to have complex user interfaces is not convincing. There are lots of things with very simple UIs, including the Gnome desktop and almost all Gnome apps.

His links seem to disprove, rather than provide evidence for, his points. One is to a Mozilla enhancement request for an additional setting that was rejected, the other is to a Gnome usability study - did it lead to changes (disproves is point) or was it ignored (proves his point).
Bright Lines in Learning and Doing
In my experience employee reviews are typically de-motivational. My employer has me rate my team members on a scale from 1 to 6 on a variety of work related criteria. The basis for getting a raise rests on the employees ability to increase their ratings on a review to review period. It's horrible (and I've told them I think so).

The entire ratings system is ripe to be exploited by people who know how to play the game. This is especially bad if non-technical people are reviewing technical people. I had to witness the worst developer on my team become the highest paid because he knew how to sell himself and could speak a language that upper management understood.

I'm more in favor of (arguably) less subjective methods of determining an employees worth (like Bioware's RPG style ratings, or Joel Spolsky's ladder). There's still room for person bias, but at least there's less room.
For me, the article displays for 2 seconds and then gets overwritten with a blank screen with some javascript running. Basically has made the entire site unusable.
I know places that deliberately have made their conference rooms Faraday cages so you can't get any wireless network there for exactly this reason.
This story truly must be one of the great Mac stories of all time, but it's ancient when judged against the "News" in Hacker News.
Back in the Netscape 3 or 4 days there was a bug that allowed Java applets to remain resident after the user had left the page.

An ILM engineer (possibly joking) told me that a clever sod used that bug plus an early porn site to set up a distributed renderfarm.
If you use Google Reader and Greasemonkey:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/2346

Quick Links makes links _inside_ the articles keyboard accessible. A few extra keystrokes as compared to the main link, but another possible compromise.

(And personally, I want the links-to-the-articles as they are.)
Doing science in the open
Darwinius Changes Everything
Wait. Is there some actual case at hand where the FCC abused this power against a private citizen, or does EFF just want to pick a fight here?
I really am curious as to how you arrived at this equation. It is a vast over-simplification of the problem.

The equation I came up with is as follows:

y1 = [l/(2b(1/tan(a)^2 - cos(a))] * [x - l/cos(a) + b/sin(a)] + l/cos(a) + b/sin(a)

where you plugin b, l, and x based on your parameters, and find the maximum value for y1 when a goes from 0 to 90 degrees. That maximum value should be less than y for the box to be able to fit around the corner.
By the way, has anyone tried a Chemex?
I like that Aeropress is made by the same people who invented better Frisbees and yoyos. It's got that old school geek charm, which has motivated me to try it out. From a marketing perspective it seems that in addition to the stimulant use I'm using coffee as a way to define myself as a clever and discerning person.
The article appears to have been removed.

"We were unable to find the page you requested."
I read it as the EFF just picking a fight. They don't mention any current cases in the article and I couldn't find one on google.
Not everyone finds higher quality stuff to be better. I prefer cheap white sparkling to champagne, and prefer instant coffee to any of the "nicer" coffees I've tried. But if you try higher quality coffee and prefer it, why not? It becomes a good treat.
A great overview on ensemble techniques in machine learning (what BellKor and many of the top competitors use):

http://abeautifulwww.com/EnsembleLearning.pdf
Ask HN: Describe Yourself using your Tools/Frameworks/Languages
Just to get a general idea of who roams Hacker news. Everyone here has a set of key tools/languages/technologies that define them.

Are you a Python wrangler, Ruby pirate, C ninja, SQL God, Law/Business Professional, Investor Angel, Assembly Dinosaur, Tokyo Cabinet enthusiast, Erlang Evangalist, AWS Addict, etc, etc.

What technologies/tools/languages define you.
Dynamically striped mirrors? Is that RAID10?
Kohana PHP 2.3.x Framework Tutorial Part 2
If you are in the sf bay area and want to try freshly roasted beans, I highly recommend ritual roasters (http://www.ritualroasters.com/) in the mission district of SF, or if you are in the south bay, barefoot coffee (http://www.barefootcoffeeroasters.com/). YMMV, but for me, it has made a big difference in quality between making my own cup in the morning vs going to a Starbucks.

I also find having a good vacuum insulating coffee mug to keep the coffee hot makes a difference too.
Hey Pedalpete,

Thanks for the comments, I greatly appreciate it. I'll "unhighlight" the shop icon, but on the shop page, we have by type & goal under the brand, maybe I should move it above if you didn't see it?
In light years Alpha Centauri is right next door, just down the street, within spitting distance...nearby.
To start off

I am a back-end dwelling developer, a C and C++ FastCGI nut, a Pythonic Dinasour, Emacs is my Swiss army knife, I am obsessed about security, and I am huge on pushing for high performance low-level scalable back ends for web development, and hardly ever use frameworks.
Ask HN: Any Bay Area Hackers into running, cycling, triathlon, etc?
I'm curious if there are fellow HNers who are into running, tris, etc. I'm planning on running a half-marathon and/or triathlon on the 2nd half of the year. I wonder if we have enough people to form a training group.
Whither Eucalyptus?
Summary of the article is : A Taiwanese supplier for Apple, fired workers without warning, slashed salaries, made them work overtime with no extra pay and did not negotiate. Protesters are trying to get Apple involved so that the supplier listens since Apple is one of the high profile customers and has strict social responsibility standards for its suppliers.
My observation was that they had the "Going to Trade Shows" part down, they just needed to add the "Like it Matters."

lol - How true for so many things.
> I met a guy on the streets of Berkeley years ago...

That's a really heartwarming story. Unfortunately, it's a single data point. We certainly can't expand that to cover all poor people, right?

After hearing people speak at RU meetings (and others), many of them had a single purpose in life: get high, gambling, etc (whatever said person's vice was). I've never personally heard of a perfectly fine individuals thrown out onto the streets, though I don't doubt it happens. However, where are the family members and friends? That would be the first place I turned - I'm not proud (not implying he was).

Side note: If someone is poor because they blew all their money on drugs, then lost their job and found themselves on the streets, I don't want to "throw" money at that problem. Sure, I'll buy a meal/gift card (or other necessities) as I've done in the past, but I'm not blindly trusting someone in that position. I wouldn't expect anyone to blindly trust me.

> The U.S. spends a lot in taxes, and that money goes to such areas as defense ...

Ok, we realize that number is about 20% - where is the other 80% going? There's a lot to fix other than just getting out of Iraq.

You want to know how to fix the problem of dealing with the poor? Change people's hearts. A caring, loving people will do more than any government sponsored program will. Unfortunately, the average US citizen is so far removed from the everday reality many others face. Their only insight into those struggles are the latest sob story drama of an American Idol contestant (or a Christian Children's Fund commercial). It's pathetic.
I'm planning a follow-up post on that topic. :)
So, in my day to day browsing of the web, reading news sites, twitter, facebook, emails, blog posts and all that other text content out there will only make my web experience at least 31 times slower, but that's ok, because at least the occassional logo and embedded image will load just a little faster.

Also thankyou for pointing me to that comment, because it also mentions that IE won't support data uri’s

So all this does, is slow down the majority of a web experience for people who want a customisable, faster browser?

How in any way is this a useful technique?

Besides, the test is a bit stupid for a real world example - 300 tiny uncached icons? Yahoo talks about speeding up load times by reducing http requests, wouldn't you just want to do the same as a single CSS sprite (as Yahoo recommends), which would also reduce the overall image size aswell by removing unnecessary meta information?
Also performance review depends upon the corporate culture but then the bigger you are the diluted culture you have ...

At the same time you can use performance review to your own advantage, how? well you can easily identify whether your manager is just a good manager or GREAT manager - Good managers help their employees succeed in whatever role they happen to be in. Great managers see the unique talents of each employee, and then create the role that's a perfect vehicle for those talents. Great managers remove the obstacles that prevent their employees from unleashing their talent. And they make sure each employee has the right opportunities, the right stage, the right audience, to be fully appreciated.
Putting Gapminder on this site would be a big win! (Gapminder - for a Fact Based World View)

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_be...

http://www.gapminder.org/
"How did you get to the point you could tackle Calculus? "

After working through Strang's Calculus and learning how to tackle proof questions (strangely enough I got confident enough to attempt proof questions after working through a good chunk of "Concrete Mathematics" (Knuth)) I then found what was impenetrable before in Spivak looked attemptable, if not easy. It helps that the end result of most proof questions are known in advance and the problem is finding/writing down the proof itself.

nce I got to that point, then grind, grind :-P
I don't know if anyone else has ever noticed this, but lots of street view pictures will have random face shaped blurs on walls and such. My guess is google has set a very low false-negative threshold for face identification, and are thus willing to tolerate blurring lots of non-face objects (which isn't really much of a loss, anyways, and definitely tolerable if it means the difference between every real face being blurred and missing 1 out of 100).
To be fair, you edited your post after I replied to it. I didn't mean any disrespect; I was simply stating a point.

Are you saying it's more difficult for you to keep up with Irish Trad than it is for you to keep up with pop music? (It obviously takes more time and effort to be a practicing musician than to simply listen to music, but that is a separate question, one that rather confounds my original question.) In other words, are you disagreeing with me, or simply being disagreeable?
> This is especially bad if non-technical people are reviewing technical people.

Hear, hear. There is nothing more maddening than having someone dumber than you tell you that you're dumb once a year.
It's seems contradictory to say that you are targeting the "enterprise" and yet they "can't afford it". Either you're going for thrifty startups, who are not enterprises, or enterprises for whom a few thousand dollars a year is chump change.

I have seen at least one online accounting app that is "free for startups" - that is, you don't have to pay until you have a minimum amount of revenue. I think it was ClearBooks.
I dont think so because basically Infosys is one of the world's biggest software company headquartered in Bangalore, India... they are the global leader in the "next generation" of IT and consulting ...powered by huge talent force of more than 100,000 employees (yes, more than microsoft, google and yahoo combined), and has offices in 50 countries and development centers in India, US, China, Australia, UK, Canada, Japan... so opening a call centre in US won't serve their s/w development objective ... and they being from india having CC there than US is more profitable.
Making forward progress in the future has little to do with your current starting point.

The time to achieve a desired end-point may vary, but until you've instilled day-to-day habits, the end goal is not achievable.
Looks great in Safari beta 4.
It's useful for pages with hundreds of inline elements, such as uncached images.

As I understand, the reasoning is that each connection to the server has a time-cost in creating and tearing down the connection.

Creating X connections, up to the browser's persistent connection limit, and sliding all the data through those avoids the overhead of connect and teardown, allowing those specific edge-cases to go faster.

For most sites, I don't imagine it would be a boost, for sites with lots of avatars like Digg or large forums, it might be a boost.
I mirrored the old mpt site here:

http://mpt.mirror.theinfo.org/discuss/msgReader$173

in hopes that Google will index it.
Are we really defined by the tools we use ?
Sure, I use a 3-cup Chemex daily. It's great - the brew is consistently high-quality, and it's so easy to clean. You just toss out the filter and rinse the carafe clean, done in 4 seconds.

The Chemex filters tend to mellow the taste (not the caffeine) of the coffee out just a bit compared to a french press, but I personally like that aspect.
I generally agree with your girlfriend.

And to be clear, I never said that regular consistent performance feedback was bad. I said that the annual performance review was not a substitute for it.
This is going to be great for professional photographers (the industry I work in). I'm been advocating they use S3 for archiving for some time ... now it's easier to get your files there.
Planetizen Poll - what to do with empty car lots?
Obama defiant on Guantanamo closure, slams Bush 'mess'
This is not a problem for a webapp. Or is it ?
Google Streetview Goes Green with Awesome Trike
The progressive movement caused many of the worst problems it claims to solve.
At the end of the article, they cite a case in Corpus Christi where they asked to inspect equipment in a man's house (he had been illegally rebroadcasting radio). The man refused. The FCC left. The man was fined.
Amazon WS Crypto Sigs v2 Broken (Even Amazon Can't Get Crypto Right)
Aaah! Audion... fond memories. I quite dislike iTunes and I'm sure many share this sentiment, I wish they had attempted to keep up and go head to head with iTunes instead of retiring the product.

If, today, they brought it up to 2009 standards, and added iPod support, I'd bet they could take a good chunk of iTunes' marketshare on the Mac!
Rubik's Cube Stamp Font Generator
The author is right that software is often not designed for ease of use by a novice or traditional aesthetic appeal.

But that's by design - not by "suck".

People building free software generally have themselves as the target demographic; they're not trying to appeal to novices or compete with Microsoft or Apple. They have a different definition of "good".