skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You've got me thinking about what it means to be a 'mediocre' programmer.

I'd say there are two types of mediocre programmers. The first writes just ok code. It's structured ok, not great, it's efficient, but nothing special.

The second type writes ok programs. Your basic I/O stuff. The UX is ok, it works, but nothing special.

Now, which would you say you are?

The other of the potential of each of these programmers is, for the person who writes ok code, but the things they make code do are amazing! The code may not be beautiful, but they take on challenges that few others do, and it works.

The second type are the people who make mediocre products, but if you actually look at their code, it is brilliant, beautiful, perfect.

Which are you? Which would you prefer to be?

Of course, their are people who have both and that is the ultimate goal.
> To note - my mom found out about this site when she received a note telling her she needs to pay close to a $1000 to license the photo that was ripped off from her site.

To me this is smells like the real motive behind this. It's not about trashing your SEO, or stealing traffic, but rather to scare those small website owners into paying some kind of 'fee'.

It's pretty safe to assume lots of small websites for local businesses use various photos they found online or downloaded from Google images, rather than their own content or images they bothered paying license for. Copying those images onto a seemingly legitimate site and then filing a claim for license payment seems like a pretty good strategy to milk money out of innocent site owners.

I'd be curious to see the note your mum received and what kind of language or tactics it's using.
A DCMA takedown notice might work, however, in my experience, a successful notice has often the result that the website in question is moved to another jurisdiction. Good luck with sending a DMCA takedown notice to a site hosted on a server in Bulgaria by a hosting company in Panama and a domain registrar in Thailand. .com are in theory under American jurisdiction but domain registrars cannot be made responsible for content under 'their' domain names …
If your concern is the host operator, well obv can't circumvent that.

Of course we can circumvent that. Make a plugin to alert the user whenever the JS changes.
I just wrote a toy lisp interpreter in C++. It's kind of amazing how easy it is to interpret lisp. Hard part is writing the GC and tail call optimization. Not trying to diminish the post at all, I just think Lisp is a cool language :)
Ask HN: How many of you contribute to Wikipedia?
The "Wikipedia for Sale" post on the front page made me wonder how many people on HN actually contribute to Wikipedia. I have never, but am interested in figuring out why. I love Wikipedia and would love to contribute by keeping spam away and stopping PR companies from being in control.

I'm a long time lurker, with a recently created account. This would have made more sense as a poll. Can any admin change this Ask HN into a poll with the following data points - everyday (daily contributer), once a week, once a month, few times, never
Indeed. I did a similar setup years and years ago for a mom and pop shop (well before Braintree and Stripe) and I had to choose between Paypal and Google Checkout. Glad I set them up with Paypal.
After thinking about WMs for a while, I ended up realising that basically what I want is Eclipse ( http://shimmie.shishnet.org/v2/post/view/3171 ) -- specifically, a tiled WM with arbitrary nesting of "vertical split", "horizontal split" and "tabbed" containers, and mouse support for re-arranging the windows. i3 comes so very, very close; but no mouse support :( (I know keyboards are better for most things, but they aren't better for all things; I'd like to be able to use both as appropriate)

Come to think of it, tmux uses that model too, with quite a lot of popularity, so it's not like it's a completely unknown style...

Anyone know of any X WMs that do it though? Bonus points for having independent desktops for each monitor, and also for keeping up with modern standards (compositing, that dbus-based systray protocol that I forget the name of, etc)
Here, our ground-rules were recently posted. https://www.facebook.com/notes/seattle-clown-jam/clown-jam-g.... This is one potential model where performers can do challenging things in an environment that allows mistakes.

Similarly, we have a Circus Open Mic in Seattle (https://www.facebook.com/events/533760116677373/) where ground rules are that admission is free and open to the public but it's generally a supportive and in-community audience. We've had comedians, magicians, aerialists, acrobats, jugglers, extremely weird people, clowns, and strip history lessons.

I present both of these as ideas for ways to develop and grow without being subject to eternal Google search indexing and YouTubing by random civilians. I think both of these seem to come down to controlling the venue and rules. If you experiment in a bar or club, you're in the wild.

We do these in theatres, black boxes, and dance/performance spaces. This allows us to control the door.
If this was a proprietary database we'd call that vendor lock-in and advocate an open source solution. 10gen is a company that earns it's revenue from selling support. They are highly incentivized to lure you in and trap you in a situation that requires a lot of consulting.
Previously on HN with 789 points, and lots of discussion (216 comments), so for those interested the topic dont miss:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4357002
Most databases don't give you the option of storing an array, a hash, a set, or a sorted set. Postgres does, but it's kind of hacky in my opinion.
Even though I know that IP addresses are just 32 bit of data I find it very interesting that browser support these representations out of the box. There is no reason to and from a security point of view it is even detrimental.
There's an interesting corollary to this, which is that organized crime is often better than the alternative. Locking up Pablo Escobar didn't cause his cartel to just go away, it caused his cartel to disintegrate into warring factions which led to even more crime and violence. Drug lords and mob bosses tend to keep that stuff under control because it's bad for business.
It doesn't have to be plain-text. It just needs to be structured, unlike a WYSIWYG editor. Recently I discovered a library called Sir Trevor JS[1] and thinking about adding a table block to it.

[1]: http://madebymany.github.io/sir-trevor-js/
33/35. I have social anxiety. Would not be surprised because I can read others emotions. Sometimes knowing the emotions of those around you can be very overwhelming.
Care to share an opinion on who does it best? Or least worst?
Responsive Design is what eBooks had since the first ePub spec. The ability of the user to control all aspects -- typeface, type size, line spacing, justification on/off.

With the advent of the iPad, we've a surge towards fixed layout.

Go figure.
Great essay in its early stages, where she talked about how we should always fight for freedom and equality. But she lost me on the second half. Anarchy is the same as having a government, except instead of having one entity terrorizing the population, you get thousands of psychopaths terrorizing the population. People are fundamentally shitty organisms. Giving them free rein, either as a dictator of one government, or as the leader of a band of marauding anarchists, is never a good idea. Monopolizing violence and creating protections against the corruption of government by the strong at the expense of the weak should be the goal.

Democratic balanced government with strong individual protections is a good thing if it is protected from corruption. If not, you just end up with a kleptocracy.

Government is just another tool. It can be used for good or evil. It's up to us to make it stay on the right side of the line.
Probably because this "trick" is often used by spammers to obfuscate URLs.
Why Does Apple Sabotage the MacBook?
Everyone is still figuring it out, even the people you look up to. Not just programming or whatever skill you happen to be talking about, everything.

It's OK to doubt yourself, but try to get a better view of your skills, accomplishments and improvement once in a while.
What Japanese management lacks to become global
Mapping is such a core part of the mobile OS experience I can't see them shuttering it. Separate from that, they use it to show ads and promote their other services (like Google Plus).
> Why is spreading life beyond earth so important? Because without doing that, in the long run, life will end.

Why is that? Which existential threat are you referring to? Overpopulation? The sun's transition into a red giant? (Not trying to be snarky, just looking for clarification.)

I'm not sure I agree that prolonging the survival of life should be an overriding goal that takes precedence over all other concerns. Firstly, there is nothing intrinsically good about life. It's a complex physical process, one which has resulted in incredible emergent behaviors, but if all life were to vanish tomorrow, the Universe wouldn't really be worse off. The Universe has no goal, no desires (or at least none that we could claim to have knowledge of at this point); it's simply a bunch of atoms interacting. So this whole idea that "we must preserve the existence of life no matter what" has no objective basis. It's more a result of our own struggle to find meaning in the Universe, our own psychological need to believe that all of this isn't just cosmic dust in the end.

My point: I don't think that human misery should be allowed in service of the "greater goal" of keeping life around. Because why bother? What's the point of sustaining life if misery is a prerequisite? If we can colonize other planets and explore the Universe, that's great; I'm just saying that we shouldn't use that as an overriding goal above all other concerns. The "best possible world" would be one in which everyone has the opportunity to pursue their desires, as long as their desires don't conflict with the desires of other living things (the feasibility of this scenario is another discussion altogether).

And yes, I realize that if a giant asteroid were to strike the Earth tomorrow, that would interfere with a lot of people's desires. I just think that "spread at any cost" is a bad goal for humanity. If I had to choose between 100 more years of life on Earth in which everyone lived peaceful, fulfilling lives vs. one million more years of life spreading throughout the Universe at the cost of significant anguish and poverty, I think I'd lean towards Option #1.
Published papers in psychology journals are authoritative sources for information.
I tried googling for information related to Bill Watterson and psychology and couldn't find any links to the relevant information. I am sure that comedy has a lot of insights to offer scientists who study human mind, but I really dont understand why psychologists and/or psychiatrists cite his work. I would like to be proven wrong, could you direct me to the relevant interesting bits of information?
GTK look hideous in every tiling am I've tried. Xterm, xvclock, etc look gorgeous in that setting.
They're currently somewhat busy. Don't take a non-response as proof of anything.
This will have no noticeable effect on quarterly results. Same for other notable shutdowns like Google Reader or any of the various APIs shuttered in 2011 (Translate, Finance, Code Search, etc etc).
> Dangerous for you may not be dangerous for someone else

He said in his comment that he's a cat 1 racer. I'm willing to bet if something's unsafe for him, it'd be unsafe for any strava user.
David H. Feedman wrote an excellent book* on this very topic. "Wrong: Why experts keep failing us--and how to know when not to trust them"

He goes very deep into the research around confirmation bias and cultural beliefs that cause doctors to be very confident and believe they are absolutely right when they are at best 50/50. Obviously not all experts/doctors are rightly only 50% of the time, but I found the book to be extremely informative. ALWAYS question experts - the worst thing you can do is shut your brain down.

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Wrong-us---relationship-consultants-eb...
Have you ever seen a pride of lions hunting? The teamwork and understanding involved there is way beyond that required to recognize that another animal might not notice if one moves slowly.

One very simple step is they recognize the concept of upwind and downwind, not to mention the concept of beaters, ambushers and the ability to dynamically change their strategy when circumstances change.
Mongo (and other document stores) let you do pretty complex querying within JSON objects. Postgres unfortunately doesn't let you do so; that's really the only thing keeping me with Mongo at the moment.
The Antiplanner is a great blog that questions whether rail makes any sense at all.

http://ti.org/antiplanner/
It would be useful to include a way to fund new features for open source projects. Anyway good job for a 48 hours competition.
TL;TR summary: NIMBY
Free to Play and the Titanic Effect
An IPv4 address is a 32 bit string of bits. That 32 bit value can be represented in many different ways, but none of those ways are IPv4 addresses. The actual address is that string of 32 bits, and that is what is used in the TCP stack inside your OS or your router.
Tech ‘surge’ to tackle Obamacare websites
Big data heralds return of the Cray supercomputer
> Nintendo definitely won't.

Except that they did. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/17...
It should be done in CSS.

Not if you want to show a simple JS example.
Smart robots and driverless cars work – but they bring ethical issues too
As someone previously burned by this business model, let me be the first to tell you how right you are. I built a small business around their SOAP search API some seven years ago, and received a commercial license and increased API usage to bring my product to market.

After easily lining up enough customers to exceed my daily limit, I lobbied for higher usage and a method to share the revenue (they had no structure to charge for API calls back then). For years I tried to contact anyone I could within the organization, but there was no response. After an eternity, they simply shut it down with no notice.

You just never know how long they're going to enjoy experimenting with their APIs, and unless you have a backup plan, it's a deal breaker.
>>if people were more involved in their society

I think I see the flaw in your plan...

Most folks would rather delegate AFAICT.
A genuine question which looks like hate but isn't: why are people still innovating on PHP? I can understand why it may still be in use, but why nurture the ecosystem?

The only people I know that care for PHP enough to be into this kind of thing are people who have never written anything but PHP, and that's a small number of people...and the number of those competent enough to write a LISP in PHP is precisely nil. Only my experiences, sure, but I'm sure I'm not that off the mark.
I hugely respect Buddhist philosphy but quoting eight fold path in a discussion about addiction to our gadgets is a non sequitur.
Do you know who is better to comment on the human condition?
Actual scientists who study human mind. And while psychology doesn't conform to some principles of scientific rigor it produces useful models for improving human condition. They often fail, but it is much better than intuition, comedian's intuition included.
Using this python script to make the int-ip-address:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import socket

import struct

def ip2long(ip):

packedIP = socket.inet_aton(ip)

return struct.unpack("!L", packedIP)[0]

print ip2long('192.241.224.102') # your website ip address

# or download it on github: https://gist.github.com/Leask/7075483
I'm 37 , unemployed and took up 'coding' as a means to pull myself out of what by U.S. standards is poverty. No healthcare and I live basically in a hole in the wall of this ladies trailer. I don't know how you can become 'better' but if you ever want advice for dealing with sever hopelessness I can help. First be grateful that you hierarchy of needs are met. Presumably you have health insurance thus if you have say, a rotting tooth in the back of your face like I do...you could probably get it checked out before it infects the rest of your system. After being grateful, the next thing to do is realize that nobody gives a flying fuck what you do and the world is cold. This will allow you to truly realize the opportunities you have as your dispose and put your gratitude on overdrive when any anomalies of concern do seem to present themselves. Next, exploit every resource you have to 'get better'. The computational power of a mac mini is actually quite a lot in the context of the computer market over the last 20 years. Don't look at as programming, look at it as turning nothing into something. If you want to 'get better' first find out exactly what you are not good at! Are you a great programmer but are shitty at being "creative"? Are you creative but can't seem to express it through code as much as you would like? Are you bad at reading other peoples code? etc etc etc. Blatant honesty about what exactly your weak points are can force you to zero in an fix it but first you might have to conduct a self-imposed research project to even figure this info out. Anyway, don't take this post too seriously, I'm a nice guy really. I just felt being a bit brash and off the cuff for a moment. I'm sure you'll continue to achieve. bye bye
> and the proposed non-government solutions (such as removing the limitations on the liability of polluters, and allowing those whose health or livelihood has been injured by pollution to sue, potentially by class action) have never even been attempted

That might work in special cases, like the BP oil spill, where you can make a strong case that a specific source contributed to specific harm to specific plaintiffs.

Unfortunately, such incidents are only a very small part of overall pollution. Pollution gets emitted from multiple sources around the state, country, or even world, mixes chaotically in the oceans and atmosphere, and causes damage possibly hundreds or even thousands of miles away from its source, often contributing small amounts of damage at hundreds of places.

Good luck trying to figure out who to sue, and then proving that any of your named defendants actually emitted pollution that caused damage to any particular plaintiff.
Show HN: Using Twine and Twitter For Ambient Social Invitations
As someone considering changing my life drastically, I would appreciate if you could elaborate on this post.
I think it's easier to add "constraints" to existing WYSIWYG apps, than to create something from scratch. Like, take MS Word and enforce using only styles (no inline formatting), no more than 1 consecutive space and line break, etc. In the end, you'll get a well formatted XML.
in which photo website the royalty free image is listed? could you give the url?
-1 for being mobile hostile by disabling pinchzoom. What value could there possibly be in disabling pinchzoom?
>You so desperately want this to be a nefarious PR job.
And you seem to desperately want me to be some bitter chick-fil-a hater. IF chick-fil-a was involved in the writing of this piece then it's nothing more than what hundreds of other companies do everyday, PR involvement is an integral part of the modern press. I may not like it but I would not call it "nefarious". I'm not commenting because I have a hate-on for chick-fil-a but because there seems to be a lot of wilful ignorance here on just how much the media we consume is manipulated by PR.

On to your points:

1. I don't really see why chick-fil-a would get more pageviews than another restaurant so I'll skip this.

2. Of course the writer wants an effective opening, but the "you're part of a pay-it-forward line" fantasy could have easily been written at a generic restaurant.

3. Other people have said it but chick-fil-a is closed on sundays. Also I don't really get what this has to do with how and why the author wrote the story.

4. I'm pretty sure a fluff piece on people paying for each other's fast food didn't take a month to write. And I think the author probably did discover the phenomenon after a chick-fil-a related conversation, one with a chick-fil-a sponsored PR representative.

5. It's impossible to say assuredly whether any article was PR influenced but that quote seemed awfully convenient.

6. You seem to be very concerned with christianity when no-one else has mentioned it, least of all the article. I would not personally assume that chick-fil-a patrons are particularly christian, it seems strange to me that this is immediately the thing you jump to. Same thing goes with the source's political leanings, I don't consider fast food to be a political matter and I don't think NYT or chick-fil-a do either.

7. Sure, but if that's the case it's interesting that most of the other restaurants mentioned are coffee shops and a bagel cafe (which aren't really chick-fil-a competitiors) rather than popeyes or mary brown's.

so in conclusion:

1. I'm right

2. You seem to weirdly have tied up a fast-food restaurant into some christian right wing identity you hold and it's preventing you from acknowledging the very really possibility of PR manipulation in an NYT fluff piece.
Withstanding The Test of Time
Thanks Nickler!

With MailChimp, the receivers would see the Unsubscribe link at the bottom, which clearly shows it's an automated email. Also, going through New list, New campaign workflows just for a quick email to 10-20 people is a little cumbersome.

Agreed with the automated emails. However, there are already solutions for this, and I wouldn't know how to differentiate it without a significant time investment.
Slackware 2.0 in 1995.
A quarter of online ad traffic is fraudulent
Sure. This is first study that I've found.

"The findings revealed that social isolation was associated with an increased risk for depressive symptoms, suicide attempts, and low self-esteem."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17849936
I was Stephen King's paperboy as a kid growing up for about 6 years. I never met or saw him once.

I delivered the paper each morning through his black gate, up his driveway around to the side door. The winter mornings were especially scary, as it was still dark out. One morning there was a black crow perched on the railing of his steps to the door I put the paper in. As I got closer, I figured the crow would fly, like a normal bird. However, it didn't. I got closer, 10 feet away, 5 feet, then 1 foot. I stuck my hand out to pet the crow. It didn't move, just standing there, looking right at me. The crow let me pet him for a few seconds, I stopped and then he flew away. I delivered the paper and went on my way.

That's the only story I have about the King Family. Oh, and that I never got a Christmas tip from him once. That's all.
> The one thing it does get right is live editing, but you don't have to do WYSIWYG to get live editing -- you can just have a splitscreen with a sane, editable, logical representation on one side and an instant preview on the other.

Years ago I did exactly this for an internal CMS. The preview window used the same renderer as the front end, and there were various dynamic controls the authors/editors could use to control content, reference other content, etc. The preview window would update as they typed and always look like the current styles. If someone went overboard with direct styling, it would be painfully obvious during review, since reviewers first saw the raw content.

The system also had a "cheat sheet" which would show technical writers all of the supported styles and snippets in both literal and rendered forms.
W00t w00t. >2K edits over nearly 10 years. I contribute in spurts around topics I know things about that don't have articles yet.