skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
starting a line with a semicolon means "start a new expression", if it is done where it is meaningful. By putting it at the start of the line, it is easier to associate it with the statement that makes the character important, and calls out that you are paying attention to one of the biggest gotchas in the language

putting a semicolon at the end of every line is basically just noise. You get used to it, and I find semi-colon bugs end up happening much more frequently. More then that, you are essentially just typing an arbitrary character 99.99999% of the time. When you need a semi colon is essentially a corner case, so the vast majority of code is just getting appended with a character which has no meaning.

Its like the javascript community decided to surround all expressions with parens, since it makes things more explicit, and there are a few cases (much more common then semi colons) where you need it in the language. Or if they decided to end all lines with //, just in case someone wanted to follow it with a comment. Those two examples make as much sense as advocating semicolons at the end of each line.
I disagree.
I think we're heading to a "Huxleyan" distopia were any
"Spring" or uprising can be preempted by promoting rampant
consumerism and the infinite distractions of the internet.

Food for thought:
http://www.prosebeforehos.com/image-of-the-day/08/24/huxley-...
This is very anecdotal, so your experiences probably are very different (especially since I'm in Arizona, a lot of people here just aren't nearly as hacker-friendly as the Bay area).

Out of the ~15-20 project ideas that people have talked to me about, I've been asked to sign an NDA 4 times. I found something interesting about the people who asked for an NDA: they weren't very good at following up. For most of the other "pitches" (I use the word pitch loosely, because I'm not a VC or anything like that -- just a college student who likes to help friends and acquaintances with projects), I'd get follow-up emails and a lot of lengthy discussions in coffee shops about the idea.

The times I signed an NDA? Maybe a phone call once. Maybe a small conversation. The discussions always fizzled out. An NDA almost directly indicated (in my situations) that the person asking had a vision of grandeur without any idea of the work that would go into making that vision a reality. If the idea doesn't make me gasp when you tell me, it probably isn't worth an NDA. And the NDA always indicated that the person is just "looking for a techie guy" to crank out code.

The people who asked for an NDA were never really interested in what I had to bring to the table, because it seemed like they assumed that their idea was enough to make a product regardless of the team they assembled. I'm fine if I'm not qualified to build a product (I'll be up-front about the limits of my skills, because I already have enough work!) or a good match for the team they are looking for. I run as fast as I can if I meet someone who doesn't care who they're hiring. I'd rather be rejected than work for someone who doesn't appreciate my work.

If I'm going to partner with someone who isn't a hacker, I want them to at least appreciate the difference between good and bad execution on a technical level. If they can't effectively evaluate my work, the relationship is automatically dysfunctional. And that starts with the NDA -- if they prioritize the value of the "idea" over the value of the people, they are already headed in the wrong direction.
My wife was sitting beside me when I clicked on it. The site elicited instant "awwwws" and a quick memorization of the domain to submit our pup.
This isn't a rant against NDAs. He carves out a point where they are actually beneficial when specific operating details are discussed. But when your "idea" is still vague, then the signer now has to navigate a minefield because of how much overlap there can be in what that "idea" could mean.
Filesharing Religion Is Perfectly Serious, Says Spokesperson
The real takeaway here is that if you don't have a service or product that people would pay for, you should shoot for user growth and cash out when you can.
Heh, I really liked the analogy with Postel's law, and I guess you're right. The main criticising I've received about the blog post has been about the swearing, so I guess I could skip that next time.
Hipstamatic anyone?
Potential Goldmine: Branded Artist Apps Could Make Money and Please Fans
It is nonsense. The Internet is slowly, but firmly diminishing the mysterious enterprise market, not the other way around. It is the same analogy why middleman (brokers) slowly eroded by the same force.

I will start from the middleman market. Middlemen are all about information asymmetry. i.e. someone knows something that others don't. The knowledge freedom that the Internet provides largely destroyed the asymmetry (knowledge gap). It is no secret that now you don't need a middleman to "brand" your music/film/video game. Instead, the leverage of social network (Twitter, Facebook, reddit etc.) enable one to market himself directly or at lower cost. That's why currently music/movie industry is under attack from two sides, both the production and the consumption. They can control neither. And this is the death of middleman market.

The same analogy can apply to enterprise market. Traditionally, it requires a long cycle to negotiating and shipping product to selected few big corps. At that case, the leverage is "information asymmetry" as well. That's why you cannot find a price quote on IBM's supercomputers, or any enterprise software/hardware. But, it is transforming too. The ubiquitous openness and flatness provided by the Internet making such man-made "information asymmetry" useless. And traditionally "consumer-facing hardware/software can penetrate enterprise market as well. That's why RIM is losing in enterprise market to Apple, and that's why Intuit is taking over accounting software market.

P.S. I am considering product for small businesses as consumer-facing product as well since it serves sufficient many customers comparing to traditionally-defined "enterprise market".
I think the low quality of the photos the original few iPhones took had something to do with it as well. The hipster filters hid that low quality and allowed an artistic bent to what was otherwise a poor user experience.

I find myself using the filters less and less now I have a 4S.
Indeed. What if you sign an NDA, and then they tell you some completely obvious idea: Are you now bound from it? Etc.
I actually applied to this summers YC batch with an idea regarding just this thing! I'm the co-founder of Fangible (http://www.fangible.com) and we've been at work since January addressing this vary subject.
"It's killing the middlemen, not creativity."

That is exactly right. Well put.
Someone needs to pay for the fuel. Someone needs to pay for the insurance. Someone needs to pay for parking, the technical development, the maintenance, and the infrastructure. Guess who that someone is? You. In the fees you pay for this service (or in taxes that subsidize it).

No matter how much tech you throw at it, walking down to the corner market for vegetables is more efficient (in a purely value/cost sense) than driving the same amount of time.

My wife and I lived in New York for several years. We walked a few blocks to the grocery nearly every day. Was it awesome every time? Honestly, no. Winters can be brutal.

But it was better than trying to hail a cab and wasting 10 bucks. And in the end, it felt good. Walking a little every day is good for you.

I think driverless cars will eventually revolutionize longer trips, but I don't see it competing with living in urban cores much. Many people want to be able to walk or ride a bicycle as part of their daily routine. Many people want to be in close physical proximity to other people. Driverless cars don't reduce any of these desires.
There's more to it than "lack of polish".

A bio researcher I know is afraid of releasing any code because of the way it might tarnish their reputation.

They're not expert programmers and are afraid to be perceived as less competent, in their field, because of the low quality of their code.
Show HN: Premium Nature & Meditation Music Web App (my first solo project)
>>>>> TimeForZen.com <<<<<

This took months to put together. Learning javascript, using the sound manager 2 api. Finding the perfect creative commons photos on flickr. It's such a ridiculously simple site (just a curated list of music) but I went through hell debugging and getting it to work. I learned an extreme amount.

My advice to designers who can't code, keep it simple, just get it done don't worry about optimization, don't worry about a backend. Code everything manually if you have to.

I've kept it simple out of necessity. I'm a designer, not a coder. I do front end html and css at most, so learning JavaScript was a big deal for me. Yes there's a million little things that can be added (like playlists, forums+comments, time tracker, accounts, etc... But I kept it simple so I could actually finish it.

The javascript is probably 4x the size it should be because I (lol) did things the long & sure way rather than the optimized way, but hey. It's works.

- I threw up a logo and the icons used in the session window. I'm not too crazy with the logo but it's alright. The icons bother me a LOT. They look unprofessional and need more work.

- There's a glitch I'm still working on. The sound LOOPS over and over for tracks that are NOT suppose to have looped sound.

- Works on Android and iPhones (glitch with absolute positioning and dom windows but sound will play).

- Can anyone test this on an iPad? I tried to do it at BestBuy but they never have wireless internet set up.
The GitHub style guide recommends the opposite:

"Do your best to never use a semicolon. This means avoiding them at line breaks and avoiding multi-statement lines. For more info, read Mislav's blog post [2]."

FWIW, I agree with the Google style guide. Maybe I'm interpreting it wrong, but ASI struck me as a fail-safe to protect coders that forgot the occasional semicolon and was later mis-identified as a feature. Having Brendan Eich weigh in on this is akin to having Thomas Jefferson pop his head into the Ninth Circuit and clarify an issue over Constitutional intent. If it were me, I'd listen to Thomas Jefferson.

[1] https://github.com/styleguide/javascript

[2] http://mislav.uniqpath.com/2010/05/semicolons/
I suppose it's too late for Fat to do the right thing and insert the semi-colon since he's ridiculed anyone making such a request?
There is some ambiguity about where bandwidth accounting should take place: on the last mile link between the customer and Comcast or the transit link(s) between Comcast and the Internet. Comcast claims that anything coming from a server inside Comcast itself (e.g. Xfinity) should not count against the cap because it causes no congestion; this assumes that the cap exists only to prevent congestion on the transit side. I suspect that this is all just post facto justification, though.
> a vision of grandeur

this sounds about right.

"MY IDEA IS EARTHSHAKING, I can't possibly just TELL it to you. I am totally going to revolutionize the ..."
Articles like this annoy me. I just don't see many developers or startups being dumb enough to think they will actually be bought out by the companies listed (even with a large user base).

It's kind of like American Idol or X Factor; yeah there is a small chance of making it big, but most realise that the competition is tough and monetising startups can be very hard. Not like that is anything to worry about when being bought out, so it seems...
Kickstarter Is Totally Disrupting Consumer Electronics, Probably By Mistake
What surprises me is not that Fat is a bit of a jerk (note, I "get" it, but I don't respect it), but that Twitter lets him keep being a jerk and actively hostile while acting as a representative of the company.

If he wrote Bootstrap by himself, he's free to call every single user an idiot if he wishes, but when it's being released as a Twitter product, one would think Twitter would demand some modicum of respect to be shown. Can you imagine a Googler acting this way on the Chromium or Android projects? Yeah, there are decisions made on those where people aren't happy, but the comments aren't laden with zingers either.

If Douglas Crockford comes down and tells me I'm doing JavaScript wrong, I would hope I'd show a bit more respect to someone who's most likely my better.
What needs to be done before we can have Internet freedom?
SOPA, ACTA, and CISPA are perfect examples of why the world wide web needs an overhaul. The thing we need to remember is that internet is a global community of PEOPLE. These people deserve equal chance to have a decision in what happens to their online community. Unfortunately, this equal chance for speech cannot exist if governments remain in control of internet freedom.

So why cant we build our own internet? A network built by the people, for the people, and consisting entirely of the people. What technical challenges are preventing us from creating an entirely self contained, self governed, and self sustaining distributed network for the communication of thoughts, ideas, information, and knowledge?

Don't just dismiss this idea. Equal opportunity for open communication is incredibly important, and too many people in the world aren't as lucky as you are, right now. Let's have an honest discussion on a world stage about what is realistically needed for this to happen, and what each of us can do to help.
I still think you lack perspective -- maybe standing "back from the fire" a bit. I would never, ever use that word to express anything about a lousy programming topic.
I recently turned down a freelancing contract where the client asked me to "kindly keep this confidential". Nothing legal more than this (does it have any legal validity?). The reason why I turned down the job offer is exactly because of this irrational "fear of disclosure".

I am not saying that there aren't cases where NDA can come into play. But what I'm trying to mention is that, just like the author of the blog, I'm very put off by people trying to protect their ideas. My reasons are very similar to the ones mention in the article, I'll add this:

By asking me not to disclose your idea, the client gives me the impression of someone undervaluing the execution part. She's establishing a framework where the "idea" is the core value and "execution" can be applied by some random code monkey she heard about through a friend of a friend; code monkeys are a dime a dozen, the "idea" is unique.

Who in their right mind would want to work under these conditions? I backed out, clearly. My point is, if you have an idea, and are looking for someone to help you code something, secrecy and NDA won't make you come off good.
This "op-ed" completely ignores the negative aspects of working on enterprise software. Much of the work isn't very interesting to tech/design aficionados since a lot of the problems being solved are more about capturing and making business processes more efficient rather than technology or design challenges. You mostly work with more mature technologies since Fortune 500 CIO types typically have an aversion to the latest cutting edge technology and would rather go with something tried and true. And the marketing and sales (and often times the deployment) of enterprise software is still slow, inefficient, and bloated -- think sales VPs and CIOs on exotic golf outings.
What does the average user want it to do, that it doesn't?

The big discussion lately has essentially come from people who DO know what SMTP is. And apart from "Gmail is slow", from what I've seen there's been a lot of complaining about mostly specialized use cases.
I like both!

I live in the Bay now, and I am running a start-up project. I think that startups are good!

I'm just coming from a culture where hacker means something very different. In California, it seems to just mean "developer," and HackerNews should probably just be called DeveloperNews, but really it's too late for that now, and not really even worth talking about. Words can mean different things regionally, and that's okay. That's the only point I was trying to make.
I grabbed the nearest book and tried to find this page. By fate it was JavaScript: The Good Parts. The page only lists the following:

Printing History:
May 2008: First Edition.

(Shakes fist) Damn you O'Reilly for making it so explicit. Next time, I want a puzzle!
I didn't know about Derby, thanks for sharing.

I won't even try Meteor, they screwed it up with the license.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0887912/trivia?tab=gf&item=g...

I was really surprised when I originally read this in the "Goofs" list for the Hurt Locker.
Closure linter's fixjsstyle can do this

https://developers.google.com/closure/utilities/
And I think Detroit disappeared, didn't it?
Can you back up any of this with statistics?

My anecdotal, local information shows people highly motivated to do things outside of the University and heading to upper 5 or 6 figure salaries at tech start ups, financial firms, and established software and engineering companies.

I also see students pursuing advanced degrees in Physics, Math, and other sciences who truly want to do research that expands our understanding of the world.

Do I think we're "some sort of elightend [sic] urban dweller"? No. But I certainly am skeptical that we any more immature than the generations before us, of the generations to come.
From what I understand, Xfinity is delivered from Comcast's own network, so it's not exactly equal to the other sources he describes. Still, this highlights how mixing network providers and content providers gets messy. It opens up the door for ISPs to use their position in an effective monopoly to favor their own content sources over others.
User Experience And The Poison On The Tip Of The Arrow
Would you be willing to suggest a global minimum bound on the amount of data that you should be allowed to push onto anyone's mail server?
This isn't a legitimate HN poll, just a set of ordinary comments; please don't give undeserved karma for this abuse.
Something mildly condescending and irritatingly simplistic about this article... I understand his loose attempt at the general point about enterprise customer base and enterprise valuation.

But great companies exist despite "intellectual property" (another loose term), not because of it, especially in the realm of software - i.e. it simply is not the driving concern for creating either a great enterprise or startup! Think about it...

The author also seems to have completely ignored disruptive technologies and applications of them, i.e. it is not about being first for the sake of it - look at Xerox etc.
The obvious next step is for Comcast to start a CDN inside their network and start selling CDN services to other companies, so that material served from the CDN doesn't count against customers' caps. They can claim that this doesn't violate net neutrality principles, but the consequences would be the same: Comcast can use their ISP monopoly to keep their foothold in the content delivery business.

The real danger to the open internet will come when wireless carriers get in on this action. Since nearly all wireless data plans offer tiny amounts of bandwidth as compared to wired broadband, there's a much greater incentive for users to use services that won't count against their caps...
Should job seeking programmers understand object oriented programming?
Just curious, isn't selling below cost called "dumping" and is illegal in many places?
My response is more tuned towards corporate/enterprise/more-than-20-person teams.

so we got salesforce for CRM, getsatisfaction/others for support, jira for project management, tons of enterprise minded apps, yet people resort to email. why? its easier to just type in an email as opposed to logging in / filling a form, and last but not the least treating notifications sent by email in same vein as a human being.

Whats pathetic is "IT" sets up these apps and does pilot program and claims success.

I believe more idiot-proof-apps, as easy as email client app shows up, lesser will be "emails"
I think the point being missed here is that although knowing what people might like is indeed a marketers dream, most computer-generated recommendations systems don't do a very good job at it.

Perhaps some people use recommendations like those at Amazon, but I think generally most people avoid them because (at least at present) the signal to noise ratio is ridiculously bad.
Sizes of "Retina" PNGs can be halved just by using better PNG compressors, here's real-world example:

http://imageoptim.com/tweetbot.html

It's annoying that we have the tools. We don't need new format for this, just use what we have already!
Healthy Programming
Sorry, you missed the point. Occasionally the user is broken, because as human beings we sometimes do things that are less than optimal. I'm not making an argument really for whether or not this is a technology issue or a client/server problem, but more to say that we should try and have slightly more productive behaviors before we expect a technology solution to solve our woes (often self-inflicted).
If Instagram is an anecdote , then what are Reddit, OMGPOP, NewToys etc etc? How about 37 signals etc?
A billion dollar exit is not the only reason to start a company or work for a startup
And with that, I'm getting back to work. I enjoy writing with Ruby, and Rails has made web development a joy for me. Beyond that, I don't find these kinds of things interesting in the least. I'd wager that most of its user base (Ruby that is) feels much the same way.
From a customer's viewpoint, it makes no difference where the bits are coming from, until Comcast charges differently.

And that's what's going on here: the bits are cheaper when they don't count against a quota, so Comcast's service is inherently discriminatory.
You're discounting the big difference here: online makes moving fast easy. Big box stores win because they are unassailable, Amazon surely is not. If enough authors don't like Amazon's policies, BAM, up pops a new site as a collective of authors selling their e-books direct to the consumer and not through Amazon. Amazon loses. If Amazon starts being a terrible company to its customers, BAM, up pops a new site which is nice to them. Amazon loses.

Amazon is not winning because it's buying out the pot, it's winning because it's providing a better service. Publishers lose out because they're the middle-men. They know this. They're too cowardly to directly deal with the customer. If they wanted to, they could have bought out Barnes & Noble and really slugged it out with Amazon, but they won't. They'll let B&N fight the battle for them, and if B&N go bankrupt, well, that's B&N's problem.

It's just plain wrong to equate online with offline. Online is a far more competitive and risky market to be in.
Those are really nice, and the gallery goes a long way toward making the case for it.

It's worth underlining the fact that "lossy" here means "really nicely dithered 256-RGBA-palette PNG8s", but (as the gallery examples demonstrate), that may be sufficient for most of the kinds of images that have significant transparency and that would be likely to be found on a webpage (even sprites for a canvas game).

Honestly, I would still like to see WebP support in spite of its drawbacks (thanks software patents!) for it's better definition of "lossy" and for saner alpha compression, but between better pngs from software like this and upcoming support for DXT5 in WebGL, most of the compelling market drivers may be gone.
"It has absolutely nothing to do with content; ... it is part of a (large) IP range temporarily blocked to curb a DoS attack." http://vi.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/sackm/til_comcast_is_act...
Wondering the same thing...