skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Serious question: why do we still have 404 pages?

A 404 means the server can't find what I asked for, can't tell me where it went, has no idea what I'm looking for. By definition, my browser shouldn't show me the content that was returned-- it knows it's not what I want!

If I get a 404 code, the page shouldn't change. The browser should just show a message indicating that that resource doesn't exist, include the reason message if it's something other than "NOT FOUND", and let me either try a different link or correct my spelling. If I clicked a link to get there, it could even set a style on the link to indicate the resource doesn't exist.

It's strange how much we're still living in the nineties. I wonder how many of the use cases of Ajax could be replaced by an intelligent browser using the existing HTTP standard?
Advert revenue is what pays my bills, I would be a hypocrite to ad block, however even before I made money from adverts I didn't use an adblocker and don't really consider them much of an issue. So no, I don't.
Application notes are effective marketing and sales tools
I should add, right now I've a cron job that runs once a night and which pays everyone who is owed money from my PayPal account. I have long worried this might look suspicious to PayPal. But the payments are usually small. On a normal night, at 3 AM EST, my PayPal account makes payments that might look like this:

$34

$17

$14

$9

$7

$7

$5

$4

$4

$3

$3

$3

$2

$2

$2

$2

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

That is a normal night. I use the PayPal MassPay API. On any given day my website gets something like $70 and pays out something like $50.

I assume I'm using the MassPay API the way PayPal wants, so I have not yet gotten in trouble. But the whole thing makes me nervous, so I plan to spend all of January switching my websites over to different payment processors.

However, I have not yet found an easier way to send money than the PayPal MassPay API. I worry I may have to stick with PayPal for awhile, as a way to send automated payments.
Ask HN: What non-standard questions do you ask on interviews?
Jobs should be a good fit for both employer and employee, so asking relevant questions is important for both parties. A lot of attention is paid to what employers ask you, but what about the other direction?

Ignoring obvious questions (salary, benefits, etc), what kind of questions do you ask to make sure you will be working in a fulfilling and stimulating environment? As talented and in-demand individuals, I'm curious to see what the HN community views as good questions.
Why the Fitbit and UP fail and how they should work
This is a very valid question, and I hope he has a good answer.
No. ClickToPlugin? yes.

http://hoyois.github.com/safariextensions/clicktoplugin/
This is a key point. BMI by itself is not an accurate indication of a person's health. I often see discussions freely interchange being overweight with being unhealthly, even though we only have data for some types of health conditions correlating with higher body weight. To my knowledge, there is no single score or data point that can be used to accurately assess an individual's health.
I'm a bit stumped actually as to how to advise. Let me think about it.

I generally feel that a great community manager has a wide base of skills, is incredibly social (has a large network), knows how to deal with trolls and also has a fairly decent tech background.

The questions should be around how big of communities they have managed, what they do to grow them, how they deal with problems (big problems, like a billing fiasco) and how well they know social media.

That being said, most "social media experts" make me want to vomit a bit and if someone professes themselves as such, maybe they aren't the right person for you.

They are harder to assess, as there aren't as solid of skills. No github acct (although if they have one, thats awesome)
I'm puzzled that you'd couple "expertise" and ad blocking. Why do you feel the two go together?
Agreed. 10 years ago, PHP (like Java) was a great bet, despite its flaws. A startup building a fresh technology stack and picking PHP today is standing on the wrong side of history, though. PHP can't be abandoned in the same way that Flex can, but it can become irrelevant in the way that Perl has done.

(not trying to bash Perl, but it's hardly the most relevant language to web development today)
Add a -1 button to Google+ with this Chrome and Firefox Extension
Backed By Angel Round, GiftRocket Goes Beyond The Check-In
I actually can't stand Groupon's unsubscribe video. It feels like they're trying to guilt trip you into remaining subscribed. If I don't like your service, I don't want to be bugged by that when I'm just trying to quit.
Bill Gates Going Nuclear With China
I guess I was just thinking of rails very clear MVC pattern. Wordpress doesn't have this at all. Instead they have "the loop" which just ends up being a mess.
Low cost Spartan-6-based system defeats Intel Blu-Ray encryption | FPGA Gurus
I am totally mystified as to how that workflow would improve my life. It sounds like a lot of work for no gain. Can you explain to me what you find attractive about it or think I would find attractive about it?
Google Analytics launches Social Data Hub at LeWeb 
Sign-up for the pilot at www.google.com/analytics/socialpilot
Well, there's not a "conversion" tool in the near roadmap. But you can somewhat easily drop this plugin inside a theme, require it and bundle everything together.
Ads don't bother me. Flash and other plugins bother me so I use a flash/plugin blocker. Keep the ads text and I'll at least see them show up on the page :)
Please don't do this regularly, though. The reply option is missing on posts for a time to attempt to reduce bad behavior, and even though it's a bit leaky through the permalink page, using that a whole lot may prompt pg to close the leak. In general, I only use it when I will not be able to reply for hours if I wait 5-10 minutes (about to start a drive, or be in meetings, or whatever).
But you also have to ask the following question: Would it have been more expensive to write it in Javascript in 2007 (with the same or close-to-the-same user experience) than to write it in Flex in 2007 and rewrite it in Javascript now.

My feeling (and I've spent some time thinking about this since we're going through the same thought-process right now for a project) is that the write it in 2007 in Flex and translate it now to JS is actually the cheaper option. The frameworks for large JS projects that we have now just didn't exist in 2007.

This is without including things like comparing the present value vs. future value of money or the risk that the fancy Javascript code you are spending tons of time building (which was much faster to build in Flex in 2007) is going to be useless since no-one actually wants what you are building.
Perhaps you had a better experience at the local place. Maybe they had a more knowledgeable sales staff that was able to articulate well the benefits of one piece of equipment versus another. There are as many reasons that you would have a good experience there as there are reasons you had a good experience at Best Buy. My point was that because Best Buy has such enormous power with their suppliers, they are in a significantly better position to bargain with those suppliers than a local shop. I would presume it would be pretty difficult for any local shop owner to convince a distributor of name-brand merchandise to pay them to stock those products on their shelves, simply because the buying power of a local shop is not that of Best Buy.

Really, the local operations are getting hit from all angles - online, big box, etc. To me, as the offspring of local business owners, that is disheartening. Like I keep saying throughout this comment thread, it is just a sad thing to watch all of the great little places in your area get driven out of business because of such vicious competition. I am not advocating any kind of corporate welfare here, but when you shop locally, more of your money stays in your area. I invite you to check this out: http://www.localfirstaz.com/local/index.php
Sign-up for the pilot at www.google.com/analytics/socialpilot
I clicked "comments" _hoping_ to see this
The article mentions specifically that storing the Bloomfilter in Redis or memcached is done only to allow sharing between multiple processes.
Seemingly every aspect of the womens' clothing/fashion industry is an exercise in perverse psychological torture.
There are definitively many issues, but all are solvable. Contributions don't just go by lines of code you write. If you are the non-technical guy, you have every reason in the world to keep your developers as motivated and driven as possible, do every non-technical related jobs possible. Even just simple networking and getting connected, there are plenty of ways for the non-tech guy to get involved, just depends how creative and persistent you can be.
Yes, I use ABP and Ghostery. I would run noscript, but too many sites are incapable of rendering in plain html these days.
This is incorrect. There is a one time payment of $25 to publish for the Android Market. The iTunes store has a $100/year fee to publish to the iTunes store.

http://www.google.com/support/androidmarket/developer/bin/an...
> They were all experienced and were very prepared. In the end they found themselves in a situation where they had to have search and rescue pull them out -- going forward or back wasn't an option.

As a very experienced and avid hiker myself, I'm extremely curious about this. Can you provide more details? Did anyone that was on-site blog about it?

Injury is the only thing I can think of...

Thanks
Adblock, Noscript, Ghostery, BetterPrivacy and ShareMeNot. I'm using Firefox.
I don't see what makes this qualitatively more amazing than storing a terabyte in something the size of a wallet... At this point, we're comparing apples and chestnuts.

If you don't frequently feel like you're living in the future, you're living in the past :)
I know your article is not really related to your title but i'm sorry when your implementation stop working on new browsers your kind of "breaking the web".

That is not to say that you can't do a good native augmentation, but they certainly did not at first.
Compromise: let's just end any subsidies, bandwidth licenses, etc. so we're at least not supporting it...
While maybe unsolicited advertising is annoying, good luck with your mental notes though. I assume you are writing your posts on a computer? Sure hope Intel or AMD never ran a commercial...
I'm surprised software catalogs are still alive :D Especially when you can get literally everything you need from torrents with keygens/cracks.
> Well, why should I shell out $479 for VS when I can get Xcode for $4?

$0 actually, the Xcode license is included in the OSX license. Xcode 4.0 (on Snow Leopard) was a bit of a special case, as it was a major Xcode release out of sync with OS releases and was thus sold for $5 as it was not covered by SL's Xcode 3 license[0], but it's gone back to free (and Lion only) as soon as Lion was released.

[0] all of this is according to Apple's legal and accounting, who are apparently a bunch of nutcase fruit-fuckers.
I don't mind most ads. But I do manually block particularly bad ones.

I wouldn't use one of those AdBlock subscriptions though. Sure, maybe now you won't be "tracked" by as many ad networks, but you're allowing your web experience to be edited by some unknown party. Most configurations don't even show you what you're missing.
Some holiday cheer for AT&T, courtesy of the iPhone 4S
Banner ads are the reason that several of our favorite websites can even exist. Therefore, no, I do not block ads. It's almost internet blasphemy.
The Roslyn Project - Meet the Design Team
>a super-intelligence just beats human intelligence [e]very time.

You are overstating the case here. Super intelligence is superior to human intelligence, but it isn't magic. There are situations where an advantaged human will beat a disadvantaged super intelligence.
I rarely use the REPL directly in Lisp anymore, I use the Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs, better known as SLIME. emacs had a project running for a while for video editing. It also has a working google maps embedding. I'm sure with appropriate whacking I could intertwine it with a Lisp listener instead of my IDE.
Opera comes with a "content blocker" that I use. If I see an annoying ad, I block its origin. I count all animated ads as annoying, because they distract me from the content.

In blocking only a few sources, this takes care of nearly all ads on the Internet, with the notable exceptions of Google's and Facebook's ads. These I don't mind. I don't interact with them either, but I see no obligation to.
I'm far from an expert in Chinese law, but I could see the two being reasonably treated as equivalent.
I use AdBlock, but I stopped using NoScript. NoScript essentially makes the modern web unusable. For 99% of the sites I visit I want them to be able to make my user experience more pleasurable through these technologies.

It would be interesting to know how many devs consider NoScript users when designing websites. (I personally think it's too much effort).
Flipboard Service Still Down Due to High Demand for iPhone App
> Why do people need IDE source control integration? ...

So that I can hit cmd-option-C (in Xcode), review my diffs and commit, all in less than ~10 seconds.

> Explorer integration on windows beats any IDE integration simply because you don't need to launch IDE with a correct project/workspace just to see if you have local changes or something. Once you have multiple sandboxes of different projects of a decent size, IDE integration doesn't cut it.

If I'm working on a project, I'm going to have the IDE running anyway. It sounds like you have a significantly different working model.

On OS X I'll fall back to the terminal for VCS without the IDE running, but it's not a replacement for in-IDE VCS.
JavaScript Polaroid (you have to shake it like one) 404 http://fatjed.com/404
I did something similar and tried to implement functional language style pattern matching in python:

https://gist.github.com/1320421

Not to actually use, of course.
Am I the only one who finds the picture a bit disconcerting? It is mostly the kissy face pose. The photo seems so over the top that it just doesn't seem sincere.

And is that a sweater vest? Nice.
In fundamental breakthrough, SuVolta cuts chip power use by 50 percent
Part of the difficulty with the dogma surrounding the issue of whether or not it's ok to extend built-in objects comes from extrapolating a set of guidelines and rules for library / framework developers to everyone else. There's real value in libraries not extending built-in objects simply because they can't make any real guarantees about their execution environment and shouldn't force their customizations on all code in that environment.

I think part of it comes from the most vocal (and probably most respected) JS developers tend to be library developers and their guidelines for themselves and each other tend to get misconstrued as general guidelines for JS development.

When you're developing in a known execution environment, I don't see any particular issue with extending natives.
This is a rock and hard-place for nearly anyone in this position, as I've been there as well. Most recently, I've seen colleagues have to make choices around NoSql key-value stores (Mongo, Redis, Cassandra, Riak, etc.)

I agree with AndrewDucker to a certain extent: structuring your application architecture to allow one to move from one sub-system to another is ideal. While appropriate in generalities, it's the specifics that matter. Most substantive environments don't interact with these systems through a simple connection that can be hot-swapped. There are dependent processes that are often designed around the fundamentals, quirks and intricacies of a given technology.

The scope of one's implementation definitely affects how much you can hedge your bets if you need to shift to another technology stack.
All ads? Really? This whole website is, in a sense, a promotional vehicle for Y Combinator.
10 things I wish I knew when I started learning iOS development
This seems like an awful lot of extra layering on top of WP's horribly ugly theming system... And adding Ruby as a requirement? What about building on PHP-based tools like Assetic, or a cleaner template format?

https://github.com/kriswallsmith/assetic

I've never understood why people were willing to jump through so many hoops building themes in WP's messy way.

As a comparison, here's a complete theme (based on the Twitter Bootstrap toolkit) for my current PHP-based project (self-promo, but illustrates the difference well IMO):

https://github.com/jbroadway/bootstrapped

One HTML file, Bootstrap + one short CSS file, zero mixing of PHP code. Most WP alternatives offer similar theming, either Mustache-based like the above is based on, or Twig, both of which are much much cleaner options IMO.
as a few of you have pointed out, i'm at the point where i can't really stand to browse without an adblocker of some sort - and so use a combination of adblock + ghostery. for those that may not be aware, if you flash your router with tomato/dd-wrt/etc you can install an adblocker/host script which will allow all mobile (iphone/ipad/android/etc) devices to browse relatively ad-free when connected to wifi.
No because I find it annoying to have to turn blocking on/off (or switch browsers) while I'm developing on my company's (ad driven) site. The fewer distractions, the better.
Define "bad behavior".
> You get Subversion and Git with Xcode and that's it. Exactly 2 choices.

Fortunately, those are the only too I need. I agree that Xcode would benefit plugins, but unlike VCE, the Xcode baseline is sufficient for my (and most people's) requirements.

> This is simply not a big deal in Windows where SCM can be directly integrated into the graphical file browser!!

Working with AVR Studio 5 (Visual Studio-based) and Visual Studio C++, I've found that IDE support for SVN makes a huge difference -- constantly falling back to TortoiseSVN is obtuse, annoying, and time consuming.
You are right, and like I said in the post, I try putting in 6-7 hours everyday if I can.
Why haven't you told us what you mean by the notoriously vague terms "static" and "dynamic"?
When I got my current laptop about 1 1/2 years ago I didn't install an ad-blocker (or NoScript or FlashBlock) and really don't care anymore. Ads improved over the last view years.

My solution for sites with crazy ad banners/skyscrapers (too colorful, too much movement or - worst of all - play sound) is simply to stop visiting them. Sidenote: If I tend to somehow return over and over again they get an entry in /etc/hosts).

And yes, pop-ups are blocked (as it's default in Chrome)
What are common use cases for Twilio?

I've perused the site and understand the functionality but don't see where such high demand is coming from. A few people are commenting here that they use it to send SMS, which makes sense, but I'm having trouble conceptualizing large use cases besides text/call user for confirmation of some action or sending a large alert to many users.

My mental summary keeps coming back to "push notifications without an app installed and to any phone". (I'm not implying that's insignificant.) Is that off base?
I don't, because I'm too lazy to install one (I change browsers often). Also, I use ads as a general 'trustworthiness' metric of a website/service. The more ads are there relative to content, the more tricky are those ads, or the more ugly they are - the more I'll consider a website to be scammy/malicious. It seems to have worked quite good for me so far.
They are obviously not professional enough. Either the MB team, or the range supervisors, or anyone else in that chain.

If your range is situated so close to populated areas that you can fire a projectile from a makeshift cannon out of the bounds of the range, then get a bigger range. Or a smaller gun. I have no idea how big their range is. However, it was apparently not big enough.

I don't know if the ball hit the hill or the sky or a bird on the way or anything else that might have happened. I weren't there. I also obviously understand that they didn't plan for the ball to go though those houses. However intentions does not change facts. Neither do regulations nor safety procedures, nor requirements.

If you cause an accident then you havent gone to the utmost of efforts in preventing it. The utmost of efforts might also include not doing it at all.
Personally, I like doing all the declarations on their own line as well. But anytime I've used JSLint in the past, I seem to recall it complaining about that. Perhaps I'm mistaken?
The "post-PC" world is extremely far off for Corporate America... or Corporate anywhere for that matter. I happen to even believe it's a long ways off for non corporate uses as well.
Free 2nd grade math worksheets and lessons for kids
Right. To me it is self-evident that shooting a cannon and (unintentionally) hitting a house is a reckless action.

I said intent because noodle listed all the things they did do to be safe and ignored the part of my comment where I point out that they (apparently) did not choose a particularly isolated location (if the range is near where Google maps shows Camp Parks, it is a few thousand feet from neighborhoods).
You didn't explicitly go over how creativity is stunted other than saying it isn't rewarded. College teaches you new facts, it is extremely objective in it's teachings so that later on you can expand your ideas and creativity upon what you learned subjectively. It s a great place to expand upon things that have already been discovered in a structured manner allowing you to specialize in a timely manner (as compared to learning on your own).

Maybe I'm just biased, but if you find my ideas odd please inform me of why you believe so as I'd love to hear!
I'd say pretty soon. They had a sign up for a canadian sms beta on their website a couple of weeks back. Our company got in; still a few bugs for them to work out, but it is a fantastic service!
That's pretty much the spirit of the plugin :) thanks
I usually don't mind browsing without an adblocker enough to put it back on... until I visit Phoronix. I do find the experience to be better generally and less distracting with an adblocker, however.
This was built for the people that do.
Best Web Design and Web Development Articles of November 2011
I block ads cause i don't want to deceive advertisers :) i never buy anything through banners.
One of the best features of ClojureScript - the freedom to extend natives fearlessly. The ClojureScript compiler automatically namespaces all symbols preventing the kinds of excruciating conflicts you would encounter otherwise - whether from browser evolution or other libraries.
The problem is that real, paid for encyclopaedias used to use real, paid for experts in the field. Wikipedia repeatedly goes wrong when it insists on applying processes that work with subject matter professionals to well-meaning amateurs.

There's not really any way they've got for resolving the situation where the intersection of motivated people and those whose work qualifies for inclusion is empty.

And yes, Nielsen is definitely notable. But give me Sibelius any day.