skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really hope it becomes standard for websites like this one to no longer require a full signup to use it. Maybe use a combination of sessions, IP addresses, browser fingerprints, etc. to differentiate anonymous users. I understand that the creator(s) of the site want to gather as much contact information as possible, but those who care to be a part of the community will do just that, while the rest (like myself) just want to try it out immediately... without filling out another sign up form.

I submitted my answer to the corn on the cob question but didn't make it any further than that because it immediately asked me to fill in a handful of fields to sign up. If I was able to continue without having to do that, I would have probably stuck around longer to provide the site with answers to other questions (providing value) and possibly even gotten sucked in and if I saw that the site was well-made, become a long-lasting member of the site's community.
Regarding point 1, that's one of my favorite features. TIL Mac users actually want wizards and gizmos everywhere.
Google alters algorithm as Hollywood lobbyists win latest copyright battle
Awesome. I'll contact you guys. Also, if I have a light and dark version of the logo, would you guys be able to give input as to which one combines better with which color shirt?

I have the fashion sense of a homeless man..
I'm not the site owner, and I'm not a web developer. I'm a big iron programmer who writes algorithms and implements processes for dealing with specialist data. I've written HTML, but not since v2.0. I'm not up to speed with CSS or HTML5, although I've glanced over the specifications and have some idea of the concepts.

With that in mind ...

I'm always bewildered by people who ask this question. I don't understand what's wrong with using tables and center. No, it's not using the latest HTML5 standards, and it's not using bleeding-edge features, but

(a) it works

(b) it's fast

(c) it runs on both new and old browsers

(d) the HTML expresses the formatting intent

(e) in this context, separation of content from formatting is overkill.

So I'd be really interested to understand the alternate point of view. Apart from the obvious mistakes in the HTML, why is it regarded as bad practice?

Is it just because it's old?
I believe the cat might be a Ragdoll, renowned for being really docile and letting you do things to it[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragdoll
There are complex interactions between the nervous and immune systems.

I don't think that anything has been demonstrated regarding allergies, but I wouldn't rule out a therapeutic effect in this case. The absence of evidence is not an evidence of absence.
Not to contradict your point, but this board should be easy to assemble as a first project with an investment in <$20 of soldering equipment and supplies. So I'd encourage anyone who's interested in this but new to electronics to head over to sparkfun and just dive in and see how you like it.
Nice article, I feel the same way about WPF. It feels like the red headed step-son of Microsoft.

I used to loathe the idea of becoming a web dev because at that time I only knew C# and of course ASP.Net webforms. I never liked the idea of having all sorts of viewstates and whatnot polluting the markup.

Then came MVC and I absolute loved it; something about it clicked in my mind and I felt right at home. The best part? My MVC knowledge translates easily to Rails, or CakePHP or pretty much any MVC framework. It's just a matter of learning how to invoke the HTML helpers and then reading up on specific differences.
While I think this is cool, I am not really sure what the advantage is of this over a bunch of micro controller cards that you can connect with a USB. There are a lot of different ones available and you can get them per-assembled or as kits.

If you are waiting for this to control things with your Raspberry PI, I think some choices already exist.

For example:
http://www.societyofrobots.com/axon_select.shtml
http://adafruit.com/products/849
http://www.parallax.com/Store/Microcontrollers/PropellerDeve...
http://www.parallax.com/Store/Accessories/MotorServoControll...
http://www.parallax.com/Store/Microcontrollers/PropellerDeve...

That's just a fraction of what is out there. And to repeat, I think the gertboard is cool. But if you are waiting on it to control things, you don't have to.
Introducing couchviews
Its verbose, hard and slow to change, hard for end users to customise, works terribly in any other context than a desktop browser, plays terribly with all other web tooling.

PG has his priorities (and limited time). I remember him stating in another thread that any time he spends improving this site were on trying to improve its content, not other relatively meaningless problems like its formatting.

In the same circumstances I completely agree with his decision, but lets not pretend as font end code goes this is nothing else than a showcase of bad practices.
Nicely done!

Feature request: show a list of the fake followers for one's account.
So JSON?
And it actually works in non-webkit browsers! Thanks for the link.
The craziness that is joysticks on PC
The main problem for me is it makes the site pretty painful to use on a mobile browser. With proper markup and good CSS, the site could easily be much more usable on a smaller screen.
I found that the part about Romney, which I do not know about and do not necessarily want to know about, gave me the feeling that the article was written with a political agenda. Then much of my interest vanished.
Not on corporate/school/etc networks they don't.

And avoiding WS and using normal sockets, god no. So much code for error handling and parsing and so on. Message passing is much nicer.
I use the Roomba technique to eat my corn. Random walks.
I've said this here before: If you ever do something awesome, tell no one. If it's awesome enough and the stars line up, convert it into your next startup and eat your former benefactor's lunch.

A little machiavellian, but not wrong.

Unless you're an owner or part-owner, the fruits of all your 'awesome' ideas are going to accrue to the owners. Is that what you want most? In many cases, genius coders, professors, and creative people are paid in prestige and exposure, while investors and founders are paid in $.
Mjau is a simple, fast, and flexible web font server written in Go.
Romney's VP is a Defense, Tech Policy N00b
Request for browser feature: in-page search in url
While reading an article that had a long introduction before the subject finally appeared, I searched the source for an internal anchor link, so that I could link to the meat instead of the top. Unfortunately there was no anchor to link to.

It would be cool if you could append a search specification to the end of a url, and the browser would then search the loaded page and jump to the first occurrence of that term. Or jump to the Nth occurrence, according to the search spec.

Ideally an RFC or W3C standard, for cross-browser implementation consistency, but the browser cabal could decide to implement it informally in common.

Example, where I use #/# as a possible search beginning:

http://blog.n01se.net/blog-n01se-net-p-375.html#/#1. Faster Javascript Engines
>Theoretically no one should have to crawl the web. The information should be organised when it is entered into the index.

What do you mean by this statement? I can see from your post you have a contrarian view on how to organize and find stuff on the web, but I'm struggling to understand what alternative you're proposing.
Something like "The art of electronics" and "the art of electronics lab book", coupled with virtual or real equipment will teach smart people pretty thoroughly.

The books are old, and so there have been a number of advances, but that's okay because people like you need a solid grounding in the basics (the simple circuit you mention) and the rest will be easy enough for you to work out.

But it'd be great to see a modern electronics course for programmers.
Sorry, we're going to reword that message. The website itself doesn't work on mobile browsers, but that's why we provide a link to our native app.
Well, in order to help me (and no doubt others) to learn further, would you be able to produce what you consider as good html that produces a page that looks effectively the same? I'm specifically asking not for a redesign, I'm looking to be able to compare "good code" against "bad code" to produce this layout.

I think that would be really useful - thanks.

In particular, I don't understand:

* It's verbose,

I'd love to see how "modern" practices make it less verbose

* hard and slow to change,

Until I can see something you claim to be easy to change I can't assess this.

* hard for end users to customise,

How are end users going to customise it? It's a web page.

* works terribly in any other context than a desktop browser,

Actually it renders well on every browser I use, whereas most "modern" pages screwup royally on some of my browsers. That's one of the things I really don't understand. For reasons I won't go into, I use some really old browsers on some limited platforms. Frequently pages that are held up as examples of good design or good implementation render really badly, if at all. HN is one of the few sites I can browser on all my platforms, so I'd really like to see what you think would be better.

* plays terribly with all other web tooling.

I guess this is where my complete ignorance of modern web programming comes in, because I have no idea what this means.

I appreciate your response, and look forward to learning more. I've wanted for some time to learn more about modern web programming, and despite several attempts I feel that it's just a foreign land. It would be great to get a real insight.

Thanks.
I'm with Henry Spencer on this.

"Those who don't understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
> Do you mean that an interactive shell should load .bash_profile?

No, ssh logs you in, so it is a login shell (and thus calls {bash_,z}profile), but if you call 'ssh ls', it is not an interactive shell since you just ask ssh to launch the 'ls' command remotely.

> Logging into my OS X system with ssh loads .profile

sshd starts login(1) (which shows the 'Last login:' line), which calls your shell as login
Interesting. It works fine for me on my mobile device, and on my netbook, whereas other modern mobile sites often don't.
That was not a very good defense, however I think the author made some good points. It seems to me that those complaining the loudest about HFT are the floor traders & market makers (rather former market makers.) Also, there is a good point in this piece about standing your ground on price (assuming you are not being stopped out,) patience would benefit many traders and investors.
Same here. I'd add that trying to get better content is not completely decorrelated from improving the interface. In fact, it could have a negative correlation: only those who really have something to say would use ugly and unfriendly interface...
See Carl Sagan's Childhood Vision of Space Exploration
RIP Paul :( You've helped make some of the best games of all times. Thanks.
a. well... yeah, or it wouldn't be here

b. not any faster than doing it without the deprecated and misused tags

c. you'd need to be a developer who hadn't updated their browser in over five years for this to be a concern... at that point you should probably find a different line of work

d. no, it doesn't, and this is the point. the data isn't tabular so it does not belong on a table

e. whaaaaaaaaaaaat
"Assange is the head of a new breed of terrorist. We are doing this as a protest against his attempt to escape justice into Ecuador. This would be a catalyst for many more like him to rise up in his place. We will not stop and they will not stop us."

Since when did revealing truths and facts, equal terrorism?
> "Why would a one-party system evolve into being egalitarian?"

Stranger things have happened - see Taiwan for a good example. One-party system, under martial law no less, evolving into a thriving multi-party democracy with a high degree of personal freedom and equality.
I have the opposite experience, actually. Its so damn annoying to have programs communicating structured data with each other over pipes that more complicated things inevitably diverge into a) monocultural programs made with a single programming language and that don't communicate with the outside world or b) Some form of exchange format (JSON, XMl, etc) that needs to be explicitly supported by every participant.

And unix utilities suck at handling structured data. If your file format is line based you might have a chance of it being easy to work with but don't even ask what happens if you insert a newline inside a textfield then.
What mobile device do you have? It's impossible to read on my iPhone.
"Its verbose, hard and slow to change, hard for end users to customise, works terribly in any other context than a desktop browser, plays terribly with all other web tooling."

[citation needed] x 4.

This is a recitation of the propaganda, yes. However, propaganda is not a logical argument. What about "<center>" is verbose? Do you have a CSS solution that is actually shorter than "<center></center>", while also being good CSS (and not just using 1 character class names)? Do end users really have a problem customizing the center tag? How so? CSS and XPath do not particularly have a problem with it. I use this site on my 3DS sometimes and it seems to work reasonably well. What "web tooling" matters, and how does it interact with Arc so horribly?

During the old CSS wars I sort of understood the argument for deprecating it, but with the way browser engines have been going, there's really no reason to pretend there's any reason to get rid of the element, because it's just one line in a definition file somewhere that specifies it as a block element with a certain default style.
Renders perfectly well on my Blackberry (foist upon me by work)
Web 3.0: The Mobile Era
Navy stumbles across a huge cluster of floating volcanic rocks
My preference for a "next generation pipe": Shared file descriptors. (Sort of)

It would work virtually the same as a standard pipe; the difference being you could control whether it was read, write, or both, and every application you 'piped' to would have access to the same file descriptors as the parent, unless a process in the path of the pipe closes one.

The end result will be the equivalent of passing unlimited individual arbitrary bitstreams combined with the ability to chain arbitrary programs. In fact, you could simplify things by simply passing the previous piped command's output as a new file descriptor to the next program, so you could easily reference the last piped program's output, or any of the ones before it.

For example:

cat arbitrary_data.docx | docx --count-words <$S[0] | docx --head 4 <$S[0] | docx --tail 4 <$S[0] | docx --count-words <$S[2] | echo -en "Number of words: $STREAM[1]\n\nFirst paragraph: $STREAM[2]\n\nLast paragraph: $STREAM[3]\n\nNumber of words in first paragraph: $STREAM[4]\n"

STREAM[0] is the output of 'cat'. STREAM[1] is the counted words of STREAM[0] ($S[0] is an alias). STREAM[2] is the first 4 lines of the doc. STREAM[3] is the last 4 lines of the doc. STREAM[4] is the counted words from STREAM[2] (note the "<$S[2]"). And STREAM[5] is the output of 'echo', though since it's the last command, it becomes STDOUT.

There may be a more slick way of doing this, but you can see the idea. Pass arbitrary streams as you pipe, and reference any of them at any point in the pipe to continue processing data arbitrarily in a one-liner.

...

Actually, it looks like this is already built into bash (sort of), as the Coprocesses functionality. I don't know if you can use it with pipes, but it's very interesting.
Oh, I can chip in here regarding big vs small flywheels.
If you look at the purpose of a flywheel - ie storing kinetic energy - a bigger/smaller wheel can serve the same purpose. The reason we don't have "large" flywheels is twofold:

1. size (obvious)
2. Torsional/shear stress - most materials are bad at tolerating shear stress. A bigger flywheel would require immense amounts of torque to get it moving. Generating a higher torque would impose huge amounts of torsional stress on the shaft driving the wheel.
> How are end users going to customise it? It's a web page.

User-agent stylesheets, which play much nicer with CSS than HTML (<center> tags are evil.)

> Actually it renders well on every browser I use, whereas most "modern" pages screwup royally on some of my browsers. That's one of the things I really don't understand. For reasons I won't go into, I use some really old browsers on some limited platforms. Frequently pages that are held up as examples of good design or good implementation render really badly, if at all. HN is one of the few sites I can browser on all my platforms, so I'd really like to see what you think would be better.

HN renders the exact same on all three of the platforms I use -- Windows 7, iPad, and iPhone. This is not an inherently good thing, and it makes browsing a pain.
This site is a bad example but tables aren't inherently bad. For tabular data or charts they are just fine, but should not be used as a tool for layout.
I've never realized there was a .org domain before. Thought something weird happened because I was logged in this site and when I tried to vote in your link I couldn't!
I'm not going to regurgitate what's already said here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/83073/why-not-use-tables-...

---

The reason I even brought this up is because I wanted to create an extension for the site; but this terrible markup isn't going to make things easy.

Plus it's heavy on my mobile phone because of all the tables.
Looks awesome!

Please use a github project (also called a repository) for this sort of thing rather than a gist. There isn't a minimum size for a github project's codebase and it's much better for code that is intended to be used by more than a handful of people.
Regardless of the answer, I have a very hard time believing that, if shown a random site also using <center> tags and a table layout, HN commenters would be as defensive and accepting of the usage.
Identifiers in source code are typically base on words, so will share the same distribution of English text to some degree. It should be easy to make a program that takes any text file, and for each character notes how far your fingers would have to move from the home row on a certain layout. This could then quantify the distance on qwerty vs. dvorak. That would provide an interesting empirical verification of this issue.

About the having keys on the home row, I certainly claim it is better, and you should try it for yourself. I will concede that it may not give a speed increase for a seasoned typist, I suspect that at a certain point when everything is in muscle memory it doesn't matter anymore. However, having to move your fingers less is simply less straining, so it will be more comfortable. This was not measured in those studies, so that's why I think they are not relevant.
I've always thought of it as

login/profile file(s)

- Run on a "new" shell when there's not any environment present. It should contain things that are "carried over" from one process to child process (ie, exported variables). May also contain things that are run "only once" from the user's point of view (check mail, yadda yadda)

- You don't want these commands run for every subprocess. Imagine that bash sources /etc/profile on each "new" shell to set PATH. You append to PATH in your user profile to add some additional directories. If the profile was sourced for each child process, your path would grow and grow, containing multiple copies of the same directories.

rc file(s)

- Run for each subshell (with caveats[1]) so that you can define things that aren't carried over to subprocesses (define aliases, functions, etc)

[1] caveats being things like remote shell command execution. I honestly don't know why it's not sourced then, but my guess would be that, if you're running a remote command, you're expected to not need things like aliases and functions defined.

Thinking about it all this way, the way the files works just seems... natural to me.
There is another reason why you might chose spirals over rows which is that while spirals are more opportunist and agile, rows require you to work harder at the start and then reap your rewards later - perhaps a little more waterfall.

Regardless of approach, your opening bite requires pushing your teeth down in between unharvested rows rows and clearing out a patch of cob. On the second bite however you can now chose between the base of your newly cleared patch which is literally the "low hanging fruit" (spiral approach) or move directly along and open up a new row (row approach).

The base of your open patch offers good purchase for your upper teeth, high visibility of any oddities that may be lying under the surface and a good understanding of how much you're going to be able to expect from the next bite based on what you just had. Should you find that the cob is too much for you, you can also chop the remainder off, wrap it in clingfilm and keep it for later (or feasibly offer it to another diner).

A row approach means opening up the whole cob in one go. It's hard work at the start and you're fully committed. If you give up half way through you can't really offer your corn to anyone else or bag it for later - it's basically a mess. That said, after that first push you'll never need to open up any new rows and the rest of the process is pretty formulaic - you get all of the uncertainty out of the way at the start.

From this I'd also guess at the following correlations:

Row eaters:

- tend to start projects solo & keep going on their own

- tend to have a lot of unfinished projects that don't work

- like to tackle "big picture problems"

- tend towards optimism

Spiral eaters

- happy to break projects down and collaborate. Unfussed by solo or otherwise

- good at finishing projects

- not that fussed by starting projects

- tend towards realism / pessimism

Disclaimer

Everything that you're currently thinking :)
It "works", but not without copious zooming and scrolling. Clicking the vote buttons in particular is a kind of challenge I don't like subjecting myself to and I actually find I vote on comments much less frequently on my phone than on my desktop browser just because its such a pain.

I know what you mean about many mobile sites since people often assume the only mobile devices are iPhones and Androids and nothing else, but that doesn't mean the way this site works is any better :)
Mind is a rear-view mirror. -Osho
The other difference is that zsh has a .zshenv (and /etc/zshenv), while bash only has $BASH_ENV, which only happen if it's set.

/etc/zshenv is always sourced, and there's no way to stop that. On the other hand, you can control if /etc/zshrc (etc) are sourced with:

unsetopt GLOBAL_RCS
IGNORE_SYSTEM_ZSH=1

But you would have to put it in .zshenv for it to get sourced at the right time.
Looks cool, but I couldn't make it work.

I went to http://patriciopalladino.com/files/hieroglyphy/ and put in a script "alert(1);". This provided me with a script of about 8300 characters.

I created a web page to execute the script:

<body onload="
[][(![]+[])[!+[] ...
</body>

Firebug reports:

ReferenceError: Unescaee is not defined.

Looks like it's having trouble picking up a "p".
Romney picked Paul Ryan for VP, and all Twitter cares about is Ryan's huge suit
Startups Want to Help People Get to Know Their Neighbors
> Well, in order to help me (and no doubt others) to learn further, would you be able to produce what you consider as good html that produces a page that looks effectively the same?

I've actually considered writing a sort of "proxy" website for HN that just rewrites the HTML to work better on a phone, just for my own use. If I ever get around to it, I'll let you know :)