skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> They are all as complicated if not more complicated than just writing HTML. They all have a bunch of rules and special cases. I'd rather just write in HTML which I already know.

I find that Markdown is significantly easier/faster to write than HTML and, more importantly, easier to read in its un-rendered form. To me (and presumably lots of other people, given Markdown's ubiquity) it's well worth learning the relatively small syntax.

Edit: Here's a quick comparison with a README.md from one of my projects:

Rendered: https://github.com/cespare/reflex/blob/master/README.md

Markdown: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cespare/reflex/master/READ...

HTML: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/cespare/ad6c41aa28583cac8...

Three things I notice from this example:

- The verbosity of an XML syntax with HTML is annoying, particularly the need for closing tags. <code>xyz</code stands out as particularly verbose (compared with `xyz`).

- Having to escape certain characters like &amp; makes this HTML sample harder to read (this is more of a problem with technical/code documents).

- Automatic linkification prevents stuttering: <a href="http://example.com">http://example.com</a>
An alternative conclusion (or perhaps an additional) would be that extremely successful business-people whom the public widely believes to be "mean" don't take great effort to prevent the public from believing this. Perhaps at a certain point of power there is a benefit to having a reputation for ruthlessness?
I would share this position.

Montreal has a particularly bad case going on, where for a large part of the 90s it showed on the city employees payslips that they were making pension contributions, but in reality the city just kept the money and said they'd pay it later (a "pension holiday"), but never did. The pensions in question do happen to be unreasonably large, but that was the problem that should have been dealt with at the time and not just kicked down the road. The city now want to get out of paying, which is a ludicrous position, in the same way that expecting new employees to get such generous pensions is insane.
"remember when is the lowest form of conversation" -Tony Soprano
Aside from traveling for job or survival, all other traveling is about the traveller, not the place the traveller goes to.

Aside from necessity, all else is narcissism. The question is what level is acceptable?

Like most things that don't threaten the herd, that's up to the individual.
Ha! Yes, perhaps we agree more than we realize, at least on something. :-)

Sorry I overreacted. Tell you what, leave the link and the hyperbole, no offense taken. And I'm going to take the opportunity to edit my comment above to be a bit less over the top in the response.
CommonMark doesn't really fix much given it's not so much a proper spec as a set of tests, and most big users (who wrote the spec!) aren't actually using CommonMark anyway.
From the landing page, I don't see any reason why I should choose you vs one of the established offers.

Especially since I only know that your cheapest offer is relatively expensive, but not what it actually offers (No, you don't get an e-mail adress from me just to figure that out).

Show your "magic" features, with videos/screenshots/demos, not just icons for them.
> Will Bill Gates ever make up for the billions of damage he caused humanity by using underhand tactics to destroy his opposition? Maybe. But while everyone praises him at the moment, 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.

I would be very interested if you could elaborate on the specifics of "the billions of damage he caused humanity" and "held the internet back for 6 or 7 years", these seem like rather extraordinary claims.
And how do you know you absolutely need to be an asshole when push comes to shove? Are you a great startup founder?

Not being mean here.
As a follow up, you'd be better protected if you DID have an employment agreement and things were spelled out. By not having one in this situation it puts you in a bad spot. Here's some more information that discusses this type of scenario: http://labor-employment-law.lawyers.com/employment-contracts...
This. Constraining the demon to two responses can't work. The demon needs to be able to give an answer with at least as much information as the entire universe's state -- not yes or no answers. The issue with the person only exists because the person's actions cannot be represented with a single bit of information. But the person cannot hope to outsmart the demon if it's response has more bits of information than the person can possibly respond with.
Short summary: there was a time when people paid for browsers. Microsoft started bundling IE for free along with the OS. This killed the paid browser market completely (bringing down companies like Netscape) as everyone started using IE since everyone was using windows. Once their position was established, Microsoft stopped developing IE. The IE team was mostly disbanded and there was no updated in IE for many many years.

Not progressing the internet was in MS' best interest. They wanted a world where desktop apps running in their OS was the future.
>In my recent tales of online dating I've run into this a lot

The reason why Tinder won and OkCupid lost so horrifically (okcupid in my area has gone from an oasis to desert in less than a year...) is because people are literally unable to even conceptualize their own interests and desires in the world we find ourselves in.

That's why okcupid profils all say they love laughing, having a good time, traveling, and are easy-going and down-to-earth. We've produced a society of totally formless humans, able to take whatever cog-shape is presented to them, and live out a meek, subservient life punctuated by crappy pictures of the Eiffel Tower or maybe, if they're really adventurous, St. Peter's Basilica.

I think Tinder's success is a great example of this in the startup sense, because they noticed hey, if most people just look at pictures and ignore all this quiz-and-essay nonsense then why not just do that? It's a recognition that people don't have personalities, they'll just mold to fit whatever they're placed in front of.

I think the next Tinder, then, going by this trend, is a machine-learning driven service that just gives you one match a day, based on how attractive you both are given your photos and measurements. You can talk and exchange outside contact information if you want, and if not you can block them/wait for the next day.
As someone who lives there, I'm also curious about that. Should number 5 be read as "tell everyone about Finland", or "tell no one about Finland"? Why?
Why is a pension "unsustainable" and what's the difference between a pension and a 401k that makes the latter "sustainable"?
When I was in my 20's, I'd do something similar, but at different bars / clubs. One bar felt very much like a "Cheers" type of bar (comfortable, felt like a second home). Another was a Country / Western dance club type, where I was a totally different person. Not to mention my work persona, etc.
It's the other way around. Failure makes people mean. Success softens people and when they're relaxed, they can afford social polish, especially around important people like their investors.

Of course, there are people who remain dickheads even after success (several were named here and I won't repeat) because they're either (a) so ambitious that they'll never have enough or (b) the meanness has become part of their "personal brands" but that's rare. Most people become more polished (and, superficially, nicer) when they're well-rested.
How did they do it though? PG's opinion wasn't very detailed in that respect.
The very short, oversimplified version:

Microsoft leveraged their dominance of desktop computing to gain dominance of browser installed base with IE. Having won the battle, they stopped improving the browser as an application platform.

During the first period, Microsoft developed and deployed a variety of browser technologies such as Dynamic HTML (aka the DOM) and XMLHTTPRequest that moved the browser toward being a viable application platform. During the second period, IE stagnated and it was left to Firefox and, later, Chrome to pick up the baton. But they had to fight for market share for several years before having enough influence to make significant progress. IE has recently caught up, but that still leaves several years before enterprise customers will deploy the improvements.

Thus in 2014 there are still major gaps in the browser platform that really should have been solved some years back, and a large portion of installed base still using the transitional IE 8 and 9.
If it is actually referring to IE6, in some ways IE's stagnation was helpful. Prior to IE6 was an arms race-like flurry of different browser vendors haphazardly slapping on features to their products, and the IE6 code freeze we saw thereafter gave standards-writers like the W3C and WHATWG time to catch up writing specifications for the web.
I think spamming refresh happens not because you're narcissist but because you are eager to see if your opinion is well-received by others. That can be unhealthy. It's one thing to get feedback from multiple sources to notice things and behaviors that are harmful or unwanted (like being cocky or people feeling you're argumentative) and another if you're anxious to learn whether or not others will find value in what you said.

It's roughly like... The "nice guy syndrome", where a person is engaged with what others expect from him so much that he undermines what he personally wants. In online forum terms this might mean that you're commenting in favor of the popular opinion of the forum and not voicing your own opinion to see whether it has flaws or not. Naturally, this is one of the many reasons why a community becomes an "echo chamber".
Hmm. Well considering that the alternative is not traveling, personally I can't say I have found that to be a huge benefit to people who have tried it instead.
On the other hand, the money foregone to help the debtor is money that will be missed in schools, homeless shelters, road repairs, etc.

Barring corruption, which I never rule out but I have no idea if it's an incentive here, it isn't fair to say there's a right and a sociopathic choice. It's a hard trade-off.
1. This is merely a published patent application, and not an issued patent. An inventor may file a patent application that claims whatever he/she wants. An application has no legal effect until it has been examined and issued by the USPTO.

2. This particular patent application claims priority to a patent application filed on November 28, 2000. This means that any prior art must have been published before that date. It does not appear that your links contains any such prior art.

I know it is quite popular on the Internet to criticize the USPTO for its perceived "incompetence", but please make sure that you have the "competence" of understanding the basics of the US patent application process before making disparaging remarks.
I don't believe this will save you from the merge conflicts.
Very slow pace of innovation? There was no innovation for a period of roughly 5 years until growing firefox adoption forced their hand. I seem to remember the internal team was disbanded and had to be reconstituted as well. Microsoft intentionally retarded the development of the browser as an application development target to protect their OS monopoly. And, indeed, exactly what microsoft feared came to pass: once apps targeted the browser, you have chromebooks, tablets, and phones displacing windows. It's not like you need a full desktop to browse facebook, twitter, instagram, pinterest, youtube, or gmail.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Net...
This has a lot more to do with your personality than travel, I think. To me, genuinely being myself is the thing that's liberating; the added stressors of travel do little to with finding clarity in this realm.
I hate to give just a wikipedia link but I really have nothing more to add than what is there:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

While this might not explain "6-7 years of holding back the internet" it definitely was not beneficial.
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/microsoftkilledmypappy.aspx
Microservices architecture
Narcissism may have increased relative to the past, I don't know, but it seems a simpler explanation that travel has become much cheaper as time has gone on, so now there are more people capable of participating and talking about it. Couple that with the development of technological tools able to amplify communications to more people than in the past, and the incidence of travel (among many other topics) becomes more visible.

It comes as no surprise that people do things that they see other people doing, which I don't think has changed much as time goes on. So, people travel, they talk about it, more people "hear" it, and more people travel as a result.
But there isn't a standardised version of Markdown. There's John Gruber's original syntax, and there are dozens if not hundreds of variants.

When some enterprising people declared they had created "Standard Markdown" the original author got very upset: http://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-common...

Markdown does not have standards, it's just a collection of base formatting conventions a lot of people like.
I agree with you but I would like to point out that the US was basically founded on the idea of getting out of a bad contract instead of paying the money we owed. It has been spun in a lot of other ways because yay america, but really we didn't want to pay England back for financing the French and Indian War and for ongoing stationing of troops because of that conflict. So we didn't and that was that.
Internet Explorer 6's stagnation.
Flickr gives anyone the ability to bulk change the license on their images to one that doesn't include commercial use. Just go to this page:

https://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/license/?from=privacy

Clearly the users that are upset didn't really understand the license that they chose.
Because domain names are cheap, and feeling like you are actually producing something that the world can see is a great source of motivation. You also run into problems when you deploy to a real domain that you never encounter if you're just noodling around with code on your local computer.

The risk of creating a bunch of toy programs on your local disk that you never show to anyone is that you avoid the hard parts. Accountability is a good thing, in programming and in homework.
Well i think you need pick a real world problem or need or an Idea and turn it into a product like

Skype ( it solve voice problem over ip and people uses it more than any other software)

whatsapp, Airbnb, Uber, Twitter etc
or build something which people love to use
To add to that, Markdown was created to scratch one person's itch with no real desire to support a wider community. It was put online and other people liked it and modified it, but the original site doesn't have any of this.
I find it more useful to see "mean" as a power dynamic than an emotion or character trait. If someone asks you to do something and you have a choice, it is not likely to seem mean. If someone asks you to do the same thing and you feel like you do not have a choice (because you work for them, or other reasons) it is much more likely to seem mean, especially if you don't think they are fit for the role of deciding things for you. If a parent holds down a screaming child during a shot, they are loving, but if a stranger does, it can be perceived as mean. If people perceive you as being mean, it likely means that you are invoking traditional power structures more often than other people perceive you should. Successful founders probably do better on both fronts: 1) not making people do stuff because they are the boss but getting them to internalize the underlying framework and pick the right answer themselves and 2) they probably have an easier time being perceived as a boss than average, so when they do force an issue, followers don't mind acquiescing. Given all that, this essay says people who are good at accumulating power organically do well in start ups. Successful minorities probably have to be super good at (1) because they likely take a hit on (2).
Yeah, this. Especially for something like regexes where a large amount of your users will be more technical, and facebook is becoming less and less popular among technical people.

Personally, I don't have a facebook account and I will not create one just so I can log in on your website. The disability to save my progress also made me give up on trying to progress since it'd just be lost anyway.
Surviving Startup Life [video]
I am the exact same way.

When I'm at home, I'm always afraid of keeping up the same persona. I have very bad social anxiety at home, I'm terrible at talking to people at gatherings, haven't been on a date in four years.

But when I'm traveling, none of that matters:

> Travel is amazing because you literally have no preconceived notions or expectations from other people so you can experiment and be different versions of yourself and no one will be the wiser.

You're 100% right. I go overseas and I have no trouble meeting new people, enjoying myself at bars and clubs, asking a cute fellow traveler out to coffee in Taipei or wherever the hell I am.

The trick is learning how to bring that home. Still figuring that one out though I've gotten better.
I built a tool to convert your CSV tables to Markdown table format: https://github.com/mplewis/csvtomd
What's the opportunity cost of not having a job when you're in South America anyway? Where would you put your salary?
The Seven Deadly Sins of Cloud Computing Research (2012)
> A little known fact, even among most org-users: Github can render
> org-mode files to HTML directly if checked into a repo, thus you can
> write your README files as org-files.

I recently stumbled across the tidbit. The Ruby library Github uses to
generate it though isn't 100% though. If you want to use org-mode
properties for style customization of html output your SOL.

Original project:

https://github.com/bdewey/org-ruby

Currently, you cannot do much to customize the conversion. The
supplied textile conversion is optimized for extracting “content”
from the orgfile as opposed to “metadata.”

It does say that developement has moved to:

https://github.com/wallyqs/org-ruby

Which has no such note, but doesn't say anything about supporting it.
The question is whether the pensioner provided enough benefit during their career to justify their pension. In a lot of cities the retirement benefits are completely out of proportion to the benefit provided by the government employee. The social contract works both ways. We're supposed to provide for the security of old people in retirement, but they were also supposed to leave a better future for young people. If the former people failed to uphold their end of the social contract -- and the retired government employees of Detroit have obviously failed completely in this regard -- then why should the current working-age people of Detroit be expected to hold their pensions as inviolable?
Yeah boy, that's the spirit! Everything is an object! As in... ummm, kingdom of nouns, yeah that one.
I downvoted you but I want to explain why. There are two things that irritated me about your post.

The first is the use of the word "retarded" to mean "something I disagree with". The word itself is nearly a slur, but if that was all it was I wouldn't downvote just on that. The problem is your conflation of disagreement with stupidity. People can disagree without either one of them being stupid.

The second reason is because you're making assertions to the contrary (of the post you're replying to) without really making any reasonable argument in favor of your own position. It just adds nothing to the conversation. In fact, your own post begs a question: how many people ARE employed in SE Asia doing MS support work? What do you know about those people and their lives?
Putting myself in the shoes of Ms. BrightIdea: "Type my revolutionary, super-secret business idea into a random text box on the web run by who knows who, and pay $25 for the privilege to boot? What a steal!" :P
Livebirth after uterus transplantation
“It ticked me off that somebody else is selling them when I was giving them away,”

This is a really common. A person creates something and "licenses it freely" out of their own generosity, and then someone goes and profits from it.

It illustrates a very deep conflict that has existed, presumably since artists existed, but really came to the fore in the age of silicon. The first example I saw sort of "first hand" was Ward Christensen's XMODEM, which he made public domain, was being sold to the US Government by a contractor who was using it in their product.

The legal question is pretty clear, you license it such that others can legally profit from it and there isn't an issue from the point of view of the law.

But what is the moral question? I've asked people in this situation (having their free stuff resold) and they split almost 50/50 on the moral one, which is half say "If they are making a profit they should share it with me." and half land in the "Good for them, but if they ask for support I'm going to charge quintuple my normal rate."

Clearly a lot of issues can be avoided by being courteous, but it really does provide something of a litmus test of people's true feelings with respect to open source.
> It's a recognition that people don't have personalities, they'll just mold to fit whatever they're placed in front of.

I've seen so many relationships end in disaster because of this. In the beginning of the relationship, one or both participants will pretend to be someone they're not, so they can please the other one. Later, they always revert to their normal behavior, and this usually ends the relationship.
I guess it depends on why someone uses Facebook. I (finally) got an account a while ago in order stay in contact with friends and former colleagues. My usecase of Facebook does not include me wanting Facebook to know everything I do.

Hence, Facebook lives in its own VirtualBox machine.
Yes, I think if programmers do not actually read code, they will not notice the bugs in it.

Considering the binary search more deeply, http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/content/26/2/154.full.pdf
is useful; De Angelos search (family 4) was a successful search, but it contains this bug. Implementations based on families 1 and 2 but perhaps trying to be less clever would not.
He writes about the dangers Microsoft saw in Javascript and generally an open web that escapes Microsoft's lock-in, and that they kept Javascript broken to prevent the escape.

I posted the link mainly because I think that a large portion of Hackernews audience is young and doesn't have a feel of times when Microsoft was casting the shadow on everything... And I think this "Ask HN" is an example of this.
PG may want to examine his own confirmation biases. "I am a nice person and I like to work with nice people. Therefore, when people I work with succeed it means that nice people succeed".

That doesn't strike me as a universal truth. My own experience in the world has been that many incredibly mean and heartless people succeed, even in the "nice" tech startup scene. My own experience is hardly a proof, but it certainly gives me reason to suspect PG's perspective is a little off on this one.
Also check out system76.com offerings. (I am not affiliated, just a happy customer.)
You can also just be yourself, all the time, wherever you are.
Cool game, it really helped me brush up my regex skills.

I think I found an error in “The Lektor Device“: The “I“ in “WITH” could also be a “T” from the rules, but only the “I” is accepted.