skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Evidently, the author got a bit carried away there. The implication that just because your HTML works in Safari means that it'll also work in IE or Firefox with "minor tweaks" is simply bogus. Anyone with any significant web development under his/her belt would vehemently disagree. I think the author is just an ardent Safari user. That's all good and dandy if you ask me. However, we should call it for what it is: that was a blanket statement. As such, it lacks verifiable, factual information.
Could HN do it better and cheaper in bed?
Wordy article but I agree on his points. WA is trying to solve a non-existent problem for this particular use case. A person wants to see a label rather than a graph.
This is a great article but only states the facts. The problem seems almost intractable, the Mythical Month asserts it in the No Magic Silver Bullet essay, in particular the following:

"there is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude [tenfold] improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity."

My own experience over the last few years is that tools and method have improved but complexity and user expectation has risen to meet or exceed that this aligns with Brooks' thinking.
The Rotting Stink of Corporate IT
Looking too far

pi is 3.14592653589793238462643383

See a 53 in there? :)

Then what position is the dot? See that number in there?
It looks "weird" because it uses a much better method of anti-aliasing. The Windows system is worse than shit. It is hell for designers because it's impossible to make fonts look anything other than shit without turning them huge, and even then they look like shit. Safari is the shining exception.

I'm not defensive. You're the one who just got into a little minirant. I was explaining why I prefer Safari for development and you returned with the little gems like "Excuse me for not caring very much for Safari, when Firefox is my main browser and does everything I need." You know, some of us here don't comment just to "beat" you. Sometimes we comment because we honestly think you've raised a point worth debating and discussing. I'm sorry for responding to you like you wanted a debate, instead of assuming you were a prick.

If you are talking about speed, I honestly don't care. If you are talking about CSS3 feature-set, I honestly don't care either, because using any CSS3 features while people are still using MSIE would be messing up the experience for about 50% of your visitors.

So there's no room for graceful degradation, then? If CSS3 lets me craft a better user experience for some users, then I'll give it to them. It's why we don't primarily design for IE 6 and its crippled users. We give other users what they want, then focus on stepping down.

As for Safari being "one of only two browsers that fully supports HTML5"... You know that HTML5 is only a draft at this point? The spec isn't even finalized. The Acid 3 test even admits this much, saying it's testing features which may or may not end up in a official spec.

Safari supports what there is at the moment. That's better than Mozilla's "We don't need to do anything re:HTML 5 and our competitors are evil for supporting the standards" line that they touted last year.

I'll test my shit in Safari, but that's as far as I'm willing to go with exposure to craptacular Apple software on Windows.

Ignore all the other stuff I commented on, since it's obvious you'll just disagree and neither of us will get anything out of it. What makes Safari craptacular? Safari 4 on Windows has a native feel, it runs 3x faster than Firefox, uses less memory, has a smoother interface in many ways, and has quite a few features (including that anti-aliasing) that Firefox lacks. Perhaps it's not your choice for a web browser, which is totally coo', but I resent your calling it craptacular and implicitly insulting all the Windows users who think Safari 4 is worth their using.
Jack Moffitt on the Real Time Web at JSConf 2009
JQuery Visualize Plugin: Accessible Charts & Graphs from Table Elements
Amazon drops price on their Kindle 2 to $299
I'm one of those middle-aged users of Facebook. What I find appalling about Facebook is how much its context changes users' online behavior. Many of the people on my friends list of Facebook are people I also know from specialized, topical email lists. On the email lists, the people are serious and thoughtful, but on Facebook some of the same people let loose with a bajillion "What grocery produce section vegetable are you?" quizzes and endless flair and bling and mafia wars. My friends are less my friends, and more of an annoyance, on the Facebook platform. Facebook turns adults into kids.

So although I appreciate Facebook for linking me up to a few former classmates from childhood (my first Facebook friend was one such), if I want to do what I really enjoy, as a grown-up adult, I look for those same friends in other contexts. And that, I think, is why Facebook is extremely unlikely to build a business model through which it can gain more revenue per user than it has expenses per user to serve up cute photographs and videos.
Warren Buffett: 2nd Stimulus Needed, Expects Longer Recession
Dr. LSD lived to be 102? Wow.

I've always been curious about Jobs's relation to LSD. I know his famous "Bill Gates should have dropped acid" line, but I'd like to see how he related hallucinogenic use to his outlook on design.
then again, as I said before, I'm not sure this email is the valid one. I got an answer, but not the one expected...
Pandora is charging $0.99 for premium accounts that let you listen to over 40 hours/month. That's $.025 per hour (less if you listen more). People pay $3 for a 10 second ring tone.

Charge more!!!!! People love and highly value your service. There are many, many people who would rather pay $5, $10, $20 or more per month to ensure that Pandora stays alive. How about limiting the number of songs you can listen to on the free iPhone client and selling a premium client for $9.99? They have 200K iPhone users.

I love Pandora, but they're not trying very hard to monetize.
Not worth reading. Let me save you a few minutes of your life. How do I vote this down ?
I'm a little surprised they didn't know the language. It doesn't sound like it's too far off from Grant Speak and the Sunlight Foundation has obviously applied for a lot of grants.

It's unfortunate that a chunk of that $18 million must be the premium commanded by the organizations that speak the language, only because others can't.
What do I care for in a browser?

Prettiness? If it blends in with the native look of the OS, that is "pretty" to me. Safari fails at this. Firefox does not.

Speed? I have a Core i7 idling at 1% CPU all the time, unless I'm doing HD video encoding. Even on my Core2 Duo, I can't remember last time I was CPU-constrained when browsing stuff. Why on earth would I care about speed?

Standards compliance? Firefox is top notch, and while Opera and Safari may go full 100% on ACID3, that is for a spec which is not even finalized and standardized yet. Anyhow, you need to keep MSIE in mind when developing stuff, so this point is pretty moot.

So what do I care for in a browser?

Stability, that it works intuitively, that it's configurable, that it sports a decent feature set, keeping mouse-dependency to a minimum and that most operations apart from link-clicking can be done trough keyboard operations and probably most of all: that it is extendible and that I can add whatever crap I feel I need in a browser. Things like Ubiquity, Firebug, Flashblock, Adblock, Rikaichan, Mousegestures, Greasemonkey, custom dictionaries and Bugmenot.

I pretty much think that the browser should supply me with the core basics, and let me decide from there on what I think a browser should be. If the browser is going to be the "OS of the web and the future", you better believe I want to have a browser which I can make mine.

Edit: Evidently Safari 4 actually sports a somewhat native interface in Windows.
Your only option is to talk to a lawyer. This sounds serious enough that you should get a professional opinion on this. They should be a patent attorney that would look over the specific details of the patent and compare that to what you want to do. There could be a tiny loophole that allows you to do what you want to do. You just can't tell without talking to a lawyer.

Also, there was some famous businessman that said "I don't ask lawyers 'What can't I do?'. I ask them 'How can I do what I want to do?'".
Soon you'll be able to buy any top-level domain you want. Don't do it
People should listen to Buffet a lot more, it's been clear since the dot com bubble (and before) he knows what he's talking about.
The only way I can see this is when talking about Firefox. I have built stuff using Safari and when I test it out in FF my padding is off by like 5 px or something silly.

Using another browser like IE usually breaks the whole thing.
Of course I respect all that. I didn't mean I was sitting here laughing at all their problems saying "haha, gotcha suckers."

I'm just saying the fact it happened so close to when I read that is _slightly_ amusing. Its a serious thing that happened, definitely, I'm just taking a step back and enjoying a small part of it.
I know I always say this, but "ask a lawyer" is the only proper response to questions that ask for a legal opinion.

If you are at all interested in pursuing the idea, talk to a lawyer. If you go forward, you'll need a lawyer sooner or later, and believe me-- it's much more cost effective to spend the money sooner than later.
There is fairly good evidence that inability to forget is at least correlated with cognitive and social deficits. For an overview see: http://books.google.com/books?id=BooNAAAACAAJ&dq=The+Min...
If all these hardware makers had invested just a little bit in desktop Linux over the past few years, they would be free from the Microsoft stranglehold by now. Why do they need daddy Google to come by an whip their backs?
Again, I'm not laughing at their architecture. I'm taking a step back and looking at the big picture of what happened and just found it amusing.

Google has great engineering vision and they're generally a great company in the way they handle things. No questions there.
State of Hypervisors: Meh
Cool hack.

Here is what I use:

- Place an "Unmask" checkbox next to the password field

- onclick checkunmask()

$("#password").type = ($("#unmask").checked)?"textbox":"password";

Simple, everybody happy.

http://mylittlehacks.appspot.com/unmask
I think what people usually refer to as Quantum Mechanics (i.e. Quantum Inference) will likely go the way of Maximum Entropy. Maximum Entropy originated as a physical concept and was eventually shown to have an origin in Information Theory and is now very important to fields outside physics. Applications of Quantum Inference outside of the traditional physics applications are being developed (see http://uk.arxiv.org/abs/0810.5290 and http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2009/03...).

Quantum Mechanics is not yet completely understood as an inference method so people confuse it with physics and Shrodinger's cat silliness results.
I dropped off after the first couple of paragraphs - was there anything there worth reading?
It's a bit of an aside, but.. I love that guy's handwriting! You don't get handwriting much like that anymore.
That's not really true. Google's range of products is tiny compared to Microsoft's, and while Microsoft's quality is variable (partly due to their wide range) it's not the case that they're universally bad.

Microsoft rely on their closed source, Google rely on physically owning the servers their services rely on. Will you be able to run your own set of Google services on your own kit, or on a third-party VM host and retain the full functionality of Chrome OS? I doubt that somehow.
True. Although this might enable an undesirable behaviour, since anything you pay attention to grows. So if one can't vote down. Voting something 'up' is effectively a vote down for all others.
patents are pretty useless, most of them are not enforceable due to prior art.

Hell HN is probably in violation of a number of patent applications for stuff like hyperlinks, submit buttons, displaying usernames etc.

Just do it, noone is going to sue you when you aren't making money. And when you are, you'll be able to defend yourself. And hey, worst case scenario, you'll end up paying the penalty, and as part of the settlement negotiate the licensing issue into the deal
"Google, while announcing its new Chrome operating system late Tuesday, said users would no longer have to worry about viruses, malware and security updates"

Good marketing. Tough to live down when you're first discovered to be "human" (developed by software engineers) - as it will be when Apple's first takes a major hit [which news suggests the iPhone may be vulnerable to].
Perhaps a needed dose of sanity (even if hyped) to counter Google wishful thinking/marketing: "Google, while announcing its new Chrome operating system late Tuesday, said users would no longer have to worry about viruses, malware and security updates"

Good marketing. Tough to live down when you're first discovered to be "human" (developed by software engineers) - as it will be when Apple's first takes a major hit [which news suggests the iPhone may be vulnerable to].
"I know I always say this, but "ask a lawyer" is the only proper response to questions that ask for a legal opinion."

Forgive the blasphemy, but I disagree.

There's almost always gray area and, depending on the lawyer you talk to, they will tend to be careful and conservative, often to the extreme of "killing the deal" before it ever has a chance.

I recently had a friend who refused to sign an NDA based on the advice of her lawyer. This killed a fantastic deal for her. IANAL (bragging, not complaining), and IMHO, based on her situation, there was a .01% chance she would have ever had any problems.

Never say always, only, or never. Oops.
Where is the bootloader? Where is any code which runs outside of Windows? I could not find it in your tree.
i am through..got the email :)
I think it's an excellent idea to spend tens of thousands of dollars to make a stand against the security industry with your startup's web application, and I too think password masking is sure to be their Waterloo. To the barricades!
I thought the most interesting part was that the system uses a simple infrared beacon which can be seen by normal night vision equipment. Given that you can get a very basic NV monocular for under $200 now, what's to stop 'targets' from simply locating and destroying the beacons before they've had time to do their job?
First of all.

Sometimes we comment because we honestly think you've raised a point worth debating and discussing. I'm sorry for responding to you like you wanted a debate, instead of assuming you were a prick.

In that case, I guess I read your comment wrong. Sorry about that.

It looks "weird" because it uses a much better method of anti-aliasing.

It's still different from everything else on the platform. To me that's a bad thing. Maybe not to you, maybe not to designers, but to me it is.

So there's no room for graceful degradation, then?

There is. But in the meantime I've found that I can cover lots of browser shortcomings trough jQuery instead of CSS and browser-specific hacks. Definitely not ideal, but it works. When CSS3 gets here, I'll prefer that instead.

Safari supports what there is at the moment.

I'm not against progress, but even Firefox has limited HTML5 support these days, and it's really not a major selling point for me as of yet.

What makes Safari craptacular? Safari 4 on Windows has a native feel

I actually had to check this out. Seems you are actually right. Historically though Apple has always tried to cram the Apple look and feel down my throat when it is obvious I don't want a Mac, giving me a non-native interface. I resent that.

That said, the fact remains that it is simply not what I am looking for in a browser (see my other post [1]).

As for my main complaint (with regard to the software being crap), my Core i7 is the first machine which iTunes is actually responsive and non-laggy on. I was genuinely surprised when I discovered that. I had to get a 2GHz Dual Core machine before Quicktime could play things fullscreen without skipping. My 200MHz Pentium MMX could that without CPU load.

When I refer to Apple software on Windows as craptacular, that is because they have quite a history for being just that.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=696002
perfect hint! follow it :) it works
Maybe it's just me, but what I got from this was: "I like Twitter. I think all these guys are dinosaurs because they don't like Twitter. Old stuff is boring and worthless because it's not new."

How about some facts? Some quotes? Some references?

At least it's funny, albeit unintentionally: I find it ironic that he complained about how Diller and Malone "have no clue what Twitter is even about", virtually on the heels of saying "music he listened to growing up (probably played on a banjo or something)".
The bootloader is GRUB. I haven't tested building TestKernel on anything but MS.NET, but you can give it a shot. Follow the instructions at the GitHub repo ( http://github.com/daeken/RenrakuOS/tree/master , also linked in my post), and if you're running on a non-Windows platform, you'll have to install nasm and point the build script to that instead of the exe that ships.
Social Skydiving Day 16
Whatever they do, I just hope they release the code. That way even if their redesign fails, the FOSS community will have something to learn from it, and if it's the best thing ever, it can be ported over to other Linux distros.
I'm pretty sure you didn't read my comment. Maybe you meant to make this reply a top-level comment of its own.
Interchangeable chargers could solve a universal problem
That might help:
"Iwebkit is the revolutionnairy kit used to create high quality iPhone and iPod touch websites in a few minutes and is based on an LGPL license."
http://iwebkit.net/
>By going with "everything is an Object", there are no constraints on the interface. Every class of objects has it's own set of methods, and tools need to be designed for specific classes/interface rather than for "everything". Interoperability will be lost.

Not if every object inherits from a base interface that defines basic operations
While I haven't done an exhaustive search of every appearing Google logo, all the ones I have seen have "Google" in a distinct alternating color pattern: b, r, y, b, g, r

The pattern in this alleged screenshot is: y, r, b, g, b, r
"Give it up for the standardization of the screw."

A memorable quote.

On a related note, there was an interesting C-SPAN BookTv program recently where the author talked about the revolutionary standardization of international freight shipping containers:

http://tinyurl.com/mwmrwq (booktv.org)
i am having difficulty pulling the latest revision. i'd like to review the progress made in the first weekend.
What Buffett actually said was: "we could've used a stimulus in the first place and didn't get it. So, sure, we could still use one".

He's backing the concept and trashing the reality in the same breath. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement of the idea that an actual government stimulus is going to get us out of this.
"Guru" is probably the right word to use for Schneier at this point, and here's another great example of him inserting himself into a story he has no involvement in, making comments that betray a complete lack of awareness of the context of the story he's commenting on. Par, unfortunately, for the course.

It is doubtless the case that Schneier is fielding constant phone calls from trade reporters asking for his opinions on the security news of the day. Taking those calls, and writing the op-ed-style pieces that generate them, is probably the bulk of his job description. And so it's to be expected that he's going to be asked questions about things like Chrome's "virus-proofness", and having given no thought to Chrome or its architecture, be at a loss for pithy commentary. Hence, "2+2=3". Thanks, Bruce.

But before you feel too much sympathy for him, remember that he always has the ability to tell the reporter, "sorry, I don't know enough to comment intelligently on this story".
I'm not suggesting that the same friends use both of them, I'm suggesting that the youth will partition their social lives like they already do.

You have your friends and you have your family. You want your granny to be able to see the pictures your mum took, but you don't want your mum to know you are friends with bobby that she disapproves of.
That all makes sense. Thanks for taking the time to reply!
He's talking about the halting problem, which isn't "2+2=3" impossible, but undecidable. Of course, the average engineer at Google has vastly more CS education than Schneier, would never have claimed to have solved the halting problem (or "program intent" as the AV people put it), and would have responded to this question more succinctly and accurately than Schneier did.
Ask HN: Review our public beta for DoLeaf.com
Direct Link: http://doleaf.com

Hey HN,

My site, DoLeaf, just launched into public beta, and I'd love some feedback.

DoLeaf is a marketplace for gardeners where you can find and buy plants from specialty nurseries and independent garden centers. We help them set up storefronts and handle all the backend tech-junk, leaving the nursery owners to do what they do best: grow plants!

So, it's not really a techy site, but I love plants and web development, so it's a good mix for me.

Come check it out, perhaps buy a plant from our one-and-only (for now) seller, and post any ideas you can think of about how we can make it better (besides getting more plants, of course).

Cheers!
20,000 Nations Above the Sea: Is floating the last, best hope for liberty?
Yup, some people in the audience mentioned about tipjoy/tipjar. The concept looked pretty cool though .... I hope it works out for them.
I didn't realize I was clicking through to Xah's page, but I knew I was there after only a few paragraphs.

I think he uses emacs as if it were MS Word or Notepad, and customizes his emacs accordingly. That's fine for him, but there is value in the generally-accepted defaults to other people. Control is not hard to type on a good keyboard. C-n, C-p, C-b, and C-f are "unconventional", but very easy to type and get used to. I must hit each combination hundreds of times a day, and my fingers never hurt. (Because of that, anyway; the only time my fingers hurt is when I have to type a lot of keys on the right pinky, ()+|`~=;':"?/ on my keyboard. I have not found a good solution to this problem yet, but it is certainly not specific to emacs.)
Question: will it compile on Mono? I think this should not be much of a problem, or should it?
I can't work out if you're being sarcastic or not!
Google Chrome OS More About Net Than Netbooks
Interesting regarding the concept of RSS feeds. I recently started using Google Reader heavily instead of the destination blogs. Maybe they'll have to add the code for it on every post...
I actually find the iPhone model annoying.

The iPhone is a portable device. Just hold it close and shield it with your body when entering a password. That way your fat-fingering will be easier to recognize.
Wow, interesting way to put it:

"Our first stimulus bill ... was sort of like taking half a tablet of Viagra and having also a bunch of candy mixed in ... as if everybody was putting in enough for their own constituents," he said. "It doesn't have really quite the wall that might have been anticipated there."