skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What are your favourite free and open source Wordpress plug-ins?
I know Wordpress is a bit looked down on in HN circles, but there’s still nothing like it for building advanced websites for semi-pro developers like me.

However most functionality is provided by freemium plug-ins that often try to do way too much to justify the subscription.

I’m trying to build out a list of high quality open source plug-ins that provide essential functionality, as a contrast to the standard commercial model.

So HN, what are the free/libre Wordpress plug-ins that you can’t live without?
Yes, you’ll want the PAM module; either yubico-pam or pam-u2f.

https://developers.yubico.com/pam-u2f/

https://developers.yubico.com/yubico-pam/
Is it possible to do this in Python, such as:

instead of: len(my_list)

to do: my_list | len

of course you can still do: my_list.__len__() but it's ugly
Hard to say. Been here for 10 years. It got me into tech as a career (although programming and computers generally had already been a hobby). I've met some people through it. Launched some things. A lot of time spent arguing in comments that was probably wasted.

Reddit, twitter, and youtube fill a similar space for me.

On the whole, they're net positive I'd say. I'm more informed about a wider range of topics and opinions than ever before.
I don't mean they should make papers by underrepresented groups open access. I mean they should make the papers researchers need to read open access so that access to those papers isn't conditional on getting into a rich university, thus reducing the barriers to underrepresented groups and everyone else. By "their papers" I meant "the ACM's papers", not "the papers of young and female researchers".

It's extremely unfortunate that the ACM has been degraded into being a "publisher" rather than a learned society, and I agree that as long as they think of themselves that way, they will continue to obstruct progress and reproduce patterns of social and economic inequality in the way they are currently doing.
There are many alternatives available for Google products but you gotta to look for them and take time to switch, it sure ain't easy but we gotta do it.
Your examples are more like colleges charging more tuition on out-of-state student, or tourist attractions charge lower price to locals, which are made public information. The context under this thread is talking about dual price that is deliberately taking advantage of information asymmetry, differentiation, or even discrimination based on social class and skin color.
Caddy rightly gets a lot of love from its users - I've been a super satisfied user for a while. Rock solid reverse proxy to some selfhosted services.
In countries like that I just don't buy anything. Life is too short for haggling.
Two things really help me:

1) acknowledging that deciding to watch a movie in the background, or be "kept company" by anything distractingly visual on a second screen, is a subconscious avoidance of the thing you aren't focussing on. Admit it, move on. In reality, I don't believe it is possible to work and watch a second screen. Work and listen to music or the radio? Yes, absolutely.

2) centralise your distractions. You're going to be distracted anyway, so as far as possible choose one thing to be distracted by; something that has its own inherent limits. If you're going to doom-scroll, try a set of interesting RSS feeds instead.
The space-to-product ratio effect: More space, more sales
The minimap does help in passively locating where things are in a file, as "this is before/after this". It also gives a signature of which file you're editing just by glancing at the shape.

Not only the position in a source file is relevant for many languages, but if you're jumping to references/definitions blindly from another source, you can tell which source file it is and where you are in a single shot without looking at the rest.

That being said, I don't use the minimap. I did try to use it though to see what's the fuss around it. For me it takes too much horizontal space. I can have another vertical split pane instead of having minimaps showing. Heck, I'm not even using scrollbars.

Having an indicator of which function your cursor is currently inside provides very similar benefits to me. Not as immediate as a minimap I have to say, but more useful if you take the time to read it. This is a tradeoff people will argue on forever.
Yes it's possible ( https://www.ha-obsession.net/2017/05/u2f-sudo-fedora-25.html... and some other guides exists ) and I used it for about a year. I stopped using it. I was so annoyed to plugin the key every couple of hours that I simply kept the yubi key plugged in all the time - free to be picked by anyone and def. not increasing security.

We still use it for SSH and its great!
Looking to do a free or freemium model!
I think like many programmers are "bottom up" (including me), I had a hard time understand virtual methods until I read an example on how they were implemented, then I was able to understand what it was and then the explanation why they were useful.

I remember two lessons about networks at school, the first one was "top to bottom" (layer 7 to layer 1), I understood nothing, then there was another one bottom up, and I finally understood networks..
Recurse – A community-driven educational retreat for programmers
I’ve often thought of building a similar service… on a scale of one to NSA how questionable did it feel to work on?

When I think about it doing it well might mean journalists or scientists get caught doing something I morally agree with
50 years ago, Germany also still had a popular saying "Eigentum verpflichtet" which I would translate as "ownership creates a duty". In short, people who owned companies, large plots of land, or other infrastructure were expected to spread their wealth by creating jobs.

Nowadays, the spirit still lives on somewhat in the fact that we have free public scenic hiking trails through what looks like very expensive private property. When the land was privatized, the government made it a condition that the hiking trail would remain for the general public to enjoy, and so it did.

I believe Vietnam still has a similar system, too, in that the government will calculate how much jobs a foreign company needs to create, based on their annual revenue. It's one of the reasons why Korean milk tea shops tend to be crammed full with 10-20 schoolgirl employees.
Ask HN: Why does productivity and health feel diametrically opposed?
I usually find myself swinging between 2 moods; One is being productive, writing, shipping code, features, working on side projects...

At that time, I'll be also drinking, eating junk, tons of coffee, irregular sleep, staying inside for days, etc...

Then when I see that it is not very healthy, I will go to the gym, be regular, eat better and socialize. That leaves little to no energy to do more than minimum work.

It seems that I can't merge the good parts of each cycle and be social, healthy, while at the same time, productive and motivated.

Has anyone here been in this situation and figured their way out?
Unfortunately “used to” is a bit optimistic. Hookworms are still a problem to this day.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-low...
I think a nuance people are missing is that for big O, it is sufficient for the existence of any positive C and x, but for small o there must always exist an x for every c.
They do have their own teams, but the governing bodies don't let them play internationally.
Even if I don't like the practice of charging so much for scientific papers, I must say that watermarks are the best form of DRM. You own the file, you can print it, you can save it. That's a stark difference from most schemes going around these days
Or "backpackers" - which seems to be secret code for: stay away, these people (usually guys) cause more trouble than they are worth.
No, it won’t stop them. Plenty of places ignore any freezes, and the bureaus themselves have been known to change the language required to get what a normal human being would call a “freeze” actually put on their accounts.

After all, it’s not your information that you’re asking for a freeze on — they created that information, and even though it’s about you, unfortunately you don’t actually own that information and the credit bureau can’t make any money if they can’t sell the information about you to whomever may want to come ask for it. You are not the customer, you are the product being sold. And credit bureaus don’t like products being sold that interfere with their business model.

But calling up each and every credit bureau in existence and asking them to put a freeze on your account, well that might actually help in some cases, so it’s probably still worth doing. Just don’t operate under any illusions regarding how strict that freeze will be, or how long it will last.
I'm pretty new here. Less than two months. I've stopped using Facebook so I was looking for some other news outlets that I could use. Now I'm using Twitter, LinkedIn and HN. HN is taking much less of mine time than Facebook. I think that this is due to lack of visual distractions.
The subjective reward has gone down though: back in the days of webrings and the visit counter gif cgi, writing some content and then maybe fill in one or two "under construction" placeholders some months later you could easily delude yourself that you were on track to an amazing future. Perhaps not altavista.digital.com amazing, but maybe becoming something like a respected resource in your niche of a niche. Today there are so many lower hanging fruits luring from inside the walled gardens...
> I don't think this is an apt analogy either because it still suggests that something was lost

Here we disagree and you are wrong ;-)

Of all the old forum lore most of it is lost for the overwhelming majority of internet users.

Some copies exist on old drives here and there, some exist in the internet archive but nothing has been migrated to newer platforms.

Mailing lists were for a long time conserved by Google but forums just disappeared.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30060405
Detroit Mound Monuments
None of what you mentioned sounds particularly onerous. Just don't ask for personal data and advise users not to post it. Let people delete their own posts and have a way for an administrator to delete a post if it might in some way be illegal (probably nothing to do with GDPR), and if people want to download stuff, tell them to use "wget --mirror". On othe other hand, dealing with spammers and eccentric/mad troublemakers could be a real headache. The frequency of such people probably depends on the topic of your forum.
I check the top posts every day for technical news but having fun is not the intended purpose of hacker news i believe.

If I want to chat with fun people, I use reddit.
Two weeks after the surgery he probably still has plastic hoses sucking fluid from his thorax and he can maybe sit up with assistance.
My idea behind "make things that are different look different" doesn't come from language (at least not written language) but from visual media in general. For example, on a industrial machine or in a guide, people will often use lots of trick to distinguish some things from other. It isn't really syntax, but considering that programming is written text, we don't have much else than syntax to differentiate the parts on a quick read.

I think that may be a bias due to how I read code. I tend to skim it quickly at first, and then read the "more interesting parts" on a second pass. On the other hand, if you read code linearly, syntax may not be as needed. I'd like to see a study on eye movement when reading code and language preference, that may help reveal some patterns (or not.).
Indeed, this seemed to indicate that the rent has increased disproportionately. The article mentions that the rent would cost $500 in today's dollars. That's very cheap for 4 bedroom apartment everywhere in western world, especially in London.

Maybe that car was really rubbish by today's standards and technology-wise therefore it is expected that now the real costs have come down. But with apartments I don't think there is that much of an improvement that justify average increase from $500 to $5000.
It's ironic that the same people crying about the death of the free market are now crying about "censorship" and "cancel culture" in cases (like this one) where it is clearly just the free market.

If Neil Young's contracts allow him, he is free to choose to stop using Spotify. That's all he said in his letter: Spotify can't have both his music and Rogan's podcast.

Calling this "censorship" is authoritarian.
I'm like 80% sure there was a study on this and not all people get an endorphin rush from working out.

And some people get a huge rush - these are the people who start to do Ironmans, Triathlons and extreme running (100km+ runs)
Bulgaria has free healthcare and university education. People in Bulgaria are also very unlikely to be killed by police or die in a mass shooting. Bulgaria also has less people incarcerated per capita than the US. Bulgarian workers get mandatory 20 day of PTO a year.

I could imagine lot of people who would think they are better off there than in the US.

E: There's of course a lot of things that aren't great about Bulgaria - it is probably the least developed and most corrupt EU country - but since US is very unequal, it depends whether your baseline is millionaire FAANG software engineer or minority person working in Walmart.
> I have time, but I don't understand the question!

I have realized I was probably wrong again ;-)
This option is not present in the call settings from the phone app.
I live in the poor Eastern Europe and its most certainly not true.
Where do you live in the east that you're so confident making this outrageous claim?
I think he meant "one or more vacations per year" not "one or more years long vacations" (it also confounded me when skimming)
Content focus certainly changed as barriers for entry got lower. In classical TV there was certainly a degradation towards low production costs and simple content in the last decade. But it is still profitable even with a shrinking pool of viewers. I expect the fate of some mass social media platforms to be that same. Some people will always remain there.

I don't know when we started to take internet comments seriously, I only know that I don't like that at all.
Ordering food by using some kind of machine is quite common in Japan.
Those are pretty awful networks... LinkedIn? There is much to say about that crowd... :) People literally advertising themselves all day long and upvoting politically correct stuff for virtue signalling to their followers. :)

I would recommend reddit for real humans, but stay away from the front page. It's awful.
I see your point, but really to me stderr should see.... errors.

So a logging level of TRACE/DEBUG/INFO/WARN/ERROR/FATAL, WARN/ERROR/FATAL should probably go to stderr.

"stdlog" should get all the levels of logging/verbosity.

And should every program you run put logging into /var/log? I get if you have daemons, servers, OS tasks, etc.

But what about the mass of commands and programs that are more adhoc? I don't want /var/log polluting with 10 variants of top, text editors, grep variants, find utils, etc. If there's an error or a logging trace I want to follow for those, I just want to inspect...the stream ... a nice STANDARD stream name/number.

As a real world example of stderr meaning error, the godforsaken AWS api puts tons of error codes in stderr. If you are trying to automate around that (for, say, auth expiration and re-auth), you need to parse that crap sometimes.
> HN definitely has a techbros vibe. I guess that's by design but it's not very inclusive.

What does this mean?
The Rav4 is a car shaped like a small SUV. That "Compact SUV" style of car is not what I was talking about at all. Again though, if you want the model that can tow and has all wheel drive, you're looking at 47,000 USD for the Sienna.

I'm sure you can find another outlier here and there, but in general, SUV's get a lot of hate but are generally great choices for safety, ease of use, and capability.
basically spaceships to capture photons!
One of the amendments is supposed to shield you from tyranny. But, going down a less risky path, I'd vote (no pun) for migration. My parents migrated away from a country that trades in humans to this day, in full view of the gov, and i can't be thankful enough.
two wrongs dont make a right.

america should stop doing that.
I’m with you in this. I’ve talked to some of my friends about this and it sounds like 5-20% ish of people feel likewise.

To elaborate: I’ve very rarely felt endorphins from exercise. I’m in good shape, I’ve exercised a lot in the past (less so now), I even ran a marathon (not quickly).

After a short workout I do feel more awake and I like the bodily feeling of having exercised, but I’ve rarely felt any endorphin release during exercise which has pushed me forwards.

For example, the marathon I did was pure type 2 fun (fun in retrospect). However most runners I talk to say running is type 1 fun for them (fun at the time). Definitely not for me, it was miserable at the time.
But happy, stress free and well fed pigs are probably cheaper.
How is your social life better, I always thought Americans are very social and easy to befriend? I'm in UK and people are very asocial and difficult to make friends with
This reminds me of a coworker that I've had bad experiences with. He fancies himself an architect, but he consistently refuses to accept any feedback on his designs. If we give feedback early in the process, he complains that we're nitpicking an incomplete design. If we give feedback when he deigns it completely ready for our review, he complains that he'll have to throw away so much work. All throughout, his refrain is that we "just don't understand his design".

I agree that it's harder when there's an absence of peers at the same experience level, and for problems that can be completed by one person, it's probably not necessary to seek validation. But if it's a problem that requires a team effort, building shared understanding of the design is at least as important as creating the design in the first place. Yes, it's more work if it doesn't click immediately for everyone else, but it's essential.

And sometimes in the process of explaining it so that even a "not great" engineer can get it, we can better understand it ourselves. And sometimes even a layperson can bring valuable insights once they get the gist of it.
Ah, I love that the top voted comment is someone mentioning Hotline. I'm logged into my friend's server - one I've been frequenting regularly since it was started in 2001 - at this very moment! I also ran my own server for years, of course. I really want to build "IRCCloud but for Hotline" sometime. I mean, just a basic self-hosted thing to start with. One of these days... haha

Recently I've started noticing people hosting gopher sites and I've actually noticed two different people specifically mentioning they have finger support on their servers! This was especially surprising since I haven't heard someone mention finger since the 90's. Very cool.
>Now I need to find out which type of JSON an application uses (does it always use UTF8 or does it break the standard?

Utf-8 isn't standard to XML, it's required by XMPP. So in this scenario the same could be required from json.

>Which version of the JSON Schema does it use?

No one uses those and everyone is happy. As for XML schemas, xmpp makes even harder to use than it makes everything else. Because it has this endless xml document that you end up having to parse with a streaming parser and those understandably don't support schemas. You end up having to build the little DOMs yourself, for every stanza. This isn't me theorizing, this is what clients (dino, gajim, tkabber) do. Now with the homebrew DOM you're unable to use xpath (unless again you implement it yourself which is no easy feat) which makes xml's awkwardness i.e. the fact that xml doesn't map into common language structures like dicts and lists so, so much worse.

> How should I deal with duplicate keys?

Generally you don't because libraries don't even support that, and people generally are decent enough to never use those.

>All serialization formats are stupid and messy in some way but I think XML gets a bad rep because of the defaults many parsing libraries picked (and the vulnerabilities they introduced).

And because it is messy. Not pushing for json in particular but even json doesn't have dtds, entities and so on and so forth. Thus parsing libraries don't implement such features, thus fewer vulnerabilities. Whereas vulns in xml parsers are basically the norm - look at python's out of the box xml parsers - there are four of them and each one has at least some vuln marked in the table in official python docs!
Again, I'm no json fan, but it's already light years better than xml. "Any damn fool could produce a better data format than XML." Look at bittorrent's ad-hoc format, bencode. Even that is much better than xml. And in a high level language an entire parser would take you one evening to write with no prior knowledge of the format. And that implementation would be probably about the size of those ad-hoc DOM implementations in xmpp clients, that don't even do any parsing themselves, and would be much more pleasant to use.
To be honest, the best advice you could receive will probably come from yourself. You alone know the details of your life. You alone have access to your mind, your emotions, your worries, your insecurities. You'll get out of this rut so long as you believe it's enough just to do it however you want, in your own way.

That all said... :)

Put down the phone. Close the laptop. Turn off spotify. Stare at the ceiling for 2-35 minutes with as little possible external stimulation. Listen to what's already being planned inside of your head. Unsuppress the background thoughts. You'll quickly find there's a lot of advice in there.. I've found that being intentional about doing nothing usually leads to something.

Here's a neat little algorithm to get some insight: maybe ask, "in the past, why did I feel motivation whatsoever?" Write down your answer. Then ask (like an annoying kid) "why?" to the answer you gave. Do this 7 times until you come up with an ultimate explanation - it'll probably be far removed from the first - which is a great thing!

Let's face it - you probably already know exactly what to do, have spent countless hours already worrying about your lack of motivation. Since worrying = thinking + pressure, you're already probably off to a great start to your personal solution! Many times in life the answer was sitting in front of your face all along.

Seems you need reassurance that maybe you don't have to keep avoiding the work, because it's not that scary after all. That said it's ok for it to feel daunting. For quite a few people, college really is.

Maybe external help is good too. Maybe there are people (who are already in your life) who will make things a lot easier for you but the only reason you aren't getting help from them is probably something like "since I haven't done it yet, it's too late to start!" which is often false :)

For instance, a professor who would - if only you'd just send a tiny 2-sentence email conveying "I just don't know where to start" - would give you the answers. Within reasonable academic integrity limits, lol.

Or maybe you have ADHD and are overwhelmed by the disconnect between how easy it is to set super high expectations for yourself but not really get invested if it's not interesting unless there's urgency? Real high expectations, and then getting caught in a cycle of disappointment and self-guilt-tripping. Maybe, maybe not, I don't know your life as well as you do :)

Oh! And one more thing.. the room you're in will change what you want to do. Library, cafe, blanket on the grass in a park. Move your body and your mind will follow.