skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Happy to read there is some interest in “Markdown 2.0” or “lightweight markup, next generation”. With adoption by big outlets like Github and StackOverflow, and dozens of static site generators built on plain text source files, marked-up in Markdown syntax, Markdown is becoming a _de facto_ general-purpose document _editing_ and _storage_ standard. With the advent of fast client-side parsers, soon it might even substitute html as a document _exchange format_, too (at least for some use cases).

But there is no official spec, development of the syntax grew stale (from the start, thanks to Gruber)¹, and hence the language heavily suffers from fragmentation²: people want to be able to do more with light-markup, so they build extensions, or fork the language altogether. The troubles with Markdown are discussed in various³ places⁴, John MacFarlane built a formalized comparison tool⁵, but as of yet, there is no joint effort to cooperate on a lightweight markup standard.

There are a few interesting projects that dare to forsake Markdown and try their luck: Fountain.io⁶ (a domain specific light markup language for playwriting), SkrivML⁷, Strictdown⁸, and z.m.l.⁹

Then there are, of course, the many predecessors of Markdown, which prove that Markdown (or light-markup in general) is not the imprescriptible privilege of its self-proclaimed benevolent dictator for life, and some of which are still widely used in various communities: Setext (1992), AFT (1999), Grutatxt (2000), AsciiDoc (2002), MediaWiki (2002), reStructuredText (2002), Org-mode (2003), Textile (2004)…

We need an extensible lightweight markup language of sorts, a “lxml”, if you will, and we need to work on it together.

If we want ever to succeed in establishing a true standard light markup language, the big challenge is not only to focus on extensibility, but also to reconcile the various existing and future syntaxes, and take care of backward-compatibility (with plain Markdown), as much as possible. As mentioned by quite a few commenters here and elsewhere, weeding out conflicting syntax should be the first thing to do.

For starters, I begun a concordance¹⁰, listing the various delimiters and patterns used by competing lightweight markup languages. (Very rough draft, though, and need to think about a way to formalize the data, to make more accurate comparisons, and consequently, better decisions on the syntax of a future xlml.)

¹ http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-future-of-markdown/
² https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources
³ http://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2012/07/30/why-markdown-is-not...
⁴ https://medium.com/the-future-of-publishing/495ccfe24a52
⁵ http://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/faq.html#what-are-some-...
⁶ http://fountain.io
⁷ SkrivML
⁸ https://github.com/jakwings/strictdown
⁹ http://www.z-m-l.com
¹⁰ https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources/blob/master/l...
As someone who has two cats, and has had a dog and a cat previously, I'm always amazed when I come across people who categorically state that animals don't have emotions. Spend a small amount of time with a cat or a dog, and it becomes pretty clear that they have moods and emotional states, albeit simpler ones that humans. I realise that domestication will have changed animals and their environmental responses, but I find it very hard to believe that dogs or cats would have developed emotions from scratch in the ~10,000 years since they were domesticated.

In my experience, those who claim animals don't have emotions are usually justifying some kind of behaviour; in one case, it was a hunter, and another, someone who was generally unpleasant and cruel to animals. The former was otherwise a nice guy, though I found his hobby extremely distasteful; the latter was an irredeemable arsehole.
> The Guardian knew GCHQ had an airtight case, it is why they complied.

Debatable, given that there are no UK laws that permit the destruction of assets not owned by the Government.

The Guardian parties were not signatories to the OSA. RIPA has no stipulations on the destruction of tainted assets.

More likely the threat of seizure of a wide range of equipment and extended 'investigation' by the authorities would have been sufficiently disruptive to the Guardian's conduct of business that it was quicker and easier to comply.

Coercion and intimidation, in other words.
I very much love the TR-808 drum synth sound, but I can't use this ... it's too slow!

What's it doing? I'm not even sure if these beats are supposed to sound out of sync because I clicked something wrong, or because the whole thing is running at 3fps.

I just wish I could play with this thing!

This is an early 80s drum machine people, it should run on a 3 year old laptop, right?

(using Firefox 29, Chromium doesn't even display the cube)
ARIN has a policy for trading IPv4: https://www.arin.net/resources/transfers/transfer_market.htm...
Constructive criticism (first two questions) and explanation why the price is insane downvoted without single response. Awesome job.
Many mental illnesses reduce life expectancy more than heavy smoking
How the Kindle turned me into a book pirate
grep doesn't use regex

+i ignore case

+l match whole label only

+lb whole label before

+la whole label after

+r recurse
Why not name and shame all of the scum bags that are involved with these patent trolls?

Post up the lawyer names, the company owner names etc. Harass them, DDOS their websites, hack their email, ruin their online presence, attack their family, etc.

Make it a job that is incompatible with a normal place in society
OmniFocus 2 for Mac released
I really appreciate the NewEgg strategy in these cases. They're fighting the good fight. And it's a great move to make the most PR splash from their victories to discourage future trolls.

If only they shipped outside the US, I would give them all my business. :)
I think you might mean Zoopla?

http://www.zoopla.co.uk/press/releases/buying-beats-renting-...
EU law the "right to be forgotten" vs. open data
One of my favorite (somewhat unknown) AngelList features
Most the issues pointed has been fixed by W3Schools and they added a "report error" form.

See this issue: https://github.com/paulirish/w3fools/issues/50
Why didn't it ship with Android 4.4? Come on HP!
Based of my experience of gerbils and hamsters, there doesn't seem to be a link between feeding and playing activity, but they were always well-fed so that probably doesn't reflect anything like a state o nature.

My two cats are definitely more active when they've not recently eaten. When their food bowls are empty, they run around and play much more --- `hunger' tends to stimulate activity in them. Once they're fed, especially with something they really like and will gorge on, they tend to lie around and sleep after eating.
Yes, you are an effete, precious little snowflake.
We tested best time to post tools so you don't have to
This is why I was forced to buy a home, in India. Two months into new rental place the landlord casually said he's going to sell the place and that I will have to abide by whatever the new owner says, worst case being vacate the place with 2 months notice that had taken us a good one month to find and settle into.

BTW, this isn't an isolated incidence. If you are renting a house in India, you will most like be subjected to the vagaries of land lord.

In the end it all turned out to be good. Now I own my house, decent mortgage and I get tax benefit as well. The net outflow (considering savings on rent and tax benefits) is very much manageable.

In India, if you can afford it, then the decision is fairly straightforward. Buy!
If you've not read of the effects of naltrexone on [Met5]-enkephalin (OGF - opiod growth factor) it's worth doing so. A fascinating area.
https://profiles.psu.edu/profiles/display/113208
Suffering from diabetes like hundreds of millions of people? Check out mySugr
ah yes, good point.
It feels like I've been reading this exact headline once a week for a couple of years.. I started to believe that there is an infinite reserve of ipv4 blocks and we'll be just fine.
What was really impressive in the arcades was not Dragons Lair but Ms Pacman and scoring over 600,000 points. I've seen some guys doing it and they kept eating all of the ghosts on power pill touch over and over. That's one of the most amazing video game feats ever.
A location system that doesn't require monthly fees
Just out of curiosity (as a UK resident), how would you plan on moving to the states from a legal standpoint? As far as I'm aware, if you don't have immediate family who are US-citizens, $500k-$1M to invest in a business, marry a US citizen or take employment on a H1-B (not easy), it's not possible?
USA only :-(
Why is Belgium disappointing you?

Well, given that his wife longs for
"finally have some sunshine, lots of affordable fresh food, perhaps live in a house with garden, beautiful nature close enough to actually go camping for the weekends, and friendly and approachable people."

I'm going to guess: high housing prices, population density killing nature & unfriendly people. Given that this is HN, I'd add "government and population actively hostile to entrepreneurship" on top of it.

You should talk to other people who emigrated, though. One of my friends did, and they found for example that they could hardly afford child daycare because that isn't subsidized in the States, unlike Belgium. There are probably multiple such small surprises lurking.
Building a virtual human with your data
We've been here before, 20 years ago, in the "Spycatcher" trial. The UK sued to suppress information from the book which had been printed in Australia from making it into the UK newspapers. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october/13/...

United Kingdom vs. Observer (sister paper to the Guardian) is worth reading at this point: http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/sites/eng/pages/search.aspx?i=001-...

" These two newspapers had for some time been conducting a campaign for an independent investigation into the workings of the Security Service. The details given included the following allegations of improper, criminal and unconstitutional conduct on the part of MI5 officers:

(a) MI5 "bugged" all diplomatic conferences at Lancaster House in London throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s, as well as the Zimbabwe independence negotiations in 1979;

(b) MI5 "bugged" diplomats from France, Germany, Greece and Indonesia, as well as Mr Kruschev’s hotel suite during his visit to Britain in the 1950’s, and was guilty of routine burglary and "bugging" (including the entering of Soviet consulates abroad);

(c) MI5 plotted unsuccessfully to assassinate President Nasser of Egypt at the time of the Suez crisis;

(d) MI5 plotted against Harold Wilson during his premiership from 1974 to 1976;

(e) MI5 (contrary to its guidelines) diverted its resources to investigate left-wing political groups in Britain."

(a) and (b) are basically the same as some of Snowden's allegations: diplomatic meetings are bugged.

(c) is a routine violation of international law, although to be fair we were trying to invade Suez at the time;

(d) is MI5 trying to overthrow our democratic government, straightforward totalitarianism;

(e) is still going on, and Scotland Yard are involved as well (e.g. the deeply embedded undercover officers in the Green movement).

The judgement eventually held that MI5 attempting to block the publication of Spycatcher was a human rights violation. I would expect a similar result in an ECHR trial about attempts to block Snowden's leaks, if such a trial happened.
By the way, there're very effective cleansers with ammonia eating bacteria that get rid of cat's urea smell.
For an earlier, non-stultifying version of the site with an actually usable, tablet-scrollable wordpress theme, see:

https://web.archive.org/web/20121114212050/http://jeremykun....

Great content, otherwise. But I swear all this 'web 3.0' gimmickry has set the web back at least a decade.
Some additional info about a virtual heart here too: http://www.sth.nhs.uk/news/news?action=view&newsID=610
The Long Goodbye? China, The World Bank, and The American Century
That would help up to a point, but there also ongoing research to manufacture it using recombinant techniques - that is, genetically engineering bacteria to produce the required protein product and then purifying it out. Then your limiting factor is a reproducible manufacturing process rather than availability of human sources.

This is akin to how, for example, insulin and human growth hormone are now produced; previously they also lacked scalability due to having to be sourced from cadavers.

So yes right now it's not scalable, but in the future this limitation will hopefully be corrected.
Panda 4.0: Why eBay lost many of its organic rankings
Agreed. The first step to fixing any vague/grey problem is calling it by its real name. If only we could hold our politicians to such a standard, patent reform wouldn't be an issue as it'd already be fixed.
Out of the 4 things listed here, in the US the only one that's "normal" is a 40h workweek.

5 weeks of vacation is a lot unless you are really senior or pulled a lot of strings. 2weeks is the average "base" here.

Solid health insurance is usually expensive.

Public schools are "free" but you are going to have to pay for college. I don't know of any completely free colleges anywhere in the country. (Not saying there aren't any, but I've never heard anyone talk about a good one.)
How long is your hair? I have a LOT of shoulder-length hair and I'm just not sure if I can clean that amount of hair with just water and no soap.

Also, you say "no one noticed I stopped using [soap]", but then you talk about a temporary increase in BO which "takes 1-4 weeks before [..] you become less smelly".

Which one is it?

Did you stay indoors for the first month? Or did people just not comment on it maybe?

I tried the no shampoo thing some years ago (my hair was shorter), my then-girlfriend did in fact comment (after I tried it for at least a couple of weeks) that my hair was more greasy (it was definitely not "much nicer"). Got a bit of irritated scalp too. I didn't feel very clean either, as if I was just smearing the hair-grease onto the rest of my body in the shower.

I felt a bit of resistance typing the above things. Are we sure it's not just confirmation bias? Because I can imagine people this experiment, IF they have success, they will report "my hair is so much nicer", but guess what, who is going to report "Yeah so I stopped using soap and shampoo, and surprisingly, my hair got greasier and dirtier, and you know the weirdest thing? I kept this up for a period of time and it didn't get better!", because people will just respond "um yeah, so take a shower already".

I have no problems with the idea, really. And I did try it, because I wanted it to work (no soap? sure! saves me having to find one that smells okay), several times even. But my experience just hasn't been very good. That's my empirical inquiry.

Actually I still want it to work, so maybe you tell me what I did wrong?
Go to the US for an extended vacation (month or so), interview with as many companies as you can, and find one that will sponsor an H1-B visa. It'll be hard, but it's worth it.
SensaBubble: a chrono-sensory mid-air display of sight and smell
(1) This defence ("just following orders") did not fly at Nuremberg; just because it's in UK statute doesn't mean it's not a human rights violation.

(2) This depends on whether you count Special Branch as a UK intelligence service or not.
I'm an EU citizen as well and I have to agree with you, aside from all you've mentioned plus winning a green card - moving to US is anything but trivial.
Interesting, I hadn't seen that link, thanks.

The reflective dependency injection is actually one of the biggest things that drew me to Martini initially. My usual Node framework of choice, Bogart, recently added this feature and, having just wrapped up a 2-month project with it, I didn't run into the problem that Jeremy (codegangsta) expressed in that post:

> [..] Martini allows you to inject all the things and that leads to a level of indirection that, while modular, requires a certain amount of cognitive overhead to fully understand what is actually going on.

To the contrary, I actually found that it made me juggle much less in my head. I know exactly where something is being injected (since they all get injected in one place), and I know generally what types of things we inject as dependencies, so the questions "Is this available as a dependency?" and "Should I inject this as a dependency?" are very easy to answer. This makes composing the application (and each route) a much smoother experience.
When I read that I thought: South of France, Spain, Portugal, Italy. Any one of those would solve the majority of those wishes, and would be a lot easier to get into than the US.

The problem is that no country is perfect. You can't get 'free daycare', 'good weather', 'affordable fresh food', 'beautiful nature close by', 'free healthcare', 'friendly and approachable people', '5 weeks of holiday' and 'free education' all in one serving. (Though I believe strongly that friendly and approachable people can be found anywhere, it's a bit of a reflection on how you are usually.)

I say that as someone that has lived in a lot of different countries. (.nl, .pl, .ca, .ro and a bunch of others besides but too short to consider relevant in this context).
There are many southern EU countries where he would get all those things (sunshine, fresh vegetables, cheap housing, beautiful nature) without having to worry about immigration. I think he could look for a remote job from the UK - should be easy already having connections there - and then move to Southern EU.
"Host your own GitHub" using Gitlab and Dokku
> high housing prices

Yet they want to move to California.

http://www.hsh.com/finance/mortgage/salary-home-buying-25-ci...

I'm in the process of buying a house and am very glad I am not in California.
In that case, it's good to have some conventions but I agree that it takes a very small amount of carelessness for maintenance to become a PITA. I think using reactive templates which associate with a model is better than declaring every reaction on the DOM level though.
Where is the step forward? The drone requires a skilled pilot to fly it. The drone cannot knock on doors. It cannot navigate stair cases. The recipient is inconvenienced and must stand in an open place to receive the pizza.
I use ghostscript consistently more than ten years. No serious issues. I use it to read/print pdfs/pss from arxiv org. Last six years I also use sumatra. Faster but I prefer mupdf reader.
> She thinks we'll finally have some sunshine, lots of affordable fresh food, perhaps live in a house with garden, beautiful nature close enough to actually go camping for the weekends, and friendly and approachable people.

That sounds kind of like Italy. Maybe not as much sunshine as California here up north, but it's certainly better than the UK or Belgium from that point of view.

Of course, the economy is in the tank, but maybe you can work remotely or something.

Going to the US is not easy: you'll have to find a company willing to hire you.

That said, if it's what you want, don't let the naysayers get in your way - go on a vacation there, travel around some, meet people, see what day to day life is like, and then go for it! It's not perfect, but there's a lot of good stuff there - much more than some of the haters here give it credit for.

Some people work crazy hours, many people don't. As someone who is likely to have a good job, you'll have decent health care, even if the system is a bit screwy.

Edit: a few other places to check out might be:

* Colorado (Boulder, Denver, Ft. Collins). Snowy, but still quite a bit of sun. If I ever went back to the US, this is high on my list of places to check out.

* Austin, Texas. I don't know much about it, but it's supposed to be a nice place, and definitely sunny/hot.

* Bend or Ashland in Oregon. Not as sunny as California, and cold in the winters. Not as many jobs either, but nice smallish towns.
Presumably what would happen in that case is that the parent company would sell the patent to the shell company, who would then just sell it back as soon as there was any threat that a victim was going to fight it in court.

It's still an improvement, but I'm sure that there are plenty of even cleverer ways to get around this than my off-the-cuff guess.
My all time favourite place in North America is Europe.

I am a European. I lived in US for two years, I lived in Canada for 15. I also lived in Sweden and Japan. States are good because it's just one big Walmart - everything is ridiculously cheap, but what it gets in quantity it tends to lose in quality. Canada in this respect is somewhat better, but it has the same problem - it feels ... I don't know ... diluted? Too much stuff, too little substance. It is nice, it is comfortable and affordable, but - and I am dumbing it down considerably - you can't get a decent croissant, because nobody simply gives a shit about getting them right.

On the other hand, the grass is always greener on the other side. If you move, you will have at least a couple of years of excitement and novelty.

PS. And generally working too much and not enjoying life is in fact the biggest lifestyle issue in States and Canada. No better manifested by the fact that most of the restaurants are there for eating and not for socializing.
Er... Yes.
More blogspam. Again. This account seems only ever to post links to this site, quite consistently at about 1 or 2 per day, and they only ever appear to be copies of something else.

Please, stop spamming.
> we'll finally have some sunshine

You will and you'll also have the chance to discover the difference between excess and moderation.

> lots of affordable fresh food

The food is either affordable or good.

> live in a house with garden

More like a house with a mandatory lawn in a region hit by a very serious drought. You might also want to ask about the rules imposed by the homeowners association and whoever rents you the house.

> beautiful nature close enough to actually go camping for the weekends

Yes, if you like deserts and you want to live in SoCal. Note that "close" has a different meaning on that side of the pond.

> friendly and approachable people

Maybe at first. With time you realize that the friendliness is a form of politeness that hides fear, distrust and greed.
Unfortunately you don't just "go and work" in the US, it doesn't work like the EU. Unless you're a hot commodity and you can convince Google et al to pay for your visa ($tens of thousands) and then winning the H-1B visa lottery, you will have a tough time.
The cost of living in the tech-scene areas are outrageous and skyrocketing, those are the facts. The sun-shine California lifestyle can be quite nice you'll need to be prepared to pay out the wazoo. Don't believe it ? Prove me wrong, start looking at the Bay Area rental market.
He can always send the daughter (and any other kids) back to Europe for college, it's (mostly) free (for citizens) here.
The intransigence that Gruber gets so much flack for is largely limited to asking people that make a text processor incompatible with Markdown to not use the name.

I haven't researched carefully to figure out if he coined the word, but if he did his request is pretty reasonable.
I lived three years in Sardinia and it is almost perfect in those respect, if you don't have to worry about finding a job locally. And it also has very cheap flights with the UK.