gdl

That was my first assumption too, but Wireshark doesn't show anything going across the network as I type, and nothing that looks incriminating when I click "donate" with text in the password box. It looks like it's entirely client-side JavaScript as it claims to be. Kind of disappointing, actually.

edit: ...Unless it's clever enough to only be evil some fraction of the time. I didn't actually check through the code.

I disagree.

This is like the inevitable comparison between the US government stealing our freedoms and China (or some other dictatorship). The argument isn't that they are exactly the same thing - it is that one is edging closer to the other than we would like, and we would like to draw attention to the bad similarities in an attempt to fix them.

If we never compare the way things are to the worst ways we know, how can we know if we're falling down that slippery slope until we get to the end and it's too late? Maybe upon reflection we'll realize that we're already several steps down a bad path, even if we're still far from "evil" territory.

I've never looked into GreaseMonkey so I might be missing some context here, but "cruft" sounds like it would be difficult to draw a clear consensus on.

Ads are relatively cut-and-dry. Wikipedia, at least as an ideal, is a collection of objective facts with citations. But "removing cruft"? I'm not saying it can't be done, but I think it would be tough to get a clear consensus within a community on what exactly that entails. Wikipedia itself has flame wars on half of its discussion pages over any details that are less than totally objective, and many that are. It works because the differences being argued about are usually small points that most users wouldn't really notice either way. If you're trying to get consensus on a hundred "bike shed" issues on each page... well, good luck.

It's a very cool and worthwhile idea though. I'd like to see whatever might come of this after a few iterations.

If you're using the word "bad" to describe something, it's probably not good. But if it's going to be bad, then yes, a consistent style of badness is preferable to one that is bad and inconsistent. At least that way people can get used to the specific faults and ignore or work around them as needed.

What you can "get away with" depends on the application and the users. A simple app for internal use can be as ugly as you like, but for something that potential clients will see before choosing whether or not to give you money (even for something unrelated) it would probably be a wise investment to get it done right.

Good point. I was stuck imagining a clumsy "You must read the article before voting" page rather than pg's silent vote dropping trick. The former would hurt the perceived simplicity of the site, while the current uses of the latter work well enough that I usually forget it's even there.

It'd be interesting to see the actual stats on this - what percentage of story votes are made before clicking the link, and do some outliers (spam, or sensationalist titles) get a large enough fraction of pre-read upvotes to justify taking some sort of action? I've assumed that it's low enough to not make much difference, but I could be wildly mistaken.

The problem is that the proposed solution is more of a mild nuisance than a solid block. If spambots or the human equivilant want to upvote worthless links, it's trivial to hit the link first. The same minor workaround would be required of legitimate users that, as you mention, may have seen the article elsewhere and already read it. And it might make impulsive people more likely to read the article before voting, but again nothing is guaranteed (and is that really a serious problem anyway?)

Minimalism and simplicity work well for HN, and I don't think there'd be a clear enough benefit here to warrant the added complexity and occasional annoyance to legitimate users.

"Somebody should have stopped me before I voted on something I knew nothing about."

Yes: yourself. Is that really so hard?

I'd like to think that we can manage at least that much responsibility on our own without it being forced on us through technical restraints.

Interesting, but I don't think there's enough data on the Lisp side to interpret much. From memory, wasn't it a few dozen Lisp entries against well over a thousand for Java?

Raw statistical uncertainty aside, if we're trying to judge the languages themselves it would need to be done with programmers skilled with their chosen language. I'd guess that most of the Java entries were by people that knew Java reasonably well from working with it every day, but I wouldn't be surprised if many in the Lisp section were people that had little or no prior experience with Lisp and decided that this would be a fine opportunity to learn it.

I agree with the possibility of increased control, and that it could be a very bad thing. I disagree with the notion that we should choose to not support Wikileaks based on that chance.

If the politicians are acting like children throwing tantrums, we need to curtly explain to them that this is not appropriate behavior. Giving them lollipops will appease them and shut them up for now, but will only encourage their bad habits and make things worse farther down the road when they've come to expect such treatment.

With news, or when old links are posted on news sites, the fact that it was just recently posted means that there will be a lot of people focused on it at that specific point in time, and in turn conversations can play out on the forum over the next several hours. There's a value to being able to have more-or-less realtime conversations like that going.

If the old links were just kind of hanging around the news page, without anything to suggest that they're specifically relevent to the moment, it would be hard for them to attract the kind of time-focused attention that you would get from a freshly-posted item. You could probably get by with a "featured classic link" that changes every day or so to keep people interested, but that would be more of a small feature or gimmick than a new type of site. Trying to push it much more than that would, I suspect, thin out the commenters too much, killing the ability to have back-and-forth conversations and turning it into more of a bookmark site.

There's a place for collecting good, old links, but news sites are for news. I think trying to force both ideas into one site would feel too awkward to work well.

(But by all means, prove me wrong. I thought Twitter was stupid, too.)

My mom thinks I'm Supreme Lord of all Technology, so I would be selling myself short if I got a job as a mere "senior developer", right?

Ignore the job titles and all that. Where will you be happiest? Where will you be challenged and be able to grow, and where will you stagnate and end up with an obsolete skillset in five years? (Hint: you won't be motivated to grow your skills as much if you're already resting at the "top")

I obviously don't know all the details, but if you're even asking this question I'm guessing that you want us all to tell you to break from this place and move on to better things. So I'll suggest you do exactly that.

Go.

That's what social bookmarking sites (like del.icio.us) are for. When I make the choice to come to a news site I'd rather see news, or at least current discussion relating to a "classic" link. If I instead see a bunch of old links without any active discussion attached, I'm quickly going to find another place to get my news.

I like the concept. A lot of people ignore rebates entirely because they're so often not worth the time, frustration, and hassle. If a site like this could be set up to be a quick and easy process, at least on the seller's end, I could a lot of people going for it. On the other end you've got easy money for stay-at-home moms or others with time on their hands.

I see it more as a logistical and maybe legal problem. Will companies honor rebates not submitted by the original buyer? If not, how easy would it be for them to find out that it's happening, and how big of a fuss might they make over the site? And as the parent brought up, what about fraud? Or not realizing some clause in a given rebate and not sending some vital piece of information with it?

It might all work out, or there might be some catch that renders it totally impractical, but I think it's worth looking into.

It depends on your goals and learning style. If you're just looking to be able to tinker a little bit with existing code, or learn best by doing, then jumping right in is probably the way to go. If you want a deeper understanding, and to avoid making as many beginner mistakes and poor decisions, books are a great way to pick up "best practices" without wasting time going through all of the worst practices first. But lots of people have found success with each approach so if one way fits your learning style better, by all means go with that one.

And really, the most effective route is to do both. Focusing too much on doing without the book knowledge results in creating terribly awkward solutions to problems that have been already been solved. On the other hand It's easy to follow along with a book and fool yourself into thinking that everything makes sense while lacking the experience needed to figure out how to put all the little pieces together to create something useful. As is usual in life, balance is key.

I'm amazed that Python had about 20 times as many entries as either Perl or Ruby. I realize they each have their own niches and that Python tends to be the current language of choice for a lot of general-purpose weekend hacking, but I wouldn't have expected the difference to be that overwhelming.

A large part of the issue is that many major copyright owners have proven themselves to have very little regard for law or morality themselves. When the RIAA blackmails people (with very little evidence against them) and forces them to pay a few thousand dollars for a settlement or be sued into oblivion by a battalion of corporate lawyers, the masses will hardly defend the RIAA. Or when they try to write laws to spy on and censor the entire Internet for their direct gain, many people get very upset at the implications. When game publishers sell games that are so heavily DRM'd as to be difficult to play legitimately while still trivial to pirate, people shrug and get the pirated copies if they want to be able to play.

On the other hand, there have been lots of stories where creators have open discussions with pirates, without reflexively making them the enemy, and are rewarded by respect and increased sales. Pirates are people too, and many act with a higher moral compass than you might expect, though it may differ from your own.

I think it's not so much that piracy is seen as good, but that it's not as evil as some would make it out to be, and the other side makes themselves so unsymphathetic that nobody cares about them.

Corruption of the English language aside, chamomile or mint infusions are no more "teas" than they are "coffees". They're all just plant stuff steeped in water, but the flavors and cultures involved vary dramatically.

I'm normally pretty liberal about language but it bugs me to have to specify a latin species name, or "tea made from tea" to make it clear what I'm drinking. Although phrases like "green tea" or "black tea" are widely-understood and fairly unambiguous in situations where one can be more specific, there isn't a good way to refer to the entire class of beverages made from only that plant.

I thought "lvml" sounded like a markup language, but it turns out that emotionml already exists and should fit our needs. http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/emotion/XGR-emotionml-20081...

Therefore, to fight back against the vagueness and possible misinterpretation of Internet slang, I propose that in the future "lol" be replaced by something like the following:

  <emotionml xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2008/11/emotionml">
    <emotion>
      <modality mode="face"/>
      <category set="everydayEmotions" name="amusement" confidence="0.8"/>
      <link role="experiencedBy" uri="file:john.vcard"/>
      <link role="expressedBy" uri="file:johnsParty.avi" start="10s" end="15s"/>
      <link role="triggeredBy" uri="file:guestList.xml#numberOfGuests"/>
    </emotion>
  </emotionml>

"The Little Schemer" and "The Seasoned Schemer", maybe? They're well-regarded around here and written as a lighthearted back-and-forth dialogue. I haven't gotten around to reading them yet, but quickly skimming through them on a hunch it looks like normal variables don't show up until midway through the second book (and even then are used minimally). The books use lots of small examples to teach functional programming from the ground up, and so use literal data values instead of variables to keep things concise and focused.

I'm sure it varies by system and the specific hardware, but I don't think it was too bad when I did it and I'm hardly a Linux expert (I've been using Arch for a few months). There will probably be a couple hurdles as you'd expect from a fairly custom Linux install, but the extensive wiki and large community make it relatively quick and painless to figure out what's going on and how to fix it.

That said, if you're looking for something as quick and easy as possible you might want to look around a bit more to see if there are any prepackaged systems that do exactly what you want with less setup. No sense making this more complicated than it needs to be if something else comes up that closely fits your needs and could potentially save a couple hours of troubleshooting.

If you're not afraid of the command line (or are willing to learn), Arch is as lightweight as you want it to be. The initial install is very minimalist and the package management system makes it almost trivial to build up from there. Install Openbox and Chrome and you're all set with a pretty lean system.

http://wiki.archlinux.org/

I don't see how this is being upvoted. She said that she has had sex with 50 people, not that she has sexually assaulted 50 people. She never says anything bad about sexuality in general, only the unwillingly forced kind. There is no amusing irony or hypocrisy here unless your sense of morality doesn't differentiate between the two acts, which I thought we got over as a society quite a long time ago.

I can see where you're coming from and at least partly agree, but I feel the need to call you out on this one. A few of your own submissions from the past month or so:

Current alert: Airport security remains relevant (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1849017)

Mike Rowe celebrates dirty jobs (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1756098)

Richard Wiseman's favorite optical illusions (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1729036)

Overall, your own submissions don't look all that much different from the current /newest page as hacker relevancy goes.

I don't think it's so much that HN is getting worse, but that it's old enough now (in Internet years) for people to start reminiscing about the "good ol' days" because people like to do that kind of stuff. It's a bit more populated and faster now, a bit less exclusive, a bit more noise to the signal. But the signal is still very much there, easy to find thanks to voting, and better than pretty much anywhere else on the web as far as I'm aware.

I'm not too worried about it. If it starts to suck, there will always be a considerable faction ready to saturate the front page with articles about the innards of Erlang to drive away those that don't really belong here. (Ahh, those were the good ol' days...)

Would it help to suggest that, on average, half of your posts should get a below average response? Most of them, actually, if you take into account how much the average can be skewed by a handful of high-scoring posts.

If you're being disinclined from posting one-word answers and empty "me too" responses: cool. No one would miss those. But if you're stopping yourself from posting interesting or helpful responses to old or unpopular threads? That's when you should stop caring about "karma" the poorly-quantified score and worry more about "karma" the concept. Being directly helpful to a dozen individuals in otherwise ignored threads would usually give a lower karma average than simply posting a clickable version of a link, but you'd get a lot more real respect from it.

Also keep in mind that anyone that sees your average karma will see your total right next to it, and if you game either one too much at the expense of the other it could give a worse overall impression than posting normally. I'd rather see a 1000-total 3-average poster than a 100-total 8-average or a 5000-total 1.1-average.

You might want to play with the alternative font choices. NoScript defaulted to blocking the Google-hosted font, and the Arial fallback is a lot wider and makes the page look bad (it turns the button into "MAKE MES").

The answer to this depends pretty heavily on what you're wanting to program. If you're planning on writing protein-folding software, or CAD, or a database, by all means dive deep into math and algorithms. A typical web or desktop app? Not so much.

A general understanding is helpful to form an intuition about what options are available for a given problem and what the tradeoffs would be, but in most cases you'll rarely have any reason to write the hard bits yourself. That's what library code is for.

That said, if you have an interest in that kind of stuff, learn it! Even if you rarely use the more complicated parts in practice it will give you a solid base for deciding how to implement things, and you'll get a good sense of just how efficient things can be so that you'll be more able to recognize poor solutions when they show up.

If he's just starting to learn HTML, fancy tricks should be the last thing on his mind. Basics come first, and there are a lot of them. Most HTML jobs are going to assume a minimum of CSS and either JavaScript or graphic design (Photoshop) skills as well - and that's just the lowest entry point. Probably most will want experience in whatever CMS or frameworks are popular this week, and maybe some server scripting (PHP / Rails) as well. The days of random teenagers getting paid big bucks for being able to slap together a bare-bones website ended 10-15 years ago.

That rant aside, if he's still interested in showing off (or maybe getting inspired), I'd suggest looking more generally into web design and maybe toying around with the new HTML5 <canvas> element (requires JavaScript skill). It's a lot easier to impress people - especially non-technical hiring folks - with these sorts of visual things than by actual coding ability that they can't judge.

If there is a lot to criticize, better for it to happen early and by a niche crowd that will give you useful advice than when you're trying to launch and everyone just thinks "this sucks" and silently ignores it.

Also, If the general population becomes interested enough in your site to spend the time hunting down an old unflattering HN thread then you've already won.