skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One question: Do you think HN is the best forum to seek the answer as this is mostly a tech oriented site?

Not that I have a better suggestion where to post the question.

I too focus on physical businesses. I read HN for ideas to make those businesses more effective through applying technology, but like you would love to find a similar site aimed more at physical businesses.

I feel every physical business can outperform their counter parts through use of innovative technology.

For example, recently one of our delivery trucks was misbehaving. I took it to this mechanic shop, a really old school type place, with just the shop owner and his two helpers. Pretty much as low tech as you can get.

The shop owner, who was in his seventies, was trying to diagnose the problem. It was something he had never seen before and the symptoms were not listed in any of the truck manufacturer's service bulletins that he had online access to. He logs into an online forum type site where he finds other mechanics that had the same problem with this particular model and reported their solution. His keyboard was so covered in grease that you could barely make out the letters. An hour and twenty minutes later the truck is back in service.

I asked him about the site. As part of the service he is required to report back what worked for him. He says 'I spend $100 a month for it, but it is worth ten times that.'
I don't think that's comparable. Maybe it would be if every new English sentence started on a new line ;)

The capital letter in English is a strong visual indicator that a new sentence is starting. In code I think the line break does that more than well enough, no need for the ;
The "latest" comment is relative. And no, this doesn't fix the problem.
I can see my server from the management console but I can't ssh to it. Damn, my IRC is down :(
This is probably furthest down on my list of worries when writing JS... Sometimes I use semicolons, sometimes I don't (I try to be consistent in the same file), and when I'm in somebody else's house I follow their style. The examples given for why I should always use semicolons (e.g. the return + value on different line) are things that just don't come up for me and usually look ugly enough I'd avoid them anyway. (Also they're fairly simple to discover if you're actually testing your code.) The last time I did a return and value on the next line was in Java...
No, I just prefer native web fonts to cufon. And you're still not escaping at least one of your queries properly unless you fixed it in the last 10 minutes.
Clear skies over Dublin, not a cloud in sight. ;)
The opportunity cost of a broad skillset
> ...act as if you are unable to drive the EV anywhere without unwittingly running out of fuel

Not to be a jerk, but have you actually watched the episode or did you just read the article?

This linked article makes it sounds like they were just driving along and poof the car died. But that's not at all how it looked on TV.
We're too far to the right on this thread to keep going with this, but take my word for at least this: public key signature verification is advanced number theoretic cryptography. It is actually less straightforward than somehow applying a block cipher to variable-length arrays of user data.
Exactly! The semicolon prefix can be put even more simply: Prefix any line that starts with punctuation with a ;

There, you've just fixed all the cases that are likely to go wrong.
Totally agree.

Although it surely would have been a cool and useful toy, there are lots of good reasons I didn't buy a cell phone in the 80s.
Yes it is. My point is that when those guys created their respective languages, they omitted semicolons. One would surmise that they thought it made things better.
That's not a problem with the line joining stuff. Both `return' and `{ foo: bar }' are ENTIRE VALID statements in their own right.

returnStmt ::= "return" [ expression ] (";" or EOL)

Note that expression is optional, so it's the choice of `return' by itself being a valid statement on its own that "causes problems".

Plus, this is not really a problem that can be solved by simply putting semicolons everywhere. You can't change the parser rules by including or not semicolons.

Also, same thing with break/continue:

breakStmt ::= "break" [ label ] (";" or EOL)

continueStmt ::= "continue" [ label ] (";" or EOL)
"return i++" is not ambiguous, on that you are correct--but it is terrible practice because it lends itself to being misconstrued.

Writing clear code is superior to writing "cute" code, and "return i++" is a case of the latter. In any case where the increment actually matters you are directly affecting a shared state and such changes should be made contextually obvious to the state of the object--one's neck would need to be very, very beard to think that this is immediately obvious and apparent in a contextually valid way.

Similarly, for many programmers, myself included, a semicolon is read as a period is in English--the end of the statement. (You keep saying that "but people don't get annoyed at Python when it does it," and guess what? I certainly get annoyed at it--Python consistently frustrates me because I find it considerably less readable.) Omitting semicolons is less immediately clear than including them and, again, can be misconstrued. Only it can be misconstrued by the program interpreter, too. (Oops.)
Using Trust Maps to Manage Critical Systems
@eropple: So you put semicolons after every line? Even after block statements {} ? Why not, if the goal is to be consistent?
"The car unexpectedly ran out of charge when they got to Lincoln"

That's not how I remember it playing out. They had plenty of warning and made numerous references to the battery meter and its "miles left" estimation. As they were looking for a charging station, James May said something to the effect, "He's running on whatever the electric equivalent of gas fumes is."

If you just read this article, I encourage you to watch the episode before getting all wound up.
Because it's been raised with minimal problems for the law's near century of existence.
The Horizontal Slice
Fareed Zakaria: Unprecedented and Un-American Behavior
After watching the episode, It seems like the point they were making in Top Gear was that:

A) It's not particularly hard to get stranded in one of these things.
B) When you do get stranded, it's non-trivial to get them recharged.

I think those are both fair points. A lot of people seem to be pointing out that "well if you plan ahead this won't happen", but how many times have you had to use your car to get to something you didn't plan ahead for? Maybe there's an emergency, or maybe I'm late, or maybe I just forgot to charge the thing overnight. Electric cars are cool, but for most people I can only imagine them supplementing a gas car, not replacing it.
Unix pipes as IO monads
Machine Learning on Big Data (Google Research)
I really don't see any problem with the way JavaScript handles it. "Unless the following line can be part of the preceding statement, end the current statement" is a pretty natural thing to me. But well, I guess that's a matter of taste, and you can't really discuss that...
How I decided the price for my Japanese candy subscription service
Which they did in order to show the obvious problem in a safe and entertaining way. It doesn't matter if the battery was going to die in 10 more miles, or 40 more miles on a highway. It would be just as inconvenient and less safe.

Again, you’re entirely missing the point, namely that they decieved the viewer about how this came to be, not whether it was inconvenient to run out of charge. Imagine, for example, that I wanted to demonstrate the catastrophic dangers of Scuba Diving. I go on a tour with a noted guiding company. I am trained in my equipment’s features. I am outfitted with a mechanical gas gauge and an air integrated dive computer. I deliberately breathe my tank down to less than full capacity before submerging, and then I deliberately exhaust air on the bottom to run it out. Instant emergency.

This would be a fine way to discuss the dangers of being out of air at depth, but it would be ludicrous to stage the whole thing as if a diver would actually submerge on less than a full tank of air and would continue the dive even if his air integrated computer were to warn him that he could not complete the dive as planned.

I’ve seen tons of videos showing this kind of thing, but none have suggested anything other than human error is the problem. If what they want to do is say that petrol is more convenient because you can get gas even if you’re a complete idiot, they can make that point easily and entertainingly without deception.
For a very astute explication of this idea, I highly recommend "Architect or Bee" by Mike Cooley. It explains well why the replacement of 'analog' engineering methods with computer-aided processes is detrimental to workers and often results in worse output.

Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Architect-Bee-Human-Technology-Relatio...
Hopefully it has been fixed, gone through all the searches over the past hour and can't see any that are still getting through.
Well, now I've learned something. I had no idea that Dumas wasn't the sole author of his novels. (I'm not sure how he did it qualifies as a "factory", but perhaps it does.) Not only that, I had no idea that Dumas was the grandson of a Haitian slave. Or that Chirac had his body exhumed in 2002 and moved to the Pantheon. Best Wikipedia learnage I've had in some time!

Edit: there's one interesting point about how Dumas worked. He relied on collaborators to come up with the basic plots and characters. Then he did the detailed writing and stylistic fluorish. That's exactly the opposite of how most ghostwriting works, or so I imagine.
Darpa Commits To Funding Useful Hacking Projects
I think it's more along the lines of them pressuring the government to change the law that now holds them accountable for the kinds of things they were doing in 2008.
See here: http://www.law.illinois.edu/bljournal/post/2011/03/29/Dodd-F...
and here:
http://firedoglake.com/2011/08/05/is-standard-and-poors-mani...
So does it just mean that the implementation is hard to get right? I'm all for killing off ideas, especially when it comes to cryptography, but I'd like to at least learn something in the process. Is there somewhere I can learn about everything that can go wrong with that specific process, or would I have to just try to implement this algorithms myself, to understand the risks? BTW. Thanks for everything so far; I trust you're a busy man.
重庆按摩
Defcon is much more like a family reunion than a scary thing. This year hundreds of hackers literally opened their veins to give blood in honor of one of our own who needed it. The hacking of other attendees that goes on has more of a prank feel to it (much like a lot of the con!) than a scary thing. It's just a bunch of people getting together to talk, do interesting things and/or get drunk together.
If you define recovery as a return to the pre-recession peak income less transfer payments, we've never actually recovered.

http://cr4re.com/charts/charts.html?GDP#category=GDP&cha...

I suspect this would resonate with a majority of Americans.
And Balmer is also probably the reason Microsoft is losing Ray Ozzie, who by all rights should have been Gates' successor.

IMHO Ballmer was never supposed to be CEO, except maybe on a temporary basis. MS needs a technologist at the helm.
My feelings exactly :3
The creativity is in no way restricted to the demoscene - just more conspicuous. Creating games involves a different set of constraints, and there are plenty of examples of ingenuity & creativity to be found there.

In fact, many game programmers are also involved in the demoscene; For instance, the guys who created Max Payne were a part of the infamous Future Crew.
I have that exact problem; finding new music. Pandora doesn't dig deep, oddly. That said, I just can't imagine people paying for music. Is it possible you could convince bands that the promotion is good for them, and to give the music for free? Then maybe throwing ads into a free newsletter to make your money?

Regardless, best of luck.
Www.cnanmow.com
Demosceners beat dotcom web kids any day of the week.

I simply cannot see any of the current boy kings being able to keep up with this sort of thing.
> Which they did in order to show the obvious problem in a safe and entertaining way

And the "obvious" problem is...? The car electronics was showing they had charge for 30 miles. Sat-nav was telling them their destination is 60 miles away.
For me the conclusion is that for the math challenged, driving an electric car is an "obvious" problem.
A great place to start is (Google) [nigel cryptography]; for your particular question, start with the chapter "attacks on public key cryptography".
Good point. I didn't know the rule was that old.
Well, at least we agree that 'return i++' is terrible practice (although it has nothing to do with semicolons) :)

But when you write Python code, do you then end every line with a ; ? To make it more readable for yourself?
I see all my servers on the management console, but I'm unable to ssh any of them, all in the same availability zone, eu-west-1b
All this discussion just makes me wonder: Why are some other programmers afraid of using them? It's just a semicolon.
My hope is that down the line, if it gets enough users, then it would be a place that labels would want to promote their artists. I agree that a lot of people don't want to pay for music - I'm hoping there are enough out there that are willing to pay for curation and the convenience of being told about a cool new band each weekday.
So far I've had a few subscribers by running facebook ads, but it seems there's a bit of an art to getting the most mileage from the ads.
Another interesting post by Steve. What are your thoughts on twilio's date prefix in the URI versus using "v1" for example? Does discovery appease the purists qualms about versioning? But if using HATEOS enables discovery (which twilio is doing), why put a date there in the first place? I am thinking they're future-proofing their top-level resource discovery, but maybe I'm missing something.
You must have really just fixed it. I'm not seeing the sql errors anymore.
It's not very complicated. A service debuts and within a matter of weeks acquires a user base exceeding 20 million people. Not without complication or frustration on behalf of those who still prefer the use of bardic names, but a success nonetheless. Yet one person still reserves their right to stand over the shoulder of the actual developers and issue directives that they feel would complement their experience, regardless of what 20+ million people think. And when her directives are ignored, she claims abuse.

Having to use your own name while negotiating the tricky waters of social relationships is not abuse, it's the first-world problem of a petulant, spoiled child.
World GDP in a country with fast-growing economies and slow-growing economies, is not that useful a measure.

As an example, Brazil, China, India have actually been growing at rates that would be miraculous in the US, because they have labor-intensive industry and increasing oil supplies.

Old countries like the US, UK, France have barely moved the needle, and are scraping by through money-printing to finance massive deficits.
I like the idea. One problem would be spiking fees. Company A licenses a patent from company B for the yearly fee of $1 per instance. Company A builds a successful product with 100k units sold. The next year, Company B decides to declare a 10x value on the patent. Company A, committed to the technology, either has to pay it or start over.

I guess this could be solved by long term lock ins at specific fees.
The question of why US productivity seems to have stagnated since the 1970s, the same period in which information technology has exploded and was supposed to revolutionize everything is known as the "Productivity Paradox". The key article in this area is http://ccs.mit.edu/papers/CCSWP130/ccswp130.html . You can also look at the Wikipedia article, but be warned that it's kind of a mishmash: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

The Productivity Paradox is a highly controversial subject with no solid answers. Four main explanations are:

1) Mismeasurement of outputs and inputs. That is, productivity measurements are not showing the "real" state of productivity. In particular, quality improvements don't show up in the statistics.

2) Lags due to learning and adjustment. That is, just like it took industry a long time to make full use of electricity, productivity improvements from computer technology will take time.

3) Redistribution and dissipation of profits. E.g. Amazon makes a lot more money, local bookstores lose money, and the economy as a whole breaks even.

4) Mismanagement of information and technology. That is, the investment in computers is just a waste of money.

The first two explanations are the "optimistic" ones in the sense that technology does in fact benefit the economy, while the last two are the "pessimistic" explanations, that technology isn't helping.
Exactly, that's the point. Or a browser extension. Or various other fun things, see tptacek's conversation above.
http://hackruiter.com
More likely the Nissan engineers were on hand, as are representatives from companies of most of the cars they test including the Tesla, to handle any problems and ensure that the filming can go ahead.
"I've been in charge of technical interviews for a large corporation for a year and a half, and there have been many truly shitty developers who couldn't solve even simple programming problems, but they knew how to bullshit, and they would totally ace your questions."

Well, first, it's not like I just ask someone if they enjoy documenting code, and expect them not to lie. That would be stupid. It's much easier to just ask coding questions than to figure out if someone is creative. That's why the problem is hard.

Second, how do you focus on the other important factors, and still manage to test for coding ability? You ask coding questions -- you just don't devote the entire interview process to them.
I guess I just don't really understand what it is you are talking about setting up. Let's just limit this to NASDAQ.. NASDAQ requires a $14/seat exchange fee for non-professional users. If you, as a distributor don't control the entity receiving the data (you wouldn't in this case), then everyone receiving data from you would still need to sign with NASDAQ:

"All data feeds — including internally or externally distributed, real-time or delayed, snapshot or streaming — must be approved by NASDAQ OMX prior to initiation of service. This prior approval process creates a direct relationship between the Recipient and NASDAQ OMX. This direct relationship is essential in ensuring the correct display of the Information, an effective entitlement process and a timely reporting process of the market data usage."

http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/content/AdministrationSupport/Ag...

If this is not what you are planning on doing, could you be more specific about what you're talking about distributing? If you had 100 people that want the realtime feed, how would you handle bandwidth/equipment issues?
So the mystery trader who bet $1 billion that the US would default or lose their credit rating will get $10 billion?

http://etfdailynews.com/2011/07/25/investors-the-1-billion-a...
Bullet, meet foot. Given that this downgrade was triggered entirely by the poor behavior of U.S. politicians, how can it be in the U.S. interest for the Treasury to come across as whiney and paranoid? If the treasury had also mentioned the perfectly reasonable reasons for a downgrade there may be some balance, but to talk of S&P "making political decisions" puts them in exactly the same bracket as the poorly behaving politicians! Would you do business with this lot?!
CloudFormation is also affected now.
"how hard is compiling a bunch of XML ..." - sorry to pick on you, but "I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

Being built on XML, which is mostly just a syntax, doesn't really say anything about the semantics of display and editing. It's only slightly removed from saying that it should be easy to compile any programming language into any other because they're all just ASCII text files.
The demise of the low level programmer
Why yes, that is a Galaxy Tab 10.1 in my pocket
Jonathan's Card
Why Minecraft Works (Design Concepts)
R2D2 - glass recycler droid
One can take shortcuts in demos that one can't take in games.

(And one can take shortcuts in games that cannot take in real simulations.)
Do laptops running Windows face the same problems with Flash?
"First of all, Berkeley is NOT getting rid of SICP and SICP ideas."

Yeah, that's what they said at MIT, and to my somewhat limited knowledge it simply didn't happen (e.g. most of that material is supposed to be taught in a course that uses Java, which invokes the surface of the phrase "not even wrong").

Ah well, "and then there was one" (CMU among the top 4).
I'm so tempted to use your service that I might give it a try, even though I think the price is a little too high due to what appears to be a shipping channel problem. I can get a lot of Japanese candy at my local Asian supermarket (kiwi gummis and pocky) but I'd really be interested in seeing a list of what goes in the envelopes prior to committing.
Even with all that in place, it doesn't mean every client is actually going to use it. http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html
Twitter lifted Search API and Search subdomain
Indeed - Feedback is only useful when you act on it ;)
I prefer to avoid Python entirely, but there are cases where I have to fiddle with preexisting code or the nature of the problem makes more sense to use it, i.e. a library already exists that doesn't elsewhere. In those cases, I write idiomatic Python, without semicolons, because That's The Way You Write Python.

Consistency is important, and the Python community has essentially said "don't use semicolons." The JavaScript community has essentially said "use semicolons aggressively". I write code according to those idioms so other people are able to more easily use it.
Same here, but introduced an issue with external display sleeping. Still a beta though.
Except most people in America don't park at meters. Not at work, anyway. Most people park in parking lots, where there's no infrastructure for charging stations. How many businesses would want to distract themselves with maintaining and running a network of metered charging stations?
Well, I started with the idea of 'We should be free to invent' - thanks for taking the time to poke holes in one proposal towards this end. I tend to agree that it would be difficult to build a practical certification system, at least with any proven system we've seen today.

Our government provides us many freedoms in the constitution, perhaps an amendment is a better proposal. That way the courts can interpret a more meaningful definition of Freedom to Invent as a way of shaping the current patent system.
I don't really buy the patent argument. A 30 or 40 year old trend over the entire economy is supposed to be explained by patents? There's a seriously strong argument which requires equally strong supporting evidence. Patents don't even apply to much of the economy like education, and even within particular sectors like health care/medicine, the patents tend to be heavily concentrated in things like pharmaceuticals.

So shouldn't we be seeing outsized differences between sectors and sub-sectors, where the patent-free area is growing like gangbusters and the patent-encumbered one is static or negative?

As far as I know, this has not been shown, and sectors which ought to be suffering the most (like software) are still doing pretty well...