skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What's your earliest web development story?
This post was inspired by a small comment thread on the "May 2014 Freelancer / Seeking Freelancer" post. In response to a comment I made about an early web adopter [2], rueven [3] responded to my comment with the following message [4]:

The story is that a friend of mine at MIT came back to
the student newspaper and said, "I just went to a lecture
given by this guy Tim Berners-Lee, describing this thing
he's calling the World-Wide Web. We should get on this!"

So we set up a Web server with some of the newspaper's
archives, and then e-mailed TimBL and said, "Hey, we set
up a Web site. What do you think?" His response was
something like, "That's great! I'll put it on my list of
all of the Web sites in the world." And that's how my
career got started; turns out that we were one of the
first 100 sites in the world.

I love hearing stories like this and am especially interested in those who created web sites and applications before there was anything but the HTTP and HTML protocols. In those early days, I know we did everything ourselves ... are there any other early web adopters who are willing to share their stories? I hope reuven will expand on his early experiences and I'll add my story to the comments below. I look forward to reading other stories about our shared history!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679422

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7681366

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=reuven

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7681874
I first played Food Fight at a convenience store near my high school. Went back to class after lunch and tried to explain the game to a friend. When I was done he said something I've since called Smerek's Law (named after him): "You can't describe a video game without sounding like an idiot."
Actually, it was very rewarding, which surprised me immensely. I'm not too surprised she didn't thank me - as k-mcgrady says, she was busy with the police by that time. But equally, we shouldn't be that surprised that people are preoccupied with their own problems and so don't stop to help us.
The 4th Circuit disagrees, and found that Levison did not communicate with DOJ "every day while trying to find competent legal representation". See page 10-12.
The problem is that by the end of 2015 the situation in Spain could improve(I really don't see that happening and if it happens is because the improvement in Europe is dragging Spain).
Also in the elections of 2011 the main parties lost almost 4 million votes (from 21.5 to 17.8 million).
http://resultados.elpais.com/elecciones/generales.html
But it's true that the projections seem to show that trend,
still both parties get +60% votes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_S...

> TV is still the main source of information for people and it's taken completely by main parties. However in social networks we are already winning, in just 1 years we already have more fans than main parties and people talks about us.

Social networks are used mainly by young people, and Spain is an old society.

>(...) because we are organized in network without leaders.

I have yet to see a country without leaders and a large well organized group of anything without leaders. It's really naive.

Nonetheless Spain needs people that starts changing things (like your group), and everything can change by Dec 2015 but I'm not optimistic.
I never witnessed a robbery or violence where innocent people where getting hurt (likely due to my someone scary look?), but it's not because of phones. It's because people are in their routines, if you would walk the same road for 10 years and suddenly someone put a hole in the middle, you'd fall in.

Plus people are sheep, if not a single person is crazy enough to start and help someone else, then most of the time nobody will.
I joined Newton just as the transition from the Dylan stuff was happening. In the space of about a week the group moved from Dylan to "We're going to get this done now, in a small form factor [called Junior], really fast and in C++".

I think the switch was due to resource constraints (512K of RAM was a big deal in a handheld product) as well as a sense that they needed to get real and ship something. The impetus may have been a small group of people (e.g., Capps and Walter and some other heavies) having a Serious Talk while at a trade show in June of 1992, but obviously management must have been involved, too. Anyway, I joined the group the week a bunch of people were out of town, and when they came back everything was different.

There were a number of sad-faced LISP hackers roaming the halls, clutching copies of the C++ Annotated Reference Manual. The ARM (the book, not the CPU) must have been hell for them.

From that point on the Dylan stuff was pretty much sidelined. The "Senior" product (a tablet) was kept alive for quite some time, but the group's focus was almost 100% on Junior. There were occasional releases of Dylan (and I got a copy of the book), but little true interest.

Paul Mercer went an extra step further in reducing risk and complexity; he proposed ditching the microkernel in favor of a relatively simple a 68K-based handheld running an event loop and some apps, and he even got a lot of it working in a demo on some prototype hardware he whipped up. This was a little too radical, since there would have been no handwriting recognition, and he wound up leaving (and later founded Pixo, which was contracted to do the first UI for the iPod and was eventually bought by Apple). I'll note that what Paul proposed is essentially what the Palm Pilot did, with a limited character-by-character recognition interface that actually worked pretty well.
Not if you receive as much as possible at once (i.e., the size of the socket's receive buffer), and process the N PDUs at your leisure. (By "process at your leisure" I mean process the PDUs, of course, but also service other clients.)

While the server is "processing", the client can only send enough request data to fill the socket's receive buffer again (around 300K bytes on my machine over the loopback interface, and it can be adjusted if it's too large). When that buffer becomes full, TCP's flow control kicks in and prevents the client's TCP stack from sending any more data, which will cause the client's socket send buffer to fill up, at which point it will be prevented from sending any more request data (send() will block or keep returning EWOULDBLOCK/EAGAIN if using non-blocking operations).

When you've eventually processed all of the PDUs, call recv() again, draining the next 300K bytes. Then the client will be able to start sending request data again.

This avoids the resource-hogging problem you described and keeps the user mode:kernel mode ratio as high as possible, which is what the article was talking about.
Show HN: off-heap  extension for Hazelcast, free under ASF2
Fantastic story. Reads like a sci-fi post-apocalyptic novel.
About the point 1, I think that someone(seen here) is working on glasses which will work as a kind of HUD, so it is possible to have 'smart glasses' without having to be cross eyed to look at the display.

Of course, GG doesn't work like this so this isn't a reason for a refund, but it is still a reason NOT to buy them.
None of those are mandatory holidays in the US.
URL shorteners without privacy policy make me feel uncomfortable, but I guess it's understandable in case of a new and tiny project.
We were building distance learning systems and the classroom controllers were low powered PC hardware running DOS. These systems were connected to the system controller by Lantastic networking (we had no TCP/IP stack on the classroom controllers) and yet we needed both network monitoring (without SNMP) and status information related to the classroom hardware (tied to the classroom controller via RS-485) as well as the classroom's state (was it being used, which devices were powered on, etc.)

We ended up writing a device driver for the DOS machines that could message other Lantastic nodes with the system's current status. Once we had the status stored back at the system controller, we needed a way to allow administrators, operators and teachers to easily see the overall status ... my initial choice was to provide the data via a web server since the system controller had a TCP/IP stack and was connected to "the outside world".

In 1995, what do you use to write a web server that has no static content? Tcl/Tk was one of the first scripting languages to include the ability to open a "server socket" and it provided lots of libraries that made it easy to template text (in this case text/html). We ended up with one summary page that displayed the status of the entire system and a detail page for each classroom. There were no graphics, system status was shown via text and colored backgrounds using in-line styles, and the server automatically redirected you to the index if you asked for a non-existent page.

Sadly, the system never made it to production as we found we also needed a web-based method for scheduling classes, provisioning users, etc. This system was written in (pre-Java) ColdFusion and the monitoring functions were migrated into that system.
They are overstating the case a little bit, but this is still a big step. These images have actually been available since 2011; back then, until now, it was under a license very similar to the old Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial. But it was not so easily understood as a CC license.

What they have done recently is assert that images of artworks that are public domain are also in the public domain. Other museums and institutions have done this, but for the Met to do it is a big deal.
I'm curious - does anyone else have a mental habit of trying to notice bystander effect situations and taking it as your job to handle them if you're able?

I've had this habit for about a year. So far, called the police too late to do anything about it twice (once because my phone was dead, once from a combination of negligence and not knowing the right number to call), and once called the emergency number for a guy who fainted in public (but ran off before help could arrive). In the last case, a handful of other bystanders also stopped to help the guy, so bystander effect mysteriously didn't work that day. So I haven't been terribly helpful to anyone, but I was surprised how often I saw problems once I was looking for it.

(I don't think I would have been terribly helpful in this situation, though - I don't know how to break up a fight without being hurt, and probably wouldn't have thought of some of the better ideas like trying to single out a strong-looking person in the crowd and get them to help.)
"...it starts currently as opt-in". Not a massive fan of that "currently".

I don't own a smartphone and deleted my FB account years ago, but this still makes me squirm.
$300-500 billion is a lot to install a national fiber network because "we might as well". If they're going to cost the same to operate, what do we get in exchange for this $500 billion investment? The ability to watch Netflix videos at a higher quality? A slightly lower cable bill? (since the cost to maintain won't be significantly lower, the bill won't be either)

I'm not trying to be sarcastic here -- this is how the government thinks about things. We have an existing infrastructure that is less than optimal, but it still functions and is in no danger of imminent collapse. Contrast with our healthcare system which barely functions and is on the verge of effective collapse. Or our public schools and police departments, which have collapsed in a number of cities.

In short, it's hard to drum up political support for large infrastructure projects even if you can show the need. There has to be a demonstrable catastrophic impact if we don't do the project, which just isn't the case with broadband.
Climbing App Store Top Charts
The cancer of listicles has even spread to the BBC? So sad. Let's not encourage this.
Printable URLs are a good use case, but printed material has the annoying characteristic of lasting longer than your average web service, including URL shorteners. For printed stuff QR codes are still the most practical option IMHO.
Show HN: Experimental slit-scan style photography using your webcam
>> Your original statement, however, gave the unspoken implication that other URL shorteners were good for printing on packaging

That's a very good point. Interestingly, I think this has caught me out in situations previously. My observation was typing non-English characters would be too challenging on the keyboard I use, and as such provided an example where that may be evident.

Having glossed over the other (more important) problem as whether to use a URL shortener was excluded from my assessment (but interpreted as acceptance). Contrary to that, I could decide to use this technique to shorten URLs on my own domain, where the issues I observed would still be valid.

However, I'll throw a counter argument to support using URL shorteners just for the fun of it. I may decide to use it when:

1. There is a service-level-agreement that the service is to be operational for a set period of time (usually tied to a paid-for service).
2. It is akin to me using a phone number redirection service (I pay a top up for the redirection), and as such, have printed this number on business cards.
3. It is akin to putting a Twitter, Facebook or Linked In URL - all services that are free, and as such, have risk associated.
4. It is akin to providing a URL with a domain maintained by a third party country - for example, Libya controlling the .ly domain[1]
5. It may allow me to change the target URL at any time, keeping the content up to date.
6. It may allow me to monitor click through analytics.

But, assuming you only wanted to use it only for online purposes, then you have the following considerations:

1. Users don't know the target of the URL and may reduce trust. I know I've not clicked on shortened URLs of things I am unsure of the target page.
2. What benefit does shortening actually provide? If it's visual real-estate, the link can still be long with a shortened label.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/oct/08/bitly-liby...
China Plans Security Checks for Tech Suppliers
I'm paying a bit more ($89/month) for unlimited 100/40mbit on the NBN. Consider moving! (That's Turnbull's advice>
> I don't believe people can be super-productive more than 5 hours a day unless they work on something they are passionate about or are on drugs.

I assume you're a software engineer? It's a particularly mentally intensive job, and I don't think your experience is easily generalizable. Jobs that don't require that level of creativity and where you can rely more on memorized processes are easier to do for extended periods of time. Say you're an insurance adjuster. Most of the claims that cross your desk are not unusual and do not require special handling. I bet you could do that productively for 8 hours a day.
FWIW Firefox for Android supports sharing Tabs via getUserMedia.
I feel like I miss something here. Why would you be arrested for Helping? I can see that you would have a risk of getting hurt or killed by the attacker, but why would you be arrested or killed by the Police?
Same. And I looooove it.
I down voted this because most mentally ill people I know don't want "care". They don't want pills and they don't want to be normal.

It's our bill of rights that prevents us from forcing help on these people and, while it's sad for them, I rather like our strict policy on NOT being able to just call someone crazy and force them into an institution.
>something that you're not good at.

This was kinda my message but it didnt come out that way. There are resources out there that are sometimes freely available you can use to get better at something you arent good at.
A large part of why PDF.js is slow is because it doesn't have text coalescing. http://www.NotablePDF.com/ is based on PDF.js and has a coalescing code in production which has improved performance substantially.

It's been a significant effort on our part, and we'll be contributing it back to the PDFjs code base. Opera also has a similar coalescing effort underway by Christian Krebs.
The Ultimate List of Freely Available Programming Books
Esther Dyson Has a Plan to Improve America’s Health
At least in the US, you can still do the email-to-sms trick. In fact, I think that's exactly why so many sites ask who your carrier is (so they know which domain to use). Sending raw SMS, your carrier shouldn't matter.

http://www.att.com/esupport/article.jsp?sid=KB63037&cv=820#f...

http://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-3309

http://www.verizonwireless.com/news/article/2013/06/computer...
Is it just me or does she seem to have a sense of entitlement? All throughout the article, she seems to tell herself, one way or another, "clearly this can't happen to me. I'm important. Too important."
I attribute this to living under an authoritarian government that supposedly takes care of dangers to society. We're just bystanders and taught not to meddle because the police will take care of it.

I've lived in different countries and have seen different reactions where people are used to feeling responsible for their peers because they know the government doesn't care, is not efficient, or otherwise limited.

Of course, some people will also be reluctant to get stabbed for a complete stranger.
SageBump is basically what I see sitting on top of other news sites. Simply put, it is an aggregator of aggregators, customised to your preferences.

Please note - the first load time, and subsequent loads after configuration changes can take up to a minute, I am working on improving this, but alot of data is polled from multiple sources so it is not an easy fix.

It is currently in beta but it "should" hold up for a few thousand users. I am ready to receive feedback so please feel free to give me pointers and your thoughts.

Any questions? Try the Information menu on the top right, then the Why? and How? tabs for a full explanation, or just ask me here.

Thank you
Great question. I've long had an idea for a fantasy football type game and shied away from using premiership football results because of this ruling. However thanks to the links UVB-76 provided I've now spent a bit of time going through the details and I'm confident that simple goal and timing data do not fall under this simply because it does not meet the 'substantial' requirement, as made clear in paragraph 76 .
It seems uk.practicallaw.com has a great comment on the finding, also supporting this argument.
For some reason, many people form an identity from what they consume.
That's not the notion of consciousness we're dealing with when talking about the "hard" problem of consciousness. You're describing its psycho-functional interpretation: the ability to see yourself as a "self".

Qualia are a largely orthogonal issue. Specifically, it's imaginable that an entity we'd consider unintelligent has a rich and detailed subjective internal life.
It's great that it suits you, but I want to know whether it provides compression levels that I'm not already getting.
Hacker Plans Holy Marriage of GitHub and Bitcoin
Yup, I think T-Mobile even bundled it with a data-and-messaging-only plan (no minutes) at one point.
It would be interesting to see if/when kdbus catches on if it will result in more applications written in that manner. A userspace daemon talking asynchronously to a thread-pool executor that dispatches tasks and returns results.
The first one is not a mis-measurement. They knew some of the platforms were not to the norm, and that they had to be adapted by RFF. The person who started the info to blame on the SNCF is linked to a region that doesn't want to pay for the normalization of the platforms.
Poverty also leads to civil war or worse. Cannibalism also is frequent during famine.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-zczJXSxnw

Incredible how much of a beating it took before it finally collapsed. It's also a lot more flexible than you'd expect.
In this case though, this offering isn't using the fiber we voted for:

>Im Gegensatz zu anderen FTTH Angeboten, die auf Layer-2 Plattformen von städtischen Werken basieren, benutzt Fiber7 eine komplett eigene Internet-Infrastruktur. (https://www.fiber7.ch/fiber7-verfugbarkeit/)

Loosely translated this means that they are using their own infrastructure not based on what the EWZ has already built.

Considering how hard it is to get permission to dig holes around here, I wonder how the hell they have done this.
I think I read about this in a book once...

"The iPhone received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the helpful sign suggested, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being checked-in on social media any given moment. How often, or on what system, the service provider plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they included everybody all the time. But at any rate they could connect you whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."
I remember seeing this on /r/PHP, and one of the top comments there was about it using Regex instead of parsing it like a language.

However, I also recall that it's thanks to using regex that it works so quickly. So I figured I'd get this argument out of the way before someone else brought it up.
Why in God's name would you say that there is a case for basic income and tie it to debt slavery? Especially in circumstances where people have no income but the basic income, because allt he work they're qualified to do is done by robots? This is insane. Here we've got all these people that you're basically writing off as worthless, and you're also enslaving them to a debt system that makes it impossible for them to ever earn anything for themselves?

Actually no I think you're right, if people like you run the system then this is the best thing we can hope for. I wish all bad social thinkers were as hell bent on creating a massive and violent revolution against themselves as you seem to be.
Facebook changes default privacy of posts from Public to Friends
Parsedown is certainly very fast, but I wouldn't call it "extensible". CeBe's markdown parser is nearly as fast, but focusses on being very easy to extend, so it's trivial to add custom syntax elements, see https://github.com/cebe/markdown

(CeBe's library is inspired by parsedown)
If some blind guy walked in with his Google Glass connected to his brain so he could see and was ask to remove them do you think the "please remove your glasses" would be acceptable? "But sir, I can't see without these as I'm blind. Are you really going to discriminate against blind people?".

Now that's a whopper of a strawman argument. I'm impressed.

The 'seeing' argument isn't important. It's the 'recording' bit that people disagree with. If a blind man went around recording everything his device 'saw' and uploaded it somewhere, sure, people would quite reasonably complain. This is (presumably) why the equivalent aural device, a cochlear implant, doesn't come with Dragon Naturally Speaking 10.
Once I find a destination on Android, I'm able to disconnect and GPS turn-by-turn will work fine.
I've found that it doesn't like to shorten certain things, though I haven't quite nailed down what "certain things" are. I tried linking a recent blog post I'd done, which is at least 30 characters (along the lines of http://website/really-neat-post-title), and when I pasted or typed it into the tweet, it wouldn't autoshorten and would consume those characters.

I find myself using goo.gl a distressing amount of time on Twitter.
Looks great, happy to see the Markdown Extra extension. With regard to performance, I've always gotten around the slowness of the original Markdown parser by making liberal use of caching, but warming the cache is still painful for a CMS. Will look to migrate to this.