skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a point in the article where the author calls me and others "poor condemned souls" who "argue for the eugenic purity of proportional fonts".

Obviously, I've never said such a thing, and at first I took some offense even though it was just a bit of hyperbole.

I wrote a fairly harsh reply here and I'm taking the opportunity to edit it to be a bit calmer.

Although I prefer proportional fonts, I've always been respectful of those who prefer monospaced fonts. I recognize that most programmers use monospaced fonts and I have no quarrel with that.

In fact, one of the explicit goals of my indentation and whitespace style is to be equally readable in monospaced and proportional fonts.

Life is full of tradeoffs, and here one of them becomes apparent. If you use column aligned code, you give up readability in proportional fonts, and also, as several others pointed out in these comments, you give up ease of editing and diffing. And while the alignment makes vertical scanning easy, it makes horizontal visual scanning more difficult.

Column alignment has a strong appeal nonetheless. I used column aligned styles exclusively for probably 20 years or more. After all, my second language was assembler! But about 15 years ago I experimented with using indentation only without alignment, and I quickly found that the advantages of giving up alignment outweighed its advantages for me and the people I worked with.

I've noticed that hardly any of the developers I work with today use column alignment in their code, and they all use monospaced fonts. Now I'm curious to ask them if they just never used alignment, or if they used to use it and stopped as I did.
> From the city's point of view it is better to try to get as much money back on the debt by auctioning the house instead of trying to settle at some arranged value with the debtor,

Which is the kind of sociopathic behaviour I'd expect from a sleazy corporate. It's meant to be public service, not public pillaging.
I travel a lot and one big advantage of travel I've found is not necessarily all the 'cool adventures' but the fact that you're around strangers all the time so you're allowed to experiment with your personality.

At home you become one version of yourself and people know you and treat you as such and you respond in kind.
Everything becomes sort of routine to maintain the status quo.

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 can learn a lot about yourself and others this way.

It's also extremely liberating.
Ask HN: How do you keep up to date with security advisories?
A good perspective. I never post where I traveled to (unless a friend somehow tags me and mentions the location we where at) on social networks even if I have photos, souvenirs and merchandise from the trips.

I tell people where I've been only if the ask me during a conversation. Going around babbling about "when I was in..." seems brash and boastful.

No matter what the author said, traveling opens up your eyes if you truly engage with the local culture.
Quite an ignorant reply to a foreigner who's native language is obviously not English.
Org-mode is a beast. A fantastic beast, much like Emacs itself. You dive in, but there's always more to learn. Some things may be for you and some things don't. Everyone should give it a try.

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.

Shameless example: https://github.com/josteink/csharp-mode/blob/master/README.o...

This alone was enough to make me drop Markdown as my go-to format for semi-formatted text-files.

A subtle killer feature here is org-babel. You can embed proper code in your text-files and have your editor (at least Emacs) understand them as such. Which makes it excellent for writing technical documentation for projects where code is involved.
I'm sorry to be rude, but that strikes me as legitimately paranoid. Why do you care so much if Facebook knows that you visit sites other than Facebook?
Agreed.

This library isn't meant to 'bash' on the prototype inheritance. It's purely meant as personal preference over prototyping. Especially for programmers coming from a Java or PHP background.
Perfect example of self loathing medium post. Nailed it bro
Anonymous hacks KKK Twitter account and humiliates them
Just venturing a guess, I'd say it's a reference to early versions of Internet Explorer (particularly IE6, but also later) which combined a dominating position (thanks to Windows) with (1) an insistance on doing things their own way instead of following standards and (2) a very slow pace of innovation. This forced coding to a very low common denominator and/or duplication of effort for advanced features and different browsers. The impasse ended when other browsers became popular enough to make IE's dragging its feet counterproductive for MS, too.
I traveled all around South America for six months and spent maybe 10k total on the trip and I wasn't living frugally at all. I stayed in Airbnb's over hostels, ate good food often, and went on lots of paid excursions. I probably could have spent 5k total if I did the hostel thing, ate on the cheap, and didn't pay for any tourist activities.

My point is you can travel on the cheap if you put effort into it, especially in South America. Traveling in Europe? Sure, that's going to be just as expensive if not more than simply living day to day in the states. There are definitely places you can travel without making a six figure salary however.
Ever see the "Republican Space Rangers" cartoon embedded within Grand Theft Auto?

Clearly the work of the deranged. :-)

F__k yeah! (w/ apologies to Team America)
That's cost-benefit analysis... Wait!
This is the first PG essay that I really strongly disagreed with upon reading. I don't think that anyone should aspire to being mean, but PG's arguments seem way off the mark.

PG doesn't stop to define "mean", and from reading his essay, I infer that PG's "mean person" is someone who is insensitive to the feelings of others, abrasive, irascible, and who tends to turn disagreements into knock-down-drag-out-pick-a-side confrontations. I find it odd that PG thinks that people like this don't succeed, because I know quite a few people both within and outside of SV who fit this description to a T and are professionally successful.

In fact, some (certainly not all) people who meet this description are GREAT PEOPLE. They're ornery and they don't suffer fools gladly; you're rolling the dice if you take them to a restaurant because they refuse to play the "I'm not going to say anything about the shitty service because I don't want to make a scene" game. That said, they're the first people you call when you need help with something serious, and they have your back even if doing so makes them lose social status.

It's especially odd that PG wrote this because in one of his most famous essays [1], he recommends that you only hire "animals" as early employees. When I do a quick mental inventory of the animals I know, the majority of them have a bit of a mean streak.

I would be in strong agreement with PG's essay if he defined "mean people" as those who derive pleasure or self-worth in putting down others. Those people are terrible, especially when they use passive-aggressive, plausibly deniable tactics to make other people feel bad. If there's one thing I've learned so far it's to break contact if I catch a whiff of that kind of toxic BS. Give me a productive mean person with a heart of gold over a tactful, toxic politician any day of the week.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html
The problem I have with the proof is how it begs the question of free will. The definition of the Demon assumes a purely mechanical universe. Free will is not mechanical. A person with free will cannot be part of the universe that the Demon is able to observe.

I'm not sure it's even applicable to the universe we live in because of random events. Is the randomness we observe a result of a mechanical process, or is it inherently unpredictable? If the later, that would make a Demon inherently impossible. It could be we just don't have enough information to decipher the things that appear random to us. Or is randomness what happens when you try to apply Laplace's Demon. As you say, a Demon needs to be able to predict its own predictions. When such a self-referential loop occurs, then any possible event is a "correct" prediction, and that's what happens.
Which is a pile of complete BS. If all actions were fully justified simply because the person doing the deed felt a certain way, then we would need no laws nor rules of conduct because everyone would always show the correct behavior. He's more than old enough to know that the kind of language he uses is meant to be insulting. He's a jackass.
Would they cancel each other? In value, I mean? Seems like the property tax would cover much more than mortgaged houses.
Edit: rant ahead, not aimed directly at bluedino

I will never understand this. I agree life-time pensions are unsustainable. I argue constantly for a) all new public employees being enrolled in a 401k and pensions being phased out and b) offering younger workers buy-outs, allowing them to invest their contributions themselves in reward for opting out of the pension system.

But that said - every pensioner out there worked for that pension. It was in their contract as an employee, a perk that often kept them in public service jobs, teaching your kids, putting out your fires, and so on.

Every single person that argues for pulling the tablecloth out from under pensioners would be ferociously mad at the idea of any company canceling or reneging on a contract.

To me, canceling or changing the pension of a retired (or soon to be retired) worker is the same as a bank deciding that you can't keep your house after all, even though you're not delinquent - it's just that the bank could use the value of your house, and breaking a contract is no big deal.

Get off of the backs of pensioners - they put in their time, worked often for decades, contracted the promise of some security in retirement, but hey, we have a financial crisis, and suddenly they're freeloaders.

Pretty much everything about pensions is broken and unsustainable, but that's not on the worker, that's on those that made the promise, and not keeping it is just the lowest form of horrible.

Apologies for the rant. I accept the down voting I expect.
Gangnam style video views exceeded length of integer
>Markdown was never intended to have any particular standardized syntax

At some point it was intended to be standardized or else we wouldn't have a standardized version of markdown syntax.
This is such a subtle problem that countless people implementing binary searches didn't think about it, yet you think reading an unlabeled blob of code will make people notice?
Fun! When I saw the title, I was expecting the opposite: a normal cross word with the usual "42 Across (4): It gets things done" style hints, but the answers were valid regex's. Someone make that too!
Can we get a (2012)?
It may just be a script that gets all the active org members who can edit github/github and copies their profile info.
I'm confused as to how he can bust on the Canadian couple that prefers to internalize their travel experiences rather than proselytize to others. Isn't that the opposite of narcissism?
Rather than the activity, social media inherently promotes narcissism.
Because syntax highlighting serves a completely separate purpose. Books that contain collections of related data points frequently do use a tabular presentation. Syntax highlighting provides visual cues for the role that a particular keyword plays in the language syntax.
This should be a reminder to many that 'there is no such thing as a free lunch'.
Buying a one-way ticket to Europe alone at age 22 with a backpack, $1,000, and two years of high school French is not narcissism, my friend. It's a maturing, confidence-building, life-expanding experience.
I've been in this position and it didn't go well. Definitely avoid this scenario in the future. You can ask but I wouldn't be too optimistic and the conversation may not go well and impact your relationship with your employer.

A long time ago I owned the domain name saintlouis.com and had started a site that somehow eventually came under the wing of my employer. Needless to say I didn't own the saintlouis.com domain when I left not long after.
This is why I loved An Idiot Abroad. Karl just relentessly called everything as he saw it. No interest in anything "exotic" if it wasn't actually enjoyable. He believs that every culture is just as stupid as the one he was raised in.
I think that the whole argument holds better if you replace the word fail with "do not become incredibly successful".

I'm thinking of a whole realm of mean, arrogant, pretentious, often business oriented people who usually sell and don't create. And I wouldn't say they fail, they often do quite well. But to his point they don't become the best.
Show HN: Ment0r – Actionable Step-by-Step Advice to Launch Your Business Idea
X86 Assembly Adventures
I thought the points in this article were made more humorously here:
http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/07/12-types-of-people-youll-find-...
> People need to feel that what they create can't be stolen.

To create a society based on protection of property, the government must be mean to outsiders so it doesn't have to be to the insiders. When the government of a country with 4% of the world's population but 25% of the world's wealth enforces citizenship and residency rights (a form of property), then that's considered mean by the outsiders.
It's not so much that pg has a different definition of 'meanness', it's that he has a broader notion of 'success'.

If we define successful as playing the capitalist game well, then sure, Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg, Gates, Ellison and others are all successful because they were sufficiently ruthless. Yet this too is selection bias, as there will surely be plenty of examples in the intersection of "people who don't fit pg's thesis" and "rewarded by society". There are, however, counter-examples: Warren Buffet comes to mind.

Just because something is rewarded by society doesn't automatically mean it is good.
In fact, if you can succeed at capitalism and not be a dick, seems to me that's an even rarer thing to do, and all the more respect for doing it. In light of the current state of society, it seems a good idea to re-examine what society happens to reward.

We'll never know if Steve Jobs and others were/are truly happy. In fact, in a certain light, Jobs wasn't successful. For all his money, he happens to be rather dead. Who knows what truly great things he could have done after a successful battle with cancer. Every time Jobs is mentioned, until he fades from public view, people will talk about his storied career, his reinvention of Apple, his vision, etc. Everyone will also mention that he was an ass and died too young, because he couldn't get out of his own way and seek proper medical care soon enough.

Given that we all operate in contemporary society, there is of course a place for being assertive and ruthless when one needs to. But PG / Ycombinator is starting to tweak his/their definition of success. In 200, 500 or 1000 years, will anyone remember Loopt? Not likely. But if a YC company successfully develops a fusion reactor the size of a shipping container, or successfully develops a cure for HIV/AIDS, and does something truly great, then YC will still be talked about for quite a long time. Much like how we still talk about Archimedes today.
In the realm of dating, what's more interesting that just "traveling" is talking to someone about where they've been and what they found interesting, challenging, boring, etc. That'll tell you a little about their personality. It's a great conversation starter but I agree simply being able to afford and get on an airplane somewhere doesn't tell you anything about a human being.
Sure, and what I'm saying is that resenting professionals like tech workers is like a guy with a single slice of bread resenting any guy who manages to get two slices of bread whilst completely ignoring that the root problem is another guy down the street with an entire truck full of loaves of bread whose hoarding created the bread shortage in the first place.

And IMO that's exactly how the guy with the truck prefers you think. Or to quote Stewie Griffin: "Dance! Puppets! Dance!"
You may have been downvoted for using "retarded" as an insult.
I read this as "I hope Uber doesn't continue on its path to domination".
As you can see from the article, I'm using dramatic hyperbole to demonstrate that fanatical devotion to either side is ridiculous. While I prefer alignment, I have neither the inclination nor the power to force my personal preferences on anyone.

I'm happy to remove the link to your comment, if you would like. I've no wish to cause you distress.

I don't particularly care whether one uses proportional or monospace. Mind you, I'm sure we can all agree that anyone using Comic Sans should report to a re-education camp.
Launched a little experiment, reducing a huge consulting service into a micro-consulting-gig. Making it more accessible to the masses. Love to get some feedback.
If you don't want someone using your photos for commercial use, choose a license that says that. I was expecting an article where Yahoo was using these photos without permission (ala Facebook advertising) but this is just a case of someone who didn't read the license details when she posted the photos to the Creative Commons album.
Great to hear this said out loud.

Travel without context is absurd. It's institutionalized syphoning of money away from tourists, under the guise of some sort of transformative experience with lots of photo-ops.

In order for travel to be "meaningful", there must context for it. This might mean going to a country for business or to visit friends. It might mean being a tourist if you know what you're looking at. Simply showing up at a museum or a cathedral, reading the placard, and walking away transformed is the scam of the century.

I never travel solely to see things unless they are things I want to see for reasons unrelated to the travel itself. Usually history.
It isn't just the monetary cost of the trip, but the opportunity cost of not having a paying job. The later is far more expensive than the former.
And here's a reverse-math extension. (and No funny SEO) :)

I think clicking is easier than typing.

http://reverse-math.makkajai.com
There's a difference between self promotion and narcissism.
If I punch you in the face and then
apologize to 10 other people for
hitting you, it doesn't make me a
good person nor have I in any way
made up for wronging you.

If you punch me in the face and then apologize to me, your apologizing isn't enough to make you a good person or make up for punching me. So say instead you punch me in the face, and then dive into the river and save someone from drowning. While rescuing them doesn't make it up to me, it's still enough of a good thing that "gnaritas punches cbr in the face and saves X from drowning" is better than "gnaritas does nothing".

But maybe we're just getting into the semantics of what it means to "make up for" or "excuse" wrongs.
would a "pre-commit" whitespace condenser + "checkout" configurable code formatter be the best of both worlds?

Write it how you want it - commit a whitespace condensed version, have a formatter re-space it based on you're personal preferences/template?

I guess it would work for non-indent critical languages.
What's really sad is that Yahoo is already giving 51% to the creators of other images, so they had to intentionally complicate their product and extend development time to distinguish between who to pay nothing to and who to pay. The article says people are already changing their licenses to opt-out. If Yahoo had gone the other way and rewarded them, maybe they would have gotten more people posting images, not a bunch of bad PR.
I've read this exact same response from you probably a dozen times over the years.

You're convinced that the means justify the ends.

It is my opinion that even in nuclear controls system engineering, gastroenterological surgery, and appellate court law that being positive and supportive of your peers is probably a better approach than however you want to justify having zero sympathy for people.

Also, in my case I happen to be interested in creating something as life-threatening as a product for posting photos of cats to your friends all while having control over your digital identity/keys. I'm interested in the ecosystem of software applications that are based on open platforms and protocols like the web and driven my individual ownership of identities and data. It seems like a fun, liberating, creative and social way to make software!

I'll also hit the eject button because it is clear that you're only interested in conflict.
Stupidity. Licenses are hard to understand in general, but they almost certainly said "Creative Commons, Commercial Use, Attribution"

And then when somebody comes along and takes them up exactly on that offer and they get offended: "That's not what I meant... I didn't know somebody would actually do it... Gosh golly, those evil corporations are doing exactly what I told them they could do... It's not right! This is what's wrong with America!"

I think it would have been good/better to reach out to people, give them a chance to opt-out if they weren't cool with it, but it could be nice to view flickr as not just images on the screen but potentially images on the wall too because there is some really nice stuff out there.
"Microsoft cast a shadow over the software world for almost 20 years starting in the late 80s." It was not only the internet. In some way it was an evil monopoly that did everything to prevent others from innovate and forced usage of it's own crappy software. The citation come's from PG's essay from 2007 "Microsoft is dead" [0].

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
Falls into the, some-of-the-most-boring-person's-I've-met-where-backpackers category. Had the same experience; especially in Berlin you'll find not a few of them.

Some quotes on that this is not just a recent development:

You don't have to travel around the world to understand that the sky is blue everywhere. Goethe

The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar. Marshall McLuhan
Interesting, here in Uruguay it's the opposite, for many positions you won't even be considered without a photo.

I understand where the UK's rule comes from, it should be better to let qualifications stand on their own.
I think I post a lot on places like HN to compensate for a lack of a social life. It's not like I even try to form any connection with people on forums online, so I'm not making friends, but I think there is a connection.
tl;dr: People who gave permission to use photos in certain ways upset that others use photos in those ways.
I'm hooked on clang-format, personally.

https://mediacru.sh/1TeMS-nN5G_y
org-mode tables are great, but they're only easy to type because org-mode does the dynamic resizing and border drawing for you. Markdown is supposed to be simple to type in any plain text editor.