mei0Iesh

But they don't explain why, and warnings are overdone due to litigation fears, so people will often use their own judgment, and without understanding the concept behind why, they may choose unwisely.

"Take all of the prescribed medication" : "They're just greedy and want to make me buy more"

vs.

"Take all or you'll breed antibiotic-resistant bacteria that cannot be treated and you will die and kill the human race" : "I better follow this prescription"

There used to be a difference between scripters and programmers. I'm a scripter, and it feels similar to learning a natural language and writing essays in it. In other words, it's easy and doesn't require any mathematical skill.

There are low-level programmers who do things similar to other sciences involving math, and my brain wouldn't be able to do that.

So if you're talking about scripting, which I think most people do, then I agree it isn't difficult.

Notice it doesn't say the first "successful" human head transplant.

Hello. I am an investor. I'd like to contact you privately about this "Uber For Dogs" idea.

Why was this flagged and removed? I don't get it. HN is weird.

The response to his death is creepy to me, like "His name is Robert Paulson". There's so much misinformation, and misuse of his death for ideological and social purposes unrelated to the actual person. The fact that someone made something called "Internet's Own Boy" only compounds this. If it were me, I'd want to come back to life just to tell you all that I'm not your puppet, and you have no clue why I died; you didn't know me, and I am not "your boy". Since I couldn't come back to life, I'd hope there'd be people who would speak against this groupthink on my behalf.

I don't think most people creating websites today have an accurate assessment of "user expectations". Often I'll visit a site that has a gigantic video playing, with some obscure symbols, that doesn't even work on all my devices. Or if I have JS turned off, a blank page.

I'm building things the same way as I did at around 2000, and my creations are just as relevant today. Most of the fancy JS stuff we could do in the '90s. The new stuff is not about basic websites, but how some new additions of HTML5 work. Most websites do not need those though, and if they do, then you learn those specific things.

I don't know what any of those things you named are. I ignore all that stuff. The only thing from the '90s that doesn't work anymore is Flash, because I guess Apple blocked it during the mobile revolution and it killed its dominant position.

Otherwise, everything applicable from back then still is today. Any time anyone mentions PHP on forums like this, there's always fashion-conscious people who jump in to attack it. But I'm still building brand new websites based on it, and people still express their gratitude, never once saying there's any problem because the site uses PHP.

MySQL is still going strong, and there's some alternatives that are compatible, like Percona and Maria.

JavaScript is the same. There's all these frameworks like there are for PHP, but I ignore all that. I never understood why I'd be better off using someone else's virtual language on top of a language. I just use bare JavaScript, and it works the same to me as it did back then. Still have to worry about differences between browsers, but instead of Netscape and IE, it's stuff like Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. A framework can make that easier, but it can make others things more difficult, and it's better to keep dependence on JS minimal anyways.

What I'm getting at is, I don't know why you need to update anything. If you're trying to get a specific job, then you need to use what they do. But for just building things in your free time that work on modern web browsers, you already know what you need to know. You could probably even run the same exact version of server and authoring tools you did before, and it should display fine in the latest web browsers.

It's different if you want to build something like a mobile app, or Windows software, because those platforms changed significantly since the '90s. There's languages now that didn't exist then, and new tools you've never seen before.

But on the web, any text editor, HTML, and any language you want for the backend is fine. Just like I still write .sh scripts, and they get the job done.

It's more important to spend that time on family, and your career. Since the stuff you already know still works, there's not much need to use anything else. Unless you're worried about what the kids think, and how they'll judge you.

I don't think "Sharing is good" is true in the real world. If you apply that as a blanket statement, you'll end up in trouble.

What is legal is not always ethical. I think there's an interesting story there about how Google is legal, if someone doesn't automatically assume it should be just because it is.

The text online isn't always similar to a published text of the past. There is a personal overlap today that changes the rules. Such as this text I'm publishing right now. Forgetting about all the legalities and technicalities, I still feel like it is different than a page published in a book. I still feel like I should have the power to edit or delete it whenever I want in the future, yet Hacker News disagrees and removes my right to modify it, forever capturing it as if it owns it, not me. I still feel like this text is more transitory, where its relevance is mostly right now, and if it were deleted in a month it would be fine, because it's mostly just chit chat.

Certainly we could live in a world where everyone has microphones transcribing everything they ever say, which is transmitted to Google, and provided to researchers, where all kinds of uses could emerge. But that's a different world than the one where we've developed rules for today. Right now, I feel like most things I say are in passing, and should not only disappear, but won't spread where someone is capturing and propagating it beyond my control.

What control do I have over my text that is in this Common Crawler database? What if it captured information that was considered to be ephemeral in the website's context, and ripped it out of its home where it's now part of this collective publication, where anyone can use it for anything?

Sharing could be good in a world where people are not selfish and malicious. But in this one, many people will use whatever data they can get their hands on for selfish and malicious purposes, that do not benefit you, the author, in any way. I bet a large percentage of use for that Common Crawler database was harmful to society, such as for helping spammers generate fake content.

Common Crawl contains the HTML?

I wonder how this is legal and considered acceptable. I wish I knew how even Google and others get away with scraping content, saving it, and utilizing it for profit without sharing any revenue with the original webmasters.

I know people can opt out of crawling, for those that actually respect that. But still, am I the only one who feels like this is wrong?

I guess I have this view that your domain is yours, and you invite the public in like an open house. It's my house, my property, and the door is open, where people can come in and look around at my stuff. But the expectation is that only locals will arrive, in small number, and they'll be good guests. If someone is breaking the lock on the bedroom door and going through the private drawers, that's wrong. If someone is taking photographs of everything, to then create a virtual tour of my house they charge for, that's wrong. The expectation is you're being nice by providing free and open access to information you created and own, and people should behave courteous to that.

Then if you as the webmaster choose, you can provide an API, or database dumps for people to download, along with the licensing terms. That is when it feels right for people to do things like this with the data, because you intentionally provided it through a non-personal interface.

To me the web is still a personal interface. I expect humans to use it, in an ordinary human-like way where it is somewhat ephemeral and courteous. I feel like Google cheated their way to success, and Common Crawl is stealing to rise their position in an unfair similar manner.

These all seem like parasites to me. They didn't create anything, they just steal it en masse.

There's so many businesses like that, such as Domain Tools that gets rich by hoarding everyone's contact details from WHOIS: http://whois.domaintools.com/commoncrawl.org

They have a screenshot history they won't ever delete even if you ask nicely. Here is a picture of Common Crawl from 2011: http://thumbnails.domaintools.com/domaintools/2016-01-08T19:...

I see this as a directory of self-centered egotistical people who feel like they're important and want to flaunt themselves. It gives me an icky feeling and I wouldn't want myself listed there. Is this website normal and I'm wrong for feeling this way?

Some of the personal slogan things for example, sound like meaningless thoughts of a narcissist:

"I create things to discover."

"I have ideas, then I make them real."

"I listen people, then I write about them."

"I notice things and try to make them better."

"I do interesting things to make sure I have interesting tales to tell."

"I help make the world a more sensible, purposeful, and meaningful place."

"I ask 'Why not?' and then write words or code to bring ideas into the real world."

What does any of that mean? Why are they posting their picture like that. Why should I care what they're doing right now?

Please tell me why this isn't just egomania.

I feel like I've been seeing more celebrity type stuff on here lately. I guess I would've been more impressed if the comments were about an actual project instead of a personality. If this project is interesting enough to be on the front page, why not talk about that?

> "only" got 15 likes.... and were considering deleting it!

> I deleted it because it had about -5 points.

I wonder if you're the one more concerned with the feedback and likes than your niece, and you're what caused her to delete it. Why are you worrying about the negative comments they receive and bothering them about your worries, which they then respond to by deleting what worries you? I can see an alternative view where from their perspective it was more like, "Gah, my uncle is stalking my IG and freaking out on me; deleting to make this drama go away!"

This was research? I saw a romanticizing of celebrity musicians as cute little kittens, where it went on and on about, "Aww, look how adorably sensitive they are."

For one thing, anyone who trains in music develops a heightened awareness to subtleties in sound. It is not surprising at all for a musician to report an awareness of richness in sound that others don't bother with. Just like a carpenter probably would report a deep awareness of grain in wood and how it affects the structural integrity or something similar.

Performance art is where people put their emotional extremes on showcase. Obviously the ones with the most extremeness are going to get the most attention from people who want to see that sort of thing. People who are "highly sensitive" are an extreme, and their display of emotions are going to appear more intense, and thus more exciting for performance art consumers.

How about doing research on the types of people who would be so obsessive about watching other people's pain and joy? Why do they get so wrapped up in the "charisma" of a performer, and needing to see something private put on display in an artificial way?

> If I'm electrosensitive (I constantly get electric shocks for example), then computers are probably the best medium.

This statement appears as mystical as tarot cards. What connection is there to getting electric shocks and using a computer other than some vague mystical correlation not founded on anything logical?

You make it sound like "If you're a criminal, please talk to someone. Call 1-800-CRIMINAL and tell us your crimes. It's time you got help, by being locked up."

That's what I would do, stay there. I wouldn't be a dick about it though, I'd simply explain that I don't mind being pat down, but don't want to be scanned for personal reasons. If it was obvious they were going to make an issue out of it, then that's when I'd calmly turn on the Periscope app and notify them I was streaming live video and audio, then sit down and see how it plays out.

It is not a concern at all for me, because I can run that command from a user that does not have privileges to mess anything up. Those options make it not even attempt to read or write any web server configuration. All it does is create the certificate.

If you can't trust a CA not to prevent their official client from becoming malware, then I don't see how you can trust them to maintain their position as CA. There is no real scenario where the official client is discovered to be backdoored, and people go on using Let's Encrypt certificates.

If you don't trust the official client, why do you trust them to be your certificate authority? Also, note that I ran this command as a normal user, not root.

That looks like a lot more work than the official client. I don't get why so many people immediately on the first day of public beta turn to alternative clients. I used the official one, and by looking at the --help options I easily found how to automatically generate a certificate without taking down the server, and without using root privileges:

    letsencrypt -t --work-dir /tmp --logs-dir /tmp \ 
    certonly --webroot /var/www/example.com/htdocs -d example.com

With this in nginx.conf:

    listen 443 ssl http2;
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem

Those paths are examples obviously. But I did that, issued a 'service nginx reload', and it was done. I can reissue that command in a cron job to renew whenever I want.

There are some Python dependencies for the official client, but my package manager installed them for me, so I don't get why people avoid it, especially when most of these alternative clients require more work.

The official client handles your registered account, and I don't trust the alternatives not to mess with that or be incompatible in some way, so if you ever want to seamlessly use the official again you might end up with a different account identity or something. I don't know, I didn't look too deeply into it, other than the steps, and the official one was easiest for me.

Not me. Donations are a much worse business model to me than ads. With ads, I offer free information they want, and free information about unrelated products and services they may or may not want. Either way they get something free, and I get money without owing anyone anything.

With donations, I'm offering free information, that they're really supposed to pay for, but instead of just asking for the money as an exchange, I rely on the goodness of their heart, or guilting them into feeling bad and owing me. Then they pay, but the information was already free, so they're not actually paying for it, instead they're paying for the smugness of being one of the few that actually paid what they owed, and I become the charity case in their eyes, and they are disappointed if they're not rewarded for their good deed. They expect me to do something, give them some feedback, either by personally thanking them, or posting on the website how great they are for donating. Either way, I owe them, they owe me, and it's all in this fuzzy emotional space that's outside the actual exchange of information and costs of hardware and networking.

I hate donations. I tried them once, and where I would've made $100 per day, I'd be lucky if I got $1 per day, maybe even $1 per week it was that low. Because I don't want to have a "family". I don't want charity. I refunded donations and put ads back up.

Ads are what people want. Nobody wants to pay directly, and nobody wants to be guilted and in debt. The people who donate are doing it for other purposes than paying for nothing. They want something out of it, and I don't want to give them it.

Go ahead and block ads. So what. They aren't for everyone. Then you get free information, donated to you by the people who like ads and support those who pay to advertise, and the businesses who take the risk in paying to have their name part of your site.

People love ads, even those who block them.

News only lasts 24 hours before it's replaced with the next topic. Most activity occurs on the front page items, as you can see by clicking "new" at the top of this site.

But that's people. Spam bots scan sites for open comment forms, and having them on every old page increases the attack surface. Usually the only comments on old pages are tons of spam gibberish.

One method sites rely on for anti-spam detection are user reports. But since the humans only pay attention to the new content, the spam is hidden on the old pages, where web spiders index it, and then consider the entire site as spam.

So sites will close old comment forms to prevent spam bots from flooding old pages nobody looks at anymore.

There are a few other reasons people might do that, like on some sites people get into a heated back-and-forth that lasts beyond the 24 hours, where although nobody else visits that page anymore, 2 people are replying to each other for days or weeks later. By closing it, they're preventing people from doing that.

Finally! Maybe now someone can build a web app that enhances the reading and discover of documents. Each browser could be a repository of text files, each with an address, so you can have words in the text pointing to another document's address.

I think "they" in your story are more responsible for building the Internet than "we" are.

Paying thousands? It's $5 or less per year for a certificate like the one Let's Encrypt provides at other sites.

I was going to star it, until I saw the advertisement in the README.md.

Phoenix appeared at a time when web browsers were bloated, and it was refreshing to have a minimalist app that simply browsed the web. It wasn't that potential was being stifled; other browsers had too many features. It was that we could download a small binary on dial-up, that opened up quickly and just did what we needed without any fluff.

Notice that last part about downloading? That's the key. We could download Phoenix, and run it. I can't download FirefoxOS, and run it. My devices are locked to what they can run. If mobile appliances were like personal computers, then a Phoenix could rise. But it's a completely different situation, so there is no way to compete like you could with web browsers.

Netflix was TV ad-blocking for me. I hated TV and stopped watching it for many years. Then when Netflix came around, I discovered that TV production had greatly improved, and it's the ad interruptions that was poisoning the art, making me feel sick to watch it. Without the ads, I could binge watch a multiple-year series of a television show, and not feel sick.

It's kind of like if you turned on TV to watch the President's speech, and noticed it was a computer-generated 3D representation. It wouldn't be distracting? He's saying all these things, and I can't receive the message because all I see is a puppet pretending to be a man. I'm wondering about who actually wrote it, how many people it took to animate, whether it's even an authentic message or if it's part of some propagandic theatre.

I think if someone is going to use their personal name on a website, they should actually write it. Otherwise, it's deceptive. If it's going to be a team effort, then call it a different name, and don't show a big picture of your face at the top of the screen.