skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now, this could be easily solved – by adding the friggin semicolon.

What this furore misses is that the original issue (JSMin failing to minify bootstrap-dropdown.js) was already fixed when the bug was raised [1]. Fixed without adding semicolons. Everyone should be happy with that. Developers of bootstrap got to stick to their "no semicolons" schtick, and the person with the original problem got it fixed. Everyone seems to forget this salient point when they rush in to this debate.

For reference, I sometimes use semicolons in my javascript, sometimes I don't. It depends on context and whether it makes the code more readable. It's not an issue I care enough about to get involved in a holy war, one only marginally more relevant than tabs vs spaces.

[1] https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/3057#issuecommen...
Interesting because my ex-girlfriend basically did what the OP did and she worked like a crazy woman from 7AM to 8PM with no days off, dealing with her team, clients, etc.
To add to what ceejayoz said: From an American perspective, the whole point of the constitution is that it places restrictions on the government which cannot be overridden with the mere congressional majority votes necessary for normal legislation and without an agreement by a super-majority of the states. The difficulty of changing the constitution is its defining characteristic. (The commonplace definition of a constitution--"a document which defines how the government operates"--is incidental.)
I like his dramatisations of publicly available video, like footage of parliament, that he is legally not allowed to use over here as his programmes count as satire.

That's right, in the UK it is actually illegal to use footage of parliament for satirical purposes.

Luckily, there is little need to satirise parliament, as they usually do a fine job of making themselves look utterly ridiculous without any external help. Every time I see footage of it these days I feel like I'm watching the worlds most boring medieval reenactment society.
The Death of the Wireframe
"Demopaja" is Finnish and means "demo workshop".
Simple explanation for Benford's Law: When numbers expand out into an additional digit through doublings, a "1" is always present, "2" is usually present, and so on down the line. The law is present in proportion to the degree that the sample set possesses logarithmic distribution.

The distribution doesn't have to be limited to doublings. The law also applies to triplings, quadruplings, halvings, etc. The key is logarithmic/exponential/geometric distribution. Try it for yourself on the calculator and see how rarely 9s come up as the first digit for every x^n.

A good real world example would be the distribution of frequencies of musical pitch in equal temperament. In this case, the exponential multiplier (x) for x^n is 21/12, or about 1.059. Here's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_key_frequencies) a list of the frequencies; notice how the first digits have tons of ones and almost no nines.
There's some interesting (one might say verging on dishonest) terminology here. An incredibly complex and specialized Broadcom switch chip is defined as "commodity" while a very similar Cisco switch chip is defined as "proprietary". What is being commented on is really business models (horizontal vs. vertical integration), not technical aspects.
Turn email attachments into URLs
couldn't find a service that did this so I rolled my own
3BNC: free speaker meetups for young hackers and old hands
the [video]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULrFtjaixbY
join us on http://shoply.com
Open a seller account.
We will treat you right.
Guaranteed.
Even hipster hackers sometimes work for staid, conservative companies. Articles like this one give the hiphacks some ammo when they want to convince management.
From an American perspective, the importance of the constitution is not that it is a single document, but rather that it is substantially more difficult to change than normal law. The UK has no constitution in the specific but important sense that no laws passed by Parliament can be "unconstitutional".
You're right. Typically, greater investments will always follow improvements in efficiency, due to the improved ROI. If it suddenly becomes easy to deploy geographically dispersed, multi-tenant networks that are easier to manage the result will be more multi-tenant, geographically dispersed networks.

Highly skilled people may not be working with networking hardware per say, but they will certainly be doing networking.
Is Flow Addictive?
Can you tell us how "Farbrausch" is pronounced?
Anything in particular you would like to know? I have done it twice. First at Trolltech where Qt was moved over (I want to say there are a handful of public blogs on this) and I have helped with a bunch of perforce/git migration/integration at RIM and consulted with various other companies.
How you get the average (Elon Musk & everyone else)
So that's not actually "safe". If you issue an insert in the default "fire and forget" mode and that insert causes an error (say a duplicate key violation), no exception will be thrown.

Even with journaling on your code does not get an exception.

Journaling is a method for doing "fast recovery" and flushing to disk on a regular basis. "Write Safety" is method for controlling how / where the data has been written. So these are really two different things.
A great and insightful article. A common theme I've seen in practice is folks who have a deep understanding of ML often run straight to applying the most sophisticated algorithms possible on raw data. On the other hand, people who know a bit about ML but understand the domain better start by applying intuition to data cleansing and then follow up with simpler algorithms. Without fail the latter group ends up with better results.
Interesting, but wouldn't the normal use case for turning attachments into URLs occur when attachments are > 10mb, and hence can't be sent via email?
That isn't really the original issue at all, Crockford's comment is just what brought it to a boilover. The lack of semi-colons has been brought up in issue after issue on the bootstrap project. Each time it's been rejected for the same arguably poor reasoning.

Christian's post is completely spot on here. Javascript was designed to be tolerant of errors and inconsistencies as much as it could. That fact however, shouldn't be used as an excuse for advocating inconsistent coding. Not that I'm saying semi-colons are the epitome of consistent coding (I prefer Ruby myself) but that Javascript was not designed with significant whitespace in mind, rather it just has a tolerance for inconsistent and arguably erroneous syntax.

The argument here is that we shouldn't let Javascript's tolerance excuse laxness on our parts. We should know better.
This whole debacle is the epitome of what I call alpha-nerd behavior, and it's slowly killing my interest in software development.
CIVIC STARTUP? Apply for the Code for America Accelerator
Git supports grafting, also using enormous multigigabyte svn repository that contain numerous projects is SVN cancer.
This is about the only gripe I have about svn. Otherwise, we're so deep into the svn ecosystem that it would be a monumental shift.
I've been shocked at the level of disrespect for language standards here. Yes: adding semicolons is probably good practice because it avoids the chance of stumbling over bugs like this. And yes: the ASI feature in Javascript is in hindsight a terrible mistake.

That said: you go to war with the language you have, not the one you might want or wish to have.

ECMAScript is ECMAScript. Arguing that your transformation tool doesn't need to handle a feature specified in the language and supported by all known implementations is just ridiculous. Arguing that people making use of a feature that the language standard says they can (and that works) are "sloppy" is equally dumb. Even weirder are the people who jumped on the use of the && operator to effect an "if" as "abuse" -- this is an idiom pervasive in lots of areas and (again) well-supported by Javascript.

Not everyone is going to have the same aesthetics, everyone has a different idea about what features are "fun" and which are "sloppy". And decades of experience in the "code convention hell" world of enterprise programming has taught us nothing if not that this sort of pedantry helps no one. If you want to use Javascript, you have to take the whole language -- warts and all.
I'm not sure we can make a distinction here; since it's possible to use any Turing-complete language to augment itself (if necessary, in the worst case, by writing a new virtual machine for itself in itself), every language, technically, includes every concept. We have to draw the line somewhere, don't we? :)
It's possible that he was operating under constraints of which you were unaware. One thing that springs to mind is escrow.
TheComplete.me Launches Social Dating Site, Raises $1.22M
Surely the language is precisely what the spec says it is?

"The parser is the spec" is a nasty design smell, IMO.
An excellent visual tour of Benford's Law: http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/march52012/index.html

My understanding of this law is that any collection of real-world data/metrics should follow this distribution pattern. There may be exceptions in which there are other factors influencing the data, but most should follow this "law". In that case, I don't see what is surprising about volcanic eruptions following this law. I would have assumed it already did (well, I suppose you have to already know about this law first to assume that).
Not going to work for a very simple reason, regardless of the complexity of licensing: making a copy is easier. No registration, no licensing, no DRM, no intermediate, just you and the person that has a copy of the other song. The very essence of P2P.

Yes, it's "illegal", but that's the whole point: it's only illegal because people thought that a model based on making copying illegal would work. It doesn't, at least not in the 21st century.

No business model is going to fix that, "illegal" copying is here to stay. All we can do now is remove the "illegal" part and start finding entirely new business models that don't depend on such restrictions.
(Video)Eric Ries Pushed Steve Blank to Publish His 1st Lean Startup Book
This looks really great, I've been looking for a fast charting library for my current project. I had been using flot but it's just a little too limiting. I was looking into building something like this http://square.github.com/crossfilter/, but I guess now I won't have to. I'll look into adding the handlebars that they have there to filter though, that's the one thing that's missing from Rickshaw imo.
I hate when that happens. However, with proper SEO, your site could still get a lot of visits. A quick search of Google Keywords shows that tens-of-thousands of people are searching for "court date" related items.
I tend to go for dark jeans or khakis and a tucked in button up shirt (long or short sleeves depending on the weather) but I tend to dress that way anyways. I don't think I'd be a good match for a company that required something more formal. I consider what everyone else wears to be part of my side of the interview with them since it reflects their culture.
Known in the US (at least by me) as Buy.com
John Lewis Broadband?
Going to disagree that this is a good idea. One of the worst things you can do is release a product "road map." It makes expectations way too specific, and will put you in the position where if you need to alter or change that roadmap you are going to get pre-emptive backlash for work you have not even done yet.
Banner ads flop in consumer-trust poll
Simon Hoggart (the main political sketch writer on the Guardian) has been even more scathing.
Pictures like this often remind me of Don Petit's writeup (http://blogs.airspacemag.com/pettit/2012/02/earth-photograph...) about how taking photos from space is much harder than you think it is.
Have Bumblebee from Transformers say the message for you. He could dig into radio archives, historical records,youtube videos, get clippings on the fly and construct the message in his style. I bet no-one can object that
No, they are different.
These are already a lot tighter than you might think. Films are getting more and more expensive to make and the hits have to make up for the duds.
I have real problems reading a large volume of code in certain programming languages. With a lot of code, even if I'm not familiar with the language, I can scan it and understand the broad strokes and what it's doing very quickly.

There are two languages I can't do that with. Javascript and Lisp. For me, Lisp and Javascript's syntax is too sparse. I've even used Javascript for a few days every week for the last 10 years and I still can't 'scan' a large code file. I know how it works, I know how to use it, I know the good parts and all the tricks. But I still dread cracking open a misbehaving Jquery plugin or any home grown, even self-written, non-trivial code base in it.

With both of them it's a laborious process of actually having to load the whole code into my head, to remember what other functions are doing, how things are initialized. Perhaps you can call it laziness, but personally I only 'load' a whole code base into my memory when I'm doing significant work with it. It takes time and effort I don't want to have to put in just to make a tweak.

So not being able to just skim read code is intensely annoying.

And that's down to syntax. So to me syntax does matter and it's why I'll keep railing against javascript being the only available language in the browser. It's not just a matter of preference, it's also a matter of productivity. I at least, and I suspect many others, are not very productive with sparse syntactical languages because they're so hard to skim read.

EDIT: Some people have the gift/skill of memorizing things very quickly. I don't, I have the gift/skill of understanding things very quickly, which generally means I can get away with a weak memory. I think a lot of programmers have one of those two skills, but rarely both. Sparse syntax is a bane for the latter.
You're forgetting workers' comp, which can be very expensive for this particular type of business. I'm in the industry, and can tell you from experience that it can cost between 20 - 25% of a workers' gross pay. There goes his profit margin.
This is an interesting opportunity, but there's a lot of opportunities for competent people right now.

I wish this site would present a clear list of reasons to pick a civic startup over a social media or mobile startup.
Anyone know what kind of technology they used to do this? I haven't been able to track information about it down.
It is valid HTML5. <html>, <head> and <body> will be inserted by any HTML5-compliant browser while constructing the DOM. However, it'll result in a broken page if parsed by an old browser.

See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5641997/is-it-necessary-t...
Lighting a rocket is easy; tough part is controlling it
It has to be quick, too.
Tupac not Tupcac!
No. The only thing wrong with HN on mobile is the position/size of the up/down vote buttons. Otherwise, if you are unable to read the text you should get one of those clients that makes the text humungous, like news:yc. Otherwise, HN (which is one of only three things I use my iPhone for: SMS, Maps, and HN in MobileSafari) nearly perfectly takes advantage of the screen real-estate with its current formatting.
Organize tasks hierarchically 
Once you use a recursive todo list you may wonder how you ever lived without it.
Not quite sure this applies too much in startupland. There does appear to be a shift away from traditional IA practices with most startup designers, but largely because it takes too damn long and really isn't that necessary.

Proper IA/wireframing/signing-off-on-steps is good for companies where a clueless management is going to make myriad changes to information hierarchy or UI bits along the way, because you have a "we talked about this already and you agreed" defense when some clueless marketing guy comes over and says things need to be bigger, this link needs to be here because it's his friend's company, etc.

A lot of what this article is proposing is missing (organizational hierarchy, an understanding of the order of information) is something that I don't really think is missing in a good tech-company designer's head. He or she is often one of few in control of that domain, and the product roadmap is often known quite a bit in advance. A lot of the polar bear book's 1000+ pages ends up getting turned into heuristics, when quick decisions and fast iteration under multivariate testing is often better off for a young company than sitting back and doing some type of holistic, IDEO-class set of mental exercises.
We used that a bit but in the end it it was overkill for our needs. All our projects are now handled in "githubflow" mode.
posted for this comment:

"In many ways, the worst enemy of NASA is `Star Trek',"
Pace said. "Captain Picard says `engage' and the ship
moves. And people think `How hard can this be?'"
Diamond-based LED sends single photons flying
Are the people mentioned on the team noteworthy? A cursory glance at the names doesn't ring any bells.
Not so young generation, I am not sure how much the young voters (18+) knows about the konami code. It is more about the 25-35 generation.
Musion Eyeliner (http://www.eyeliner3d.com/)
CoffeeScript is For Closers (video)
Anyone else think this is by far the most boring technical debate ever to hit HN?
They detected my fake Facebook profile http://imgur.com/CCPUU
I would think that there would be some sort of "fair use" for trademarks. My understanding is that the philosophy behind trademark law in the US is always based on whether or not a reasonable consumer would infer that the advertisement is officially associated with the trademark holder. But given that, I don't know why so many companies use the term "The Big Game" rather than "Superbowl"; maybe they like it better than having to explicitly include a disclaimed. And I also have no idea how the law works in the UK.
Maybe it would work better on an interstate, particularly flat sections, where there are no cyclists, and vehicles are constantly moving forward at high rates of speeds? Warnings could be posted to warn motorcycles not to swerve (e.g. like uneven surface warnings).

And to deter slow-pokes, entire sections of highway can be filled 100 feet deep with the stuff. If anyone slows down too much, the highway sarlacc acquires a tasty meal.
Agreed.. but for cases like uploading photos to websites from an iPhone it is quite useful.
ACM/IEEE-CS strawman computer science curricula for the next decade
Add the semicolon

"but but but" add the semicolon

There's so much FOR it, it's unbelievable. Yes, it's good to 'break the rules' now and then. Add the semicolon

This is not about if JS allows it or not. It's important, but mostly irrelevant.

You can also not add 'var' to JS variables unless needed. That's going to be a lot of fun when it goes wrong.

But here are the million dollar questions:

1 - How much time is spent making it work without a semicolon as opposed to just typing it? This is not about typing ';' - time for that is irrelevant, but the mental effort of doing so
2 - How much time will it be wasted to fix minifiers (that is, add to them the intricacies of no-semi colon parsing and probably having to write a whole different parser)
3 - How much mental effort is needed to comprehend and correctly fix non semicolon code

Number 3 is the biggest issue and if you don't believe me it goes by another name: coding standard

Yes, JS works without semicolons. And yes, C works without indenting, without meaningful names to variables, etc.

It's not about "to write JS you should know all the nitty-gritty rules of the language and you're stupid if you don't know them so you just add semicolons". It's about teamwork, and facilitating code comprehension (and maintenance).

And language designers make mistakes. They don't know if a feature is going to become a trap, irrelevant to 99% of developers (and with an easy workaround) or just a pain in the behind.
Your idea is reminiscent of this influential article by Jack Reeves: http://www.bleading-edge.com/Publications/C++Journal/Cpjour2.... He argued that source code is design, and that "construction" or "building" of software happens in the "build" phase, i.e. translation to machine code, which has been automated for a long time.
It's plain old extraction of surplus-value, adding very little to the economy as a whole.

This guy took the risk of starting his own company and has literally created 8 jobs that did not previously exist in our economy. The 8 people that work for him are better off than they were before (otherwise they wouldn't be working for him).

However it sounds like the IRS will eventually come in and destroy those 8 jobs, all in the name of 'protecting the workers'.

Also, there are problems with coops. They tend to be inclusive, hoarding jobs for the few who get in. They tend to drive up prices for the work they do, destroying some amount of value across society as a whole. (basically the same problems as with unions).

This one man will be able to offer more jobs and provide better services to more customers than any coop could ever hope to provide. That is why he gets paid more than his workers.
By "original issue", I was referring to the actual GitHub issue / bug report.

On the wider issue of semicolons I am in agreement of you, and all my own code is written with that in mind - though I respect the bootstrap authors preference and would style my pull requests without semicolons.

If their insistence on not using semicolons causes conflict with other popular software, I would hope they see sense and fix those conflicts - even if that meant adding a semicolon or two.
Could you define "sparse"? Perhaps illustrate it with a counterexample in a language that does not exhibit that property.

(Also, have you tried Dart, Coffeescript, or any of the dozens of other languages that compile to Javascript?)
Note: The term 'explaining' was used with extreme liberality above!
Probably Musion Eyeliner:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musion_Eyeliner
I would imagine that traditional pitch/tar (being a big bag of long molecules) is itself already a non-Newtonian fluid (is temporarily harder under impact). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment for why you can consider pitch a very viscous fluid.
> A more "Mongo" approach is to migrate data as you need to; e.g. you pull in an older document and at that time add any missing fields.

I think this works when you're talking about adding fields. But it really breaks down if you need to make some change regarding "sub-objects" or arrays of "sub-objects".

If you have made a modeling mistake and you need to pull out a sub-object you generally have to do simply stop the system and migrate.
Riding The Third Wave of TV Transformation
"If you watch the newer Star Wars movies pay attention to the transitions near the end. When they are switching between each of the battle scenes they use Powerpoint style transitions. Dissolve, blinds, swipe. It’s an amateur effect in a movie that is otherwise very technically difficult and visually impressive. The skill is there, but taste is lacking."

I'm sure the use of dissolves and wipes in the newer Star Wars movies had absolutely nothing to do with the previous Star Wars movies using those everywhere. I'm sure it was a lack of taste on the part of the editor.

If anything those were the best parts of those movies, they were at least consistent.
Lesswrong link with existing discussion: http://lesswrong.com/lw/apm/how_would_you_stop_moores_law/