skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The truth is more shaded than saying they held back the web. What I remember is that IE 5 came out in 1999, and was a significantly better browser than netscape 4, which was my favorite browser at the time. So, netscape had an inferior product. Meanwhile microsoft also decided to bundle IE with windows, for free, on all new PC's. So netscape had a worse product and worse user acquisition. If you're a startup in that position, what is the logical thing to do? Well, netscape decided the most logical thing was to start a multi-year rewrite of their entire product, with the goal of having an identical UI, but a fresh codebase. IMHO, it is fair to say microsoft helped netscape into the grave, but it is also fair to say netscape did much of the walking.

So, from about 2000 until about 2006 IE was the only game in town because there just weren't any viable competitors (well, ok, there was opera, but...). Looking around and noticing they didn't have competition, microsoft figured they didn't need to iterate their product, so they didn't.

Now, this will sound strange to say now, but IE 6 had the best standards support, in 2001. However, it also had a lot of proprietary features which made things easy to do that were hard to do using W3C standards, which as standards tend to be weren't as developer-friendly as they could have been (I still think CSS's layout model is a big mistake). Web developers being web developers they couldn't resist those features to build stuff quicker, and they ended up building a lot of IE-only sites, which created the legacy which we are still battling today. And that made it very hard for upstart browsers like firefox to gain marketshare.

Now, again IMHO, it is fair to say microsoft did nothing to discourage people from using those proprietary features and getting locked into a dead-end platform. However, it is also fair to say you could and can build a standards-compliant codebase which is IE 6 compatible so developers were helping the jailer put on the chains.

I think blaming it all on MS is easy but inaccurate. It was a shared blame across netscape, microsoft and the web development community of the early 2000's, which ended up in a stagnated browser market from 2000 to 2005/2006.
It's striking to see how many people rejecting pg's thesis seem not to have read it very carefully. His piece has a lot more nuance than the comments would lead you to believe. Specifically, he's referring to an emerging trend within a specific domain, making historical counter-examples - especially those drawn from other domains - hardly disproves the point.

If you're one of those HN readers who habitually check the comments before deciding whether to read the piece, know that this normally reliable filter is not working here.
Contracts aren't inviolate. When you contract with an entity to receive money in the future, you always take on the risk that the entity will discharge the obligation in bankruptcy. And people who have unsecured obligations, like pensioners, would normally be low on the totem pole in bankruptcy.

Ultimately, there's an inter-generational conflict. Voter participation at the state and municipal level is low, and its not inaccurate to say that the pensioners voted themselves these unsustainable benefits, and also voted not to put money away to fund them. Why should our generation come along and pick up the difference?
The zeroes have a slash through them on my browser - does yours not have that?
Nobody? In the last few years, Charter has gone from a few Mb/s downloads to 100Mb and my monthly price has been cut in half and there are no data caps.
Good job, you made a review site? Sorry I know I sound negative but you made a simple review site for domain registrars in an attempt to make commissions from those registrars, and then attempt to get people to refer others to those registrars through you to get commissions.

Unique, new, or innovative? No

Better than current solutions for finding reviews on domain registrars? No

A simple attempt to earn affiliate commissions with a review site? Yes -- this concept has been around forever in the affiliate world.

Not sure why this link is on hacker news...

My personal advice would be to spend your personal time on something actually productive.
Am I the only one that is annoyed that this doesn’t use RFC 5785¹ – i.e. /.well-known/humans.txt?

① https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5785
Thanks for this clarification. The TechCrunch title was obviously misleading, so we changed it.

Edit: we also changed the url from http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/28/nintendo-patents-game-boy-e... to a more substantive article that it points to.
Not true - 21 here, was only born in 1993. I'm aware of the disputes that have happened over time, especially arguments with Netscape / Jobs / etc. Microsoft has a pretty interesting and rich history, and I was extremely surprised about the recent open source announcements. I read somewhere they actually have an open source branch, it's just not widely talked about, mainly because Windows overshadows it.
Also do not have a facebook account and was bummed to see my progress gone.
Abbreviating Huge and Minuscule Numbers with Math and JavaScript – Randomness
Scented and Unscented Pheromone Products for Men and Women
This implies that Markdown is designed as a language, which would have things like grammars and can be reasoned about with proofs and the lambda calculas etc.

Instead, Markdown should be thought of as a convention. A convention that allows for automated translation of ascii text into html. Further, instead of thinking of Markdown as designed think of it as evolved.

In the case of an evolved convention, we wouldn't expect formalism or even long term design. What we would expect and what Markdown is extremely good at is usefulness, high levels of adoption and ease of change. Which we do see. If your needs require formalism, or complex html features then Markdown is not the right tool for you.
Agreed - the only thing I have had issues with in the dark is my screen will not go dark enough when I'm in a pitch black room. I use programs like dimscreen, but they often take a lot away from the image when the laptop screen is at its lowest darkness
Simple selection queries for JavaScript objects
This comment breaks the Show HN guidelines. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html:

Be respectful. Anyone sharing work is making a contribution, however modest.

Ask questions out of curiosity. Don't cross-examine.

Instead of "you're doing it wrong", suggest alternatives.
When someone is learning, help them learn more.

When something isn't good, you needn't pretend that it is.
But don't be gratuitously negative.
I am excited, but I would rather wait until a Phase 3 result before getting my hopes up. Phase 1 is just to verify that the vaccine doesn't kill you all by itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_trial#Phases

It might also be good to remember some of the history around why this structure is in place.

The Battle to Beat Polio: http://youtu.be/qMRgQhbSyqs?t=18m50s
I also have a MacBook Air and I run my Linux (XUbuntu) desktop in a VM. I guess it depends on what you're doing but for me personally it works just fine. The Air has a compact size and a great screen. I don't think I could have gotten myself a better work laptop. I just wish they came with more memory (32 gig would be really nice).
> I'm actually the go-between at work between those people think are assholes and some people that are overly sensitive. I quietly hate the role I play and wish I didn't have to waste time trying to protect people from their emotions. It's exhausting.

Why do you do it, then? Stop. You're clearly ill-suited for the job and it's probably not what you're being paid to do.

> It's mentally taxing and expensive to deal with overly sensitive people who lose focus on the task at hand because they feel offended or hurt.

That's how a lot of people who work against sexism feel when they see posts like yours. Their task is to reduce sexism, but you get offended or hurt by the course of their work, so they're forced to deal with you. Can you imagine how mentally taxing and exhausting that is? It's not different from how you feel.

You're playing the victim card here. You're creating a massive waste of everyone else's time because you don't value the contributions that others make that aren't in open source.

> I wish you the best of luck, but what you shouldn't do is come into anyone else's house that they built and call them out on how they behave in their house.

Why not? If someone puts a sign on the door of their house that says, "Free candy!" and then enslaves and sells every person who comes through their door, is it wrong to stop them from continuing such a practice? Is such an act condoned merely through the act of their having built the house?

Now, of course, perhaps the house-builder does not engage in such actions. But then the question is whether or not you agree with the calling out of such actions. This is where you get into the question of whether or not you agree with sexist conduct.
You're more spot on than I'd wish you were. This is so sad.
> I don't think PG thinks about this kind of activity when he writes about startups

I'm confused by your comment. Sure Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle are older established companies but from everything I know about Apple and Microsoft their stories seem very much to fit the startup mold (don't know much about Oracle). And the other three Zynga, Facebook, and Uber are comparatively much more recent successes that definitely took the standard seed funding to VC route and embody everything you would think of as a modern startup.

So you're saying that this doesn't apply to super successful startups? Honestly that's not been my experience, both personally and from plenty of stories I've heard from the more "modest" startups that have been successful but not on the same grandiose scale these companies have been.
If you like this, you'll also like Wiio's laws: https://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/wiio.html
This new site is super-awesome and challenging, but a great thing about the hexagonal grid in "A Regular Crossword" was that each hexagon was constrained by three intersecting regular expressions rather than two. That meant that the constraints could be trickier or vaguer in some ways, and comparatively more dependent on the sequence of elements within a regular expression rather than on the process of elimination between two intersecting sets.
You can still have simpler table syntax that's nice to read but easier to maintain. For my own markup language (http://breuleux.net/quaint_demo/) I implemented this syntax:

+ Name + Occupation
| Alice | Accountant
| Bob | Baker
| Charles | Car salesman

Headers are easier to make and the last column does not require a trailing marker. It's still some work to align columns other than the last, but that's not a requirement and I'd still much rather have a non-aligned ASCII table than nothing at all.
> I can't help but think he deliberately held the internet back for 6 or 7 years for his own profit. You almost can't start calculating the damage he caused precisely because it is so mind boggling.

That's 7 years less of internet and technological perspective he gets to experience in his mortal life, if that's actually the case.

It depends on what you think is more valuable. Are you working in tech for tech? Or are you working in tech to make money? Just because these people made a lot of money, doesn't make them totally knowledgeable about all tech.

I think as long as you give ideas openly, you get ideas back. You teach people about tech, you learn about tech back. People who get greedy are fucking themselves in one way or another. With all that fame, independence, and achievement comes a lot of opportunity to miss developing a sense of humility, social connection, and interpersonal growth.

But, I think there is a cautious difference we must make here. There is a difference between meanness, and the attempt to make fair judgments - diplomacy. The position of a person who has to decide the fate of their company and the effects that has cascading down human generations on technology and human growth in general, is not in an easy position to be in. If these were simple problems, we would see simple answers.

It is easy to look back at people's decisions in retrospect and criticize. It's hard to make those decisions when you are actually there. It's hard to empathize with people that seem like assholes, but I wonder if they have difficult empathizing with themselves. We get to see a sliver of who these people are, and that sliver is distorted through a chorus of echoes across culture.
No, I meant a "markup language". And you're right -- Markdown is not "a means of communicating information"; it's a script that converts one form of information to another.
That's quite right, although the "doormat" sentiment is also true:

https://www.gnu.org/events/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.html

"But the other issue I was thinking about was, I wanted to give the community a feeling that it was not a doormat, a feeling that it was not prey to any parasite who would wander along. If you don't use copyleft, you are essentially saying: [speaking meekly] “Take my code. Do what you want. I don't say no.” So, anybody can come along and say: [speaking very firmly] “Ah, I want to make a non-free version of this. I'll just take it.” And, then, of course, they probably make some improvements, those non-free versions might appeal to users, and replace the free versions. And then, what have you accomplished? You've only made a donation to some proprietary software project."

RMS felt that what would make him a "doormat" was if his code ended up in a proprietary program, not if someone made money from it.
I'm not trying to make an ultimatum - there will definitely be exceptions, as I pointed out myself. But if you ask around, most people in that demographic won't know about the story of MS, won't have seen stuff like the Gates deposition video, etc. The most you'll get is a vague notion of Microsoft being called evil by greybeards.
I strongly doubt you ever tried to make a site work in Netscape 3. If you'd nest layers (yes, the <layer> tag) more than 2 levels, random stuff would break.

You talk about APIs but really, if JS compat was your only problem you were a happy developer. It was the markup engine itself that was crap. IE's was simply also crap, just in a different way.
Thats where oss-security, and similar lists tend to be useful.

But to be honest once you've got an RSS to email/chat gateway you can subscribe to new releases and similar with ease. So you tend to find you're updated almost by accident.
So, can we deploy docker containers using BSD's jails?
That's just PR.
You do know about the 1930s phenomenon of diplomats and other prominenti flying home cooing about how Herr Hitler is greatly misunderstood? Personal acquaintance is not always a better way to judge someone's real character than the documentary evidence. Speaking of which: I'd have to dig to find the reference, but I've read (part of) a book by a psychologist at Microsoft. She stated that one of her official duties was to try to help people deal with their billg sessions. Pretty unusual even by the standards of high-level business meetings, yes? I feel embarrassed even mentioning SJ: let's begin with the 500-page official biography, which in turn corroborates (or sometimes just regurgitates) first-person accounts, books by fairly-well-regarded authors like Steven Levy and Michael S. Malone ... Are you meaning to include this kind of evidence under the category of 'media noise'?
Since getting ReText, a simple Markdown editor which can export to PDF, ODT and HTML, I notice I want to make many documents in it instead of using LibreOffice. As long as it doesn't need imagery but just normal text with formatting (chapters, bullet points, perhaps code examples, etc.), it's much easier to create and keep in version control. It's super light, in a text-based format no program will ever have issues with (try the "open" docx format in LibreOffice) and when sending it to others I just attach a pdf export.

Markdown as a spec may not be nailed down 100%, but as a practical thing to use it's very handy. There are implementation differences between StackOverflow and ReText, but those are details.
~10 years ago I introduced Textile markup at our student newspaper and they're still using it. Nobody complains about it. Some people write in Word first and then add the tags, but most writers just use the tags right away.

You're free to argue that these markup languages all suck, but this idea that it's impossible to get "normal people" to learn even a little bit of syntax, is preposterous – what about twitter #hashtags and @replies?
wikicreole.org don't work without www. Right link is http://www.wikicreole.org/
In my experience as entrepreneur and manager of a software company I believe one of the essential qualities as manager is to understand what is going to happen(predict) if people follow a path and DO NOT LET IT HAPPEN.

It is like controlling a RC hellicopter or quadcopter, you need to do very shuttle movements and is almost effortless. But if you let it to destabilize, the thing is hitting the ground hard and trying to fix it could make it worse.

If you leave someone working 6 months on something, you better control it correcting deviations soon, instead of just telling the person that all their work is worthless later.

People that avoid confrontation at all cost could make thing worse as when they are forced to act it is too late.
Thank you for such a good description of what you are doing. I am also trying to do mindfulness meditation but am only managing 15 or 20 minutes a day just now. It can be frustrating but occasionally (rarely for me) you notice something (almost) happening that makes it worthwhile. I think persistence is key. Reading this type of post helps me persevere.

I should also mention a good book I read recently about meditation, helping the author Tim Parks overcome increasingly chronic pain. The book is not only very funny in parts, it is also a beautiful description of mindfulness practice :

http://tim-parks.com/non-fiction/teach-us-to-sit-still/
Actually a surprisingly data-rich article, though a bit overly polemic...
This. All the benefits of markdown (and similar), with a decent toolchain, version control capabilities and exporting to various formats.
Ah, so you're one of these people who flag things you find objectionable on ideological grounds, rather than spam/idiocy/etc?

Because dissenting views should be silenced. I'm sure you think you're a nice guy too.
> my parents won't let me spend my pocket money on them

This sounds like a larger problem. Unless they're trying to get you to invest it or something "responsible," it seems like a red flag that someone as interested in computing as you appear to be would have parents stifling their learning.

On a more useful note, there are some good courses available on Coursera:

https://www.coursera.org/courses?query=algorithms&languages=...

Both the Stanford and Princeton intro courses there don't appear to require nonfree texts.

Also, I wouldn't worry about a course being "old." Algorithms don't really go out of style, outside of some advanced topics like concurrency and architecture-specific design. Algorithm texts from the last century (or perhaps even earlier, if you look at number theory work by ancient mathematicians) are totally useful and relevant today.
During the entire time that Microsoft held this so-called monopoly---which was at most a monopoly on the desktop, not the servers or networks that most people think of as comprising "the internet"---Linux and other unix-like OSes continually made progress and now power the vast majority of the systems that provide the internet and indeed the devices we use to access it (tablets and phones).

I'm not persuaded that Microsoft substantially held back the internet. IE of a decade ago was not a great browser by today's standards, but the hardware of the time could not have really supported the javascript-heavy apps that we take for granted today. I occasionally use gmail and google maps on a G4 powerbook with a "modern" browser (TenFourFox), and it's pretty painful. It almost feels like being back on a 48K dial-up ISP service. And let's not forget that Microsoft invented (or at least had the first browser support for) the scriptable XMLHttpRequest, the foundation for almost all of the asynchronous web apps that we use today. In fact way back in IE 5 (with the MSXML ActiveX plugin) you could build rich, responsive interfaces and asynchronous interaction using XML, XSLT, and scripting YEARS before you could do it in any other browser.
Ask HN: Windows port-knocking clients?
Are there any Windows port-knocking clients which are compatible with any port-knocking servers that run on Linux or FreeBSD?
Most operating systems will not idle on a sleep() call, as far as I remember. Since the server is executing multiple applications, it is very likely that the processor will be assigned to another running application. The only way to really know this would be to know the state of the specific process php is using for the request, which seems unfeasible in a production environment (except if you have admin of course).
You should read Microsoft's reply to the essay [0] which contains your arguments and PG's reply to it [1].

It's interesting to review claims from years ago and I think PG was largely right. Microsoft is not completely irrelevant (yet?) but they definitely lost the cultural war and moves like open sourcing .NET show that they want to join the old opponent's positions.

I'll add that I'm not sure if Microsoft's historical influence was evil. They prevented fragmentation and created a unified environment and probably enabled PC revolution.

[0] http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/04/since...
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/cliffsnotes.html
It doesn't make sense to replace Rails views completely in my view. There are parts of the app that are still being served by Rails views because they are not mission critical or have a great solution already in-place. Where React comes handy is when you have an interactive one-page app with a lot of moving parts. I have 2-3 React apps in this current project. Webpack is a great solution for packaging your css, js and other assets in logical units. I think it's much better than Sprockets, but it requires some configuration.
I've rarely met people he would be openly mean or hostile to others they consider their equal or above them. But watch how they treat people who they would perceive as beneath them and then you'll see if they really are an asshole or not.

I'm just really surprised PG didn't even mention or think about the fact that founders just might seem so nice because that's they way they choose to present themselves with someone with as much renown as himself. If I was sincerely trying to think about this critically that's the first thing that would pop into my mind.
It would probably save more lives to just legalize all drugs. Until drugs are legalized and quality controlled there will be no way for consumers to even know what they're getting.
Often its an issue of magnitude though. If someone wants to use a photo I've taken very small in the corner of a 200 page document, which forms part of a piece of work they have been paid by the government to do, its probably not objectionable. If someone however sells my software slightly tweaked and rebranded, its probably not OK.

There's a range of greys in there but the licencing is black and white.