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.