skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Doesn't HTTP compression make minification largely unnecessary?

It depends. If you have really high traffic or you care about every last microsecond of responsiveness, minification is essential. Also, minifiers these days tend to know about scope and program structure and may even be able to figure out when you're referring to defined browser objects like 'window'. So you just get that much more bang for the buck when combined with other forms of compression.

As for your other question, about convention: back in the dark days of the mid-90s Javascript was just the subset of scripts that both IE and Netscape would support. Omitting semicolons usually caused horrible bugs in one or the other. Also, most tools for formatting source code assume that newlines are not significant, and may wrap, split, or join lines in a way that breaks the logic.

Anyway, most battles over source code standards end in the most explicit option winning. This case is no exception.

Your question is fair, considering that ECMAscript is standardized now. In principle, you could switch to a newline-terminated style, thus saving a whole extra character per line. (But that would be eliminated if you minified).

However, even today, I would guess that omitting semicolons risks breakage. Browser makers don't test much with newline-terminated scripts.
All homosexual marriages are sterile.

Some heterosexual marriages are sterile, too.

In my country, children are (currently!) really fortunate: they are guaranteed to have a mother and a father (yes, I know already your objections), and, as psychology is able to demonstrate, this is still the sanest and most harmonic way to grow children.

Why do we always exclude children from this reasoning?
http://paste.pocoo.org/show/91848/
Sounds like a startup opportunity. Ebay for sublets. Then again, everyone is going virtual these days so it might be a still born opportunity.

As for you specific situation, I would eat the 3 months and be done with it. But perhaps someone else has a better idea.
It's not like they haven't rebranded everything before:

* 9X
Visual*
Active*
Direct*
* 200X
*.net
* Live
Windows Live *
Windows *
If you're interested in myers-briggs, you may want to check out the http://str8.to/my-type-facebook app.
they should become the new email
I'd be happy to help. Just ping me at iamelgringo at google's email service.
Agreed. From the sound of it, this Ginko "bank" was just a poorly disguised Ponzi scheme. This type of scam is already regulated in the real world, for the good reason that it always blows up if allowed.

The article is somewhat interesting but the points it makes are all dangerously, fatally flawed.
Be-A-Magpie Is PayPerPost For Twitter
I couldn't comment on anything specific to lights, but I can comment as a web user. Sometimes it's the little things... I was a bit jarred by your website being so dark. The menu buttons were hard to find (hard being a relative term here, of course) because there was a lack of contrast. And then the news page shocks the system again by being bright white. On the blog page, the menu buttons go away (but they do not on any other page).

Usability things aside, am I guessing correctly that you are intentionally making the site very dark in order to say something about the light industry? I don't quite get it... on a gut level I would have expected something crisp and beautiful maybe, in order to match the product (something maybe like http://www.betterplace.com )
If users could connect the visual to some source of data to see all of the information on the display that would be really cool
The '{}' is where 'find' substitutes the filename into the '-exec' expression.

The '/.' is pointless but harmless, conservative ass-covering, likely because the author was burned by leaving off a trailing slash before. They're already restricting types to files anyway!

The semicolon terminates the -exec expression, and has to be escaped with a backslash so that the shell won't interpret it.
Explicit statement termination is all about speed - ensuring that JavaScript interpretation is as rapid as possible. Terminating a statement implicitly requires additional processor cycles - and we still need to husband those cycles to maintain a responsive user experience.
On Mercurial (ie: git lite)
Intersting idea, but what's to prevent RPX from changing its model down the line and selling its portfolio to Intellectual Ventures?
It's unlikely to work. People don't like their light texture to change - because it's what they are used to. LED light has a different texture from normal light, and this is a bit jarring.

So, unless you can make something cheaper, the only way to gain traction in the light market is by massive marketing - and I don't think a startup can afford that type of marketing.

Also, remove the webfaction affiliate link, it makes you look real cheap.
For Luxury Brands, Less Money to Spend on Ads
Someone once wrote a book on this sort of thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great_...
Randy Farmer did an interview with "Community Management" - where he talked about the importance of minimizing the effects of vandalism. Yahoo Answers solved their spam issue by using the community to move from 12 hours to 30 second response times.

http://thefarmers.org/Habitat/2008/06/randy_interviewed_on_c... (video and transcript)

I've been interested in this question myself for userscripts.org

The question seems tied to a reputation system (to determine who is allowed to moderate).

Joel and Jeff of Stack Overflow discuss reputation systems in a recent podcast: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/10/podcast-26/

Which makes the question for me: how do you implement a reputation system on an existing site without pissing off users?

Small details can lead to large consequences for your users, and when you have 6MM pageviews a month and 50K+ users, it seems like the wrong place to learn by making mistakes.

Perhaps transparency around actions performed by the community moderators, so those who weren't granted new powers can provide a check against abuses. Providing a mechanism to view deleted comments/userscripts (but not who as to limit retribution), others can alert admin (me) if moderation needs reversed.

Anyone have experience adding community moderation to an existing popular site?
Times New Roman was designed for small newsprint, printed as cheaply as possible on crappy paper. For that it works fairly well. At normal size, though, its schizophrenic design becomes an eyesore.

More importantly, the default Microsoft versions of Times New Roman have shitty kerning, are set not to use ligatures by default, use capitalized (“lining”) numbers, and so forth. If you redid all of the kerning tables by hand, and used a better typographic engine than MS Word, you could get Times New Roman to look passable; it’s never going to be beautiful though.
"With NPEs, you can't sue them which is what makes them particularly scary because you have no real defense against them," said Amster, adding that roughly 16 percent of all patent litigation is associated with these entities. Asked to elaborate on why the NPEs can't be sued, Amster said "they don't do anything."

Ahh trolls. Buying tomorrow to keep it from happening. Almost like shorting the future. That's eye opening that we're coming up on 1 in 5 of all patent cases being troll related.

I wish these guys luck, I think. I just wonder what (really) happens if you're not paying your $35,000/year (the "startup" price) and you happen to use a technology that sounds kind of like a patent that's in the trust that IBM is also using.
How are you going to go head to head with Phillips and win? They can push stuff out to stores, grocery markets, and all kinds of channels. What's your strategy?

Your web page is kind of empty looking to me... there's no 'there', there. The news bit is kind of weird; it doesn't feel well integrated. I also agree that the hosting affiliation link is kind of distracting. I would go for something apple-ish... showcase your product, show people how beautiful it is.
Raising kids in an online world
New longevity drugs poised to tackle aging
Leaving out semicolons leads to errors. Ambiguity etc...

return

[1,2,3]

What should that do? Should it return, or return [1,2,3]?
There are many other examples. Use semicolons and there is no debate over what should happen. Making them optional in javascript was a ridiculous idea.
Poorly disguised Ponzi scheme... That reminds me of another certain banking system...
Do not go from Perforce to Subversion. Whatever you decide. That is a massive step backwards.
I've used Catalyst in the past, now at work I am stuck with CGI::Application and it seems rather OK, but still a little step back. At least in Catalyst it is natural to have multiple classes (each for one controller) - while the app being developed here ended up as one huge application class.

But really the more imporatant part of the decision is what templating and ORM to use. I have a blog post on that: http://perlalchemy.blogspot.com/2008/10/progress.html .
Slashcode uses http://www.slashcode.com/docs/INSTALL.html#requirements
All of our recent projects use Catalyst (commercial and personal).
The best thing is that it prevents us to repeat each and every simple functionality that we previously had to write with CGI or CGI::Simple.
We can totally concentrate on the actual work we want to do without spending much time on groundwork.

From time to time we factor out common code into modules on top of Catalyst. Everything else is just application code.

Catalyst is super nice for fast development and/or prototyping of web applications and has all the flexibility you need.
I'm sorry to say but it's starts to get messy when it's used by a team. Darcs suited me fine while worked alone with projects but as others joined we faces serious problems, including loss of data. I gave it up, switched to Mercurial and never ever missed darcs.
I should recommend either mercurial or git, but the learning curve of git is steep.
Totally agree.

The wave of emotion that has erupted with the election of Barack Obama reminds me of the Allied victory in France in WWII.

Especially since the article opens with this weeks example of hyperbole ad absurdum.
The topic is about web frameworks, not how to build your own or what techniques are hip and trendy.
You had me at "developers". You lost me at "released".
Slashdot really rules as no. 1 site for hacker news and comments. I use HN primarily for start-up related news.
When Twitter Met Facebook: The Acquisition Deal That Fail-Whaled
And of course you can use Mason with Catalyst: http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Catalyst::View::Mason

In this scope it's just another view like http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Catalyst::View::TT , http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Catalyst::View::XSLT or others http://search.cpan.org/search?query=Catalyst::View::
What is it? Am I the only one who cannot see a thing on the homepage?
They can work in certain settings. We're using some white LEDs in our kitchen, for instance, and they work fine (and consume an incredibly small amount of energy). They also pretty much never die, which is nice... you kind of buy them for life.

Wouldn't use them in the living room though, unfortunately, only good old fashioned yellow incandescent light there.
If that was the rationale, it would be better to just push it into the mail box completely.
Big nono: I've been looking at your page for 5 minutes and I still can't figure out what it is that you make (other than that it's related to LEDs) - I'm not gonna watch a video just to figure that out.
Thanks for the considered response: this sort of background information is exactly what I was looking for.
‘The Guild’ Lands Microsoft and Sprint In Exclusive Deal
I am eternally grateful that my parents didn't try to (as one commenter put it) "limit my screen time" without bothering to find out what it was on those screens that I found so interesting.

As my own small ones approach the digital rubicon, I've discovered some news that may be troubling to some parents. If you're going to parent your kids in an online, facebook, twitter, world, you're going to have to go there with them; At least far enough to get some idea of what its all about. I'm not sure what advice to give people who laugh at their own inability to figure out that "text stuff the kids these days are crazy over".

One the one hand, I hope I can keep up. On the other, I live here, and can't wait to show them the cool stuff.
Maybe they have a patent they can license to Phillips and other large manufacturers.
My job isn't to learn version-control systems. Time spent learning a programming language is a direct investment in productivity; time spent learning a version control system is, at best, a required distraction.
Keep in mind that I come from a mainly Python and Ruby background; both of those languages have always had newline-terminated statements. Yes, neither Python nor Ruby nor newline-terminated Javascript would return the desired result. But neither language seems to be suffering hugely as a result. (As far as I know.)

Why would you write a return statement like that in the first place? (Not intended as flamebait - I am genuinely curious to know.) If it is a simple typo that separates the 'return' from the '[1,2,3]', then isn't the negligent typist just as likely to leave off the all-important semicolon? Or is there a genuine reason you might want to put the [1,2,3] on a line by itself?
Agreed. Though, one caveat: SVN will slow down as it diffes large binary files. I remember reading a developer works article file about this. (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-svnbins.htm... thanks Google!)

(PS: if I'm misinformed, or out of date, I apologize. I use SVN, but never upgrade and have PSDs in the ~100-200MB range and its not terribly fast.)
AAA Credit Card
An informative and detailed analysis of the AAA Credit Card
well-played, eric.
i think part of the problem is that people simply aren't knowledgeable about the theory. what Jung described is not at all as trivial as the Myers-Briggs implementation makes it seem. this combined with the natural difficulty of figuring out anything about people through their own volition makes it a messy issue
The fray you found me lyrics
Hmm, interesting point. I've never worked on a truly large JavaScript codebase; it would be interesting to test the effect of implicit and explicit termination on various JavaScript engines. Presumably the performance penalty would apply to traditional interpreter-style engines much more than to modern compiling engines like V8.
If you set up git's bash completions, and run through a git tutorial, you'll know enough git to work on your projects. The more esoteric subcommands are generally useful in specific situations and simply don't have equivalents in most other VCSes.
Catalyst is an ideal candidate for you for this. The Controller and View code is very much separated from the Model code that you want, and agnostic to the framework code. I'm writing some text mining stuff at the moment, and Catalyst is what I'm using to keep web application logic and problem-domain logic well separated from each other. This (hopefully) makes everything much more maintainable.
Have you tried LyX? http://www.lyx.org/

I started using it a few years ago and haven't looked back.
Welcome to the real world, where "the next programmer to work on this might be dumber than you" is considered a valid justification for cargo-cult programming.

A good minifier should replace line-breaks with semicolons as appropriate using all the same inferencing rules as JavaScript itself. Until one of those comes along it seems like using semicolons is necessary to make the best use of the tools that do exist.
A domain-specific compression algorithm will often outperform a general purpose compression algorithm, and sometimes a combination of both is even better.

Besides, downloading a zip file is still faster than downloading the uncompressed file, so either everybody's doing HTTP compression wrong or it's not so hot to start with.
Catalyst is certainly numero uno in the Perl web framework world. Here's a list from the Perl5 wiki... http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?web_frameworks

Don't think u can go wrong with any of the established ones on that list. However two new kids on the block thats worth casting your eyes over are Squatting (http://search.cpan.org/dist/Squatting/) and Mojolicious (http://mojolicious.org/).

I'm currently enjoying using/playing with Squatting. Its a Microframework (inspired by Camping by _why) and you may find it a good first step from CGI apps.

/I3az/
$5 Million Lawsuit Charges Apple With Fraud Over 3G Speeds
Guess I should have read the OP - you caught me - tl;dr
I've defended a lot of Microsoft's behavior, but I certainly can't defend their branding strategies. Prefixing product names with the company name ensures trademark uniqueness and reduces customer confusion. However, Microsoft seems to insist on hierarchical branding namespaces which preserves the trademark uniqueness, but increases confusion.

Is it Microsoft Office Word? Or is it Microsoft Word?

Instead of Microsoft Calendar, it is Microsoft Windows LIVE Calendar, which is different than Microsoft Windows Calendar and Microsoft Office Outlook Calendar... If only Microsoft could consolidate efforts and stop creating various self-competing products.
Why Did Google Discontinue SearchMash?
How to fund a conference with donations
I agree. You often get multi-line statements and in many languages/APIs they're a nature way of doing things. Here's an example (in no particular language):

win = Window.new()
.setTitle("A new window")
.setForeground(Red)
.setBackground(White)
.setMenuBar(fileMenu, viewMenu, helpMenu);

I think this would be uglier and more error-prone if instead you had to use \ or some other character to indicate they are all part of the same expression:

win = Window.new()\
.setTitle("A new window")\
.setForeground(Red)\
.setBackground(White)\
.setMenuBar(fileMenu, viewMenu, helpMenu);
Here are the results of my experiment, as promised.

Here's my little mini-site:

http://www.christmasbingocards.com

This is a holiday promotion aimed at my customers. They're overwhelmingly non-technical folks, and not too sophisticated at the Internet. (I am well-aware that most people here would not purchase my software. I'm totally OK with that: you are not the audience.)

I asked the Turkers three questions (and will tell you my rationales):

1) Is it IMMEDIATELY clear what the site offers when you open it? [Rationale: This site is a sledgehammer, not a scalpel. I want them to understand what it offers before they hit their back button. If thought is required, I failed at design.]

2) Try to print out Christmas bingo cards. Tell me how long it takes you from me giving you that instruction to something coming out from your printer. [Rationale: My target is that fourty-something mother with kids, with no special computer skills, can accomplish this in 90 seconds. There is actually a bit of an overlap between Turkers and my market.]

3) If you thought your friends would find Christmas bingo to be a fun activity, would you recommend this site for it to them? Why or why not? [Rationale: The Turking population has a significant overlap with my core audience. Why not ask a quick thumbs up/down?]

What it taught me:

1) The site achieves its singular purpose fairly well.
2) It is attractive enough to move several testers into mentioning it to their friends. (As in, not hypothetical.)

The feedback lets me know "OK, the site is basically OK and needs to be built-out more than rethought from scratch". Knowing that, and the peace of mind from knowing that, are worth $7 to me easily. I hope this service continues getting developed, because I can see a lot of uses for it in my business.

(Yeah, I could roll my own with the Turk API... but I value my time at $100 an hour. This means I never want to be playing the sit-at-computer-refreshing-Amazon-so-I-can-authorize-fourty-cent-payment game.)
At the beginning of BTTF2 Marty travels to a possible future. One that would have become the actual future if he hadn't interacted with anybody and then gone straight back to 1985. Doc Brown's plan would have worked too if it weren't for those meddling kids.
It's called wikipedia
Thanks for the responses, everyone! Sounds like - regardless of what I might think of semicolons personally - the reality of the current crop of minifiers and JavaScript engines makes a case for their continued use.

Now, how about ActionScript? This has a compilation step, so the Flash VM is not dealing with your code directly. If we discount ActionScript obfuscators, could a stronger case be made for omitting semicolons there?
Explicit statement termination is all about speed - ensuring that JavaScript interpretation is as rapid as possible.

Is this correct? I would imagine that JavaScript implementations typically compile it into intermediate code, wihch is then interpreted. If so, then it shouldn't make any difference whether you add the semicolon or not.
Saved? I'm not really sure it needs "saving." I've been around since about a year after its inception, and like Paul said, people have always complained that quality was going down.

But honestly, it has stayed about the same. Sure, once in a while some trollish post gets to the front page, but the mods tackle it or people flag it or upvote other things within a day. The signal to noise ratio is just really high, and unless that's going down drastically, I don't see a problem.

Come back the day HN becomes Digg, because I don't think it'll happen...for a long long time at any rate.

Growth is good. It's only bad if you have people who fundamentally misunderstand this site, and by far I think most of the people who join News.YC understand what it is about. I mean, if they didn't understand, why would they even join or hear about it to begin with?
Makes me wonder, are any other email services besides gmail open to this exploit?
I wonder, will the brain-like computers need sleep?
This one made me an ESTJ, which is completely unlike me. Organizing and efficient? Preferring highly structured work environments?!

I'm actually an INTP, which means that this test gave the direct opposite of the correct results... doesn't seem to be very accurate at all.
These guys should look at supplying such bulbs for solar panel powered homes, as there is a clear benefit there compared to standard homes.
Would it perhaps be practical to pull the binary files out of SCM and build a small tool that figures out denpendencies and downloads the relevant files from the build server?

It sounds like that might ease your constraints.
Well when you say common, do you mean with another application that utilizes an open API that is connected to many popular platforms and that is as widely used as Twitter?

Not many come to mind.
Interesting. I hadn't come across that idiom before. In Python, you'll have things like:

myLongList = [1, 2, 3,
4, 5, 6,
7, 8, 9]

No continuation character is needed, because the continuation is implied.

However, I can't think of a direct parallel to your example above. It looks handy. What API/language are you alluding to?

I guess the Pythonic way would be something like:

win = Window(title = "A new window",
foreground = "Red",
background = "White",
menuBar = [fileMenu, viewMenu, helpMenu])

But I disgress. :^)
So...the personal upvote/delete boxes in search right now, they're here to stay?
You can check details here too:
http://www.techflash.com/IBM_Cisco_support_RPX_in_defensive_...
Google should buy Twitter and integrate it into Gmail ...two tabs one email tab and one Twitter tab.

Not sure about others but this would great for me, as I spend a lot of time in Gmail and refresh Twitter many times a day.