skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I imagined it had nothing to do with personal workstations... ;-)
Stop fighting wars in the Middle East and then double check those numbers.

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_deficit_chart.ht...

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/defense_chart_30.html

Also breakeven is having the national debt grow as fast as inflation even though CBO considers that a deficit. 12 trillion * .03 = 360 billion / year.

PS: There is still a gap but doing things like increasing the SS minimum age by 1 year and cutting back on defense spending might hurt but they don't exactly break our society. Next up remove the tax break on charitable donations.
Sure. Here's the old HTML for your reference.

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/files/old-site/registration....

The CSS links in that are good, but the relevant snippet is the following. The second definition is the one that, when added on top of the first, fixes it for IE.

http://www.pastie.org/666918
Cool idea. What are you using to access twitter? I've been using tweepy, it's been good to me so far.

P.S. There's an unnecessary horizontal scrollbar in firefox. Just sayin.
Using text-indent: -1000px is a terrible hack anyway. Some hacks are necessary but when you're moving elements off the page to achieve an effect, you're definitely doing it wrong.
The excuse for not testing on all browsers is that its incredibly time consuming. It also requires you to be at your main workstation that has all those test VMs.
Other fun stories of software gone wrong, off the top of my head:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5_Flight_501

http://www.pcw.co.uk/computing/analysis/2073427/emergency-ro...
That IBM has been hush-hush is interesting.

The insider trading scandal is quite huge and a number of hedge fund execs have been quietly cashing out and leaving the US.
No worries, chief. A truly well constructed piece, and particularly cool given it was ready for release only a few days after the event.

When's the sequels coming out?
Microsoft have recently released Super Preview - a very handy (and free) browser tester. You can compare IE6,7 and 8 side by side.

Download it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8e6...
Facebook: Simplifying the Stream
I lurked via RSS only for a very, very long time before I made an account. Now, I still primarily read, but I also comment. I occasionally hit the "new" page and upvote things if I have some free time.
Michael Vanier: LFM and LFSP
An example from my code:

/// - parse an HTTP input stream as XML
/// - requires a progressive parser (currently xpat, which is distributed with
/// Apache)
/// - the XML in turn is mapped to database operations, and the results
/// of the database operations used to create the HTTP response
So would the point then be that we need to belittle (or abuse or revolt against) IT departments that rest on 20th Century laurels. Or perhaps... embark on educational campaigns aimed at companies that are not mandating/funding their IT departments to join us in 21st Century?
Look into Maven.
If I find something interesting, I usually don't even think about posting it, as I'm too lazy to check to see if it's a duplicate or not. Is there a cure for that problem (or my laziness)?
Well, I read they bought high yield bonds (known as junk bonds in the 80s), to get them through a nasty period where the IPO markets had dried up, and VC obviously couldn't fund a late-stage company.

So maybe it's both bonds and improvements?

As for evidence of the bonds: Book The Warren Buffett way:

"In July 2002, only one week after Buffett wrote CEO Jeff Bezos a letter praising him for his decision to account for stock options as an expense, Buffett bought $98.3 million of Amazon's high yield bonds."
Ignoring virus/spam stuff,

Startup Control Panel is usually the first thing I install if I wind up getting parachuted into a random Windows machine - first step in finding the wood amongst the trees:

http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml
Often times, IE6 users don't know that they are missing anything because they are on IE6 and have nothing to compare to. A message of "this feature is not supported on your browser" or, preferably, "this feature requires a modern browser with support for HTML X and CSS Y" would go a long way to communicating that, in a factual, non-confrontational way. I think the latter message is better because it gives those who would use the website a factual rationale to take to their IT departments as to why an upgrade would be good, rather than letting the IT department dismiss the website creators as IE6-hating.
Installation:

For the record, I looked into prebuilt binaries for Gambit. The support is quite extensive for Mac and Windows.

Mac: installers provided for G3, G4, G5, X86, X86-64, and universal binaries.

Windows: installers for Gambit compiled with MSVC and mingw.

The latest version (4.5.2) is available here: http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/download/gambit/v4.5/pre...

Canonical download link:
http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Distri...
I think course literature is going to be the "killer market".

IMO, the biggest factor keeping this from happening is the cost. Even if your textbook is on the Kindle Store, you have to pay an extra $260 and pay for the books on top of that.

I think most students would rather keep using their backpack until the price comes down.
Historical Thesaurus is a masterpiece worth waiting 40 years for
How does the following work? Must be a preprocessing step, if I'm not mistaken.

With play, you can just write:

Article article = Article.findById(id);
User user = User.getConnected();
render(article, user);

And retrieve objects from their Java local name in the template. That saves a lot of useless lines of code...
"Also the software will only work for 2 hours in 'Demo' mode, then it won't work until you unlock the software."

Which is funny, because this could lead to hacked Hackintoshes.
Random blog spam.
Postscriptum:

Saying "wheel!" is crude and invites a simple counter. But the point is there is a simple, important thing where artifice has a substantial lead.

And without well-chosen application of design, the large-scale evolution might be practically excluded from certain areas.

(. . . that was really a side issue. It was the procedural similarity of design and evolution -- they are not so much opposed, as differently balanced.)
It's not cherry-picking to note that several players whose obscurity and subsequent utilization by the A's were basically the focus of Lewis' book had unimpressive careers in the majors. Jeremy Brown had 10 MLB at-bats total; the book, IIRC, ends with him hitting a home run.

And again I'll just note, the author of this article is a reporter of some real repute.
Signs your code sucks
Pollution in China, in pictures
Exactly. But then the author ends with this note: "But [Billy Beane] is not the man who changed baseball."

It seemed to me the author was making the argument that Billy Beane's tactics, which once were unique, are now widespread and without that advantage, his team stinks.

So... it sounds like he did change baseball. At least he changed the appreciation of OBP and Slugging Percentage. This article's conclusion is confusing.
I'm the writer of the post above and a web dev. Generally, I don't test or develop for IE6 anymore. It's down below 10% share and that will keep falling now that the Win 7 upgrade cycle is on.

So I understand the animus towards IE6 as a technology, but not toward its users.

The truth is, an organization on IE6 will become uncompetitive in the same way that an organization using green screen terminals will become uncompetitive. Old stuff gets flushed out eventually.
I want to downvote you but I'll reply instead: I've noticed this sort of response on HN more lately, where someone is criticized for the way they did a thing, or their approach in solving a problem, but the criticism is completely unhelpful.

patio11 clearly said in his blog post that CSS wasn't his bailiwick. Instead of simply saying, "You did it wrong!", you might say:

Here's a link to some popular CSS image replacement techniques: http://css-tricks.com/css-image-replacement/

It's also worth pointing out that, in that article, patio11's text-indent hack is cited as probably the most-commonly-used method.
Yeah, IT has a job of optimizing the company's use of resources. I still question the idea that IE6 or IE7 are good for security, but (given more enterprise software) IE6 is generally a business requirement. Truthfully, if your company is still on IE6, then IT should have a whitelist of the sites you can visit (not a blacklist of the sites you cannot).

-- yeah, I don't think we are really disagreeing on anything substantiative
That sucks. I'm not sure how the images are supposed to expire - I'm using year old images in VirtualBox and while I occasionally get messages saying Windows cannot be authenticated I'm still able to use them.
I will take this opportunity to keep plugging for http://crossbrowsertesting.com/

I'm not affiliated with them in any way, they've just made my one of my jobs much easier for not much money, and they hang out on HN sometimes besides.
... is a fantasy.
Oh god. Please don't use zebra stripes. That's even harder to read.
I hate cellphones, but I'm not a senior citizen, and am not any less educated than the "adopters".

I despise cellphones because I grew up with a father that had one. I was fortunate enough that, at that time, Dad could come home for lunch ... but it was inevitable that he would get interrupted. Later, when his office was at home (and he still had a cell phone) his boss would call and interrupt when Dad manage to find a lull to visit with the family.

Currently, my father works in the cellphone industry, and has some eight or more models down in his office. It's all we can do to get him away from them, and even then he'll have one or two phones with him. And it's still inevitable that he'll get interrupted by it! Only now, it could be a call, an e-mail, or an instant message.

The only time I have been thankful to have a cellphone with me was when I borrowed one, and was t-boned at an intersection.

Do I have friends? Sure! I chat with them every few days, email a little less frequently, and manage to talk on the phone with them once a month or less (we do meet frequently).

If I bought a cellphone it would be prepaid, for business use only. But then again, just like getting a driver's license ... there's a cultural sense of obligation that comes with the phone. If I get one, my friends will expect, and pressure, me to use it--just like they expect me to use my driver's license, even when I don't want to go out.

So, I keep adequate change to afford pay-phones (remember, when the power goes out you cannot get a signal on the cellphone as long as you can the pay-phones) just in case I have to make an emergency call.

Why should I care about cellphones? I'm "connected" enough as it is!
Generally, they haven't upgraded because of some enterprise app that isn't updated, and most IT workers have Firefox on their machine.
I read HN from google reader so it doesn't even affect me. I wonder how many people actually read the site instead of from their reader.

edit: I just realized that by doing it this way, I negate the point system. Oops.
Look at what working with the universities did for student loans. American educational institutions have proven themselves perfectly willing to screw their students for a cut of the profits.

Sure, that would be great for the publishing industry, just as it is for the student loan industry, but considering the cost to the student it doesn't seem like the outcome to root for.
A previous discussion (from 2007): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33246
Just a reminder in the future to delete the number from these posts, to remove the "appeal to lists" factor-- as per the site guidelines-- so that it becomes "Signs that your code sucks" as opposed to an amusing list.
This a pretty reasoned, fair approach. The Maps team is handling this as well as anyone could be expected really. The best part is that most users don't understand dynamic changes based on country or IP, so to them it just looks as they'd expect it.
So, how would you do it then ?
One of the authors of DTrace explained the CDDL/Linux issue two years back so it's not surprising. http://blogs.sun.com/ahl/entry/what_if_machine_dtrace_port But you have to consider the politics of the situation: no Linux vendor will ship this code so very few people will take the effort to download and install it.
The Web I fell in love with is the Web of URLs that respond to a GET request with a page full of HTML.
Depends on what industry they are in. I don't think a browser choice really matters to quite a lot of companies.
Correction: That should read 'James Long' instead of 'James Longster'.
Wal-Mart is despised and loathed because they have borderline-abusive policies towards their employees, because a Wal-Mart store has the capacity to completely disrupt the entire established ecosystem—that's been there for decades or more—of a community, and because they contribute to a leveling-out of cultural diversity in favor of a single lowest-common-denominator monoculture. None of these things are true about Google.
I don't post because I most of my information from HN and Reddit. I let the community be my filter.

I do occasionally comment, though, and I read lots.
I suspect that this largely depends on who you talk to, at least as much as it depends on age.

I'm pretty young and I have a cell phone and I plan everything a total of about an hour in advance; if it involves me driving a few hours or involves me herding other people, I might or might not plan it a day in advance.

However, I know other people in my peer group who plan all kinds of things weeks or months in advance, and ask me every time about those things, leaving me to shrug haplessly.
With all these accusations flying around that Psystar stole the code they're using, does anyone have any proof beyond "They're doing the same thing I'm doing, they couldn't possibly do it on their own!"?

Typically when I see these types of stories the developer that feels wronged posts a bunch of code comparisons, binary comparisons or strings found in the binaries to show that it's a possibility. All the articles so far on this subject point to the author's blog post about changing the license for his software but it's quite lacking on any proof.

I'm all for open software and I don't know which side of the fence I'm on for the hackintosh debate (though I'd love to legally run OS X on my custom built PC, I'm stuck with a mac mini for now) but can someone post some proof?
How test-driven development works (and more)
XSLT makes for a nice templating engine.
Benefits of cloud storage for small business
So, then, the "minor tweak" you are relying on is for the U.S. Government to pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan tomorrow? I don't see any indication of that happening.

When the government actually puts any of those ideas into practice I'll be elated. Until then it's nothing but fantasy, and sure as heck no reason to expect that our deficit spending is under control.
> You need to use comments to explain the code – Code should be able to explain itself and should be in a format that is easily readable. If you find yourself needing to explain what your code is doing then you may want to look into rewriting that code.
EDIT: This is not referring to using comments (e.g. javadoc) to explain the purpose of a method/class and its inputs and outputs.

-- What? --
wmf called it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=897924
...while reducing perfomance...
LoseThos, 64-bit Free Operating System, v5.15 Released
I am using oauth-python-twitter.
I didn't hear about tweepy until about a week ago, I would definitely have gone with it if I had known. It's nice and clean.

I am in firefox 3.0, and no horizontal scroll bar. I don't know what would cause that...
AJAX PHPMyAdmin Alternative
IIRC Reddit had those originally, and I learned from their example it was a bad idea.
> Newspapers, their passionate boosters maintain, are a kind of civic Pilates, the institution that keeps the core of our democratic republic as tight and toned as Megan Fox’s midsection. TV news can show us war zones, and radio news may offer us aerial assessments of traffic jams, but newspaper news does the real heavy lifting of journalism. It sorts fact from rumor. It shines light on government murk and corporate malfeasance and helps our citizenry make informed and rational decisions. Without healthy newspapers, we’re just Myanmar with better department stores and less stylish military uniforms.

How strawmanish. It might even be possibly true if only newspapers resorted to journalism.
Mine still work, you have to go through a few hoops to convert them, but I have them working in VirtualBox fine.

I think the howto to convert them I found on stackoverflow or something, can't remember now.

I have XP_IE6, XP_IE7, XP_IE8 working fine.
Yeah, and Joe Blanton's in the World Series for the 2nd year in a row, and Nick Swisher's a game away. What's your point? The list of players from Moneyball isn't exactly embarassing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball:_The_Art_of_Winning_a...

One of the main reasons Jeremy Brown was featured so prominently in the book was because he was such a long shot to make the majors but was being drafted anyways. He was also doing pretty well in the farm system his first two seasons before injuring his thumb. It's sports - lots of players, regardless of how promising or hyped they are, have to leave the game for a wide range of reasons. Jeremy Brown's career is not at all evidence that Moneyball's premise was flawed.
I liked it when we figured our how to POST to a C application and then Perl came along and ruined the party. I had to learn a new language just to keep doing CGI. After that, no one but yahoo would hire a CGI C developer.
The ranking of the news is also news.
This is only true of "unclever" code. You haven't written a lot of code if you haven't found a concise, optimized, abstract way to solve problems that aren't intuitive when first seen with the naked eye.

We aren't writing books, we're writing instructions for a computer and those two things can sometimes be very, very different.
IE6 sucks, blah blah, I get it. I still don't think there's any excuse for a web designer to ship a product that doesn't work with IE6. If its a truly huge web app, OK. But for most sites it shouldn't take a good dev more than an hour to fix any IE6 bugs.

Instead, I take an Ellis Island approach: come as you are. If you want to buy my product, I'm going make sure that happens, and no IE6 bug is going to get in the way.
I think you misunderstand the OP then - it wasn't a limitation, it was an expansion.

Edit: I guess the OP wasn't that specific, but this seems to be the right way to look at things - all deployed installations of Linux, regardless of application.
Tomb Digger
I am 29. I have never had a cell phone, and never felt the need to have one. I've never been in a position where I've needed to call someone, or needed to be available to someone, where I wasn't already sitting next to a landline. Plus, I'm a miser.
Smartphones kind of kick ass above and beyond the phonitude. I get a lot of non-communication utility from having a symbolic mathematics environment, alarm clock, MP3 player, camera, Google Maps, Wikipedia, and business Internet (i.e. I can find store hours & addresses online while away from home, I can look up authors and reviews of books while I'm at the bookstore) in my pocket.
Its debatable whether you want a debian-like operating system instead of a mobile OS that follows all the good Unix-y practices.

Besides, Nokia never spread Maemo around. And it always felt like a proof of concept platform.
Peregrine falcons are probably better at catching food.
One problem with that is long names kill @replies.
However F-16 Falcons do not reproduce.
Hmmm... idea:

design at the micro-level = hypothesis formulation
direction of successful project at macroscopic level = repeated testing and reformulation of hypothesis

in other words, project success is science well applied
Online Money Making Ideas
3> (define x
(lambda (y) (* 2 y)))
* WARNING -- defining global variable: x
3> x
Bus error

Gambit v4.5.2
OSX 10.5

Of course, I do know that x should not be evaluated. For that have to type (x 3). But its still annoying, and very unnecessary. In DrScheme/PLT I get a:
> x
#<procedure:x>
Explicitly telling me its a procedure.
I took a quick look. The piece is better than I remembered. It takes what is a (by now) common point and makes it uncommonly well. The second-last paragraph, in particular, brilliantly summarizes both what people like about LFMs and what (other) people hate about them. Surprisingly, it's fair to both sides.

As for the distinction between LFM and LFSP itself, I believe it's fundamental -- or rather, the distinction between M and SP is fundamental. It explains important facts about the software industry that can't be explained any other way ("if X is so good then how come blah blah blah"). I think M vs. SP is fundamental because of a demographic fact: the population of SP is an order of magnitude smaller (at least) than the population of M. Combine that with the economic fact that the demand for software exceeds the supply of SP, and our world begins to make some sense.

The only thing I'd change is that the terms "smart people" and "masses" are too judgmental. What we mean by "SP" is people with a high tolerance for abstraction. There are many individuals in M (i.e. who have a low tolerance for abstraction) who are plenty smart. Still, this is a venial flaw, because capacity for abstraction is a big part of being a smart programmer.
Super Preview sucks - its basically an app wrapped around a service like browsershots.org. All you get are flat screenshots, which isn't enough.

You're going to need to find a way to test on a real version of the app. Xenocode(.com) used to have sandboxed versions of all the browsers available, which was perfect, but they've since removed the page. So now the images provided by MS (referenced in parent) are your best best.
I typically work with largish teams on very large websites (cingular.com, jcrew.com, ulta.com, pcavote.com, etc...).

With good frameworks most JSPs are very close to normal HTML and we actually usually have: designers/UX folks who provide PS docs/images/etc..., front end devs (JSP/JS/AJAX impl folks) who take those and make real working JSP pages out of them, and back-end devs who write the Java backing components.

You seem to be expecting these new developers who are just learning HTML to know how to build complex pages using aggregate web service calls via JS, based on a non-standard in-house system.

Even if you don't have separate designers and front-end devs, and I've worked at several places like that, helping HTML designers figure out JSP using a good framework (ATG, JSF) really isn't that bad, it's just a few new tags which are really well documented all over the web.

While I am a Java dev/arch, my "view point" is typically that of a lead architect, team lead, or project lead, so making sure people can get stuff done, regardless of what role they're in is key.

Do you have any live examples of websites built using your proposed method?