skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They don't have the same allegiances as the mainstream media. That doesn't mean they don't have any.
If I may monkeypatch the original argument, I'd point out that there isn't any particular reason that you can't output perfectly accessible HTML with this approach. In some ways its likely to be easier than some other approaches, since when you think this way, you're starting out with more actual, factual semantics in your data representation.

Moreover, if you're going to argue the "nobody's actually going to do it" argument, I'd say that "nobody's actually using CSS to generate one HTML page that works in a screen reader, cell phone, rich browser, and REST API" either. For the same value of "nobody", which is to say, not literally nobody, you can find a handful of people, but the idea that there's some mass of developers "correctly" using CSS is pretty silly too.
Surely the author's reputation has some influence on the weight an article carries?
Radical ideas on 'Cash for Clunkers'
Kissing the App Store Goodbye
The phrasing is a bit ambiguous.

96% of applications are being approved within 14 days

They don't say "approved or denied" just "approved".
Another developer who fails to grasp the difference between distribution (the App Store) and marketing (the bit you must do to raise awareness of your application).
Everything you said is true, and you have some good points.

But you are making an assumption that is not necessarily true. You are assuming that the interface, the part the customers see and use, changes so much that they require retraining.

It would be entirely possible to re-implement the entire thing in another language with no discernible changes to the end user. The end user need not necessarily know that anything changed other than it is now moving faster since it does not have to go through an emulation layer and can take full advantage of the speed of modern hardware.
With that reasoning, the way we write dates should be YY/MM/DD.
I think I did that once, then learned not to do it again.
I guess the real question is, what exactly is the problem with HTML?

HTML is ok, it's CSS that's got the problem. It's the difference between Microsoft Word and Publisher; CSS doesn't provide enough layout primitives to do common web layouts easily. Instead, you have to specifically structure your HTML for it and layer on the <div> tags and copious amounts of CSS code.
I'm speculating, because everybody is about this point, but written the way we write it, the most important number is the first one your eyes encounter. In most human numbers, you can immediately tell the magnitude from the length without actually counting the digits (since there won't be more than about six), so the first number your eye hits tells you most of what you need to know about the number, as the difference between "five thousand" and "six thousand" is far more significant than "one when taking modulo ten of something-thousand" vs. "two when taking modulo ten of something-thousand".

Written your way, you'd have glance to the end to tell the most important digit, then work your way backwards along the digits of significance, then jump back to the text.

Human language is pretty sensitive to this sort of consideration, all things considered. It looks chaotic but there's a lot of order to it, usually, under the hood.
His entire intro is dumb. If you simply define object code as stuff a compiler emits and source code as stuff a compiler processes, than obviously every piece of data is both source and object code. That's the essence of the von Neumann architecture (and, incidentally, that's also why stack buffer overflows are possible). Repeat after me: data is code.
My apologies if I seemed smug, tedious, condescending, knee-jerky, or whatever. I'm not intentionally repeating anything I read somewhere else. I'm just thinking about my own experience with free software, and then writing what I think.

I do genuinely think that there are two different costs for software-- the cost to the programmer and the cost to the user. The two costs have no relation to one another.

I agree that you and the original author are both talking about the cost to the programmer when you say that "free software" is not really free, in that the programmer bears an opportunity cost, as you described earlier. That's true. You, the original author, and I all agree on that point.

Where we disagree, I think, is about whether that cost is important. I think that proprietary and free software have roughly the same cost to the programmer, i.e. it takes just as long, just as much effort, to write code, regardless of whether you're getting paid. Since the cost to the programmer is the same for both, it's not a distinguishing feature of free software.

If he just means that there is a cost to create all software, it's an obvious conclusion. I don't think I've ever heard anyone claim otherwise, i.e. that free software is created without time and effort by programmers. That's why I don't find the original argument compelling.
Since English is read and written left-to-right, it seems like it'd be more intuitive to do it the other way.

How is it more intuitive to write 3-20 when you mean twenty-three?
Apple keyboard firmware hack demonstrated
What you say is true, but only because the software most people use on their servers makes it true. The conclusion is not that we should continue to use the current broken infrastructure, but that we should build different infrastructure. Your argument is kind of like someone in 1904 arguing that air travel will never be commercially viable because there aren't any airports.

I find it a bit distressing that I would have to explain this here on HN of all places.
For some apps, that would make sense, but most use of dates is scoped within this week, this month, then this year. If you look at your calendar, you are mostly concerned with upcoming events and not next year's. So the Aug 1, 2009 date gets the important information up first, or possibly 1 Aug 2009.
A Prolegomena to the Future of Open Source and Open Education
We effectively do work that way, when speaking.

"Next month, I'll be out of town from the 15th to the 20th," contains a month (and implicit year), followed by the day. You'd be less likely to hear "I'll be out of town from the 15th to the 20th of September this year."
but it is always source code to the client

Source code is what people read/write, object code is what software & hardware reads/writes. HTML is always object code to the client.

HTML and CSS are still source code to most people -- most web sites are designed by designers who hand you off perfect static renderings before you tear them apart and plug them into whatever template engine you're using. But look at something like http://www.extjs.com -- the HTML is complete object code generated entirely using Javascript.
It's not that simple. It usually depends on the criticality and severeness of the bug. You have to weight the quick fix (if any) against the consequence of not acting on it NOW and any guesstimates of side effects.
If you don't mind sharing, what did you switch to?
My guess is a criticality accident. They are very hard to avoid without [institutional] experience.

I've been expecting one for quite a while.
Words I Would Love To See Banned From Press Releases
Really? You really migrated servers over to another distro within a few days of hearing the the project manager had gone AWOL?

You do realise that you can stick with the same distro forever and just patch all of your packages manually, don't you?
When you say radiation do you mean radioactive matter, or actual radiation (like gamma rays)?

Because there is nothing to contain if it was gamma rays since they dissipate (like light). If it was neutrons then it can make other things radioactive, but again, there is nothing to contain.

Contain sort of implies an explosion. But nuclear accident does not necessarily mean an explosion.
The "tables vs. CSS" argument has a clear answer and I can't believe we are still arguing about it.

CSS people who argue against tables are obeying their instinct that content and presentation should be separate. They are mostly right about this (I say mostly because the more graphical a webpage is, the more the content and the presentation are inextricably linked).

What the CSS people refuse to acknowledge is that CSS dropped the ball on this, and that CSS failed to incorporate tools for describing layouts in table-based ways. The table-based paradigm is a very natural way to describe layouts -- that's why everyone used tables for this prior to CSS!

Tables are not the enemy! Tables are natural! Tables are expressive! Give me any web page and I'll draw you the lines that show its "table-ness".

If CSS supported tables properly, the web standards people wouldn't have to walk around being enforcers about this. If you could easily convert HTML-based tables to CSS-based tables, everybody could be happy and live in harmony.

The CSS advocates should redirect their ire to the shortcomings of CSS, rather than the people who are working around those shortcomings!
We use ISO dates in our company so that neither the US or European employees get confused. It's also how you express dates in Chinese ( 2009 nian 8 yue 1 ri ). It bothers me that we express dates any other way.
i.e. the way most of the world writes the date
Yes, but the app store is 99% of the marketing for iPhone applications. And their are other issues, like the app store approval process, for example.
These are not contradictions. The best evidence is that eating cholesterol doesn't matter. It's your diet that controls how much and what kind of cholesterol is generated by your body, and that's what may or may not be a problem.

As I understand it, it hasn't been terribly well demonstrated that simply lowering cholesterol, usually with drugs, actually reduces any risk either; this remains conjecture despite the amount of cholesterol-reducing drugs in use. The "bad" and "good" cholesterols we've heard about seem to be fairly firmly correlated with bad heart health, but causation has not yet been established, unless there's been some fresh research I haven't heard about, which is very possible.
You would say 3 and twenty, and doesn't french say its numbers that way?

"when you mean"??? This is just how you grew up, it has no bearing what what is more or less intuitive.
2 of those 3 'clients' were people (screen scrapers and client scripts). In order for either of these to exist the data needs to be in a code that can be read by people.
Seaside and Web Velocity are very much in line with this idea.
Sounds good, except for the part where they are going to help find people to work with you. There is no way in hell I'd go into a venture like with someone I didn't already know and respect.
It doesn't change the fact that, the way you're suggesting, I cannot have both a namespace and class named foo in the global scope or within the same namespace.

if I did, I'd see the same ambiguity the PHP internals developers were discussing.

And spin it however you'd like, having a namespace conflict with a classname is far more confusing than trying to wrap your head around this (apprently) insanely complex use of the backslash operator as a namespace delimiter.
Yes, I agree. I was using "pretty" as a catch all phrase for the je ne sais quoi that makes an OS a pleasure to use. Just piling on the eye candy is never going to get there.
when your application is only available through that one distribution channel, your marketing ability and effectiveness are pretty limited.
It's really common to hear "I'll be out of town from September 15 to 20 this year", though, and that's the way most (USian) people write out the date, too: Sept 15, 2009.
Ask HN: A date conundrum
I heard this on the radio tonight but didnt catch the answer - it is bugging our whole house like crazy and we cant figure out the answer.... So. Help?

Question is: what is the next 8-digit date containing all unique numbers (i.e. no duplicates).

We came up with 17/06/2345 (UK format, 06/17/2345 in US format). But apparently that is wrong (we texted in and they listed us as "wrong")

Our logic is that the year 2345 is the earliest it can be because you need at least 2 out of 0, 1 or 2 to manage unique day/month combo's. As 2 is well wrapped up for the next 100 years 2345 is the first we can think of that gives us the 0 and 1 free). Am I wrong?

Any ideas?
I didnt make an argument I pointed out a blatantly incorrect statement.

but to follow your point is there anything fundamentally flawed in the concept of html/css/javascript that makes portable sites impossible, or are you suggesting we make some pluggable generic server side rendering that can be controlled by the client because css doesnt deal with heights very well yet?
Yowza.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2HdUuM_2Gk
Non blogspam link: http://www.pygame.org/whatsnew.shtml
Everything is all about marketing now. Getting coverage and the word out there - makes a big difference (not that I've done that with my apps).

How are you going to compete with the likes of EA, LucasArts, ngmoco, Konami and capcom with massive budgets and connections? For me it seems you need to create something different/wonky that people will talk about, or the staff likes, to get on the top 25 or other lists.

Simply making something and putting it up there won't make you shit, I know I got one up there.

>> An Orwellian review team which does not communicate to anyone (even inside Apple), uneven policies which change at random times leading to horror stories form Shaken Babies to Google Voices

I agree for the most part with this. Any sort of crazy idea I have, I immediately think I'm not gonna bother with this because it takes to much time to develop just to be denied by Apple, for some arcane reason, and get a rejection letter with a nondescript problem. Other problems with the review process, you have absolutely no idea how long it will take.

I would love to get some sort of lead time, or amount of apps before yours.

For me it's a crap shoot, but I make things I like and want, if I plan to send it to the store, because I think others might enjoy them, I test them out to the best of my potential and try to conform to Apple's HIG.
French: vingt trois (twenty three)
German: drei und zwanzig (three and twenty)
FCC asks Apple why they rejected the Google voice app
A couple drops in my tea.

I cook with heavy cream sometimes. But I cut that out a couple of months ago. Doesn't seem to have changed anything.
Rubbish. How on earth does a distribution channel limit ones marketing ability? These are completely orthogonal aspects of producing a successful product.

Do you think movie studios hope that you'll stumble across their film by looking at the show times of your local theater? Do Authors pray that you'll stumble across their book in the M-R fiction section of a bookstore?
What You Need To Know About JavaScript Scope
4/5/2013 (Apr 5, 2013)

Are the days supposed to be two digits?
This is bordering on amusing to me now...

Frankly, and I hate to devolve into the ad hominem, you're taking this religiously. You've turned this into a Bikeshed issue.

This is only a "bad decision" because you've decided that YOU know TheWay.

Those languages that use the dot for scope resolution have created an ambiguous operator in the plus sign. Concatenation? Addition? In a dynamic language you'll have to do some looking. And that's a good thing? Just because it's familar to you?

And for your test of variety, I truly enjoy that you ommitted every single langauge that would give you some actual variety. You chose 6 languages all from the same paradigm.

This is the last reply I'll be writing. I made the mistake of thinking that if you are a programmer, able to presumably create software that actually ships and makes peoples lives easier, you MUST be able to hold and weigh opposing view points and judge the relevance of things. I honestly wonder if you're the type that sits on the team, picks apart working code, and refactors and refactors and never actually ships. I'm not saying you are but I am saying that everyone of those types that I have come across share your same academic sense of RightWay and WrongWay.

There are things that each language does wrong, that is, things that are confusing. But if you are CONFUSED by a backslash, you ought to reconsider your choice of profession.

And finally, something you seem to have glossed over, is that if you find this as important as you seem, why don't you take the opportunity to create a working patch that uses the double-colon?
Bootkit bypasses hard disk encryption
A videolecture on this paper: http://videolectures.net/aml08_lim_ghrl/ (warning: microsoft streaming technology).
Collusion is defined as "secret agreement or cooperation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose" at m-w.com. I would think this qualifies, and I used this word instead of the more inflammatory conspiracy, which would also be technically accurate. I was not using it to be scary, I was simply trying to describe the circumstances as they appear at the moment.

The FCC is investigating to see if any regulations had been violated; proof and a finding of guilt or innocence will come later, but it seems to me there is probable cause to investigate at this point.
The Ultimate Guide To Speeding Up Firefox 3.5
I agree that Andrew was referring to that subset, but I don't think that changes my reaction. I still think that startups aren't in a zero-sum game.

Do you think Silicon Valley startups generally are in a zero-sum game?
Pretty sure you're right. Maybe you just texted in the wrong format or something.
"what is the next 8-digit date..."
The problem is that, unlike Word vs. Publisher, we don't have a set medium that we're working toward (e.g. paper.) When CSS was created, it controlled and formatted all the things that browsers could present, which wasn't very darn much. Then we thought of more things for browsers to do, and had to make our CSS much more complicated to get the same effects.

To give an even older parallel, when HTML was created, it had formatting primitives that were just fine for the browsers that existed at the time. Then, as people wanted more from browsers, spacer gifs and other such aberrations were invented to allow us to achieve our complex ideals, until we invented CSS and things were simple again, for a time.

The point is, the web is an ever-changing medium. We create a language for easily expressing existing web designs, and then set our sights higher and bludgeon that design language into expressing new (and previously unachievable) designs—such as, say, multi-column text layout—until we create a new web design language and the process starts over. This isn't a problem with CSS; no matter what we create, it will never be enough. There's only so much you can do with ink on the boundaries of a page of paper; there'll never be a limit to new ways to lay out shapes and vectors in an infinitely scrollable, resizable, dynamic, animated and reactive space that can be variously interpreted by different clients.

That's not to say CSS isn't showing its age. It's just that this isn't shouldn't be considered a failing in the original design of CSS; rather, it should be seen as a sign of experience for web designers, that they now have newer, larger ideas that their smaller, brittler tools aren't up to expressing. Perhaps this is the best argument of all for separating content from presentation—if they're separate, we can replace CSS with something more robust (and then replace that with something even robust-er-er) without touching the content itself.
I am pretty sure you're right too, because I wrote a program to brute force the calculation

http://codepad.org/G9RLrsku
> is there anything fundamentally flawed in the concept of html/css/javascript that makes portable sites impossible

No, of course not.

> or are you suggesting we make some pluggable generic server side rendering that can be controlled by the client because css doesnt deal with heights very well yet

Yeah, pretty much. That way you don't have to wait for the standards bodies or the browser developers.
Then the submitter is correct.
It would be less if an issue if the iPhone weren't so popular and AT&T weren't involved. But the iPhone takes a nearly dominant share of the smart-phone market right now, and AT&T has even been convicted as a monopolist in the past. The two-year service contracts and shortage of decent competitors probably contribute, too.

It was cute when Apple locked down its operating systems, because there was no serious threat to the market -- but with two big companies involved in flagrantly anti-competitive behavior, in a market the government understands better, there's a higher standard for fair play here.
Thanks everyone to reply - I guess the texter might have typed it wrong then damn :D We literally spent hrs going "wtf...? it must be that"

Thanks for the sanity check
While the article does not go into specifics about the "Science" involved, it is not hard to find hard science that show unequivocally that only lowering calories lowers weight, eg. this one from the New England Journal of Medicine: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/360/9/859. Why is the first law of thermodynamics so hard for people to internalize? Shall we start measuring the energy in stars in terms of grams of fat too? One expects this kind of thing on Oprah, not on HH.

At any rate, let's assume for a moment that the blogger is still eating the same number of calories, and doing the
same amount of weight lifting (that is, still burning the same number of calories), but he is still losing weight. To
be consistent with the 1st law of thermodynamics, it will mean he has made his body less efficient at absorbing the
calories in food. So he has successfully shocked his metabolism into being less efficient. Will he stay on this diet forever? Because as soon he starts eating bread again, presumably his metabolism will emerge from the state of shock he induced. When that happens, while he will feel as if he were eating the same amount of calories, he will effectively be eating much more since his metabolism will no longer be so inefficient.
I'll take your iPhone then.
I bet they said it's wrong because they are counting "06" as "6".

If you consider that each value (day/month/year) has to be at least 10, then the month must be 10 or 12 (not 11, because of the duplicate "1").

Then, your day value must be somewhere in [23, 29] for October, or in [30] for December.

After that, just look at the remaining 6 digits and order them in ascending order.

Example: If you choose October (10), you could pick 27 as the day, which leaves [3,6] U [8, 9] for the year digits, so you'd get 10/27/3456 (US format).

EDIT: In fact, I think that example may be the best answer, because choosing a day less than 27 makes the year value larger, so using 27, 28, or 29 should minimize the year. Since you want the earliest date, 10/27/3456 should be it.
I'll be honest...I was thinking it was going to be an article about the Manhattan norm (a.k.a. the Taxicab norm) at first:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_%28mathematics%29#Taxicab_...
The distribution channel for SmartPhone software is the Internet. You don't see BlackBerry apps being sold at retail B&M stores in tiny little boxes. Developers sell their apps usually through a web site with their own checkout system that delivers a binary to the user who then must figure out how to install it. With the iTunes store the first part of the model should be the same -- the developer creates a web site and promotes their application through ad buys, promo copies to reviewers, and whatever other tactics they think will work. The only difference is the checkout stage would link to the iTunes Store URL to complete the transaction.

I think all these developers are really missing the point that built in App Stores on devices are simply a delivery medium. You shouldn't rely on it to be a discovery medium for potential customers.