skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First of all, I reject the premise of this article:

> Markdown (.MD) is a text format that lazy people use to write HTML.

This is just blatantly false. Markdown was never intended to replace HTML.

Second, the author points how how "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is not very legible. I completely agree. However, this is contrived example that you are unlikely to encounter in practice. Just as it would be unlikely someone would mix bold and italics so closely in "real" formatted text.

The author then goes on to say that

> Lets face it, even Programmers don't like reading raw Markdown and so in the most popular .MD repository of them all - github - the Markdown files are rendered in the browser as nicely formatted HTML.

As a programmer, I actually really enjoy reading Markdown files. While it is true that it can be made more visually appealing for inclusion in a website like what happens on GitHub, it is great to have a somewhat standardized format that makes it pleasant to read those same files when you aren't browsing the files online. While I would bring up browsing files from the command-line here, the author seems to have a strong dislike for those of us who dabble in the black magic that is the shell.

All this aside, it is true that Markdown is not the right tool for everyone, and that the toolchain does not necessarily make it easy for beginners to get started writing all of their documents in Markdown. However, try to make someone open a Word document without Word, and see how easy that is. The lack of (beginner friendly) tooling is definitely not a sign of a poor format.

Finally, the author ends with

> However, if you have heard that there is this cool format available and it cures all your textual needs and it is just really really easy to use and really really quick...then think about the elixir you are being offered and re-read this document before slurping away...

a) it is not a new format
b) it never claims to cure all your textual needs - it aims to make it easier to create formatted text, where previously there was none
c) it is, without a doubt, really really easy, and really really quick, because any plain text document is valid Markdown. All Markdown does is attempt to standardize some (already fairly common) methods for applying *simple* formatting to that text.

While the author bashes Markdown's lack of standardization, the cases that are brought up by CommonMark are more important for implementors than for writers, and "regular" users will likely find the informal language description more than satisfactory for common usage.

TL;DR: The author is hating on Markdown, mostly due to incorrect assumptions and seemingly a personal dislike for plain-text formats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_of_presence
Storage for AngularJS done right
Point of Presence, I believe.
Ok, we changed the title to something close to that but with more language from the article itself.

If that's not good enough we can edit it again.
> Markdown isn't designed for creating HTML

reasons:

* a third party tool produces different results from other third party tools

* the chosen third party tool works from the command line

* because un-official docs say so

its document markup specifically to be rendered to html, its not html abstraction, if it was html abstraction, it would be looking like haml instead

- - -

"![]()" doesn't look like an image, "![the motions of several cogs](/imgs/several_cogs.gif)" does, and would be really hard to mistake for anything else

thats like complaining about the use of brackets in C by just saying, "`{([])}` looks unreadable, doesn't it?"

- - -

"Markdown is good for limited use cases. Use it for README files on github." and yet you just spent an entire blog post complaining about that exact series of use cases

zero alternatives mentioned to complaints raised, pre-emptive insults against those who might have issue with a poor article
Right and I don't know the specifics of this situation so I really shouldn't conjecture.

Clearly the company didn't feel they had the option to take more time to decide. If that's the case that's on us and we can do better. I will absolutely assert though that if they needed the time they could have had it.
Appcache is a completely different feature that existed in Meteor long long time ago.

The new feature that works in Phonegap integration is storing the application data in App's local storage (not browser's). Not only these files are accessible before the browser is loaded but also they don't need to be downloaded first time, the initial code is shipped with the standard app bundle.

(I work at Meteor on this exact feature)
Woah! I'm glad I closed my accounts with Chase this weekend. I can't say that they have better security, but IAFCU[1] is a much smaller target.

[1]: https://iafcu.org
Ask HN: Technical Contact at Airbnb
Hi,

Hoping someone here might be help able to get me an email address to talk to someone in operations or development at Airbnb.

Happy to give more details privately but I could use an open line of communication with someone there.

Thanks!
Windows 10 (Threshold) Changes to the Windows Command Prompt
I'd add that emotion cannot be uncoupled from some policy decisions. A wonderful example is gay marriage. There is no "data" one can fit to decide whether it is right or wrong to permit/recognize as valid. If all US states decided to legalize gay marriage or ban it, there is no way anyone could decide whether it was a "net benefit" to society, mostly because homosexuals are a minority of the population. The rights of any minority, granted they are small enough to be but a ringing ontop of your signal, it shouldn't matter if you are just thinking like a utilitarian.

So, from whence comes individual rights? The usual argument is, "imagine if that were you!"--that's empathy. More seriously, we guarantee individual rights for others because that means we have them for ourselves.

This leads to my second point: I think the reason empathy even is a thing is that we are inherently selfish, and for anything to be really done for the "greater good" individuals need to either have a stake in that greater good or they need to trick their selfish selves into thinking they are actually in that situation too, which, again is empathy.

Empathy works for the most part. It sounds like the author is trying to fix something that isn't broken. I'd say the current problems in Washington are in fact a lack of both listening to data _and_ a lack of empathy. I think more empathy would be beneficial, not detrimental.
This is a layoff in disguise. The high-quality employees have better options, and will leave. The clueless ones can be dealt a termination letter after they move, when they're not keeping up with their newer, Bay Area-er, trendier competitors^H^H^H coworkers.
my early years were spent about ten miles from green bank. this was before cell phones, but we did have a little bit of radio and broadcast tv.

there was an interesting article a few years ago about the guy in charge of patrolling it.

http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/12.02/quiet.html
Yep, that's what the randomness is for, and you can also add entropy by randomizing the time before the dialog starts to present he user with the "emergency connect mode instructions" which explain the disconnect/reconnect process.

Plus, 99% of the time the user is not plugging in a HID device, so the "unrecognized input device" dialog can be made ominous enough that users will realize something is very strange about that one USB stick.
The New, Beautiful Evernote Web
And has a much smaller information security budget, but many of the same vulnerabilities as Chase....
I'll agree markdown has some strengths and weaknesses. The image syntax is terrible, and even the link syntax is a little iffy. But the bullets and the bolding? Yes, it's excellent, it does exactly what it needs to be. Whenever I need a user to give me rich text for something, I tell them about Markdown. No worries about all the font and styling screw-ups from a word document where the user has pasted text.

"I need the user to give me plain text but they also need bold, hyperlinks, and bullets" is the use-case for markdown. It does this fine. It could do things better, but it does its job fine.

I have had users get annoyed, however, that _underscore_ doesn't underline.
I have a friend who runs a fairly large produce distribution business. According to him it is not uncommon for sellers to simply change the label to "organic" on regular (non-organic) produce. This gives them an easy mark-up and more profit. Also they tend to market the ugliest produce that they wouldn't be able to sell elsewhere as "organic", so the quality tends to be lower, too.

I know it's not scientific, and I can't give any actual numbers, but I trust his opinion.
I feel that this lecture generated less comments (maybe less upvotes too) than the previous lectures. I would guess that this is because we might think we are "so over all of this". I mean, we all think we already know this "get out of the building" and "talk to your customers". We think "c'mon, this is so basic, we are more sophisticated than that". And I think this is a mistake.

Underestimating this initial process, taking it for granted, we create the perfect environment to trick ourselves in not doing it. We might tell ourselves that our product is a SaaS for a very specific crown that we can only find online, and there is no street fair or postal office where we can find them. We might tell ourselves that a $100 Facebook Ads campaign is good for testing our assumptions. Or that is not necessary to get really immersed on our industry, because we already know what is wrong and how to solve.

These are all little lies that convince ourselves that our particular context is different. Sure it is. Sure you might not find your customers on the streets, but that is no excuse to not talk online to your customers, be constant presence on a forum, and arrange meetings with those who happens to be on your city.

Most of advice for startups out there are for those who already have some traction, a few employees. So people might skip the skills and attitude necessary to go from 0 to 100 users or customers. This is the perfect lecture for this crowd.
Markdown has basically kinda won the Plain Text Format War but man sometimes I really wish it had used the "enclose text between slashes" format for /italics/. Enclosing text between asterisks is for bold. Enclosing text between two asterisks before and after is for... what? Who writes that out in plain text areas? Nobody. Nobody except Gruber.
Thanks - that's always been my guiding tenant as an entrepreneur - start a business that makes money right away.

Our primary marketing is currently focused on the business owner, since they're the one that pays us for the subscription. However, we are launching a feature that lets buyers refer other businesses in exchange for Amazon gift cards ("Like buying this way? Tell your other suppliers!")

Good thought on going after the 4HWW community - this is perfect for a sub-10 employee business that doesn't have a lot of manpower to waste on pushing paper.
My conspiracy theory, it's all a move to make Reddit attractive as a major Yahoo acquisition. Yahoo is getting an injection of billions from Alibaba and has been on a tear with acquisitions. Moving everyone to SV makes for an easier acquisition (especially from a company that doesn't want remote workers anymore).
This is a great response. Thanks!
So I'm gonna smoke this blunt and move on

If I was his defence lawyer I'd try to play it off like a big stoned misunderstanding. Whoops dropped my blunt into the server room!
What's crazy is that you think using light gray as a text color is a good idea.
Then the valuable commodity would become directories of worthwhile content. You would have people doing deep dives into the crap to find the locations of a few good pieces to share with their buddies or trade.
Because no one understands, so no one cares. Target and Home Depot didn't take any hit to their stock prices being the two biggest data breeches in a row. At worst, it registers as a minor inconvenience.

I dropped Linode after they showed me multiple times I couldn't trust them with my data or my money. People still recommend them, trust them, and even try to convince people to come back because the breech of trust wasn't that bad. Even in the tech world where people should know the impact and should care, no one really does.
Made for touch
Tumeric might also help with Alzheimers
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3665200/

and Herpes (HHV-6) might effect the progression of Alz
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23916950
I'm sorry, Danilo. I did not realize that you personally felt marginalized. That certainly puts my comments, and your reaction to them, in a new light. My sincere apologies.

The story I got from your public persona was that you came up from nothing to be a web programmer who calls the Bay Area home. That story could describe me.

I hope you will forgive me for my incorrect assumptions.
An Overview of General Performance Metrics of Binary Classifier Systems [pdf]
so we got nothing to worry about?
Or maybe a way of clawing back shares of the company now that new money is coming in? Not sure what kind of deal early Redditors got, but getting them to quit in frustration with a move and give up whatever options/ownership/etc. could be a possibility.
The root problem here is that every HTML WYSIWIG editor (from MS Word to TinyMCE) uses their own special blend of tags when creating HTML. There's only a handful of tags that are generated by Markdown, the problem is that editors often don't use standard tags (e.g. <span class="bold">) or they try to do too much and enable every feature that exists in HTML. This causes an absolute mess where one editor can't really parse another's output. (Sometimes the web based ones have trouble dealing with their own markup - turning HTML into a write-only language akin to regex).

Markdown is just a horrible solution to this problem. Rather than 'Common Markdown' there really needs to be 'Common Markup' which strictly limits the tags WYSIWYG editors use. This would enable true interop and solve the real issue for most people who could - like the author pointed out - see the formatting they were using.

Think of it as the equivalent of ASM.js for markup - only the core tags (the ones Markdown uses) would be used, and only in a specific way. That would speed up parsing, processing and display and none of us would have to remember if adding a link uses () or [] first again (I always get it backwards).
WordPress Blog Theme Bundle
> But you can bet that when (not if) a breach of the NSA happens, it will never be reported to the public.

A security breach of the NSA has happened (obviously referring to Edward Snowden). It wasn't just user data either, but thousands confidential documents about nearly everything the NSA was doing.

Given the simplicity of his attack, and the fact he would of gone by undetected had he not disclosed those documents to media sources, it seems probable that important data has been stolen from the NSA in the past.
Authors usually don't get to pick the titles of their articles. That's the editor's job and they try to pick headlines which will attract readers.
> risk that it has oxidized

Always worth it to bite down on a couple pills every so often and check. Use those rancid sensors built in by nature. It's oil after all. If it tastes bad, it's gone bad.
Okay, after reading the OP, explain
something to me, because so far I just
don't get it!

That is, from all I can see, the situation in the
OP, admittedly only from an accelerator, is much like that in essentially all early stage VC firm equity funding. That is, I'm failing to see how "both sides of the table"
have much chance of shaking hands.

Why? As in the case of the OP, from all I can see,
and as mentioned in the OP, to be considered for
any funding at all, even via an accelerator, the
startup needs to have a product that has traction
in the market with that traction growing.

Before that traction, the guys with the checkbooks are not
interested.
After that traction, like the guys in the OP, I
wonder why the heck they would want to take
the term sheet, deal details, check, Delaware C Corp.,
Board of Directors, etc. instead of just growing,
as in the OP, "organically".

Sure, I can imagine some exceptions, but
the OP company was just two guys.
More over, in the currently running
Stanford course by Sam Altman and YC,
the strong advice is to have
2-3 founders for a long time and be
very slow to hire anyone.

So, the OP company had two founders,
traction significant and growing,
and, thus, qualified for some funding
but with so few founders likely
had a Ramem noodle level expenses
and some revenue maybe free cash flow.

So, why take an equity check and all that
comes with it instead of just continuing
to grow organically?

Or, net, in simplest terms, it appears that
by the time a startup, based on information
technology and software where the product
exists and has traction and was developed by a team of just 2-3, qualifies
for funding, it will rarely still want or need it.

So, I'm losing just where the guys with the
checkbooks expect to find startups they
want to fund that will take the funding?

Yes, I can think of some rare exceptions,
but otherwise, again, I'm not
getting it on how anyone could
expect the two sides of the table to
do a deal?
It's not that Californians are awful, it's that direct democracy is awful. It's a noble idea that time and time again has proven to be a horrible idea.
I just don't understand why people seem to be so worked up about this. It must just hit really close to home on sites like this.

Look, I love remote working and I almost always find myself on the side of workers in any management v workers debate. But I find it very difficult to get worked up about the plight of folks who are likely making 60k+/yr. And much more if they are in a tech-focused role.

Reddit loses money. Does everyone just expect them to continue on with no changes forever? And where's the HN outrage when a factory closes down?
No sympathy on reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2i5df4/til_th...
"You mad bro?" comes to mind.

Successful rants provide solutions at the end. Otherwise, its just that, a rant that has no real meaning at all other than allowing you to vent - like this post.

Feel better (I do).
I can relate to your long division example. In grade school my mom helped[1] me put in a ridiculous amount of effort in order to get through my school's spelling tests. I have come to believe that the reason that I couldn't spell was because at the time I did not understand the rules behind how the letters form together to get words. Simply memorizing how words are spelled took a lot of painful practice.

A more recent example is when I was first learning lambda calculus I wanted to understand how church encoding worked to allow basic integer operations with just function abstraction and application. Most of the operators are easy except for predecessor, which is absolutely nightmarish to get on your own. I tried memorizing the definition I found on wikipedia for over a year to no avail, but once I understood how it was working ...

pred = λ n . λ f . λ v.
n ( λ a . λ b . b (a f) )
λ k . v
λ i . i

I haven't yet forgotten what it is.

[1] - well, basically dragged me kicking and screaming

EDIT: formatting
This experiment seems to prove the exact opposite to what they are saying.

Obviously many/most? animals have evolved group behaviours that benefit their species over other species which in turn benefits themselves.

Often these behaviours are not directly related to propagating their own genes ie protecting someone else's kid or having enough poison in you to scare something that kills you into not eating others like you.

How are these spiders different?

The 'group' that was suited to the environment failed.

This to me proves that groups don't evolve. If it was the group that evolved and not the individual then the group suited to the environment would have survived.

Instead it reverted back to combined individual behaviour.

The individuals had evolved to their environment and had genetic behaviour that allowed them in their natural environment to work as a team for the success of all members as per usual. Put them into another environment and they fail because their personal evolution was not perfected for that environment.
Yahoo's acquisition of Tumblr has been seen has a flop. http://fortune.com/2014/10/02/yahoo-tumblr-acquisition-flop/

Mayer may have already played her hip-internet-company-with-no-revenues-acquisition card.
Why do you suspect that? I was an openbsd developer. I am quite familiar with their workflow, and cvs suits it perfectly well. There is virtually no gain for them to move to git, and a ton of pain.
I was a founder of a company in the TS Chicago class this summer.

I can tell you that this letter of intent was one and a half pages long, contained a simple, bulleted list of documents required for due diligence, and explained the structure of the funding and program.

Additionally, there is a very clear line that indicates that they are willing to extend the deadline provided you give a reason.

Finally, this document is not the formal acceptance of anything related to the program.

I would suggest that "demand[ing] it back" using "high pressure sales techniques" is a strong overstatement.
Just a friendly reminder that India follows metric system.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=reddit#!/story/sort_by_date/0/redd...
I totally get what you're saying, I guess I just have different values (for lack of a better term) where this stuff is concerned. My ideal job would have me bouncing between different operating systems, hardware, and languages all the time. For career reasons, and just to feed my curiosity, I have a fear of getting too comfortable with any one workflow/language/OS/etc. Plus familiarity breeds contempt- every time I thought I found the perfect anything, it was only because I hadn't been using it long enough to hit any of the pain points.

I've come to feel really strongly that there is no one right answer when it comes to those things. Sometimes there are wrong answers (I wouldn't write a word processor for a desktop OS in assembly if I didn't have to), but rarely is there ever one right answer, and there's usually something to be learned from all of the viable alternatives. If I get too used to one particular environment, to the point where I refuse to use anything other than that one environment, then I would feel like I was missing out on a lot of cool stuff by ignoring the rest of the computing world.

The other side of it is that I've also come to feel really strongly that a lot of the tweaks and optimizations that people swear by and obsess over with (for example) their editor configs aren't actually improving efficiency. When I've gotten into deep configuration and automation and optimally efficient usage of vim or emacs, it felt like I was more efficient, but in hindsight I don't think I actually was. I might've saved a few keystrokes here and there, but at most the extra keystrokes I shaved off were annoyances, and not meaningful impediments to my efficiency. I spent so much more time learning how to shave off those few keystrokes that it's unlikely that I'll ever get it back via repeated usage of what I learned.

That's just me though, everybody's got different motivations for why they do what they do. I would like to think that all of the above comes from hard-earned experience, but it's just as likely to be my own preferences and values. When you get super old like me, you get to pass off your personal preferences as genuine wisdom learned the hard way over many long years. :)