skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am not experienced with javascript, so I don't understand this argument. Can someone please confirm the following, or explain what's going on?

Here is what I understand:

1. Javascript will add a phantom semicolon at the end of each line if it seems like you need it, for some definition of seems like. To me, it sounds like this is so that new HTML writers in '98 wouldn't see their pages blow up when they forgot a semicolon at the end of a script. It doesn't sound like professional programmers are expected to leave semicolons out on purpose (this is the opposite from python). The bootstrap authors took advantage of this because somehow screwing with the compiler is in vogue.

2. Crockford's tool broke when a semicolon was left out somewhere. I guess he didn't implement a proper js compiler that covers the entire language spec.

3. There's some business about unary and binary ! operators? Something about sticking a ! in front of your line lets you leave the semicolon off the end? This sounds utterly braindead to me. It's no fewer characters, and the thing you're typing is going really far away (at the beginning of a big block of code) from where it's actually meaningful to you (at the end). Also, it looks like it relies on some fairly convoluted unintended consequences of the spec, that may not be future-proof.

Here is my analysis, if the above understanding is true:

1. Bootstrap needs to fix their code. This business of the compiler sticking in semicolons where it thought you meant them is a crutch to prevent stupid errors from being fatal errors in the average case, but that doesn't mean they aren't errors. Be explicit.

2. Crockford should fix his tool soon, not complain about other people's code, and say "I'll fix it soon, but for now, here's a workaround: just put a semicolon in your code".

3. What the hell. Are people really doing this? Is the web one big obfuscated javascript competition? What happened to writing simple, explicit, readable, maintainable code? Are we really bickering over single characters and trying to play subtle tricks with language esoterica to save them like a bunch of 14-year old perl newbies? Man, I hope these morons aren't in charge of my bank account.

Overall, I'm with Crockford, but he doesn't need to be this much of a jerk about it.

Further analysis, now that I've read it with a decent (non-cell) data connection: allowing gifs in a public issue tracker is a terrible decision.
The poster is correct that email is not a TODO list.

However, email is broken. Email is inherently insecure, unauthenticated and wide open to abuse. There is no way of knowing that an email from me is really from me and wouldn't it be better if SPAM could never get onto the network in the first place?
yay another email post.
love this post !!! e-mail is not broken but we don't use e-mails like 2000... we need a smarter client
> The style of this post is a bit 'wild' but ...

So? Is that bad? Everyone has their own way of expressing. Some herein declare that electronic mail is not flawed. Some say that email is not broken. Some just say that email doesn't need dick-sucking.
That's really stupid. There's no plausible reason that the end of that method shouldn't have a semi-colon. I honestly wouldn't advise anyone use Twitter Bootstrap. You should always use semicolons in Javascript even if you're hippie. Hippies use coffeescript.

And I think Google's style guide[1] is prevail over Github's style guide[2].

[1] http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/javascript...
[2] https://github.com/styleguide/javascript
you don't have to use linebreaks either but people use it. There are lots of good practices making code easy to use, read and maintain. So just put f.. semicolon.
I was attempting to use email as a message transport mechanism some time back .. some problems I ran into; off the top of my head:

1, Acknowledgement of receipt .. this has a whole load of pitfalls to watch out for so you really have to treat email as a send and forget and if you require acknowledgement of a message .. good luck.

2, Timing, email isn't real-time, your message will arrive when it's good and ready.
Without all the sexual allusions this could be a decent statement -.-

(sorry, I have nothing against that when joking with friends or reading some not so serious post, but it does not fit to a commentary about email)
A-min. The problem is that the way we're using e-mails has changed, but the e-mail is still a good concept. I would keep it ASCII (ok, maybe UTF) and screw everything else. It was supposed to work like that and it does it just fine.

The other note is that the communication is changing. E-mails are less and less like a full mail message, and more SMS-like, almost real-time, and packed with multimedia content. I think GMail is handling that as well as it can. It's surprising how slow it takes us to make new standards when they're obviously needed.
Not my family; the "elders" (my Dad and his 3 siblings) all get on go-to-meeting every other Saturday and have a video chat. They were very excited that I joined their meeting last week. I have dozens of cousins of various degrees I only know through facebook, which we are using to organize a family reunion. I'm not sure how this makes our family's personal connections weaker.

by the way; phones and postal mail still use technology.
> raising the skill requirement to contribute (you have to know JS better than average to never use a semicolon, and do so correctly)

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. ~Martin Fowler
Email can be secured and authenticated with GPG and perhaps more people should consider doing this.

The problem with SPAM is that what some may consider to be a 'fascinating circular' will be perceived by others as SPAM.

SPAM is often in the eye of the beholder.
Go ahead do that.

Just know I have a filter to ban those who send read requests too often.
I was wondering the same thing. What about someone who doesn't want to incorporate a company but just create a bank account for billing? (I'm thinking Stripe).

[edit]
I'm an individual web developer and even Paypal doesn't work in my country so it sucks. It'd be great if there were a way around it.
Couldn't upvote this more.

I am fed up with posts telling me email is broken and a new disruptive tech will be the cure. Email is an open protocol, decentralized, providing optional security.

Shortcomings—or rather call them additional requirements—can be solved with tools keeping email focussed on async text-based communication. Want to send large files? Dropbox. Want more automation? Improve the client side and/or write scripts. Want less spam? Don't distribute your address or sign-up everywhere.

If you don't like your inbox being a todo-list you should change something—maybe your job, profession or your work environment but it's definitely not email. I have got rarely todos in my inbox.

For me, email is—if you mind a set of rules—an efficient way of communication which is documented. You can easily and asynchronously discuss and agree on topics in a transparent manner with one or more participants, again: with an open and decentralized technology, no middleman anywhere. Sometimes obviously it's better to meet folks face to face.

Now tell me, which tool can do this? What do you want to improve?

This whole email is broken thing is just done for the sake of getting attention, making a lame conference presentation "disruptive" or getting some crappy todo app funded.
In the big picture, I agree that everything about the GitHub thread, meta or not, is terrible.

But any author of a language minification library will have to deal with corner cases. I see no easy way out. Would it be better for Crockford not to have started writing JSMin?
Never use Your ORM Directly
I have been using Kenneth Louden's book on compiler construction and as a beginner I find it extremely helpful so far.
The bottom line for me is: I hate email. It might be a great framework and all, but I dread opening up gmail. I know it's going to be full of shit I don't care about, I know there's going to be an unsurmountable, unsorted, confusing, library of old emails. Further, if i'm expecting an email, it could be anywhere! Bulk? Spam? Inbox?

But why then do i love getting an sms? Where's the difference? The speed? The quality? The simplicity? Somewhere, email has gone wrong.

A simple answer could be that've just been giving out my email to too many services, but honestly, that's what every email user does, and this should be assumed by the developers. It could be that it's just the clients that are broken, but then fix the clients!
Yes, everyone has their own style and some are better than others. It does not bother me but I think a metaphor like this is misplaced and distracting.
Farbrausch is simply a demogroup...

http://www.49games.de/ was the 'commercial' arm of Farbrausch (most Farbrausch members worked there) and they got bought by the german game developing company Bigpoint: http://bigpoint.net/2011/09/bigpoint-takes-over-the-entire-d...

Here's Kebby (FR) talking a bit about the demoscene at MIT: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/17875473
My univsersity education is my career though. I'm in my first year, and everything is still starting up. When it's time to take my bachelor, of course i'll suit up. For now though, I'd rather spend my time exploring.
KKR Vs KXIP Scorecard | IPL 2012 |  Match 17 | IPL 5 | Kolkata Vs Punjab
Extra geld verdienen met sociale netwerksite Chiliwire
>We fix it by building smart clients.

I think improving email lies before the client. Email is just a message container and apps generally throw a load of different content into that container, events, to-do's, photos etc.

Some of this stuff should never arrive in my inbox. A to-do email should automatically go to my to-do list, an event should automatically go to my calendar, photos should automatically go to iPhoto (or whatever).

Separately to that I can choose how I'm notified about that content.

For example, for all the marketing emails, I'd much prefer to have a Flipboard type app on my mac that receives all of those messages so that they never arrive in my inbox.

So no, email is not broken, but we haven't kept up with ways to manage the growing number of correspondence email is handling. I think the solution lies on the server where mail is sorted into types i.e. if you have that Flipboard for Marketing app, you get those marketing messages otherwise you don't.
Stripe requires a social security number and an EIN (if registering as a company).

Getting the EIN is easy (online in 10 minutes), getting the social is a lot harder.
That's cool man, I just remember Valve saying he was one helluva brilliant guy, so i was a bit skeptical of your assesment. I'm not a coder, so I can't really judge for myself.
Ok, maybe the fascinating circular should never make it onto the network. To be fair, I meant viagra sales rather than circulars.

GPG is not user friendly. Remember, the public are stupid.
*At Chase (bloody auto correct)
I think this is pretty neat in retrospect, but it seems to me it didn't do Atari much good.

Makes me wonder if all these "Vision of the Future" videos that companies put out now are equally as pointless.
> Email can be secured and authenticated with GPG and perhaps more people should consider doing this.

Doesn't work unless you teach people about security, which is difficult. We have padlocks next to URLs but it's amazing how many people are still willing to send CC info over HTTP.

> SPAM is often in the eye of the beholder.

There's a lot of grey area, but when a particular string has a 99% unread/deleted rate, you can make statistical inferences. An enormous percentage of email falls into this category, and it's why "spam filters" exist and generally do a good job.
I thought I was the only one who got frustrated with sexual innuendo peppered blog posts or those with swear words ever other sentence.
It may not always be a good idea, but for me, when I get pulled over, I get out of the car immediately. In my 20s I was pulled over so many times for 'random' car checks that were really about bored policemen passing time, that I started to get out of the car first to upset the dynamic.

It helps that I'm really tall, but it's worth it for the look on their face when it turns from 'bored paternalism' to 'we might have to watch what's going on here'; it takes some of the initiative from them. It's a subtle way to change the power dynamic, especially if you're tall - you can no longer be talked down to, plus you're free to move. Being free to move isn't about posing a physical threat, but being able to control your end of the conversation better, plus you can watch what they're doing. Of course you should always, always remain polite, but screw being in the entirely submissive position of being locked into your seat.

Incidentally, the 'random' checks have stopped in the past 5 years that I've had a newer car... and curiously my mother has never been 'randomly' stopped.
If it's that simple I'd suggest coding it yourself.

I'm a programmer/entrepreneur and was recently approached for a 3-way split in a mobile game startup. As it stood 33% would go to an illustrator, 33% to an idea guy and 33% to me. Reviewing the situation it was obvious that only I was really bringing anything to the table (experience in the mobile market, numerous shipped software products) and that I could replace the others easily (plenty of ideas, ongoing relationships with freelance artists). Neither the illustrator or idea guy had an experience in mobile or games. So, it was likely to end up that I would contribute most of the knowledge and 80% of the work -- all for 1/3 of what I would make doing it on my own.

My point is you have zero leverage as an idea guy. If you have more than that, say, you're an artist, have plenty of money on hand or have some other skill that will make your business successful, you should talk about that. I doubt any programmer is willing to invest her time (which will be substantial, "simple" or not) in order to figure out if your idea has legs.

If you have any chance of making your project successful, you probably also have the mental tools you need to program something simple yourself. Try it out!
Berners Lee's 'principle of least power'?
I always wonder how can live preview work with I/O statements, like selecting/inserting from/to database.
Can you forbid REPL to execute such statements? And then somehow mock that data for live preview?
"Moreover, anyone who downloaded live random numbers from the ANU website will get a fresh and unique sequence of numbers that is different from all other users." - that doesn't sound very random..
If that happened, rest assured that legislators would find a way to streamline the process.
> DotA isn't IceFrog's to give

No, but it may be Eul's, who is also a Valve employee.
I've used email as a transport mechanism for more things than I care to think about. In some cases it was a perfect fit, and in others... no so much.

I build a system that synchronized user data between to organisations. It didn't need to be real time, just a nice feature where a user could change his or her address a the parent organisation and it would later trickle down to other systems.

A second system has handling orders for production of electricity in the Danish power grip. The decentralized power plants had a little as 15 minutes to react. The designers of this system clearly didn't understand email, the assumption was that emails show up in a minute or two, failing to understand that in reality it shows up when, as you say, "It's good and ready".

Email can be a good it for a messaging mechanism, you just need to consider the application. If you need to communicate with a lot of people or system cheaply, and you can afford to lose a message or two, emails fine.

On the other hand, email and ftp is most likely the two most misused protocols ever devised.
> There's something horribly wrong with everything about this.

The time is ripe for Dart!
Bus-Size Dinosaurs, as Fuzzy as Chicks
Whats the difference? If our client reads specialized xml instead of plaintext, haven't we "changed" e-mail to the extent that we have broken it for non-compatible clients? To me e-mail is ascii/html without meta-data, when we add meta data we have e-mail 2.0, which is not compatible and hence different.
I burned myself soldering drunkenly at DEFCON. Not recommended.
I always tought that the tiny hint of a narrative was why I've seen Debris[1] reach much more nerds than other demos, not its spectacularly small file size.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqu_IpkOYBg
So... When will they get around to reading the wiki?
How A Stroke Changed Katherine Sherwood's Art
Why is this discussion about semi-colon insertion and not about the use of short-circuiting as a replacement for specific 'if' statements and general inconsistency in the project?

https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/blob/master/js/bootstra...

https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/blob/master/js/bootstra...

(Incidentally, would lines 54/56 of bootstrap-modal suffer from the same problem? Or does the fact that the last function call on line 54 is already in an && expression change things)

I'm kind of surprised that the bug wasn't fixed by changing the line to `isActive || $parent.toggleClass('open')` as is done here https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/blob/master/js/bootstra...
Sure these ideas sound pretty good (though I don't fully know what you mean by "cultural improvement" or "right connections"). Thousands/millions of people around the world are working towards a lot of these ideals. I'm not fully sure what you're offering here?
>We fix it by building smart clients.

If you allow me to pick an interesting remark from this post: I think the idea of embedding instructions in the payload of an email is an interesting one. For instance an email could contain text and a link to a Pivotal Tracker story while at the same time it could contain a JSON payload which tells my augmented email client to render the story and allow me to interact with it. The post makes a good point in that email as a protocol is not broken but that the problem lies with today's email clients.
in vim pressing A lets me change things at the end of the line, and semicolons get in the way of that
Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks. It amused me and made the post more entertaining for me to read, thus holding my attention better.

Yes, I probably do have the sense of humor of a 12-year-old, but that's immaterial.
In German slang, "Asi" is shorthand for "Asocial person". Guess it works on many levels?
> some are better than others

No they are not. Some are more * preferred * by you than others. Personally I find such metaphor to be engaging & expressive. I love @holman 's writing for same reason. But that doesn't mean one is better over the other.

Writing style is form of art & expression. The quality of an art piece is determined by how well it is expressed and formal technicalities. So as long as his expression is in place, and grammar is sound - it's good art.
I use Lisp, so the answer to your question is yes. I do use parenthesis in all cases.
This is one of the many reasons why I love Go's pragmatism. gofmt is the end of all this kind of silly unproductive arguments.

The sad thing is that apparently some programmers take this stuff so seriously that they refuse to learn a language that wont let them use their pet brace style or whatever. I wonder how they collaborate with other programmers or if they would reject a job offer from a company that used the wrong coding style.

P.S.: Also Go's syntax manages to keep code semicolon-free while avoiding the pitfalls of JavaScript.
I must admit, if I were to draw pictures of the future I might forget putting black people into it, too. Obviously if I were to think about the future somewhere else, I might remember, but where I live (Germany) it just isn't so common to bump into non-white people. So it seems naturally that drawing them wouldn't be the first thing I would think of.
Yes, spam filters work OK, so what is the problem? Do we really need some governmental/corporate agency deleting our emails, with all its attendant dangers of abuse? Because that is what you will get. I would rather have spam.

GPG has email clients and key management clients (e.g. seahorse) which make it increasingly user friendly.
What would the world be like, if you could instantly buy every book as an ebook anywhere in the world, if ereaders were clearly more convenient to use than paperbooks and if they were so cheap, that everybody who now owns 1 book would own 1 ereader?

I might be wrong, but in my imagination this would be awesome, offering nearly limitless possibilities for disruption. For example the adoption of open-source textbooks in schools would be much easier, academic research in some countries would really benefit from easier access to materials.

I think there is no question that this will be technologically feasible at some point in the future. The question is, if it happens and when. I hope it happens as fast as possible and judging by the development of the ebook world from 1990-2007 and 2007-Now, Amazon is by far more beneficial than the traditional publishers in this regard.

Certainly a monopoly is never optimal, but let's worry about that once the future has arrived. There is always antitrust law. Until then, I hope Amazon (or Google or Apple or ...) achieves as much marketshare as possible and pushes the development onward.
... that is, for some values of "everyone" ;)
If I would act like Crockford to my clients, I could clear out my fucking desk.

Must be a really cushy place he is in.
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Ask HN: What am I missing?
Summary: Need HN's help in thinking through a real dilemma.

A hacker by profession, I currently work for a popular startup in the valley, on track for IPO in early 2014. I joined very early (5th, 400 now). I'm however now all set to go on my own. I've found a great co-founder who already has some traction in the space that's dear to me.

Having gotten the wind though, my employer has come back with a very lucrative offer. It's loaded with dough, a shiny "Director" title, responsibility of multiple teams and enough autonomy, with a moral commitment of staying until the IPO. Very flattering and humbling.

It's getting harder by the day to decline the offer. Need HN's help to think this through.

Reasons for taking the offer:
1) Dough. ~200K salary + 7 digit-options of a fast-growing pre-ipo company.
2) New title opens up a lot of possibilities. e.g. VP at another fast-growing startup.
3) Staying thru an IPO from the beginning likely doesn't happen often in a lifetime.

Things I'd lose if I stayed until 2014:
1) The awesome co-founder
2) (likely) Currently favorable economy
3) Some itch. I'll be 36 by then

What else am I missing? This is of-course a personal decision, but I'll really appreciate any words of wisdom.

Me: 33 M, a husband, a son, a father of a priceless 2 year old, with 2nd one in the pipeline. Busy enough to not do a startup part-time. Monetarily quite comfortable, but not financially independent. Not keen on buying a house anytime soon.
I'm waiting for the NAND or NOR gate...
Startups to help kids earn money and encourage creativity
I know what I'll be building next time I visit the sea side. No more sand castles...
If JSMin is not among their target environments, they should not use it.
If you made it this far, consider taking a look at palish's operational response ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3843339 ) to the @DouglasCrockford/JSMin vs @fat/Bootstrap brouhaha ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3842713 )