skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It took me awhile to figure this out, but if you double click on the element styling you want to add additional CSS to (for example, the right column shows #content p has "color:#bbb;", double click on the "color:#bbb" part), add semicolons and the new style after the old one. (with the example the single line textbox should have "color:#bbb;padding:2em;") It'll correctly parse and add the new styling.
I think the point is that if a given site is no more busted than one of the most widely used sites on the internet, the fact that it doesn't validate is a minor concern.
> "I can't see much of a downside for this potential drug"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funes_the_Memorious

"In effect, Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it...It was not only difficult for him to understand that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and different forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen from the front)."
Looks like you can self-administer for $340.

http://www.abcam.com/RGS14-antibody-ab14262.html#images
Better Password Inputs, iPhone Style
Your chance of winning is tiny, but unlike other competitions, the $25 in free AWS credit is a nice bonus for all applicants.

We submit an application pretty much every year, and it covers a good chunk of our S3/Cloudfront costs for the rest of the year :)
this guy needs to familiarize himself with Bayes' theorem. I don't know the real numbers, but I would hope and think that the number of prime mortgages that we're given is 10-20 times larger than the number of sub-prime mortgages.

So, a better question might be what percent of prime mortgages and what percent of subprime mortgages go into foreclosure. Not what percent of foreclosures comes from prime vs subprime.
Alexa is good for relative figures and larger trends, not for detail. The 'compete' graph has exactly 3 data points, the 'alexa' one has 30 and shows a completely different graph (and imho a more realistic one).

The lack of accounting for the influx of MSN traffic is a major omission, so my point is - and I think this is a big difference from the original article - that there is better data available than that used in the article which would suggest a different conclusion and that no matter what source of data you use you have to be careful to extrapolate at this point in time.

Better like that ?
In no way would I want this. Perhaps I'm just being that old guy on the porch complaining about technology, but I happen to like my innate ability to forget things.

I come from an extremely forgetful and absentminded family, and so it is a constant struggle to keep 'important' things in the brain. But the benefits of it by far outweigh the drawbacks (which usually come in the form of late fees and only 1 arrest :).

The brain needs to wash things down the drain to make room for new stuff. While medically we might be able to prove this is not damaging, I can only think I'd get a little crazy having so many details in me. How can we say it's not damaging when we know so little about how the brain works?
No, I don't think it's obvious. We forget things for a reason; increasing the level of noise in the human mind doesn't just come with no side effects. Even if the drug works perfectly as intended, not having the ability to forget memories that are irrelevant can be a big disadvantage I'd think.
Not quite what I wanted - this shows the most voted for articles in the last 10(?) days. I would like something that can show the most voted for articles since I last visited.

Defining "last visited" is non-trivial - I want to be able to look at more than one page of "best since last visited" articles.
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Maybe this can help

Tip #1 : 100 letters all numbered from 1 to 100 when reading from left to right then top to bottom.

Tip #2: Take pi and split into pieces of 2. At what position is the @ sign?
This argument has been hashed, re-hashed, and re-re-hashed on here a million times -- well, variants of it, at least, such as "HN uses a table-based layout, which offends me".

You can find some here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Anews.ycombin...

In particular, pg responds somewhere in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100460). I might be carefully building a straw man here, as you are speaking to valid xhtml, not necessarily semantic xhtml. I hope you'll forgive me. I think the two topics are related, and that some of the arguments overlap.

The bottom line seems to be "Who cares? It works fine."
Yes, but: you rarely put up your house as collateral on starting a job.
I believe that the difference between Software Engineering and Computer Science is not in human activity (mind you, Computer Scientists are affected by that discipline: how about reading papers and such? Reading and understanding heavy math is never an easy thing).

The differences are in scope and expectation of audience.

Usually, a paper of Computer Science deals with a limited and well-defined problem, while even the simplest program from Software Engineering must work on an infinite set of requirements, from security to ease of use. Plus, many of a program's requirements are in perpetual war with each other. Therefore, Software Engineering is slippery: sometimes, such and such requirements dominant, some other times, those other requirements are important.

Secondly, Computer Scientists demand a certain level of intelligence, effort, and knowledge from their audience (aka readers of their papers). Software Engineers have no such luxury: Just look at how they are screamed at just because a button is put at the wrong position. Plus, many computer users have come to expect that they are stupid and have absolute right to remain as stupid and ignorant as possible. Remember, computer programs are complex. Hiding away the complexity of the program, having an attractive interface, while still being correct, secure, and efficient must be satisfied at the exact same time. That's extremely difficult (if not impossible).
I think it is bad to let the thought "Is it a big enough idea?" stop you from building something. You don't know what doors building it will open.
> Maybe this needs to be reversed. I'm sure there are some smaller labels who would be more than happy to pay the stations to get some of their tunes on the air.

You're assuming an interesting relationship between the "current resources" and the "should play" curves.

Each radio station has a fairly fixed amount of "play time" and there aren't that many radio stations. I think that it's reasonably likely that "big music" would buy up all the time worth buying at prices that the little guy couldn't match.

Note - I'm not saying such restrictions are a good thing, I'm just saying that it's not a choice between happy unicorns and ugly trolls.

Of course, "big music" already does use various forms of "not money" to "promote" their folk. Play the game, and you get phone interviews, early release, special versions with local flavor, and some free tix to a concert that is going to be sold out no matter what your radio station does. That can't be matched by a smaller label, let alone some genius in a garage.
Very true. We constantly hear the "I woke up rich the very next day!" type stories, and it skews the perception of what running a business is like.

I have a lot of sympathy for old-school businesses that need a lot of operating capital. Putting your house in danger to support your business is a choice I hope I never have to make. In my case, that would essentially be the same as putting my marriage on the line.
Thanks for the links.

In any case, it doesn't really matter to me, so I apologize if I came off as snobbish. I was simply trying to point out the irony of asking HN if they could make a site better when HN itself has invalid xhtml.
Absolutely correct.

I had great expectations when I heard from Wolfram Alpha. The things Mathematica is able to do backed by a giant structured data store seemed mind blowing.
As the author said the visualization tools and the (still small) dataset _is_ impressive. I thought: We have all this data, all this visualization options and now we can create aggregate and munch all the facts of the world with an ad-hoc query language. But this simply does not work. There is hardly any functionality to really process data (aside from the predefined ways). And if you come to think about it: One cannot think of a way more complex transformations could be expressed with WA's natural language interface.

For me a better interface would look like this: The basic interface is some kind of full-featured expression language to navigate the data hierarchy (perhaps similar to SQL). You could then build some GUI to interactively navigate/parametrize data/transformations to build more complex expressions. To make the system more easily accessible you could then - and only then - add the natural language recognition system on top of this, which tries to guess some expressions from your input string and gives you some suggestions to start from.
Cue the luddites...
"non-solution to a non-problem" reminds me of a similar quote by James May on Top Gear, "a brilliant solution to a problem that should never have existed"
I'm developing a web service that spits out json. I dropped Safari immediately because it automatically downloads anything that is application/json, whereas Firefox will display it and syntax highlight it with the JSONView plugin [http://ajaxian.com/archives/jsonview-json-browser-from-withi...].

Despite the great improvements Safari has made with respect to its developer tools, it can't top Firefox's amazing third-party plugin selection.
I don't really find these arguments compelling.

Using the Acid3 test in this context is misleading. Acid3 tests a random selection features to ensure they work corrrectly. In this case, Firefox 3.5 fails on 7 of the tests and 5 of these are due to SMIL (pretty much SVG animation) and SVG fonts. They are obscure features, and don't provide a compelling reason to choose Safari over Firefox, least of all for development where you won't be able to use those features in the real world until other browsers implement them. Whatsmore, in designing Acid3, Hixie deliberately picked on browser bugs so the test didn't favour one vendor, irrespective of how they effect the real world - taking a single number out of context and point at that to prove the innate superiority of one browser over another, or that one browser follows "better standards", is incredibly simplistic, let along drawing conclusions that sites will be easier to port because of it. At worst, all it could tell you is that one vendor is focusing on passing a test and another isn't.

I don't really see the pre-optimisation as a real-world issue, and I seriously doubt bugs creep in through it. It feels very much like somebody making a problem out of nothing.

All projects have long niggles and bugs that have been there since the dawn of time. The fact that Firefox has bugs spanning years is more of a sign that the Mozilla project has been around for years than inehrent tardiness.

I also don't really understand the conclusion that "OS X is the only system that allows me to test all major browsers side-by-side by means of virtualization software". In actuality, if testing is your priority, then Windows would probably be the platform of choice as it's the only platform that can run all the major browsers (IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox, Safari and Chrome) natively. Linux can also virtualise all the browsers not available natively through virtualisation of Windows, no different from Mac OS X.
I agree with most of what you're saying. MSN definitely should have been taken into account and it's way to early to call Bing a success. Where I disagree is with the criticism of the data used for the article and then use of equally unreliable data to prove the point.

The Alexa data has more points, but it's looking at the same period of time so I'm not buying into the idea that it's more realistic. Not to mention day to day numbers are a microscopic view of a much larger picture.

We've got two measurements of the same thing that seem to be drawing two different conclusions. I don't think anyone could reliably come to the conclusion that one is more accurate than the other based on the information we have.
The middle-aged crowd is the one with the money. Middle-aged housewives are the ones with the money to spend, and the time to discover new things to spend on. This is why so much of the retail world is aimed at them. As a result, much of our culture is distorted by the lens of their viewpoint. I think a lot of youthful rebellion of recent decades has been changed by this.

One middle aged woman I spoke to on the plane noted that there is a need to be able to "compartmentalize" one's online social networking, much as one does this for work. Her country club employees (where she works) have Facebook profiles which she uses to try and make contacts for new sales, and she finds that some of her fellow early 20's employees have Spring Break pictures only a few clicks away from hers. Not the best thing for her. I suggested LinkedIn, but this doesn't quite work for what she has in mind.
Marketing Internet service to India's poor
Chrome OS could put squeeze on Ubuntu, Moblin
Hm well it's the 53rd letter, and the pi number is "48".

I've tried adding them up and the ASCII of the letter to try to get the actual decrypted letter but that doesn't seem to work so well. :C
Why didn't they hide their tracks? Because they're not the "bad guys." They're just bored employees.
> I have learned some strategies over the years, but these strategies are not ones that everyone is willing to employ.

Share please!
OS X is the only system that can run a virtualized IE?
As soon as I saw Schrodinger's Cat I quit reading.
Why don't businesses disable automatic updates and distribute patches through their IT departments? Why do I have to suffer for their requirements?

That's actually quite surprising, as I assumed it had to do with Microsoft's hardware support requirements. Windows has to support any arbitrary set of x86 hardware, whilst Apple can roll together OS updates because they only have to support a limited set of Macs.
This is an OS?

My OS project (http://www.loper-os.org/) has been accused of having a 10:1 hot air to code ratio bytewise, but at least I have written a bootloader which initializes hardware and prints "Hello World." This man currently has "prototypes in a mix of C# and Nemerle." Does he intend to recreate Microsoft's complete runtime environment on the bare metal? Are we to laugh or cry?
Micro-optimizations aren't bad for users, but they can be bad when you're debugging. The source code you wrote is not necessarily the source code that Firefox displays to you.
I Am Stunningly Uninterested In Diller And Malone’s Opinion Of Twitter
OK, maybe I'm stupid or slow, but there's something I just don't get about "browser wars".

Exactly where does it say that HTML, CSS, & Javascript has to be source code? If browser differences cause you so much grief, why don't you just treat whatever goes out to the client as "object code" of your own engine.

That engine would have to create a different page for each browser that you decided to support. Sure, it would be 4 times the work for every page, but that's work done by your engine, not you. Browser differences are accomodated through maintenance to your engine, not every page or library.

IE is not going away any time soon, so your output better be able to handle it's DOM. While you're at it, take a look at your user's resolution as well, and serve it the way they want to see it, not what you decided is best. No one likes horizontal scrolling or white space on the edges.
The thing that I am most irritated with is the discrimination between Google and Microsoft. Hey, why no one ever talks about how Bing (or Live Search, or whatever) may record your behavior? Heck, Microsoft EULA states explicitly that Microsoft reserves the right to peek at its customers, and it does not even give you the code to confirm that it does/does not. Why does no one demand privacy and whatnots from Redmond? Because they are too scary? Because they produce the best software, which crashes into my face at least once a month?

sign If you are so scared, grab the source (which Google promises to open), check for any potential privacy problem, remove these problems, recompile, and off you go.
Err, I think you're looking at the "Background" section of my previous post. In the one linked in this post, I give a bootable kernel in Boo which implements basic functionality.
Ok, we've pointed out a lot of the flaws with a system like this. But what if there were advantages beyond just 'exchanging data'?

One drawback to the business card is that it is very passive. I just cleaned out piles of business cards and threw them away. However, a priceless one or two were very handy. I wished I had kept track of them better.

What if, when I 'bump' someone, it also lists all the people we have in common through linkedin and facebook? It could also tell me all the other people at the function who I have previously 'bumped'. (or are 1 or 2 degrees from me)
Now I went from a basic 'hi how are you, what do you do' conversation to bonding over a common associate.

I can only assume there is more to this than basic contact exchange functionality. It's gotta have more of a pull that their working on for Bump 2.0. (points if they name the extra functionality 'grind')

(maybe there is a dating element to it as well?)
IPhone-like password fields
The idea of homomorphic encryption has really caught my attention - I am trying to work on distributed computing with privacy sensitive biometric data.

I hadn't appreciated before that Gentry's work was both general (any computation can be performed as a boolean circuit of addition and multiplication) but also impractical : a trillion fold increase is computational burden for an encrypted web search? That is going to kill the advantages of distributed computation.

Schneier also opened my eyes to fact that previous existing encryption schemes are homomorphic under certain operations, such as RSA under multiplication.

I wonder if there would be any gain to distributing parts of a computation and then reassembling it rather than having a fully remote computation done under homomorphic, but very costly, encryption. Of course the gains of parallel computation would have to more than offset the costs of distribution, but that is always the case for parallel applications.
Then you missed the best part about quantum computers. ;)

LOL

I agree that quantum mechanics, and applications like Schrodinger's Cat are strange and seemingly senseless, but I think that it is fascinating that it may be applied to computing.
It's not an exact comparison. What I'm pointing out is that disruptive innovations are often like this:

> In terms of functionality, web apps have been a regression from their desktop counterparts.

They're not better - at least not initially. They're good enough.

Will web apps follow that path and displace desktop apps? Maybe, maybe not, but it's not as ridiculous a concept as the rant makes it out to be.
I think Wolfram put up their crazy interface in order to avoid just giving away free online Mathematica. Also to allow Stephen's ego to further blossom.

If you could use WA as a Mathematica console BUT with access to great built-in (crawled!) data and visualization tools, then it would be useful.
E-reader news: New devices, rumors, and a Kindle price cut
There's also Froogle, Google Notebook, Blog search, Google Video and there's still no way to delete a GAE app... My view is that, unlike what much of the media seems to assume, Google and other huge companies aren't executing some secret Harry Seldon-like plans to conquer the universe - they just do a lot of stuff, sometimes it works and sometimes not. (Eg: Sun paying $1b for MySQL. Conde Nast paying actual money for Reddit's "Crowd wisdom". Bebo acquisition and most everything else AOL does.)

As for their social networking acquisitions vs WAVE, I'm completely ignorant on both (and expect to remain so, along with most of humanity).

But my main point isn't Google, but FSJ's tech coverage. Between Techcrunch & co hysteria and The Register's empty cynicism, I think FSJ's piece remains the best analysis of the Chrome OS announcement yet.
Rails Bundling — Revisited
Using smarty templates
Yes, but: you often make financial commitments on starting a job.
The problem at this point is not responsibility but liability.

Lenders and folks who bought securitized loans have taken a huge hit. (I'd agree that they haven't taken enough of a hit, they were going to keep the profits so they should take the losses, and if they didn't know what they were doing....)

Meanwhile, we're spending money to keep folks in houses that they never could afford instead of letting those houses go to folks who stayed within their means. And, by "we", I mean said "stay within their means" folks.
Google says Chrome OS security 'should just work'. But will it?
Just to be clear, I wasn't trying to imply that the Sunlight Foundation would have been expected to succeed; I was pointing to a group of talented, motivated hackers (like you might find here) who took a shot and learned firsthand just how difficult and convoluted the process really is.
The only problem with that comparison is that Willie does not help Fats to get his fortune at all. However, software engineering heavily depends on and benefits from computer science.
Very nicely written article.

Aside from the alpha discussion, an additional useful point is the concept of too-intelligent interfaces. This is related to two other observations. One is that for high-throughput data entry (also programming) a nice GUI is really not the thing you want. You want to be able to navigate entirely with the keyboard.

The other is wsywig document processors. Serious documentation (such as that for a fighter aircraft, which when printed out weighs more than the aircraft itself, of for documentation required by the FDA for new drugs) is not really done with wsywig editors, but markup editors of different kinds. If you document is 300,000 pages, you want the pagination to be done in batch.
It would be good if we could look at his actual statement/blog post rather than an analysis. Given how so few of his words are mentioned in the "article", it makes me wonder if the 'press' is misinterpreting what he really said.
They pay royalties to song-writers but not performers.
Dziuba doesn't have an obsession with TechCrunch, but with snark in general. Once upon a time he wrote balanced articles criticizing things he didn't like. Then he realized that the more negative he was, the more hits he received, and like many weak-minded tech writers before him, he sold out for the sake of a minor celebrity status.
Agreed. I searched for the page, looked at it, and it doesn't seem off topic at all.
the hn community didnt build this site
Iranian officials use website to identify protesters
But the damage may be done by the time you get around to it.
Try getting a moderately complex shell script to run across different platforms. I dare you.

While it might be a safe bet these days to assume that bash exists (Though there are no guarantees), you can't really do anything with the shell alone - You have to call external commands, and they vary from platform to platform. FreeBSD has all sorts of annoying small variations of standard gnu utilities (or was it the other way around). And Windows doesn't even have a standard shell.

> To me it seems like Fabric/Capistrano were invented by people, for people, who are afraid to learn the bash syntax.

To me it seems like you never actually used shell script for anything serious.
I think it marked it as a duplicate of an already [dead] submission.