skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even if Gregorio is right about the proliferation of fixed URI-pattern conventions, he's way, way wrong about robots.txt.

If there was a similarly simple and effective solution, either in 1994 or now, he would have suggested it. But he didn't. We have to guess that he'd want something involving a declared robots-rules-'link' elsewhere.

But layering robots-rules as a 'link' from the headers of the root page, or markup tags (if the root page happens to be HTML), still requires an initial investigative hit to a site -- and if at the '/' page, probably involves more bandwidth than a compact robots.txt or 404.

Assuming a hostname is a unified 'site' is not perfect -- but in 1994 and now, that's the only inherent and well-defined unit of administrative control provided by the HTTP protocol.

By going with this easy-to-understand, easy-to-implement convention, webmasters have had enough freedom to opt out, and crawlers enough freedom to collect, to enable ~15 years of dazzling growth in powerful search applications. And robots.txt files built to the 1994 standard still work, handling 99.999% of what webmasters need to communicate to crawlers.

That success satisfies my design aesthetics.
and a reference mechanism. Providing contrast. You can't appreciate good if you don't know bad. Morbid jokes are also a subtle way of reminding us of the unthinkable.
Python lives on because it is uber-genius. Same with the Marx Brothers. Not every artist has what it takes to outlive an age. The Beatles come to mind. As opposed to, say, Donovan (google him)

[edit]: another example: Richard Pryor, vs most other standups from his era
Sigh. Why do men allow women to emotionize them out of their own property? I mean, I'm assuming she just made you sleep on the couch, but personally, I think that's a bit dehumanizing. Why do we, as a culture, accept that?
Yes, I realize she was hopped up on hormones. There are plenty of other examples, though, where women get some kind of "right" to kick men out of their own place when they feel emotionally sidelined. Are women really so emotionally fragile that this needs to happen?
Looks like there was some back-and-forth with claims of a misleading title in the comments on the article. Rather than try and keep up with what was changed and when, I dropped all interest with what the author had to say due to their shoddy writing style.

It's up to interpretation whether or not the title is "misleading," but one thing is for certain—it's definitely sensationalist.

To me, stock photography/illustrations have nothing to do with "crowdsourcing," (e.g.: 99designs, LogoTournament).
Yes, this. The whole purpose of robots.txt is to allow restrictions to be applied on objects that the crawler hasn't looked at yet. A META tag can only apply restrictions after the fact.

Moreover, his proposed replacement is incredibly browser-centric. It requires any compliant crawler to contain an HTML parser. And woe befall anyone who typos the META tag, or manages to confuse the HTML parser before it gets there! The robots.txt specification, by contrast, requires no such heavy lifting: just request a single fixed URL.

META tags make perfect sense for favicon and the like - I won't dispute that. Robots exclusion, however, is a special case - it belongs outside HTML, not inside it.
He had me until the last paragraph.
I never said they shouldn't be "gaining additional training and maintaining readiness for a time of war." I just think there are more productive ways to do that. Have the engineers do civil projects; have the infantry work as policemen, or firefighters; have the officers work in management of various companies. Basically, keep them integrated into society.

I wouldn't trust my life to a general who hadn't also successfully run a company full of people who didn't care what he thought and quit when he did something stupid. You may be an experienced military X, but you'd probably be a better X if you also knew how to do X as a civilian. In fact, you'd better be ready to do X as a civilian when your service is terminated, however that may happen.
Raising and providing for your kids is the most important thing in life

No, it's the most important thing in your life. Do you know what I find more appalling than not knowing or caring whether one has procreated? People who pass judgement on those people based on their own opinions.

I'm sorry, but there is no objective reasoning whatsoever to claim that raising/providing for one's children is the most important thing in life and for you to suggest same, and berate others for not taking your viewpoint, is the only appalling thing here. Get off your high horse.

(no, I have no children, illegitimate or otherwise)
You might be right, but I think it's wrong to dismiss it just because it's hard to explain. Sometimes great new technologies are difficult because there is less to compare it to.
i remember having a hard time explaining why gmail is a better email solution to friends. they'd say: it's just email, what's better about it. sometimes, just because things are difficult to explain doesn't mean they are difficult to use.
LG KC560 – The cute little mobile device
LG KC560 is a beautiful little mobile communication device that comes power packed with a lot of features and a cool appearance. The phone helps you enjoy the best of features in all aspects. You can also show off your personal style with the help of this mobile phone.
I forget: is using a real ico file for favicon.ico well supported? If so, there is no 16x16 limit.
It Is More Advantageous To Shop for Your Gadgets Online
The internet has changed the way we interact with this world. It has changed our lifestyle completely and businesses to have changed drastically. Almost all the businesses have changed their business models and they have started selling their products and gadgets online. The same applies to electronic gadgets and gizmos as well. In reality it is the latest gadgets and mobile phones that have the highest selling rate online.
RSS Feeds For Web-Designers And Developers
Of course you can’t possibly check all those feeds everyday but a quick scan in your feed reader and you should be good! They inspire me and keep me up-to-date with what’s happening in the design/dev world. Hope you find my ‘little‘ list useful! (OPML file available for download)
Parallel web downloaders are evil.
another: http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/762/arcship.jpg
Yeah, but you could have just said "It's web-based email like hotmail or yahoo, but faster and easier to use. Plus you get tons of storage."

Done.
That's really the exact opposite direction that I would go in for explaining this to a non-geek.

"Ether-what?"
To be clear, I'm not dismissing it...I'm looking forward to playing with it. I just don't see my friends using it, and if no one I know uses it, why would I?
Guys, please check out the server-side features too, Vaadin is not just client-side GWT on stereoids. Having server-side framework too means that building applications is easier than with plain GWT.
After he wrote this article in 2003, he posted a favicon in 2004. Also, possibly due to the lack of a robots.txt, his site isn't in archive.org at all.
Wouldn't that be the same as shifting the active area of the keys a few pixels upwards?
If it was vaporware, they wouldn't have spent all that money on the Israeli startup they got the technology from. They also had working games at E3, admittedly played from the age. Nobody AFAIK has attempted 3D motion detection on a console before, things like EyeToy are 2D only.
Google's Playground in it's current online form only supports Google's own OAuth end-points.
My (disclosure: yes, I made the tool in question) tool supports arbitrary end-points.

If anyone can come up with improvements, please do say so.
There are always (at least) two ends of a relationship. You can never put the blame at one end only.
It is an amazing way for google to push their gadget platform though. I'm an early beta user of wave and I think it's pretty cool how you can just "email" a bunch of your friends a gadget that works inline the conversation. So you could email your 10 friends a poll widget to decide the best time to meet for lunch. The robot api concept of theirs is interesting, but I don't see immediate useful applications of it just yet.
Ask people what they want from current services (email is the one 99% will understand) and work out how Wave could be used to meet that need.
i.e. Instead of emailing a new attachment everytime a document is changed, tell them to put the text in the email and how they can continue to edit it.

Does anybody know how Wave is going to deal with Spam? I assume you are not limited to sending waves to people who have added you as a friend or contact.
Also to be clear, their stuff is truly beta which is why they are limiting the users to a small set of developers. Sometimes while using the site you'll get a 500 error that will force you to refresh the browser page.
"Why would I need more storage? Oh, and Hotmail is fast enough for me and I know how to use it."

People are resistant to change...
well this is a geek site. when explaining it to non-geeks, you could just say it's email on crack.
I can't help but wonder why they didn't try harder to fix spam.
As far as i've been able to tell, it'll be same-old/same-old: Mark as spam, possibly automatic filters.

It seems to me that part of the answer to the question "What would e-mail look like if invented today" should be "there would be no spam".

Couldn't it be done by request/approve like on Skype/Facebook or something more advanced like reputation or something?
Not just "well supported" - required. And you can, and I always do, put in multiple sizes. I usually have 16, 32, 48, and 64. And for the 16 I also add a 256 color version.
App servers don't handle the spoon feeding of clients, front end webservers do, at least in any sane architecture.
Hah, I've told someone it has the everyone-can-edit style of Wikipedia and from then on they assumed it was for research only and were confused as to why we'd need "another one".

Sigh.
Dissect the argument with surgical precision, if need be, but never with a canon? Sounds good to me.
I'm been meaning to build my own library under pretentious motivation; however, I've had a hard time to justify the performance, time, and money of an archaic medium. A simple ebook reader will do.
Vaadin keeps the application state on the server, but the presentation (HTML) is 100% generated on the client side. Changes in server-side state are serialized and sent to client in compact User Interface Definition Language (UIDL). This is obviously a more secure approach to writing web apps, since the state is safe on the server. So no pre-rendering of UI on the server..
having talked to the guys on the Wave Team, it is clear that they are still trying to figure these things out. They are just now opening it up to more users and seeing usage scenarios they didn't even think of themselves. I'm guessing spam wasn't really an issue they had to deal with so far, and from what I've seen, there really is no spam on the site yet. Also, given that you invite your own contacts to join a 'wave,' chances are, spam won't be a huge problem as far as I can see.
"Does anybody know how Wave is going to deal with Spam? I assume you are not limited to sending waves to people who have added you as a friend or contact."

i'm really hoping that is the case. it'll be more like a phone call in that sense. before you get to answer you can see (the number) who the call is from. this will really cut down on the spam.
Yeah. Every component has a server side and a client side. Client side has all the rendering stuff in it while the server side has the business logic. That way the functionality can't be hacked as the client side is just responsible of sending input to the server, where all the hard work is done.
Hitachi develops world’s smallest RFID chip
> But layering robots-rules as a 'link' from the headers of the root page, or markup tags (if the root page happens to be HTML), still requires an initial investigative hit to a site -- and if at the '/' page, probably involves more bandwidth than a compact robots.txt or 404.

Not necessarily. If the location were specified in the http headers then a robot could use the HEAD command first. That's relatively minor bandwidth cost and still lets the robot get the site rules without first getting any content.
Greetings from the company developing Vaadin :)

Yes, Vaadin is a server-side framework. Server-side is not for everyone, but there surely is a place for Vaadin. For example issues with trusting the code that's executed on the client are greatly relieved this way.

You could think of Vaadin as the Swing / SWT for web applications. Sitting in between JavaFX (plugin required) and Java Server Faces (html required). Vaadin is great for desktop-like applications in the webbrowser, but doesn't really fit the RESTful type of applications.

If you have questions, just visit our forums at http://vaadin.com/forum and ask away! There are plenty of experts waiting for challenging questions ;)
What's up with the "value" String in this example?

"addr":{"value":"700 First Ave"}
You can ask all the questions on your mind on our forums (http://vaadin.com/forum/). You don't need to attend JavaOne to get the hard questions answered.
I just consider time a very good test of whether a comedy, a show, or a movie has any originality in it.

I still laugh at many of them dating back 10-30 years but for some it's just plain obvious that they were never genuinely funny.
I recommend that you don't read/follow any of these web-designer types and instead just google the specific tools and techniques you need when you need them.

These guys tend to be verbose and repetitive, mostly just to build their posse and expand their reach. Life is too short to be plugged into them; just think of all the "X essential Y" type posts, they have whole sites devoted to them, and if you read a few of them you will realize how little content there is.
I guess I'll try and work on it.
What made you choose a person's ability to write and say "clever stuff" as your measure of intelligence? It certainly isn't a good indicator among the people I know.
Wii Hacker is working on Microsoft's Natal
Atom Pinhole Camera
That's a silly definition of anti-competitive.

Is it anti-competitive for me to choose to only work with google adsense, and not yahoo or ms? Could yahoo or ms sue me? I think not.
(a) I have not seen e-cigarettes marketed as a smoking cessation product, or at least I am sure that is not the primary goal. I gather that the e-cigarettes are marketed as an alternative to traditional cigarettes.

(b) I have cut back to one or two every couple days. I ran ten miles last Sunday. That is a lot better than what I could do when I was smoking half a pack a day.

"Nobody wants to smoke; not even smokers. If you think otherwise you're deluding yourself." I guess I am delusional because I sincerely believe I enjoy a smoke every couple days. I enjoy donuts as well. Both are not good for me, and that is why I consume these items in moderation.

If the e-cigarette is shown to have minimal health risks, I'll give them a go.
This looks really cool. I really hope they expose it as an API or even better release it with a permissible license for us to deploy. We need aggressive competition against SimpleDB and the large number of key-value stores we already have.
I don't think how poorly a skit is done affects its quality.

Most of original comedy comes from the cheap early times when the team was on a low budget and nobody but them really believed in the show. Fame probably has a negative effect since once you got something you start worrying about losing it and then you're likely to stop being original.
One case where they don't work well is when you have multiple users on one domain. Like an old school server with the users at /~user1 and /~user2, etc. user2 might write a cgi program and want to create an entry in robots.txt but he doesn't have access to the global robots.txt, just the stuff in his home directory. Ditto for the favicon.

Nowadays domain names are cheap and I don't see as many sites like that any more...
One day I hope for more universal cloud api's so that switching between services or distributing it (if ever needed ;)) over different cloud service providers doesn't require rewrites or extra overhead.

idea, write some Cloud Service Communicator API that connects through all other api's. Another layer to add.
It's the address of Yahoo!'s headquarters. (edit: yeah I don't know why I didn't see what thwarted saw, clearly I'm an idiot)
Microsoft Launched New Search Engine, BING
BING is designed to take over from Microsoft’s current search engine Live Search, and its already being tipped as a dangerous contender for the mighty Google.
The Wii sensor bar combined with the little camera inside your Wiimote can give you a reasonably accurate estimate of where your wiimote is pointed on the screen.

This is quite bad at gestures though, particularly when the front of the Wiimote is pointed away from the sensor bar (as it is in games like boxing and tennis). In these cases, lacking a visual way to tell movement, the controller relies entirely on the accelerometer, which while theoretically capable, saturate very quickly with full body motion.

This is why in Raving Rabbids, where you have to play rabbid-DDR with the music, you have to jerk the controller - the accelerometer is neither reliable nor accurate enough to reliably infer your intentions through light motions.
Geez. Who has time to follow all of this stuff?

I'd say pick a dozen, and read them alongside your morning coffee.
An interesting and rare glimpse into Bill's childhood.
Yes, it's a family of technologies called Comet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_%28programming%29
LG KP199 Mobile India: Reviews, Features, Specifications
I think that taking the ride seriously means working on wrong things for wrong reasons, whatever the "wrong" means with regard to each individual.

It doesn't mean all work and money is bad. However, it suggests that money can't be a top-priority if you intend to work for your core values and change the world. If it is, all you ever get done is moving money from one place to another and nothing ever changes. To change the world, you just stop worrying and go make attempts at it, and then trust that you'll get enough money somewhere to keep your world-changing efforts uninterrupted.

It is my guess that many people on HN have these things much better aligned in their lives than a big proportion of non-HN people. The thought of being trapped in something you don't believe in for the sake of money and possessions probably appears a rather unsettling idea on this forum.
Well I'm schooled now.
In its early days ICQ had a mode that allowed you to see what the other user typed before he hit "send" - just like google wave seems to do. I hated it - I like to edit my message and make sure it's right before others see it.

I see value in others getting updates without hitting refresh, though.
I think the question is why isn't it:

{"addr":"700 First Ave"}
Using HEAD doesn't make a link-in-headers approach use less bandwidth than the classic /robots.txt convention. In the very best case -- no robots-rules -- a HEAD is equivalent in bandwidth used to a /robots.txt 404 without a content-body. But if there are robots-rules, the HEAD-then-robots approach means two hits and double-headers instead of one hit.

(It's possible to strain and devise a convention that uses less bandwidth; that's why I said 'probably'. But that would require even more complexity -- such as the server being smart enough to send each robot only the rules that apply to it.)

Configuring a server to emit special headers is also harder for most webmasters than dropping a text file into a conventional location. And a HEAD-then-robots process is more complicated for robots-writers.

For the purpose of warning off robots, the /robots.txt placement convention was a very, very good solution on many axes, including minimizing traffic and adoption costs.

Only a peculiar early-optimization based on a certain aesthetic sense -- and being concerned about being a bad example for other similar applications that aren't a pressing issue even now, 15 years later -- can justify Gregorio's opinion that /robots.txt "was a not-so-good idea when the robot exclusion protocol was rolled out".
Bpython: syntax highlighting, autocomplete, autoindent for you Python shell
Fire risk assessment
and I think also 1) Camera and 2) GPS (not sure)
Pocketbikes
Shouldn't the title be "Yahoo's cloud database"... I was almost expecting another EC2.
That last paragraph is a beautiful contrast to Bill Hicks' usual approach. Shows deep down that he's a nice guy that just uses bile to make his points.

I miss Bill. :(
Truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth
Ask HN: Interactive web graphics with RPC? (open source, of course)
I have an XML-RPC server written in Python.
I would like to write a simple graphical web application. It is basically location-specific text rendering.
The frontend should communicate with the RPC server to determine the appropriate responses to user mouse interaction.

What open-source framework/toolkit should I use? I am open to flex/html canvas/javascript/whatever, as long as it is open source, I can prototype rapidly, and I can communicate interaction with an RPC backend to determine updates.
Just saying that not all of the people that many people today think are great, were thought to be great when they were alive.
thanks trapper, that's a nice thing to say.
A note on my flag: there's nothing wrong with the topicality of this submission, but the headline words "shouldn't be emulated" on the original have been changed to "should be eliminated" here. That misrepresents the original author's intent in a controversy-stirring manner.
No, it neither iPhone nore iTouch has a camera. Thats for sure.
Governments must force companies to publish all kinds of information about their practices, such as a yearly financial report. Without that obligation, that information would never be made public, because the company would force individuals that wanted to publish the data to keep their mouth shut (that follows from the fact that many companies do their best to get an exemption from publishing all kinds of data).

Free speech includes the freedom to publish information that has been decided to be 'public information'.
With regards to b, most of the reasons that people have against smoking have to do with nasty smelling smoke and increased chances of serious health problems from inhaling tobacco smoke, not addiction to nicotine.

Nicotine isn't what's giving people cancer, and nicotine isn't what's causing people to stink of smoke.

Regardless of what you think of addiction, these reasons are why the e-cigarette can be considered "better than smoking".
I always assumed it was to publicise the capability --- webmasters would see the requests for them and find out what this strange favicon.ico file was. If Microsoft had stuck to the <link> approach, they would have had to rely on other methods for informing webmasters, and their advantage over Netscape would have been slightly less.
I assure you, that the iPhone DOES in fact have a camera!
I find it a motivating factor, but I find I am at a disadvantage to other younger entrepreneurs because 1) I have less time, 2) I am more risk averse, and 3) I have more responsibilities and bills to pay at home so I can't just live on ramen and focus on building something on my own time
There's a difference between "most important thing" and "only important thing".
Watch Auctions
UbuntuOne use CouchDB
You might try these demos:

Graphical editor and bunch of other graphical stuff:
http://john.virtuallypreinstalled.com/ToolkitDraw

iTunes demo made with Vaadin
http://demo.vaadin.com/VaadinTunesLayout/