skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you missed the point.

This is not really about whether semicolons are required or not.

The point is that in order to ensure maintainability of code you should try to use language (and framework) in a way which ensures better maintainability, supportability, and portability of your code.

Look, the statement like "a && b" is 100% valid in many languages but in order to increase maintainability, supportability, and portability of your code it should be written like "if (a) { b; }".

The easiest way to understand the point of this rule is to get a job maintaing some old crappy code-base :) - I learned that way.
Syntax matters for people who are just learning a new language. When I was learning to program I thought about code in terms of the pascal statements I had to write. Now I think about more abstract ideas, about data flow and control flow. I can map those ideas to the language I am using at any given moment but that only came after many years of experience.

On a different note, I have abstained from commenting on Rust's attitude toward keyword names but aside #2 just bothers me. Naming conventions matter and since Rust may possibly become used in the future it may inspire some new generation of users to learn to program. 20 years later they will start writing their own languages and think "Hey, I used 'ret' in Rust and that brings back good memories so I'll just keep using it!". Truly an embarrassing part of hacker culture.
Instagram for Babies? Seriously?
The article is light on details. imo there are two major things your team needs:

1) Programmers that have the needed math skills, or mathematicians with the needed coding skills

2) A distributed ML framework

Solving problem one is not easy but it's straightforward.

Solving problem two is harder. While there are a lot of open source machine learning projects, almost all of them seem to have a focus of being used by a person and not a program. Moreover very few do distributed processing except for mahout (http://mahout.apache.org/). Mahout is promising but the documentation is still thin, and I'm not sure if it's getting momentum in terms of mind share yet.
It's very difficult to judge what will be a hit or a dud.

I don't know much about movies, but I know many games which were terrible until the last few months of development, who then went on to become a success.

It's possible that some movies are made or broken at the editing stage.
But "no noticeable benefit" is your aesthetic decision, not an objective truth. Not everyone feels the same. Pythonistas, for example, might quibble with you about that, because they skip semis when typing all the time and will experience editor friction when using Javascript. And even if you think it's "crazy" to skip the semicolons, you might not think it's crazy to write something like "test && result" as a simple if. Shell and perl programmers like that sort of thing and can read it without difficulty.

I'm not saying that all working code is good code, or that you have to actually use all the language features in all your code, or that you can't have your own well-reasoned opinions about this stuff. What I am saying is that if you're serious about using "Javascript" and interacting with the broader community of "Javascript" programmers, this kind of feature pedantry is going to hurt you and the community badly. You will constantly be running into useful (maybe even brilliant) code that does "crazy" things.
Bingo. I'm sure the same was true of angels dancing on the head of a pin.

Edit: the point is that sometimes arguments seem stupid because we don't always say (or even know) what we really care about.
>>On the other hand, I think it is crazy for a major project to use a valid syntax that not only breaks said [popular] minifier but also offers no noticeable benefit.

That's basically the take-away I got from yesterday's semicolon drama. You can appreciate that JS allows you to omit semicolons or you can bash those who choose the ambiguous over the explicit. But if you're the lead on a hugely successful project you should pick the syntax that will make it work everywhere. It's especially odd for a web developer to choose aesthetics over pragmatics when it comes to things like this.
Historically with SVN, branching was skittish.

Really? How? I've always found Subversion branching to be painless, reliable, fast enough, and merges often go flawlessly, and it's really not been that hard to resolve merge conflicts.
That's all well and good until you write code that other people have to read. It's basic courtesy to respect the value of their time.
Russ Cox puts images into QR codes. Here's how
even more impressive that I could watch it from Austria - by now so much content is region-restricted that this was a pleasant surprise.
Great guys and a great idea worth checking out.
The set of support vectors is just the set of training examples that have non-zero alpha parameters. To implement the gradient update you just evaluate the support vector machine on the example (using the explicit kernel expansion) and then if the example has signed margin less than 1 you add y * eta to the corresponding alpha value.

The difficulty with Pegasos for non linear kernels is the support set quickly becomes very large and so evaluating the model becomes very slow. Note that since the alpha values are not constrained to be non-negative (unlike the standard dual algorithms) the alpha values don't ever get clipped to zero--instead they just slowly converge to zero. It's still (I think) one of the fastest methods in terms of theoretical convergence guarantees but perhaps not as fast as LaSVM or something similar in practice.

However, there's been a more general trend in machine learning to use linear models with lots of features instead of kernel models, partially because of these sort scalability issues.
Neat! Thank you for the info. I wish they had included links to each person's internet presence on the main webpage.
I'm using a statechart library (Stativus[1]) in a similar capacity, but with... states.

[1] https://github.com/etgryphon/stativus
Mibew Messenger would be better suited to what you're looking for, no? (www.http://mibew.org/)
Great idea. I think I would like to see a way of viewing the whole tree (it may be there, but I couldn't find it). Also, an api is always nice :)
Now ... there's a thought.

Agreed: better to put this in the client than require user behavior change.
Here in India, if I buy legal software, I'm usually ridiculed by my supposedly "well-off" peers.

This is when I buy a $2 iPhone app. :/
Why wouldn't someone just use Instagram and take pictures of their babies?
Zubhium ,Introducing app health and crash analytics
Having been to a few festivals over the years, I had a good time watching via the YouTube stream. No sweaty people crowding me, up-close views, fantastic sound quality, and all the beverages etc I wanted readily available with no lines ;)

Obviously nothing replaces the experience of being present, but if you can't go, or are just getting to a point in life where festivals seem like more exhaustion than they're worth, these live streams are amazing.
This is so, so, so much more boring than NoSQL. I agree that Riak vs. Mongo has gotten pretty boring. But this is semicolons. For f's sake.
I have grown extremely weary at the level of discourse that this whole situation has provoked - the linked post is one ad hominem after another! What is this supposed to accomplish? Hopefully I can get the people I'm criticizing to change their ways by making them feel really bad about themselves? By telling them they aren't visionaries, they are semi-colons, they are arrogant, sloppy, lazy? It's destructive, self-indulgent, and completely unnecessary.
Love the technology, but is anybody else just a little bit creeped out by this?
MetricFire is a great product. Stupid simple to use, reliable, fast, no discernable impact on our production systems to add monitoring. Does what it says, works well.
Today's the day that YC invites applicants to interviews
"On April 16, we'll invite the groups that seem most promising to meet us in Mountain View during April 26-30." from apply.html

Does anyone know when the invitations go out? I'm super anxious to know.
Ok, understood you. I checked even spam - nothing. Waiting :)
BEM: a new front-end methodology
I also had this exact problem. I posted this question on StackOverflow about it, and the accepted answer led me to the solution I use now, which is identical to the one described in the article:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9405148/how-can-i-bubble-...

...I always just do something along the lines of window.MyAppNamespace.EventProxy = _.extend({}, Backbone.Events);

The nice thing about this tactic is that it loosely couples interactions between your views. A coworker who also uses Backbone.js prefers passing references between your views to each other. Although this makes the code easier to read in some cases, since it's more obvious what the flow of control is, it tightly couples the components.
Correct.

Boats run under water.
I agree, but another problem is the fact that people read the box cover as much as they read the game manual, which is to say, not at all.
Surely the environment is the spec.

If he wants his code to work with this particular minifier, he should include the semicolon, nothing more, nothing less.

Is a bit like trying to speak in official french. It might be correct according to the officials charged with protecting the french language, but you will sound extremely odd to most french people.
I was. I wonder if they need permission from his mom (estate) for this.
Here is a little bit of background. I'm writing RESTful service using node and I really like how easy is to write async code. There are tools in node that allows me testing it - one example here https://github.com/flatiron/api-easy but there are more that I have considered. The problem I have with all those options: I need to write too much code to produce simple test. Python unittest and python-requests modules allow me writing much simpler code that actually does the same. There is simply no sense writing async code for unit-test like testing. Node is good for writing async code and I'm really happy this that.

Client side async code has its own place as well. I really enjoyed writing complex load tests with node. That was simpler than investigating python options and node is faster in such scenario.
New Threats to the Internet Infrastructure [video]
The article mentions that it is intended as a stop-gap measure until proper repairs can be performed. So I think that as long as it is less destabilizing than the pothole itself, it serves its purpose.
Big Day
We applied to Y combinator and I know today is 'D' day for a lot of anxious people out there. Does anyone know if applicants that are not invited for an interview get some type of rejection letter? and do you know when they start letting people know.....any other excited applicants out there not know how to contain themselves....?
I just started a new job, at it's the first time in a fairly long career I have had to use git instead of svn. The company I joined only recently switched to git too.

Thing is, I understand svn. I get it, and I have used it for years and know, almost instinctively now, what will happen when I use the various commands.

Git for me just feels overly confusing. I suppose it's just because I'm used to "the old way" but just take a look online at how many articles that are out there trying to explain how git works. Why are so many needed? It feels like there are many more than there are explaining how svn works.

By the way, I can see the benefits of git and I feel I'm getting the hang of it quite well now, but I still like svn :)
One minor quibble: "sexual content" is a set that most definitely does include "homosexual content". There's no need to grant Happeh the idea that they weren't properly warned.

It seems to me that we should not feel any compulsion to cater to those who think that there is inherent moral difference in non-heterosexual behavior.
Wadler's Law: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Wadlers_Law
I agree. But it seems like it would be a great niche. kinda like a virtual timeline of your child's life. I could see baby/kid brands signing up on the service.
Glad to see someone finally understands the limitations of files and folders in IDEs. Let me suggest that your next step might be cooperative development as opposed to solo development. Hiveware for SoftwareDevelopment (not yet developed) would let Light Table users develop a single project's functions cooperatively and simultaneously without merge. Check out www.grammarapps.com to get an idea of the technology.
Correct, but one can use rdiff-backup http://rdiff-backup.nongnu.org/.
Since I use mercurial for critical files I have some versioning.
I don't agree that surface syntax doesn't matter unless it affects language functionality. Syntax is UI for programming languages, and UI for programming languages matters as surely as UI for other software matters. Fortunes have been won and lost on UI.

To me, the problem is that there is no answer to programming language syntax that pleases everybody. There are general aesthetic principles to follow, but the fundamental questions - semicolons vs. newlines, indentation vs. braces, short vs. long keywords - generate a lot more heat than light. We have to pick one and disappoint somebody.

Note that even in this thread, there is disagreement about whether JavaScript is too terse or too verbose!
> The main issue with these parser-fetish arguments is that they assume that you write code for a parser – sometimes even a certain browser – and not for other developers.

That's an excellent and important point beyond the petty incident. You write code solely for humans, not for the compiler.
I'm less creeped out by the technology than by the implications in terms of copyright. What this may mean is that a copyright holder on the image of a person (such as Tupac) will be able to milk that image long after they are dead and potentially without having to pay anyone.

When you see Snoop Dogg 'performing' with Tupac you have to wonder where the money is flowing. Tupac's gone, perhaps his family is getting some pay back from the fact that an old recording of a song is played publicly. But what happens when Tupac suddenly records a new song? Would not surprise me to discover that the record companies are able to claim that they deserve all the money associated with that.
The problem is the gap between the ostensible purpose of the bill -- which most people seem to agree is a good thing -- and what the language of the bill actually allows. You may think that "threat information" is not your mom's personal email, but what if her ISP or the government disagrees? How is such a dispute to be resolved? The EFF is arguing that under the bill as it stands today, you have no recourse.

It is always important to ask how the language of a law might be abused. As history shows, it probably will be if it can.

My take at the moment is that the bill is probably salvageable if:

(a) the definitions of what information can be shared without judicial oversight are tightened substantially;

(b) a judicial oversight process is introduced for information that is potentially more sensitive;

(c) businesses that exceed what is allowable under those provisions expose themselves to liability; and

(d) clear and strict restrictions are placed on what the government is allowed to do with the information, along the lines that it may use it only to facilitate cybersecurity investigations.
Careful with the Collobert ICML-2008 paper. It has a very negative reputation among NLP researchers who actually know the area, just for its setup/evaluation. If you're interested in the methods (which I think are interesting), that group's later work is much improved.
No no, I assure you that was the point I took away. And it seems you missed mine, which is that it's fine to make pronouncements like "don't use short circuit and as an infix if" for your own code. But flaming about them in public is rank pedantry. It's the kind of nonsense that the enterprise world has been dealing with for 20 years now: chasing the "maintainability rule of the week" is going to hurt you badly long term.

Learn to read and maintain the language you have, because you can't win this.
Can you describe your largest migration, in terms of users affected and the repository size?

Did you experience some of the issues Facebook has?

See:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/18977...
The 4-inch iPhone
Bootstrap and JSMin have both since fixed their code.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3845267
What's Not wrong with the London startup scene...
“Press 3 for $15 million” — How Twilio got a touchtone term sheet
Dwolla opens up shop in NYC
You're right. That was lost on me. I remembered the transitions in the original Star Wars, but didn’t think they were so over the top. Now I need to go back and watch the original films to see how bad they really are.
A little bit?? there better be a good way for forensics to determine it wasnt you on that "CCTV recording" anonymouslyt delivered by "friend" of someone being murdered in a dark street.
There's definitely been a dip in productivity here today haha. One thing I wonder is if they call or email? YC's application page says "We'll call you," but all of the stories I've read says people have received email invites.

edit- Maybe it was my imagination, but at this point it just says "we'll invite." So my bet is on email, since that's an awful lot of phone calls.
Discover inspired places to work
No plans for iOS support yet, we're focusing on backend platforms for now.

We're going to put some energy into GAE support over the next few days. Thanks for your comments, we appreciate the interest!

(Our backend systems scoff at >1M events/day - we already handle ~60M/day and we've only just launched...)
ASUS presents the new series of laptops | Gadget Magazine
Urban Systems: Integration and the Value of Intersections
because it's 2012.
Thank you for this. I'll retitle the HN submission.

BTW, I'm not affiliated with the kickstarter project in any way.
> It's a case of getting your pitchfork because you heard a rumor.

Completely disagree, it's a case of using an argument that isn't exactly what you think because you think it will serve your agenda better. The people complaining here want to get rid of gay content, they don't want themselves to be warned about it - just happens that saying the latter makes them sound more reasonable (well: slightly less unreasonable).

Of course, the overall homophobia thing is roughly speaking a case of pitchfork/rumour, people who become bigots through hearing that they ought to be, not any logic at all.
Well, in nearly every job I've had, there's at least one alpha nerd[1]. Worst of all is the alpha nerd boss (I intentionally avoid the word 'manager' here). I welcome advice on how to find working environments free of this sort of thing.

[1] - two or more is even worse: they're like male gerbils or betta fish, in that they fight all the time.
To be quite honest yes.

I started programming and hacking because i wanted to make something cool and interesting which others would appreciate, not to bicker about something as silly as semicolons. If i wanted to do that, i'd work in retail. When an argument over something so trivial gets to this level, i cannot help but be bored by it.
Thanks for your comments and support, Frank!
Really? When your entire code base (libpurple) is GPL, and in order to develop to iOS you would have to throw out everything you have spent years doing, and start from scratch?
You mean, say, if they published academic papers about it? Like these?

http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/361/
http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/

Of course, PageRank was only one of many relevant innovations. A key one was the open bidding for ads. Another was focusing on a high-quality user experience, which included no banner ads and highly relevant search results ads. Both of which were totally visible to competitors, and only came well after the business was underway.

They have kept two major sorts of innovation secret. One is their aggressive pursuit of very low cost computing infrastructure. The other is the relentless improvements to search quality. PageRank is only a small part of that now. That IP has a ton of value. Not because of some secret Big Idea, but because they have taken a lot of little ideas and relentlessly winnowed them, yielding actual knowledge.
Yup- "computer science" is definitely going retrograde. It was recognized a long time ago that the "implementation is the spec" was a disaster for program semantics. And now we have "implementation is the spec" for something as easy and inessential as parsing. 1950s computer science labored under the misapprehension that parsing was hard (FORTRAN contributing greatly to this feeling). Then parsing was solved (while we don't always user machine generated parsers the ability to specify a grammar and see what features make parsing easy versus hard is a huge step forward). In fact this early victory over the formerly hard problem of parsing is one of the reasons people started anticipating higher and higher level languages and the complete automation of programing. But (as Brooks points out in "The Mythical Man Month") parsing was solved precisely because it was an inessential difficulty. Save your mental cycles for essential difficulties (semantics, evolution of state, remote machines, concurrency and actual domain problems).
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