skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: My new simplistic/flat website design
Why is everyone assuming the NSA has to be using their own standards, behind close doors?
There's a few things worth responding to in your comment, some technical and non-technical, but both important for beginners to keep in mind. I assume you know most of what I'm going to say, so I'm pretending a student asked this.

So, what's the problem with the <center> tag?

First, at the purely technical level, <center> was deprecated in HTML4.01 and is not part of HTML5 at all. As far as I know browsers will still render it fine, but it's technically not valid HTML5.

Second, <center> was deprecated along with other tags like <font>, <blink>, <big>, and <strike> because of a popular movement in the late 90s to encapsulate the logical and semantic structure of the document in HTML and the display structure in CSS. So, there's a case to me made for not using it as a Best Practice™, irrespective of the technical details about what browsers do or don't do, whether it's deprecated or not, etc.

Third, other people take your code as a reflection of what was going on inside your head when you wrote it. Your HTML and other code exists in a cultural milieu whether you like it or not. Potential employers will certainly read these sorts of things into your code, so if you care about that then you should care about what they'll think when they see you using the <center> tag.

In sociolinguistics there's an idea of the "prestige" of a dialect. For example, in the US, someone speaking Received Pronunciation (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIemPxHSb6Q&t=6m28s) will be perceived as more educated and worldly while something speaking with a thick Appalachian accent (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03iwAY4KlIU) might be perceived as a hillbilly. It's relative to both the listener and the speaker, of course, so someone might think someone with an RP accent is a snob or find solidarity in in a shared-but-low-prestige identity (cf. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7CzHFWsXQQ).

The <center> tag is a marker for a low prestige dialect of HTML authorship. The fact that the OP got mildly reprimanded for using it is actually a sign of that. Folks will take its use as a sign that the author is an amateur and doesn't know that much about HTML. And if she were to use a <font> tag, oh buddy -- let slip the dogs of war!

This isn't inherently true, of course. If I sat down and wrote some HTML using center tags I wouldn't suddenly know less about HTML, but that's the default presumption. This might not seem fair, but be honest: what would be your default, automatic reaction to someone using the <blink> or <marquee> tags non-ironically?

Like someone moving to a foreign country for the first time, you'll pay a price if you don't understand the parameters of the culture in which you've decided to participate. Even if you disagree with the "cultural" conclusions, e.g., you think <center> is fine in certain situations, you should have an idea of how other folks might take it. Otherwise you'll be surprised, confused, and perhaps a little hurt when folks push back.
Looks awesome. Any chance there will be a way to compile HTML/CSS/JS apps to NML/NSS to run on Nidium?
What you meant is `while !max || max < i`, but the answer is the same: the former will perform better because it only makes one comparison for each iteration of the loop. The latter needs to additionally check the existence of max.
friendly reminder that people using browsers from last century may not be your target demo
Yep. As someone who has taught in the midwestern US, sophomores can deal with all sorts of accents, while freshmen have varying levels of difficulty depending on where they grew up and their local prejudices. I profited on teaching evaluations from being white & having a Midwestern accent myself; less cognitive load for certain kids.
It should be noted that this isn't an official NSA account
In England there's the Official Secrets Act. Signs say something like "a prohibited area as defined by the Official Secrets Act".

There has been some paranoia around photographers taking photographs in public. The London police force had to issue guidelines for their officers about correct procedure. (http://content.met.police.uk/Site/photographyadvice) (http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/new...)

It's probably not a good idea to stand outside GCHQ's fence and take photos. They'll claim it's to protect secrets - the privacy and secrecy of who works for them, for example. (Because there is mostly carpark between the doughnut and the public road). I don't know if someone would get arrested, but "they" would certainly feel able to use their anti-terror powers and the experience would not be pleasant.
Sometimes I wonder whether advocates for heavy client-side JavaScript ever bother to test on mobile devices, because it very much seems that in the majority of cases they don't. The vast majority of JavaScript-based "show HN" submissions I've seen don't work on mobile browsers well or at all, to the point where I've been trained not to click them. This submission from a few days ago is an example, and last I checked it caused browser crashes and, even if you managed to load it, was unusable with an iPad: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6270451

Edit: Here is another example from the past few days that's unusable on mobile: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302825

This is a common problem with media sites. I dread trying to load quartz, usa today, gawker, etc since every thick-client media site is intermittently a bad citizen on mobile browsers (for example, gawker in Chrome on iOS currently perpetually reloads the page). Even when these kinds of sites work, there's often a multi-second delay where where the user has to sit and watch elements fly around as the page is built.

Edit again: just to be clear, if you are a non-technical product manager or CEO type, my comment should not be interpreted in any way as an implication that the web or JavaScript is somehow inherently bad and therefore your developers must build a "native app." My comment's intended audience is developers with a deep, working understanding of these technologies.
Is there anything more to the MVP than the website and I would guess a ticketing/live chat system? I'll admit I didn't listen to the audio, was hoping for a transcript.
I wouldn't think less if you for not having a Facebook, but i'd probably become less of a good friend to you simply because of logistics.

I (as anyone who had traveled, I'm sure) have a lot of friends on Facebook whom I met on a trip. Maybe we only had a beer and hung out for 3 hours. But since we added each other on Facebook, we're able to keep in touch. I talk to foreign friends via Facebook all the time.

So instead of my buddy in Brazil that I met in NYC, you'd just be some random cool guy I knew once.
What's your GitHub username? I'd be very interested in hearing more specifics and possibly collaborating to adjust the recommendations if needed.
Once the taboo of "I saw this person's update on Facebook, but I can't just jump into a conversation with them referencing that update without qualifying it with a: 'I saw your update on Facebook'" then Facebook will begin to advertise itself as timeshifting social interaction. You can "catch up" with your friends without having to actually talk to them. Here's one use case (sorry for anybody seeing me reference this car crash multiple times):

I got in a car crash. If I had Facebook, I could have made a post about it and explained it once. I've explained what happened to 20 people it feels like, all of whom have Facebook. After the first few times of realizing I had basically drafted a script of the accident, I began not going into too much detail with everyone, only for them to ask more questions until I returned to the script. All-in-all though, timeshifting social interaction sounds really bad for everyone, but really good for increasing how much a single person can consume overall (which is again, probably bad for everyone).
What a ridiculous rule of thumb: Snowden got a lot of closely held information in front of the general public. If that doesn't count as a revelation, your standards are too high.
I bet the outcome of the study changes over time. Sure, Facebook can be a mean place, like the school playground, but you tune it out (both mentally and with software) over time.

If you look at how national populations react to internet ads over time, behavior changes, and the same goes with Facebook. In the case of ads, people mostly just become desensitized, and I bet the same goes for the bile on Facebook. Not to mention how the website changes over time, in response to measured user behavior.
A minority that is growing quite fast , people are not stupid prepare for the javascript backlash like Flash hate wave. If your content is not worth it , if i need javascript just to read some text , if you dont explain why i should turn javascript on with a noscript tag ,then you'll lose me and many more as an audience.
Licensing Software Engineers Is in the Works (2012)
Whereas to me, what you describe sounds fantastically superficial and impersonal, whereas in sending a personal eMail I've had to actually, deliberately think about my interaction with them. I suppose context goes a long way.
A C compiler that converts C to English is not a compiler
Why you don’t need a co-founder
Looks like Golang but cleaned up and with generics added in.

Maybe it's a bird, maybe it's a plane, maybe it's Superman.
What about the people who like their job less because you don't trust them?
So how do you update or replace facebook with more meaningful interaction?

And no snarky, just delete it, comments. I mean seriously?

There are many people on my facebook whose content I consume but dont interact with. And I know that it happens to me as well and is where the loneliness comes from.

How do you fix that without being creepy and showing all who've seen everything you post (which facebook tracks as it is surfaced in groups)?
I think g-forces from turning is a real concern, but so is the fact that there's a lot more air at sea level than 30k feet. Planes land and take off at less than 200 mph.
Syrian Military Defaces US Marine Corps Website (Links to News Article)
Most likely related to the OSX issue described here recently: https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/19
While there are Occam's razor and complexity arguments concerning the relative merits of the Many Worlds Interpretation and the Copenhagen Interpretation, I think this is at best a weak argument. Because, who knows? We could actually be living in a world with very complicated physics.

However, there's a different flaw that I believe completely torpedoes the Copenhagen Interpretation: the Copenhagen Interpretation is not a fully specified theory because it never actually gets around to defining when a measurement is performed. What algorithm can an experimenter run to tell when a measurement takes place? There is none. When a system is considered to be "measured" is always determined with the help of human judgement ex post facto, and alway in such a way as to fit the experimental outcome. If proponents of the Copenhagen Interpretation ever proffered such algorithm to determine when a measurement takes place, then at least we'd have something testable, even if the test were outlandish. But as it is now, the lack of such concrete specification makes the Copenhagen Interpretation unfalsifiable with respect to the Many Worlds interpretation.

Besides that, there are a couple other weaker reasons to be very suspicious of the Copenhagen Interpretation. It doesn't seem to address in any way the fact that experimenters and detectors are a part of physics themselves. If you believe that consciousness arises from physical processes happening inside of the universe, it's very hard to imagine how the Copenhagen Interpretation would compute and explain (even in theory) the physics of what's happening inside of the brain. [1] And if waveform collapse actually occurred, it would be the only known law of physics that's non-local, inherently random, has a preferred reference frame (breaking relativity), destroys information, and violates CPT symmetry. This rule is not like the other rules.

[1] - There actually is a serious school of thought that conscious beings brings the universe into existence, rather than the other way around. I don't know of any experimental evidence for or against this theory, but I'm personally not a big fan of it because the Kolmogorov complexity required to fully specify the theory is fantastically large, because it would need to fully specify how consciousness operates. Without a corresponding amount of evidence in its favor, there's no reason to elevate this hypothesis among all the others with the same or less complexity.
Fast and Flawed Inspections of Factories Abroad
> Worrying about browsers without JavaScript is like worrying about whether you’re backwards compatible with HTML 3.2 or CSS2. At some point, you have to accept that some things are just part of the platform.

This is the key bit.

It's a pretty popular attitude on HN to dismiss supporting IE, or IE7, or even IE8 or IE9 -- despite having significant user bases. But there's still a strong vocal contingent which argues for webpages to still work fine with without JavaScript, despite it being a miniscule user base. They both seem to come from philosophical standpoints, rather than anything practical. (Granted, SEO is a valid consideration, but that's fundamentally a different conversation.)
The model for many of the iOS games is to sell you in-app purchases, the cost of the game itself doesn't mean much in that system.
I don't think so. Modern technology allows instant gratification for social contracts from anywhere in the world. It makes us more dependent on each other, and it also allows for long term storage when you then put this in junction with recording devices.

You're right that people have also been widely varied in their preferences with social contact, but for lack of a better argument than an appeal to nature, this is different, and we don't know what the consequences are. At least the older ways of contacting people were time tested before the phone.
Sigh... The study is focused on teens and people in their young 20's - only 82 of them. How could that be enough data given that demographic has already been largely influenced these social networks while growing up? I'd be curious to see this study done on older more mature people.
Cells are probably just as ideal nanomachines as birds are ideal flying machines. Yes, quite nicely optimized to do what they do, but for our purposes 787s, F-22s and S-92s are much more useful.
Government strength is relative. Weakening the American government is equivalent to strengthening other Governments. Would you mind telling us which ones you prefer and why they are morally superior?
It doesn't crash on Chromium, Firefox on Archlinux and Ubuntu.
Seems right. I reproduced the error on Chrome/Mac but it worked for me on Chrome/Windows.
While it might not be on the World Service, I'd like to point out that a wide range of content is internationally available in the form of podcasts, this is the Radio 4 link - http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4 but do browse around. There's really an incredible amount of content on there (and there is a ton more across the pond at NPR).
right - it would have to go without saying that EVERYONE gets the BIG, including millionaires and paul allen.
> While there are Occam's razor and complexity arguments concerning the relative merits of the Many Worlds Interpretation and the Copenhagen Interpretation.

Exactly, we don't know anything, but Occam's razor is all we have, and I believe many smart people take many-worlds seriously because it is simpler.
No, he really didn't. We knew that the USA intercepted any Internet traffic they could get their hands on, and we knew that big data companies were in bed with the NSA. If the talking point is that Snowden got these facts on mainstream news, that isn't a revelation, that's marketing. "Relevation" implies the idea didn't exist beforehand.
Go Skiplist - alternative to binary search trees
But if you want a program you can install one, why access programs through bloated obscure web browsers? The web is a great place for sharing text of information. But why not learn from the mobile phones which provides native consistent programs for what many people have to access through some web 2.0 crap?
So, because I disagree with your point of view I am 'brainwashed'? Should I continue on the same path and attack you, personally, for the 'obvious' mistake of thinking that way?

In my world parents can teach their children everything - on top of the regulated, quality-controlled standard education. Why? Because otherwise you cannot control that a child receives decent education. And no, brainwashing (to use your term here) your own child or deciding that math and biology are not relevant, but let's do just sports instead, is not a human right.

Education is. Home schooling offers little benefits and leads to huge problems (regulation, quality control are my biggest issues with it).

> It's not for all parents of course

Oh? Really? So .. we should decide on a case by case basis? Maybe ask for a 'driving license' to teach your kids? I think we have a degree in Germany that involves something similar...

> Homeschooling works much better

No. And quite frankly, I couldn't give a damn about the US here. Show me the sources and I'll probably find out that most of the 'home-schooled' were privileged rich kids where people bought their way out of the 'normal' way. And probably all the nutjobs (again, you have a couple of interesting religious groups in the US that like your concept as well) are excluded from the study. But hey, surprise me and find me a relevant study?

> Of course it is restricting

Oh man.. The US way again. Freedom > everything else, right? Without starting to point out that you don't live in a free country according to _my_ definition: We don't even agree on the priority of things here. Germany has no free speech as you know it. And I want that to remain the way it is. My (liberal, pirate party voting) peers largely agree. This isn't 'brainwashed' or stupid, that's a difference in culture, a model of values that doesn't match your own.

And let me close with a stab of my own: If this is the way you like to lead an argument, I doubt that you're able to school a kid. "Those Germans? Brainwashed. They do atrocious things, show naked skin on TV, supress free speech and take kids away. In the night. Before they eat them"
Won by the Jews.

/s
Not a single mention of SEO on the article. I guess Google is dead too.
Not only Google! Bing (and so Yahoo), Yandex and Facebook (only #! for this last) support this protocol too.

And if you use html5 pushstate you could even serve the HTML captures to any bots. Eventually you also could easily add graceful degradation to your site serving snapshots for non js users. As of PoC for SEO4Ajax (http://www.seo4ajax.com), I built this application (http://www.appscharts.me) illustrating this purpose.
I'd rather have Flash + HTML that I can parse and view on any application rather than JS that works on the list of Approved Browsers that were all released within the past week.

Nobody would've made a Flash-only site but for some reason JS-only sites that shut out anyone with slow computers, old computers, mobile browsers that aren't Safari, etc. are totally okay.
No, the CS isn't just a couple points higher.

CS compared to nursing is 7 graduates vs 12 = meaning that you have almost 50% more nursing graduates out of an equal sized group of incoming freshmen than CS graduates.

You have 17 accounting graduates for each 7 CS graduates, almost 150% more. Even psychology has 10 graduates for ever 7 CS graduates, which is roughly 50% more.

I hope I did the math correctly, but at close to 100% small differences in the percent points means a huge difference in outcome.
and in fact that particular bustle link you posted is a perfect example of where using HTML5 + microdata would be not only faster to render and crawlable but also allow the underlying data structure to be consumed by javascript. There's no reason why

Bustle.pageData.article.title

couldn't have been extracted from

<article itemscope itemtype="/article">
<h1 itemprop="title">Why We Should Root for Lamar Odom</h1>
...
</article>
I tend to invite people out for beers or coffee on occasion.
There are dinosaurs like me who use the web mostly for reading stuff on websites. I also happen to use an old, quite slow computer as my default machine.

It aggrevates me when a site that I try to open because of its textual content takes 30 seconds to render since there's too much Javascript going on. Then I'm typically sitting there thinking: "how hard can it be to display a piece of text?" Because of this, when I see my CPU spike as I try to open a website in a new tab, I very often decide to simply close the tab again and do without the information I originally came there to see. This happens a lot for me with online magazines, such as wired or techcrunch. One trick is to invoke the "Readability" bookmarklet if I can get to it fast enough, i.e., before the JavaScript has frozen my browser completely.

Of course I understand that I am part of a tiny minority. And probably I'm not part of your target group anyway. And the web is so much more in 2013 than pages with text on them.

If you do, however, want someone like me to come to your site, you better remember to keep it dinosaur-friendly.
Sarajevo, Korea, WWII, WWI, Iraq 1, Iran-Iraq War, European Reconstruction Post War?
I remember at least three "mandatory" statement to wrap any heavy script. Actually I don't remember them, just some fuzzy count.

ps: I don't know how Excel is structured these days but up until 2003 there was zero multicore code, and VBA is not the fastest system around, so any way you can trim the workload is good.
I wonder if that would impact the value to a collector. To IT people it's just the exact same 1s and 0s, but to a collector would it be considered a restoration or would it be considered to be non-original data?
The great wall of China started as one measly block. Do we undermine the effort of the labourers that pushed it into place? It is just one rock. Not worthy of any praise.

But we may be missing the bigger picture. What you call a minor achievement is in reality a big step towards becoming a programmer. The biggest block to programming is being courageous enough to dig into the source code. Be it markup, or else. Who are we to criticize the achievements of others? When in reality we walked down the same path. Do you not remember the first time you were able to print your name to the terminal prompt? I do. It was 1984. I got the same jolly feeling when I did it with Javascript, back in the year 2000.

Who knows if the OP will turn out to be a great programmer?
The Dr. salutation threw me off, I don't think he's technically a doctor. However he has been awarded a bunch of honorary doctorates.
Facebook is essential where I live (Estonia) for promoting the band I;m in, and for being hooked into music events. Back in my 'home' country (Australia), it's used less for this purpose, but it is still used this way.

Like all tools - judge it's usefulness, and use it appropriately.
"Goddamn hacker bullshit. Looks like someone used a buffer overflow on the mainframe to encode a virus, and the thing dropped a bunch of malformed proteins while replicating in place of the data organelles. It's growing tumors and vomiting everywhere, probably cancer. We're going to have to terminate it and promote the secondary out of hibernation."
American History: The best creative minds teach how to innovate
Finally: Reversible USB plug
So a revelation isn't the revealing of a secret to people who don't know the secret?

(or to put it another way: revealing a secret to a population where the vast majority do not know it)

Snowden revealed the scale of the operation too, and the depth of the rabbit hole.
29 Songs To Enjoy on Your Labor Day Off
What's a Point of Sale system have to do with this train?