skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is about as close to propaganda as a poster can get, no? I think if we had a new world war between two highly sophisticated nations, we would have posters like this lying lying in the streets. Apparently now the idea of men being biologically stupider than women is an acceptable opinion. I know we smile at these posters and say in our heads "well they don't actually mean it like this" but there is a bad aftertaste.

Personally, I rather like the idea that we are all equal but different.
There is so much ideological talk about these things and nobody seems to ask any deeper questions. If boys are underperforming in school, does that mean they are stupid?
Admittedly, it seems boring. Intuitively we all "kinda" know this can't be true, but who has the time to care about these things? By accident I stumbled upon this, which was a very refreshing take on many downtrodden paths of what is discussed over and over again:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xp0tg8_hjernevask-brainwash...
> I wonder how large percentage of messages are dropped silently by services like GMail as a spam prevention measure. I bet it's non-zero.

Nobody forces you to use GMail. There are other mailservers with a much more sane behavior. For example, the mail server I use either accepts a mail, or doesn't accept it (when it looks like spam). It might be possible that a certain percentage of mails is misclassified, but in that cases the sender receives a confirmation.
Finally seems like will be true the need that some people were claiming last years. We need a citizen network.
"The next battle in the war for dominance over the Web is going to be waged at the browser level." -> Nah. This has been tried before, what's different now that would make it suddenly work?

Google's plan with G+ isn't to overtake Facebook. It's to commoditize social.
The guidelines on what to submit on HN are open to interpretation. I posted this in the hopes that other HN members might find it interesting, since it might lead to a better insight into the broad effects of war on society.

Frankly, I didn’t expect it to end up on the front page, but it did. HN more or less regulates itself, so I’m not too worried about submitting an article that bears little or no relation to the IT field, as long as I myself find it to be valuable.
Looks promising.

- Do you also handle PDF or you prefer rasters?

- Are you considering handling payments directly from the customers?

Would be so much better w/ payment handling (one lib to integrate). We wouldn't even mind if the package is arriving with your logo.
IMO this looks overly complicated, especially as SPF works fine. The only problem with SPF right now is that many receivers (including) GMail don't abide to the specification. If there's an "-all" clause at the end this implies that you must not accept mails from other mail servers than the ones allowed. If you still do - your fault - but don't complain that your users receive mails with faked sender addresses.
That's the rub, though, isn't it? "When used properly". PHP doesn't at all encourage you to use it properly. It doesn't define what "properly" is. The original article detailing PHP's fractally-bad design gave an impressive list of PHP's design flaws and all of the broken things it can do to you. If you know these things and know how to avoid them, you're golden. But who (especially new programmers) can be expected to know all those things?

I also think C++ is a pretty bad language, but you can do some very impressive and clean -- and most importantly, maintainable -- things with it if you use it properly. Unfortunately there are lots of definitions that people have come up with that detail the "proper" subsets of C++ that are safe to use, with disagreement on a bunch of things. (And for the love of $DEITY, please don't lump C++ in with C, which is really a beautiful, amazing language.)
For now Megaupload files are not deleted
The use of semicolon as best practice was sorted out years ago in the js community. Crockford has all his rights to tell these guys to sharpen up because that "fat" character is obviously a python smuch with no knowledge of JS history or respect for elders.
Startup Leaders Today Mentor More Than Dictate
Working of an email
Yeah, you're lucky to find any produce at all in an American convenience store, though you're likely to find milk and probably bread in the better ones. On the other hand, there's all the beer, soda, "potato chips" (crisps to you), and chocolate bars you could ever want; sometimes a better selection than the supermarket!

Also, because Americans drive everywhere and walking is impossible in most places, most of our convenience stores are attached to gas stations (petrol stations to you).
At the moment we only take rasters, not PDFs.

We're not looking at handling the payments directly at the moment, as that could complicate things quite a bit (we have to store custom pricing for each merchant and each order etc).

It might be something we look at long-term, but not for now.
> and more SMS-like, almost real-time, and packed with multimedia content

Unfortunately yes.

Just a decade ago we made fun of people sending mails with HTML content because they didn't know better. The same goes for correct email quoting. Nowdays this seems to be commonly accepted - even by people who call themselves "hackers". The only difference is that the omnipresent @hotmail.com has been replaced by @gmail.com.
Normal rate globally is roughly one and a half as many suicides to deaths due to violent crime as far as I am aware, although this is notoriously difficult to measure. Although the figure could also mean that the chance of a soldier being killed in combat is lower than the average homicide rate in the US, combined with a very high suicide rate for the soldier.

25 times just seems ridiculously high. There's around 5000 US soldiers killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan, so thats up to 125000 suicides.
>So what about the technical problems? The crappy security, the poor error messages, that the senders email gets dumped straight to spam without any notification? What about crappy email threading that requires people to send the entire post back in the reply? That if a normal person wants to send emails themselves it's a colossal undertaking that's better farmed out?

All these are issues with email clients and not email itself.

You want security? Encrypt your emails before sending them.

Poor error messages? The computer understands the error code its getting. It's your client that's not showing you a layman understandable error message.

Sender's email dumped straight to spam without notification? Duh, hello, it was sent to Spam because your client classified it as spam (and more often than not, that classification was right). Do you want to get a notification for every email that lands up in your spam folder?

Email, threading works pretty fine in gmail, so I suppose that again is a client problem.

And normal people send and recieve emails daily. Very rarely does a 'normal person' send bulk emails, and if you wish to frequently send bulk emails and not get caught up in spam filters, then you will have to work a bit towards it. However, again this is not a problem with email. It's a problem with the spam filters of service providers.

What I am trying to say here is that the author's point is simply that email is very good at what it does. The issues with email are all in the way the email is handled, and not in email as a technology itself.
The last example demonstrated more than the % and = punctuators failing your lexer, and then it doesn't demonstrate still more that would remain, including but not limited to...

cat foo.js; jsmin <foo.js
while(
!true){true;}

while(;!true){true;}

You might look through the token(izing) section of the ECMA's spec, specifically puctuators. http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST...
To fellow UK citizens, http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ will be useful for you. Type in postcode, type in message and it emails it to the relevant MP.

Remember: you don't write to change anything, you write to establish that this is not ok and gives ammunition for the people arguing against this.
I'm skeptical about that. I think that the issue is that even algorithmic beauty could be considered just aesthetics and people except more than beauty from art, as has (post-)modernism demonstrated very clearly.
> Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

(http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
The "prior character blacklist" is now:

& | + - * ? : % = ( [ { ,

Currently hunting for more problems, and a more elegant solution...

Offtopic, the reason I did this JSMin fork was just to challenge myself, not to make a political statement or anything like that. My cat was just diagnosed with feline lukemia. I know this project is a little silly, but it's been fantastic for keeping my mind off of real-world stuff. You're awesome for providing all of these examples; thank you.

More usefully, this serves to prove that Mr. Crockford was likely correct in his assessment.
Examples of landing pages that employ gaming techniques to drive singups?
After browsing through a number of newly created landing pages recently, it seems to me that the whole idea of driving pre-launch signups is worn-out. While the whole concept might be OK, products IMO will have to start offering something more in return for someone's e-mail. That "extra something" might be some kind of entertainment, or a game. Do you know any examples of landing pages that incorporate gaming techniques to drive singups?
Five SEO Tips
I contacted my MP about this last week, and he emailed back, pledging his opposition to this plan. I'm unsure what I should be doing next. Is there anything else I can do?
I can't choose what service my recipients use.

edit: I might add that spam backscatter is a significant issue (which stems from fundamental problems in email), and thus not sending bounce messages is fairly sane too.
My situation is somewhat similar: I'm a Canadian citizen but was in the US for several years on an H1B work visa, which got me a SSN and a personal bank account w/ Chase.

However, I've since relocated to Australia. I'm developing a web based business but would like the business to have a legal presence in the US so that I can take advantage of e.g. stripe.com for payments.

At this point I'm not considering taking VC money as I prefer to be bootstrapped. So I'm fine w/ simpler business structure of e.g. LLC vs. full blown Corp.

Can anyone recommend the process and/or lawyers for setting up a legal business presence in US for someone in my situation? I'm happy to pay the going rate for incorporation.

If you're a lawyer please feel free to contact me. Details in my profile. Thanks.
It's not so much about which is better: it's about the fact that we need consistency. At least with "leave it to the browser", there is some consistency and users can learn to live with that consistency (e.g. by writing longer posts in a text editor and copy-pasting).

When everyone does it ever so slightly differently, you are lulled into a false sense of security.

I don't mind software sucking, so long as it sucks in a generally consistent way.
I can certainly respect that. But I can also respect (and maybe more) someone who does the same thing in his spare time, but for free.
Reminds me a bit of Slate's Lexicon Valley in their episode about Webster's Third (edition dictionary). It was to be the end of to end all as far as knowledgable authority goes. Want to know anything? Consult your trusty dictionary!

http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2012/0...

edit: I believe it was Webster's Second that was supposed to be the 'cream of the crop'. This is discussed in the podcast.
http://huntall.com/lenovo-thinkpad-l430-l530-future-notebook...
> Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. ...my inbox is a todo list

So we should not use email as a TODO list, but keep a separate TODO list. Email is not broken, it's just the wrong tool for keeping TODO lists.

I would never have thought of (mis)using email for a TODO list, and I'm astonished to read from various famous people (not just pg) that they're seriously doing that.
Maybe this is a typical mistake of Internet beginners, but why are so many experienced and very busy people doing such a huge organizational mistake, every day?

There are lots of tools for keeping a TODO list. For my personal purposes, a plain text file works flawlessly. [1] Bigger organizations use various forms of issue trackers, or use a simple Wiki to simulate an issue tracker.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3830247
Customer handling would be a big help for marchants wannabes like us. Currently we only have the resource to put a lib into our app.
We are not sure how well printing would go

Is there a reason you only do rasters? I've believed that vector graphics is superior.
The printer has problems with the rendering?
A phone number that apparently isn't so great: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3840287
Should JSMin being enforcing the spec or good practice?

My vote: Good practice

Upvote replies to vote. Please don't down vote the replies so we get a clear picture.
http://blog.izs.me/post/2353458699/an-open-letter-to-javascr...

That is a pretty good rundown of the rules. The only problem with not having semicolons is cases like this, where someone is using a bad tool to minify your code. None of the tools that currently do the best job will break on that code.
I think it's because back in the day, the mainframe mentality was predominant. Sit at a terminal, make the computer do something, and get the results back. In 1982, nobody thought email would become a mainstream form of communication, and CompuServe had recently introduced the first chat room.
So, uh... I'm a little confused here.

About a year ago I opened a terminal on my Mac and typed:

$ gem install rails sqlite3-ruby

I waited a few minutes for it to finish, then made a new directory, created a new rails project, ran 'rails server', opened a browser, and it worked.

Has this changed dramatically? I'm not talking about people who want to test out 5 different versions of ruby and rails simultaneously. I'm just talking about the basic first-time rails developer who wants to get a rails env up and running quickly (which is explicitly the audience for this one-click installer).

If you want or need ruby 1.9.x, then that's a little more work. Install homebrew or MacPorts or whatever and install 1.9 through that, make sure that guy is first in the PATH, and then do the 'gem install' dance. But this is hardly something that needs 5 months of work and $40k to accomplish.
The UK Office of National Statistics collects some information about suicide and the military.

(http://www.statistics.gov.uk/hub/release-calendar/index.html...)
The Spec
The search really is terrible though. New apps don't get placed in the results at all, even if they have the keyword in their titles. I can say this from experience. If you actually go to page 8 or so, you even get to see popular apps like angry birds pop up regardless of the search terms. I just think for a company that made it big due to a search algorithm, the play store should at least be decent at parsing titles and descriptions. My app was called Cyclic Timer. Perform a search for "timer" and it doesn't show up at all in 20 pages, yet irrelevant stuff like angry birds does.
Why Every Monday Matters
Wow, I never thought VC++ and MFC are this extensively used in demoscene groups.
Email threading has worked for longer than I care to remember in mutt, for whatever it's worth :)
Well not useful to you monetarily, but you can still enjoy the product that other people got right.

Augmented reality concepts have been around for a long time, and whoever gets it right will become insanely rich. The rest of us will get to enjoy it :)
I don't agree with you. We should be establishing a polite ettiquette
True, they could at least allow signing, good point.
The "tech feminist" movement just reached a new level of hypocrisy and stupidity.

The creators of this fine infographic seem to think that:

- math equals intelligence, especially at young age (they used the term smart and not better-in-math)
- school grades reflect actual knowledge
- women are bad at science because they lack self confidence and whatnot

Sorry if anyone, I do think we need more women in tech, but making propaganda is not the way to do it.
Crockford is releasing a tool which is compatible with his opinions, not with JavaScript. All browsers execute that code fine, present and past, and at least for the next decade or so.

Crockford can be an arrogant ass about this stuff, that's why jshint exists, because not agreeing with Crockford does not mean bad JavaScript, no matter what he would have you believe
Farbrausch are one of the most amazing demo scene groups out there today. I highly recommend watching the video captures of their demos on Youtube. Alternatively -- or perhaps more authentically -- you can download the executable demos and watch them on your computer. Highly worthwhile!
I have a question about avg ticket costs. My first (and so far, only) ticket was in LA for crossing a solid HOV line. The ticket itself was 80-100. However, they added a ton of fees to it (the best one I remember was a fee for courthouse improvement but there were fees by the county of LA and the city of LA). All-in-all, the grand total was around 400. Is this just a California thing? I don't see how people can eat in that state when a ticket costs this much.
Not really. You can use an ITIN. IRS gives them and they are for tax tracking only. http://www.irs.gov/individuals/article/0,,id=222209,00.html

With that and a passport you can easily walk into a bank and open a checking account.
I just wanted to note that the HN title distorts the information in the article which reads "For every soldier killed on the battlefield this year, about 25 veterans are dying by their own hands."

Note the words "this year" and "are dying". It doesn't say that there are 25 times as many suicide deaths as total combat deaths ever, which the HN title would seem to imply. Combat deaths are way down this year due to the withdrawal from Iraq and suicides are quite high.
Most people who were a part of the scene in 2000 remember The Product (1). I remember it winning The Party and being struck by how impressive their work was. If you're on windows, I guess you can download the demo itself (2). At 64kb, it should be a pretty quick download ;-) Their impressiveness has only gone up since 2000, as you can see by watching Debris (3), which at 177kb beats the living crap out of most things you see today.

The amount of work that goes into the tools these guys make is incredible. Quite happy to see ryg, kb and team release all this stuff. There should be a ton of things worthy of checking out in all this source code.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkEsP9H2HGM
[2] ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/demos/groups/farb-rausch/fr08_final.zip
[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_efKXc4zd6w
> a pointless language war that nobody on earth cares about.

The comment section disagrees with you. He's just writing his damn code the way he wants to, which a large number of people seem to care about.
There are other options here too but, given the OP, people seem to get irate when you use the features the language specification guarantees :'/

alert(1)
void function(){alert(2)}()
Here's a page from "Whole Earth 'lectronic link" describing notable networks from 1988.

(http://i53.tinypic.com/2janfrd.jpg)

One reason why people may have missed the "linking people to people" thing is the cost. I have no idea how a 1988 $ compares to today, but $11 per hour is incredibly expensive.
> If you want JSON messaging included, you could build a client that reads that specific MIME type and interprets it differently than other messages

This is literally what I suggested in the article.
fr08 was their best work to me. I remember that summer - bought a new graphics card only to watch fr08 :)
Are You Truly Indispensable At Work--Or Just Fooling Yourself?
Same here..

http://i.imgur.com/2VvTX.png
By attacking his previous work, you don't address the question at hand, and sidetrack the debate on the worth of the messenger.

Strictly speaking, you could say it's an ad opus attack, which is still fallacious.
VC++ nearly exclusively. Some GCC'ers, but that's it, really. There's some more recent demos written in, say, Python, Java and C#, but they're pretty exceptional.

Demoscene is also nearly entirely Windows-only. It's a good platform for games, and thus for demos. Plus, culturally, demos are about as closed-source as you can get, so there's this natural repellent force between the hardcore Linux zealots and the hardcore demoscene geeks.
CoffeeScript guide - Printable version
Needed it, couldn't find it, made it (Printable, that-is).

Content belongs to http://coffeescript.org/
It's amazing how they can fit that much detailed demo in 64kb along with sound. Feels magical :)
I have been incredibly impressed with their demos over the years.

Their wikipedia entry lists 28 (!) members.

Did these guys work with any well known software/game companies/products?
Taxis of Tomorrow, Flying Cars
I already posted this elsewhere in the thread, but since it directly applies here too, you should check out Leanpub[1].

[1] - http://leanpub.com/
I propose the Bowkett Constant, the ideal canonical seriousness level for all developer gatherings.
Yes - sending bounce messages isn't a good idea in most cases. But you don't need to: you can just reject messages during the SMTP dialog and then there's no need to send a bounce (that what's the mailserver I use does).
Software Rasterizer Part 1
Informing your friends and relatives of the benefit of opposing this nonsense.
Well, yes, good question :).

You can contact your MEP (and other representatives) at (http://www.writetothem.com/). This sort of thing often pops up in Europe and it would be a Pyrrhic victory to stop it in UK and then it gets made mandatory across Europe.

You can try and convince those around you that this is an issue and that they should do the same. Parents, friends, but perhaps also work colleagues and clients. (Any tips here would be welcome, I am a developer, not a salesman, so I just get "here he goes again" rolled eyes)

You can write/contribute/donate to organisations like Liberty or EFF that fight this sort of encroachment on our lives.

You could also get more active in politics yourself. I hear the UK Pirate Party is always looking for support.
See: Satire.

Also in case you haven't noticed, semicolon.js is also Satire.
Reminds me of the SNL skit, "Don't Buy St You Can't Afford!"

Tell you what, Twitter. When you grow up and create a believable business model, you'll be able to call the shots a little more.
Could you please elaborate on that? I'm genuinely curious - I'm not "hardcore gamer" anymore, but I'm still fairly interested in games - but I didn't know that "professional gaming" became zero-income occupation. What happened?
Is someone actually proposing to update the email network protocol to support todo lists, or is that just a straw man?
Also, consider non-punctuator issues; such as those with exposed reserved-keywords.

cat foo.js; jsmin <foo.js
do
!!1 && 2
while(0)

do;!!1&&2
while(0)
I agree. The BOFs were often VERY hard to find, plus they were what felt like a 10-minute walk from the hotel lobby. I tried locating a few that I was interested in but didn't have much success.

PyCon 2012 was my first geek conference and left me a little disappointed.
This should hopefully help in eradicating "Chapter One: Installing Rails" from most Ruby on Rails books. Perhaps one of the the most frustrating chapters that someone beginning to learn Rail's faces.
Redesigned Facebook Brands for Web & Mobile
The Mobile Paradox
The most valuable commodity we have.
Treating depression with electrodes inside the brain