skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I noticed recently that it doesn't seem to combat the worst offenders: sites using width= attributes or invisible-table-based margins. I hit Readability, and the content is still squished to one side. Heck, I turn styles off and it's still squished to one side. This is what people mean when they say these old sites aren't "accessible": they can't be transformed into pure content to be input into something else (Readability, or a screen-reader, it makes little difference.)
I don't plan on ever submitting my resume to stack overflow careers. I'm pretty confident in the content, but i feel my lack of participating on the site (no reputation) will work against me, thus making the site useless.

of course I haven't looked for a new job since the economy tanked, for all I know dice may not work any more :)
I think I understand what they are trying to do, & it is not all that bad. The implementation is just a bit sleazy. For social networks (especially upstart little ones), one of the best traffic sources will probably be your members getting Googled.

If you are active on half a dozen sites & you Google your name, Facebook doesn't tend to do too well.

Apart from that there is also chatter of various sorts that may drive some search engine traffic & perhaps some Twitter-like real time stuff.

It must be frustrating that with all the long tail relevance of the site, they are letting all this traffic go by.

But I think Jason is right, this is sleazy.
This is kind of a lame article although the topic itself is a bit interesting. I am actually paid hourly - as a full time developer (not a consultant). It was nice when we were being asked to work late as we at least were being paid for out time (although we didn't get paid overtime - the hourly rate was the same regardless of how many hours we worked).

It's a little less interesting when you're not working overtime and you have to make sure you get your 40 hours in. In my previous jobs (which were all salaried) things just seemed a little more relaxed - if you needed to take off early or were a little late getting in it was never a big deal (as long as you didn't make a habit of it). Now it feels more like I keep an eye on every minute.

It definitely makes me more aware of the whole time = money thing but I'm not so sure that means I'm happier... more neurotic about time perhaps.
After reading this awesome article I decided to write my own version of exactly what I saw in his pictures:

timing_array = Hash.new

for q in 0..6

max_n = 10**q

prime_array = Array.new

for z in 0..max_n

prime_array[z] = 0

end

for i in 2..max_n

a = max_n / i

for j in 1..a

prime_array[j*i] += 1 unless j*i > max_n

end

end

puts "prime numbers to #{max_n}"

prime_array.each_with_index {|num,v| puts "#{v}" unless num > 1}

timing_array[max_n] = Time.now

end

puts "and the resultz"

puts timing_array

1000000 Sun Dec 13 20:33:05 -0500 2009

100000 Sun Dec 13 20:32:34 -0500 2009

10000 Sun Dec 13 20:32:31 -0500 2009

1000 Sun Dec 13 20:32:31 -0500 2009

100 Sun Dec 13 20:32:31 -0500 2009
Seems like this David Mark is mad at the world:

http://sixrevisions.com/javascript/promising_javascript_fram...

http://sixrevisions.com/javascript/promising_javascript_fram...

http://stackoverflow.com/users/88658/david-mark

http://help.wugnet.com/bravenet/webmaster/Great-Examples-cod...
If you have, which probably anyone concerned with privacy has, they default to "not everyone" choice.

I had not read about this, signed in last night to get a message from my sister-in-law about Secret Santa arrangements for this year, and got hit with the prompt. It defaulted me to everything being public. I don't know whether I count as "anybody concerned with privacy" or not, but my understanding on Facebook has always been that when you Google for my business you do NOT see how long it has been since I broke up with my girlfriend. The fact that that would have changed if I was not extremely thorough at clicking my way through their roadblock was upsetting to me.
As a side note, he raises an interesting question that has been floating in my head for a while. Two hundred years ago, politicians were the most educated and informed people around. We could rely on them to make good informed decisions. But with the explosion of information and ever-accelerating development in technology and therefore our every aspect of our lives, it seems politicians are reduced to the common denominator knowledge and understanding and quality of their decisions is less and less sufficient to lead a country.
It depends on where you are and who you're competing against. In smaller markets, or if you have unique skills, employers searching will be finding a small number of employees, and won't care about Stack Overflow participation. So for example if you know lisp and want a job in Austin, you're competing against exactly one person, who only has 424 reputation, so you're pretty likely to get a call anyway even without StackOverflow reputation.

If you are competing against more people, say, if you're looking for a Java job in the Bay Area, it may work against you, but I doubt if it will make the site useless. In my own recruiting using Stack Overflow careers I found plenty of good people who didn't even use Stack Overflow and I still contacted them because their CVs were great.
How does your game theory example stack up when 20,000 people coming through the border have no intent to blow stuff up, and only one does?

The benefits of roughing up 20,000 innocent people start to look a little bit small in comparison to the probability of that behaviour catching the one extremely polite person going out of their way to avoid detection.
That's a nice theory... I don't have any way to test it, but I've seen a LOT of StackOverflow CVs and have NEVER seen someone who was unemployed.

More likely that they're UNDERemployed, bored at a dead-end, stupid job, so they have time to answer questions.

That said, the typical high achiever on Stack Overflow is also a high achiever at work. I know for a fact that Jon Skeet's employer loves him despite the fact that he has the highest reputation on the site.
And the GIF file format
PS when I search StackOverflow I look for lisp, OCaml, ML, Smalltalk, etc., not because we need them, but because we like to hire people who know them.
All of the major SmartPhone operating systems allow you to see GSM signal quality in an exact dB measurement. It should be pretty easy for someone with access to many GSM handsets to do field testing. Arguing back and forth with anecdotal evidence is pointless when it's so easy to obtain the facts.
Are there any examples of domain specific jobs sites that have been very successful?
So one guy == typical?
That's complicated by the trend towards cronyism.
It would be interesting doing some sort of data gathering on that question. I'm sure it's the jibe Stackoverflow has gotten used to. Who wants an employee that wastes all his time asking & answering questions?

Might be worth proving it wrong.
Seriously? You'd think that they would learn after the Beacon ordeal (easily the event with the most negative publicity in Facebook's history.)
DM-FileManager 3.9.6 Cookie Injection and Authorization Bypass Vulnerability
According to his LinkedIn, David Mark is now working at Sitepen, the primary contributors to Dojo. I guess he no longer believes that all JavaScript frameworks are completely idiotic...
Windows XP Roaming Profile Synchronization Issues
"Hourly employees happier than salaried" is not equivalent to (nor implied by) "[p]eople paid by the hour exhibit a stronger relationship between income and happiness" so I'm left to wonder which it is.
Look at http://stackoverflow.com/users, those are all famous Netizens, you should be able to figure out if they're high achievers or just basement StackOverflow nerds
Thanks for digging these up. His tone and his arguments are two different things; I find his tone hard to take, but can any JS coders weigh in on his arguments?
I was lucky in that I had experience in the service at a young age, so I'm used to being very docile when the situation calls for it.

An interesting thing I learned from those videos is that cops can say anything at all to you -- they are not required to actually tell you the truth. I found that very unnerving. On the other hand, I found that you can ask if you are being detained and if not, if you are free to go. It's a funky kabuki dance you do. There actually a video on that site of interacting with a border patrol agent. The agent wanted to detain, search, and interrogate the driver but the driver understood that since they were not at the border the agent did not have authority to do so, even though it appeared that the agent stood his ground. It was a very interesting interaction.

I remember in my mid twenties I was driving with the chief of a local police department in his personal car a good ways from his home (long story). While we were talking, his speed got too fast and he passed a radar checkpoint that a state trooper had set up.

I never saw a man go from totally macho to totally polite and subservient quicker in my life. It was all "yes sir" and "no sir" and "I believe I was not paying attention to my speed and was probably speeding, but I have no idea how fast I was going", etc. You would have thought that the man's personal deity had appeared to him from the way he acted.

The trooper gave him the ticket too! It my my heart warm to see the system working the way it should.

Of course, many times the system doesn't work the way it should, and once you have too many laws you easily reach a point where law enforcement officials can capriciously determine which ones to enforce and which ones not to. (We reached that point a long time ago) Adding extra cops and border agents does not make these problems go away and in fact just make them worse. (Insert long little "l" libertarian text here)
>> pretty much just wants to strip the GPL from MySQL so that he and others can develop completely closed-source databases based on it.
> So what's the problem with that?

Nothing. It's just that he sold the right to do that to Sun for a billion dollars, and now wants the EU to give it back to him for free. If he wanted to build a closed source DB off of MySQL code, he should have done so when he owned the source.
Why is this even being posted to HN? Is it buzzword compliant or something?
I strongly disagree. ConsumerSearch is SEO'd the same way Stack Overflow is: it's designed to capture search ranking with valuable content. It's a useable and useful site.

Compare to:

http://www.washing-machine-wizard.com/
Movie: Visualizing Bank Failures, 2008 - 2009
Last time I checked Weblocks it had an outdated documentation (as the original author left the project) and new developers were adding new super-cool stuff in such way that using it actually involved becoming a dev on the project.

Few years later I experienced the same with UCW (beign another continuation-based web framework). And the same with Lisp-on-Lines (mr author, do you have something working outside of your own lisp image yet, after 5 years or so?)

Then I came to conclusion that there's some reason in the CL world that many projects become write-only vacuums with NIH syndrome, and their dev communities don't care of creating a _user_ base as they favor having _dev_ base. Also the term 'change management' or 'release management' seems to be incomprehensible by CL people. That causes almost impossible to deliver a product to the customer based on such software and stay sane.
His arguments are nonsensical. Are there bugs in jQuery? To be sure. But he has absolutely no clue what real developers are looking for in a library. Many of the complaints in his critiques center around the fact that jQuery does things which will break browsers like Netscape 4 and IE 5. Not only does jQuery not claim to support those browsers, there are literally no web developers using jQuery who care about support for those browsers.
I get, in this order:

* ConsumerSearch

* Dishwasher-Review.com (spammy)

* Epinions

* CNet

* HowStuffWorks

* Viewpoints.com (spammy)

* Buzzillions (borderline)

* Consumer Reports

* Wize.com (borderline)

There clearly is spam, but it's not a garbage dump.

Dishwasher-review may also be unnaturally high in the SERPs because of its close matching domain. And I'm not giving Buzzillions the benefit of the doubt.
The Encyclopedia of Counterintuitive Thought
Another reason not to participate in comp.lang.javascript: Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn.
He (David Mark) isn't going to get much support with his attitude.
"Long-tail" SEO is definitely a weakness in Google quality control. It is remarkably easy to get yourself into the first search result page by autogenerating specific pages for specific models, a trick I learned recently from patio11, and for which I surely owe him a drink (my mom, a teacher, already has enough bingo cards).
Both good points. We're on it.
It reset my permissions to default and I didn't click through as most people probably did. I went through my privacy settings afterward and found my application settings reset to allowing any and all applications to see all my data. I had a good number of applications blocked and my blocklist was purged. A few other important settings were reverted from private (me only) to public (everyone). I immediately fixed the permissions and deactivated my account. I am not putting up with this.
At least a few psychologists are attempting to make things better.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1405131128/
Waterloo Co-op website: http://www.cecs.uwaterloo.ca/employers/prospective/
shrug

There is some shred of validity to them.

However, most JS coders are too busy using jQuery or Prototype or something to Get Their Project Done and then move on to the next thing to be bothered by this guy.
>That said, not everyone can be a good writer because there is an innate intelligence of some kind upon which good writing must be predicated and not all people have this.

If you are writing correctly you are exercising cognitive skills, and I think can actually improve them. It has already been shown physical exercise is positively correlated with iq. I don't think anybody has done the study but I imagine a similar correlation would hold for intellectual exercise, writing being a main example.
I believe, if you have $1B, then you can loan out $900M, keeping 10% of the original balance in reserves.
The straight dope did a column on this, and later amended it with Scientific American results:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/422/which-freezes-f...
In addition to being somewhat trollish, this article is inaccurate. The change doesn't make everything public -- the settings vary by type of info and also I think it tries to preserve customizations (I'm not completely sure how that aspect works, but different people get different defaults as I understand it). A quick search turned up this screen-shot: http://images.smh.com.au/2009/12/10/960612/420-facebook-priv...

Also, I'm pretty sure his "search" theory is mostly nonsense. From what I can tell, the change is driven by a genuine belief that these settings provide greater utility for users. This has certainly been my experience sharing on FriendFeed (which is more public) vs sharing on Facebook, so I tend to think it's correct.
Ah yes, David Mark. This guy trashes other JavaScript frameworks (usually quite pedantically) in order to promote his own "My Library". Not a good strategy if you ask me.

We were the target of a highly superficial "review" by him soon after Cappuccino was made public: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.javascript/msg/1799...

(for the record, YES and NO are there for compatibility with Objective-C, and we benchmarked the math functions, used in graphics routines which needed to be highly optimized, and found a significant performance improvement, in IE if I remember correctly, by aliasing them to eliminate the Math object property lookups)
Studies: Experienced VCs Add Significant Value
David Mark is an anti-jQuery crusader. He is known for speaking ill of people who use the library as well as the developers (John Resig in particular). He insists that jQuery is responsible for all of the sites across the internet that have JavaScript errors.

See http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7vul9/some_tech... http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8ndyw/jquerys_l...
This is a bit (way) overblown. To me it sounds like a rant looking for a place to happen. I will freely acknowledge that people are creating content that provides little value to the searcher but rank highly in result-listings and picking up the ad money. But even if you get to a good appliance site, manufacturers are also gaming the review process so that you're unlikely to be able to tell the difference between somebody who really liked a product and some shill from corporation X.

Simply because sites appear in the listing that you don't like doesn't mean they are spammy. People are also writing good content for the same reason. If folks are searching for material and you can provide something unique and valuable (which is really only determined by the consumer), there is a role for additional content providers in any area. Heck, there was a HN article a week or two ago about a company that is making huge bucks providing random video instruction. Remember these guys? http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia/

Finally there is existing content that is gaming Google's system to gain ranking where it probably doesn't deserve it as well, keying off of strategic partnerships and other things that just make them look better.

Once again, boys and girls, Google is an algorithm, not a way of life. Whenever you put an algorithm at the center of your company people are going to manipulate it. Google doesn't get to have the "magic" or right algorithm that is somehow non-game-able any more than Microsoft or anybody else does. This is an evolutionary process and we've got to expect change and adaptation. Seeing a lot of spammy sites in your results just means that the system is gearing up for the next evolutionary leap. Can't wait to see what it is.

As a personal story, I have a massage chair that gave me fits when I bought it a few years ago. So I put the name and model in my blog.

To this day I get about a comment a month with somebody asking questions about the chair and somebody else responding. Was that a spam article? Would it have been a spam article if I had purposely targeted that particular chair's keywords?

I think it's just content, and I think the rest is just content, and I think people write content for all kinds of reasons. If you incentivize it, people are going to do more of it. Search-by-keyword incentivizes creating content.
It's hard to find much validity, especially when it starts to boil down to comments like "As I recall, it seemed needlessly complex." He long ago formed the opinion that all libraries were shit, and apparently made that basis on how complex the code seemed and other superficial reasons.
Having a less painful development platform than Symbian and a better development environment than Symbian SDK/Carbide C++ combo would be a good start.

Last I checked, the emulator included with majority of SDKs is still a bloated monster that is very divergent in behaviour from the actual device.
Links of London Chains
Craiglist's old "Erotic Services" page :)
Actually, it might be worse than the article says.

TFA says that it only changes your settings once you click through... but I have been getting new "friend requests" from people I have never heard of this weekend (since the change went into effect), I think because my profile and various other info had already been made public.

Facebook's entire thing (IMO) was that it was a safe and private way to share stuff between friends.

What they've just done violated all of the brand equity I had in them, and I am seriously considering shutting off my account. I have already maxed out the privacy settings.

It's this type of crap that causes a promising idea like Facebook to turn into a has-been in a matter of years because of mass flight of users.
Not to mention, in his "reviews" he consistently nitpicks on tiny things and then declares that no further effort could possibly even be warranted. Use a dollar sign anywhere in your code and David Mark will declare you an incompetent fool.
Linux System Administration Basics
MX is a little light on content is shifted a long way towards gossip rather than news. Still it's a good size for some light reading while catching transport home. I think they do have a fairly healthy business model going forward though.
Actually that's not quite right. (I was just talking to an engineer who services nuclear reactors for a living about this.) Most of the spent fuel rods are left sitting in storage pools ("wet storage") next to the reactor. What you refer to, cask ("dry") storage, is the other option, but is not as prevalent due to cost and opposition to storing nuclear waste outside. Ironically wet storage is the less safe of the two, because mechanical failure could result in the coolant boiling off, at which point radiation would be released into the air. Apparently this scenario is outlined in one of those Discovery channel, "What would the world be like without humans" shows.
I remember reading one of his rants from a while back, and it actually caught me off guard. I know quite a bit about javascript, but the way he was talking made me think I was perhaps missing the boat. I looked into what he was saying, and some of it was sort of accurate, but not really relevant.

I think he just has angry-hyperactively-perfectionist-armchair-developer syndrome.

Case in point: where is his brilliant contribution to the JavaScript ecosystem?
And yet I can't help drawing a parallel: comp.lang.lisp was famously full of the hateful spewing of an intolerant contributor, and for that both the group and the contributor (Erik Naggum) were basically worshipped by a non-trivial community. Why did Lisp produce that outcome, while JavaScript produces this?
Traffic per user is decreasing that is why you are seeing moves like this to boost traffic. Their business model relies on traffic per user going up not down. They will continue to do immoral things like this until they go all out and change the terms of service and sell all your data to advertisers.
I think it really depends on the app. Sure for some apps all you need is some buttons and some input fields. But even in the not so old days of desktop apps we had Authorware, Macromedia Director and HyperCard because some apps are not just data input apps, and this problem existed back then, it was the reason for the afore mentioned application builders if you will.

You mentioned Cocoa and it is funny that you do, because I think that Apple is one of the ones that got it right (I have only done IPhone development, so forgive me if this does not apply to OSX proper). But with the nib file abstracted away from code it allows a designer to build screens, lay them out and then move them on in a work flow to a developer. Allot of the more modern desktop development languages / frameworks now have this separation but it is relatively new and the web seems doomed to follow every incarnation until it too finds that separation of different technologies is the cleanest way to build a system.

The web is a different beast, while there are pure application many of them are hybrids I think Linked-In or Facebook are a really good example of these hybrid application/documents. They are very interactive but at the end of the day they are a document that sums up either my personal or professional life. With them usability and design is just as important as the code that sits behind them.
[citation needed] - seriously though, I'm struggling to believe that politicians used to be any more competent a couple of hunderds of years ago. It's just that the incompetent ones aren't remembered. The United States had it's fair share of incompetent presidents in the 1850s for example.
Thanks, I will take another look at it.