skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
user extensions affecting how the website works

That's really the point of having them, isn't it? To make the site work the way the user wants. In fact I'd say what it will actually achieve is less visitors to your site... they're just going to leave and go somewhere else.

I classify this along with the anti-right-click, disabling select/copy/paste, changing the status bar, resizing windows, and other general "DO NOT WANT" aspects of sites.
Stupid Patent of the Month: Phoenix Licensing Trolls Marketers
Victory State Department Will Try to Fix Wassenaar Arrangement
Government Can't Force Apple to Bypass iPhone Lock Screen, New York Judge Rules
And Tor even provides rudimentary ACL built into .onion address itself with somewhat obscure options of HiddenServiceAuthorizeClient, and HidServAuth. This basically lets you create a circle of Hidden Services you can only access if you have a matching key.
One thing I don't quite know yet: how does 'make install' interact with package managers? Does it bypass them?
The VMware Hearing and the Long Road Ahead
Web development has reached "maturity"... How funny a thought us that.

Sorry to be brutal but. Fuck no it's not. An hours studying of the JavaScript ecosystem should be more than enough for most to see that not only is web development not mature its mutating and beginning to try to consume other programming disciplines like some form of cancer. Just look at how NodeJS has been creeping its way from server to desktop to mobile.
Ask HN: Selling side project app
I've been working for a few months on a neat little app and associated web site for a niche market. I've got branding, logo, domains, admin panel etc all pretty much ready.

Unfortunately some commitments of mine have came up and it's unlikely that I'll be able to continue with it.

I had some success a long, long time ago selling an ecommerce site in a similar state on ebay.

I understand there are sites like flippa which I can give a go.

I'm not expecting to make huge sums of money, but would like someone to take what I've made and give it a shot and hopefully get some beer money.
Android UI patterns
Hulu has a few of these. Maybe not the "ideal" versions though. Definitely has the dub of SAC. High def version of GITS 25th anniversary edition. Has some version of Solid State Society, Ghost in The Shell 2.0, GITS: Individual Eleven, and GITS: Laughing Man.
> Does make bring out people's conservative side or something?

Misuse of tools in software development is why we end up with broken software, useless solutions that solve stupid problems because the problem wasn't well understood as first place, and first and foremost unnecessary dependencies. That's why we end up with this makefile "hack".

Now explain what it's got to do with "conservatism". bad practices != innovation .
Hellwig's VMware Case Moves Forward with Hearing Last Week
That's great! I always thought of SAC as "cyberpunk Law and Order". It's fun to hear that that was actually the intention.
GITS has a long story. It started as a Manga, whos author was a big fan of western philosophy (the ghost concept is supposedly lifted from Hegel's geist).

Thing is that he was barely involved in the making of original movie, but heavily so with the TV series.
I watched the original in 1995. It is a masterpiece, have rewatched many many times, always great. The remastered version with 3D is horrible though. The Stand Alone Complex is way more pop-corn material, also easier to digest, didn't really like it very much. The original film's pace is closer to a Tarkovsky film... Slower, more profound, poetic at times.
The article is simply reinforcing the idea that there is an alternative, and monolithic applications are not some kind of "outdated technology". Both SOA and monolithic applications are useful in different circumstances.
There are few things more infuriating than a build tool that prompts for user input when it doesn't need to. Most people like to automate these things, and having a prompt ask for input after typing `make` is completely unexpected and annoying.

Bower is a particularly bad offender here. By default it will periodically ask you if it can send anonymous usage statistics. If you've never experienced it before, you have to angrily google the problem once piping `yes` to it fails and find a github issue where the solution is `bower install --config.interactive=false`

Always assume your build tool is running in an automated environment without user input. If the user wants to do something out of the ordinary, provide command line options and try to follow the conventions that already exist.
Nice idea was my first thought. Later I was looking for the site again, googled 'most dangerous wrting app' & found this:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/28/10853534/flowstate-writing...
Depends on what you mean by "interact". When you run it yourself, package managers don't matter. You're not interacting with them in any way (assuming it's a standard autotools/cmake/qmake/...-generated Makefile).

If you mean during packaging, then usually the code is configured with the actual destination path (configure --prefix=/usr), but then installed into a directory which will be packaged by overriding destination (make install DESTDIR=/tmp/some/path)
this is fascinating... makes me want to go back to school and study viruses (what field would that be?)
None of the protection features that Dell claimed to have would've protected against what killed the Chromebook: a cable wired up to feed a negative voltage into the charging port. The author of this article is so terminally confused that he couldn't even ask about the right things
The last app I need to see is one that encourages drivel.

My killer writing apps:

4x6 index cards. For capturing quick thoughts, identifying references, marking items for verification or further interest. Advantages: you can write a fair bit on them (they've two sides), you can continue to another card, you box them for reference, you flashcard them for reminders. You can re-order, shuffle, or organise them however you want.

A notebook for longer / temporally sequential writing. I'm working on what sizes I like most, though I'm leaning increasingly to large lab-book sized engineering tablets. Smaller ones for on-the-go work. Heavy enough paper for a fountain pen not to bleed (I've picked up a relatively inexpensive but nice one recently).

For online composition: vim. Increasingly, Markdown, though I'm conversent in HTML, LaTeX, and a few other markup languages. The biggest challenge to composing online is that it's difficult to cut-and-paste in the original sense -- cutting out a segment of text and pasting it, whole, in a new spot. Vim's mark-and-move operators are actually among the better option, along with split-window view.

Various online editors almost all pretty much precisely suck. The notable exception is Reddit using RES (Reddit Enhancement Suite), with its full-tab window (better yet with the browser set to full-screen), offering side-by-side source and Markdown formatted output. It's not quite as fluid as vim, but for up to about 40k characters (6,600 words or so), it's doable.

The biggest problems I have when writing aren't writing. It's organising. My references. My thoughts. The overall structure of the document. Yes, quick jot-and-file systems are handy (a local email account used to file thoughts to is one of the better modes I've come up with -- everything is datestamped, has a subject, and may have additional metadata added), but ... constant pressure to ... just produce for no reason. Is stupid.

As others have noted here, and as a tremendous literature of experience and research on getting-in-the-flow and true creativity supports, the modality of this particular gimmick is pretty much certifiably bullshit.
Every time I see comments on how a site tries to override the browser functionality, I'm once again reminded of why I don't have JavaScript on by default. I don't notice these things at all as a result, and this site is as pleasant to read as any other.
Hi kwikiel, thanks for your comment. We'd love to find some time to talk and see how we can make it easier for you to send updates. Please email info@sybg.io and someone from our team will get back to you.
Good point but I think it goes without saying that all social apps are worthless without a user base. I hope the convenience and advantages of this approach will attract future users.

I am not handling all unique URLs as truly unique - they are normalised. So actual pages where you would want to leave comments - say some business' home page or a Twitter user's feed - will have a unique URL and will allow multiple users to discuss content. Something like https://youtu.be/PcdMU-H9Jts and https://youtu.be/PcdMU-H9Jts?t=899 are kept as aliases in my DB and will have the same comment tree.
Don't run more than one process needs nuance. Apache and Postgres work fine in containers and are fork based, and helper apps or threads that are purely supportive don't matter either. No more than one job or "thing" makes sense.

I hate ham fisted advice like this that will always end up being dogmatized and multiplying complexity needlessly.
3 Decentralized Apps You Have to See
> Given Microsoft's recent moves towards a freemium desktop operating system

It's not even free. New computers still pay licenses for windows 10. The "free" upgrade offer ends in July.
All-on-one-page "Print" link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02...
I can't shake the feeling that the media attention to Anonymous is what has given us this upsurge of "trolling" in recent years.

Meaning that people employ variations of Anon tactics, as reported by the media, against people and groups for the flimsiest of reasons.
Exemption from that particular law doesn't necessarily protect you from other anti-gaming statutes, especially at the state level, which is exactly what is playing out right now in this space.
And where public schools are good, it feeds back on itself, esp in Cupertino and Palo Alto. Good schools draw in tech millionaires, who supplement their kids' public education with private tutors and summer school booster classes. Scores go up, house prices follow. Seems like there is an infinite supply of newly minted tech millionaires to consume all available housing. And to be fair, who wouldn't want what's best for their kids? It's a culture of being the best.
They do know that sounds a lot like "daiquiri", right? Thats sort of a branding fail.
What do you do if you create a website which modifies the dom, but find out what your users have extension XYZ which completely breaks are our assumptions about what the dom is? For example you just received a server-rendered page which should have "ul/li/span.Foo", but find out that the span is a link now instead, so your JS breaks down.

All of the things you mentioned are websites trying to break your expected behaviour. This is the exact opposite - your extension is breaking the expected behaviour and the website wants you to leave it alone.
> it will be a matter of computers calculating probabilities based on a huge dataset they are constantly mining to detect abnormalities

You're describing "Person of Interest"
You knew what he/she was trying to say...
Hypothesis is a great idea but in my opinion is overly complicated for most users. I was very excited about Google Wave as well and that didn't didn't turn out very well. Birdy is very different - it works on most modern devices and is very intuitive. Everyone used comments before - now you just can comment on any page instead of relying on website owners to provide you with a platform.
joneil thanks so much for your comment and your fantastic (and detailed) feedback! We really appreciate it. Glad to hear you had an overall positive experience with our tool. We're continuing to make improvements and as part of that you found our not-yet-existent FAQ page. As you continue to try it out we'd love to hear more about your experience, what you like, and what we can do better!
Free Windows XP-10 VirtualBox/Parallels Images from Microsoft
I'm perfectly willing to admit that I might be wrong here, but I don't really see a difference between a microservice approach and any other technique for abstracting out functionality. The only real difference is that you're using a network connection to enforce your abstraction. Back in the old days we use to use fork() and pipes for the same effect ;-)

The thing is that if you don't require multi-processing, you are adding complexity to your solution that doesn't actually exist in the problem domain. Not only that, but you are forced to nail up your API between the services. My experience has been that one of the most common causes of complex code is premature subsystem decomposition. Before you have written much code, you design the subsystems and nail up an API. If it turns out that it doesn't fit, the opportunities for refactoring are practically zero.

For some problems (and it could easily be the case for the problem you are working on), micro-services are really useful. Generally this happens when you require multi-processing. You create a service for each thing that requires a separate process and you build an API for communicating/coordinating those processes. You have to do that anyway, so it's a benefit to design the services (or whatever).

Generally speaking, though, it is beneficial to delay subsystem decomposition as long as possible (but no longer). This allows you to change your internal APIs with low cost and acquire more requirements. This significantly reduces the risk that you have to major squirrelly work-arounds. If you don't need another process, then you often split out reuse libraries as soon as their API solidifies. If you do need other processes, then micro-services (or other similar approaches) can be introduced.

On many teams, you often have developers who are incredibly confident that their initial designs will hold up over time. They are usually the person I am cursing when I show up 5-10 years later and have to wade through the jungle of bizarre work-arounds. For that reason, I tend to suggest to people that they should avoid micro services until they actually need them (which could very well be never).
One last thing, if you're up for it please email info@sybg.io and someone from our team will get in contact with you. Would love to chat a bit more.
Google Summer of Code Organizations announced
> Chasing Windows compatibility is not the answer. [...] reducing Windows dominance is more important. Make it easy for people to switch platforms so companies need to listen to consumers.

Agreed, but not everybody's seen the light, aka POSIX.

I also view ReactOS as a way to subvert Microsoft's control over users and developers who enjoy aspects of Windows-like operating systems, such as the UI or the APIs.
I only recently watched Ghost in the Shell for the first time. I have no idea how I missed it all these years. I also had no idea about the follow ons you posted. Excited to watch them now.

On another note, Black Mirror is great but it doesn't even exist in the same realm as Ghost in the Shell. In 1989 we had a much less developed idea of the consequences of future technologies. The ideas presented in the original Ghost in the Shell are basically just rehashed in Black Mirror. I remember how mind blowing I found the Matrix when I first saw it (I would say it's probably the only futurist movie that changed my outlook on the world) however after watching the original Ghost in the Shell I realised that it was just a reinterpretation.
Why should I care about what the website owner wants? It's my computer running his shitty Javascript.

I get to choose how this client-side Javascript runs because I get to choose how every kind of software runs on my own computer.
Yup. When I was reading the Horatio Hornblower books a while back, and Amazon suddenly started recommending books by Patrick O'Brian and Dudley Pope, I didn't arrive at the conclusion that Amazon's algorithm was "racist" with respect to 19th Century British naval culture.
I think you or the colleague are more likely to be correct than 40+ years. There are hugely capable companies driving this and more understanding than ever on what will be achievable and how much money will be on the line.

Self-driving, electric cars will make future taxi-equivalents affordable enough that it's considered for many instances. That makes for a massive market.

It's not as though current taxis have a sparkling reputation as drivers either. Not many will be sad to see the end of them.
In the Birthplace of  Highest-Grade Meet, Workers Still Face Discrimination
If I can ask...what do you make as a technical writer relative to what you could be making if you were an average person doing the actual technical job, e.g. what is the work and wage like to write about JavaScript as opposed to being a front-end developer at the average tech company?
Replication initiatives will not salvage the trustworthiness of psychology
The housing cost is only comparable to SF for homeowners. Renting is still nearly an order of magnitude cheaper.
This is the one thing I really took away from (way too much) recent reading about Scalia and textual originalism - in my opinion, it's almost downright foolish to obey 'the letter' of the original law, and it's completely right of anyone asked to judge based on the law to do just that. I think it'd be kind of stupid in this case in particular and in all cases in general to ignore the context surrounding the law, both at the time it was written and in the present day.
I've blown the USB bus on my old Mac Mini by plugging in a crappy USB hub. IIRC (the machine is no longer with me), some of the ports no longer worked but at least one did which was enough for me to plug a "real" hub in to. Still a PITA.

Edit: that was a 12V powered hub, not "a cable", so maybe that's why.
Also things like generating code at compile time, but a lot of people could argue it both ways.
Read this headline and thought, "First React Native, and now ReactOS. What'll they think of next?"
If you look at their feature list (https://basecamp.com/3/features) you see:
- Message boards
- comment threads.
- Real-time chat/pings.
- Automatic check-ins.
- To-do lists.
- Docs & file storage.
- A centralized schedule

Everything in this list sans real-time chat I would consider as low complexity, low volume and low velocity. It's basically request a view, hit a cache / db, display some data. Send an email now and again. Store some stuff on s3 now and again.

There are lots of sites that have more complex feature sets then what basecamp does. Things like complex transcoding of media, real-time updates on their views, streaming of complex media types, need for near-real-time integration with 3rd party APIs, real-time bidding, real-time decision making, real-time analytics, etc etc etc.

I want to be very clear that I am not criticizing Basecamp as a product. Simplicity is difficult to achieve in software and their product does a great job of doing most of what you need, and not much else. I based the software stack of the first company I founded on pre-1.0 rails monolith (mongrel had just been released), so I'm not even anti-monolith.

I just think this particular post of his is entirely too simplistic and could lead younger software designers astray.
i think they are referring to the self in the philosophical sense. if you only see things in a literal light, the world will seem very narrow.
LowRISC was selected for Google Summer of Code 2016
Thanks for your very sensible explanation - I'm going to have to borrow for next time a non-techie friend of mine says something about a film that covers a person's life (so I get an expected eye roll or worse).

Reminds me of a guy who shot 1 second every day for a year to make a video. He ended up on Ted's main stage and ended up making an app.

http://www.1secondeveryday.com/
I envy your confidence of being successful!
Double nitpick: I think kinetic energy is actually the more relevant quantity. Citation after a bit of googling: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/141779/what-cause...
So basically you're ok with randomly getting broken pages if you use content-modifying browser extensions? If yes, no problem. If it's an issue - something's got to give.
> It also turns out that when I buy and eat a pizza, I built no equity either. Did I just light money on fire?

Obviously. If you would just buy a pizza restaurant instead, your payments would go towards your pizza equity. You'd get pizza, but you would also get returns from your mortgage payments on the pizza restaurant.

/s
Considering that this commercial aspect represents the potential for much larger, and perhaps less scrupulous operators (you know, private military, or who even fucking cares anymore, it's just too easy for it to happen to argue) ...to do the exact same thing at any time...

And sell the data to a single person who merely wants it, or maybe a motivated group of people who have an incentive, and can pay...

Or maybe someone looking to buy an election and maybe even sell an entire war... Which has never happened before, I'm sure. News Corp. Enron. Doesn't matter.

Who ever it was the last time, the next time, the names will be different, but we'll be blind-sided again, all the same. And how could this have possibly happened? Where did we go wrong?

But safety in numbers, relying on my own safety as one in a city of millions, means my data is surely worthless, right?

Who would care about me? And then everyone else says that too. And then you have the whole city that way.
a friend who recently took up twitter ran into this exact thing. here's what happened, they had figured out that you just write stuff in the text box and press enter. great. simple. done!

here's what happened though, they started a tweet with @nameoffriend and noticed that unlike their previous tweets that were just words, this new tweet they wrote and sent didn't show up in their timeline like the others.

so she wrote another, thinking that for some reason it hadn't been successful. nope. again, it didn't show up.

so after the fourth duplicate message which started with @nameoffriend she gave up in exasperation and said, this is stupid!

she was later informed that all her messages which started with @nameoffriend had in fact been sent but she wasn't seeing them until she clicked on the tab tweets and replies category

it is this sort of thing that makes twitter's UX just atrocious for the average person

of course, many people on HN will read the above and chuckle but you have to understand that the average person out there is not nearly as tech savvy or nearly as invested. they will not commit to dedicating 100's of hours to learn the intricacies of a specific UI. no way!

if it is badly designed and made so that they can't use it in the first or second try, they get frustrated and just leave, and go where they can interact without the UI tripping them up, which is what you're seeing in twitter's stats