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Stories from May 6, 2011
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1.Getting Users For Your New Startup (pud.com)
286 points by pud on May 6, 2011 | 59 comments
2.Apple not providing LGPL webkit source code for latest iOS 4.3.x (gnumonks.org)
274 points by gnufs on May 6, 2011 | 112 comments
3.The author of Nginx on why V8 is not suitable for web servers (translate.google.com)
274 points by hanszeir on May 6, 2011 | 70 comments
4.Stolen Camera Finder (stolencamerafinder.com)
234 points by obtino on May 6, 2011 | 70 comments
5.Mozilla tells DHS: we won't help you censor the Internet (boingboing.net)
233 points by miraj on May 6, 2011 | 41 comments
6.How fast is the Internet at Google? Mind blowing. (thenextweb.com)
186 points by dannyr on May 6, 2011 | 99 comments
7.New iPhone app identifies trees from photos of their leaves (leafsnap.com)
180 points by gmac on May 6, 2011 | 51 comments
8.56% of Americans have Internet data caps; FCC asked to investigate (arstechnica.com)
149 points by amnigos on May 6, 2011 | 72 comments
9.This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C (readwriteweb.com)
136 points by kerben on May 6, 2011 | 75 comments
10.Machine Learning: A Love Story (hilarymason.com)
124 points by ColinWright on May 6, 2011 | 5 comments
11.Skype bug gives attackers root access to Mac OS X (theregister.co.uk)
123 points by jlangenauer on May 6, 2011 | 65 comments
12.What To Do When Your Web Application Goes Viral (dlo.me)
115 points by theli0nheart on May 6, 2011 | 18 comments
13.KGPU — Accelerating Linux Kernel Functions with CUDA (code.google.com)
97 points by Tsiolkovsky on May 6, 2011 | 34 comments
14.What Does Having the #6 App in a Mac App Store Category Get You? $15.42 (hanchorllc.com)
95 points by Osiris on May 6, 2011 | 38 comments
15.Open Education Resources (kqed.org)
94 points by nprincigalli on May 6, 2011 | 21 comments
16.The Parser that Cracked the MediaWiki Code (dirkriehle.com)
92 points by rams on May 6, 2011 | 31 comments
17.Visual Website Optimizer featured in India's national newspaper (timesofindia.com)
88 points by sushi on May 6, 2011 | 21 comments
18.Show HN: My embeddable C/C++ webserver (github.com/udp)
84 points by udp on May 6, 2011 | 44 comments
19.Ask HN: TED like sites/videos?
77 points by vijayr on May 6, 2011 | 31 comments
20.Waterbear - a visual language for Javacript (waterbearlang.com)
75 points by toni on May 6, 2011 | 22 comments

Yes. I take license violation very seriously. Imagine if Apple was violating a Microsoft license in this way. They'd be sued in a heart beat. Companies need to realize the (L)GPL is serious. It's not something you can just ignore because it's convenient.

It's scary what you can do with machine translation these days...

I guess Amateur porn just got a lot less anonymous.
24.Leaked “ACTA” Lobby Letter Reveals Hollywood Pressure On EU (torrentfreak.com)
72 points by ssclafani on May 6, 2011 | 1 comment
25.Mini-Django: Single file django project for instant gratification. (readevalprint.github.com)
72 points by coconutrandom on May 6, 2011 | 4 comments
26.Writing Maintainable JavaScript (msdn.com)
68 points by rmurphey3 on May 6, 2011 | 19 comments
27.Investors Cough Up $1.6 Million To Dine With Grubwithus (techcrunch.com)
68 points by jkopelman on May 6, 2011 | 16 comments
28.AIM AV (aim.com)
67 points by kirtan on May 6, 2011 | 33 comments
29.Exception Safety, Garbage Collection etc. (a.k.a. Why Does Java Suck So Bad?) (slideshare.net)
66 points by eplawless on May 6, 2011 | 68 comments

The W3C is broken: it has spent the last 10 years standardizing ideas instead of existing practice. This is totally backwards and leads to standards that are too complicated, unrealistic, and in many cases not needed at all.

The W3C was originally created to standardize HTML, which was already being used by many vendors and users but in incompatible ways. That is exactly the right situation for creating a standard. It leads to standards that are realistic and motivated by a demonstrated need.

Unfortunately, almost everything else the W3C has ever done has happened in the opposite direction: in response to an idea or a perceived need, some people theorize about the best way to solve the problem and then write a document that a bunch of vendors are supposed to then implement from scratch.

This is how we ended up with the XML stack, which was designed to solve the data interchange problem but ended up being a disaster of complexity, inefficiency, and ad hoc implementations.

Even the case of CSS (which has been quite successful) is sub-optimal IMO, because it didn't choose to standardize the existing practice of how people were using tables for layout. The CSS box model makes it stupidly difficult to do things that are trivial with table-based layouts, like a a three column layout (which is considered a "holy grail" by even CSS advocates: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/holygrail/).

CSS could have used a table-like layout model that makes it easy to arrange <div>s into rows and columns, allowing a smooth upgrade from people who were using the <table> tag. Instead they invented something new that was much more difficult to design for, creating an unnecessary tension between web standards advocates and people who just wanted to get things done.

Standards should codify and refine existing practice, not attempt to invent new things.


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