skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was also used, as I understand, as sort of legal allowance to form paramilitary parties with sort of like police powers. So you, as a citizen, could enforce laws when there was no police or army able to do so for you. For instance, in the days of slavery, the 2nd amendment was used to justify groups of armed thugs [1] that hunted black slaves on the run.

I've never understood the logic behind Republicans of the 20th century [2]. AFAICT, they think the 2nd gives them "the right to defend ourselves from a tyrannical government". That's clearly bullshit. First, because what constitutes tyranny changes a lot from person to person, and only legislation can define it clearly and "democratically". Second, because the former means you're legitimizing political violence in a democracy, precisely the system where that kind of shit should not be allowed. So in fact you're just making terrorism, or at least the kinds of terrorism you like, legal, with all the contradictions that would bring. Timothy-McVeigh-like bullshit ensues.

[1] Of course, back then they were considered to be respectable persons that followed the law.

[2] They're not the only ones, of course (cf. Black Panthers, which I personally am more sympathetic to, since IMO there was clearly oppression there), but they're the loudest.
No, not really. My problem is having a massive untrained population of gun owners. If I could have a reasonable certainty that if you owned a gun, you were trained to use it safely, were required to store your firearms safely, and were responsible/liable if your firearm was lost or stolen, I would be perfectly happy for you to own a gun.

But this discussion invariably comes down to "gun-rights" folks asserting that any abridgment or checks of their right to own a gun is equivalent to tyranny that would justify overthrowing the government. It's ridiculous.

I'm not against gun ownership, i'm against unsafe gun ownership.
My aunt was a programmer. She gave me my first computer (TRS-80) and taught me to program in the 80s. By the time I got my degree and started working as a programmer she had retired to northern BC and was no longer into technology. I owe my career to her.
Guns also save lives. And nations without guns are not violence-free at all. Its a spurious connection, made by lazy thinkers.
America was founded by revolutionaries; people who understood that tyranny and threats to liberty do not necessarily come from foreign powers. The right to bear arms and form a militia was established to protect citizens from their own government as much as any foreign power.

The idea of a bunch of gun toting lunatics becoming fed up with the government and revolting is terrifying, but it's also how this country came to exist.
> If those trivial issues can't be overcome, that person will have problems programming in any language.

No. I've written non-trivial JS code and the amount of possible mistakes that a person writing JS can make is a lot more than say, Python or Ruby. You have to be really really careful and simple things that you shouldn't even have to think about become tedious.

Not to turn this into a JS hate thread, but I'd rather write C code that doesn't pretend to be safe, than write JS code that does, and screws up anyway.
Someone's already done that, all you have to do is use it (maybe as well as twitter if you want):

https://app.net/

https://tent.io/

Here's why you shouldn't depend on Twitter or other closed platforms long term: http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been
That's why I didn't literally said nothing at all, and it's great that there's something going on with the language, but it would be even better if we were to start new language from scratch, rethought for today.
Why There Are No Game Console App Stores
Anybody looking into a package management solution should just use nix and be done with it.

Works on Linux, Mac, Windows, BSD, probably others.

Language-agnostic (and build-system agnostic) so if your project ends up depending on bindings to a specific version of libjpeg or some other C library, you won't be stuck. Likewise if you have perl/ruby glue scripts in your project (which is bound to happen), their dependencies can be properly modeled too.
Seriously. Just like that "Bitter Pill" story in Time a day or two ago highlighted that insurance is a red herring for the deeper problem of profit-driven costs in US health care, the issue of gun control is a red herring for a deeper cultural problem. Like you said people are becoming more fearful and more selfish. Combine that with a culture that glorifies violence and the insane media circus that pops up whenever anybody puts the words "school" and "shooter" together, you get an excellent, self-perpetuating environment for fomenting violence of any kind. Delusional people who can't get mental health care and who want to send a message will find a way to do that no matter what's banned or how Orwellian our society gets.
I'm torn - here's a situation in which I disagree with 50% and agree with 50%. Should I upvote? I know I shouldn't downvote but what's the protocol when a "vote" implies "a good contribution" yet you disagree that 50% of the post is such? Interesting...
As I said, it was a supposition ;)

I can understand having a license to own a gun (My dad owns a hunting rifle, and a handgun that was an inheritance from my grandpa which will possible pass down to me) but I was watching some news a couple weeks ago where they were showing a hearing on the senate (I think) and the people that went to talk there were defending that changing the laws to allow some guns but not others (automatic rifles I think) was wrong.

In exactly what case does a civilian need an automatic rifle? I sorta understand the afraid of the government thing, but let's be honest, if the government wants to be even more/fully totalitarian, an untrained militia carrying rifles won't stop them.
Increasing Intelligence
This is exactly what I thought would be irksome, and it was :)

I am aware that it is hard to avoid a subjective analysis when it involves oneself, yes. So I'll just say, as far as your points on long functions, interdependency, and reuse, I agree, to a point. I'm not exactly writing, say, single line functions, though.

As far as crashing goes, I throw exceptions over corrupting data, please give me some credit. I mean crashing as in some internal state goes awry (e.g., failing to lock properly in multithreaded code) so he doesn't know why it is crashing.

I will take your comments under consideration. I'm afraid there's nothing I can do here that will prove I know what I am talking about, so I guess you will have to draw your conclusion on our dialog alone.
I don't feel safe when I see or smell Marijuana. Is that a reason to not legalize it?

If we were discussing the legalizing of MJ, I have a feeling your attitude would abruptly change.
There have been a lot of articles re-hashing Crockford's analysis floating around recently. These have been valuable, but they tend to focus on the same topics in the core language (largely concerned with scope, use of closures, behavior of basic data types, and functional programming). In web development, the DOM and events end up being a more common area where I and other devs are tripped up. A few things I wish I knew before a deep dive into an large scale JavaScript project:

1) Newly added elements will not respond unless events are bound to them. One solution (thinking in jQuery here) is to bind events higher up the DOM.

2) Each line in code may not simply execute in sequence. For example, asynchronous ajax calls require subsequent calls to be nested in callbacks.
I think you're reading the article in a quite biased manner. I didn't pick up on any of the negativity you seem to have interpreted.

I don't think anyone here is against renewable energy, but certainly the storage of it represents a gigantic challenge. The article just tries to table some reasonable numbers for discussion. You've said nothing that even slightly contradicts the author's findings, and your vague insinuations that the author has an anti-renewable energy agenda is not helpful at all.
Sure not violence free... but not as many mass shootings.. :)
This is true! It also helps the work(/school?)day go by much quicker, since the first half isn't dragging due to grogginess and the second half isn't suffering from the poor mood the dragging first half generated.
>But I still don't understand that how can guns be allowed in such a manner when they don't let you handle a gas cylinder at a public place or a take a metallic fork on an air-plane.

"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

-Thomas Jefferson

You can't fight tyranny in government with metallic forks and gas cylinders.
Show HN: Signup & gimme the good, bad and ugly
> On a commercial airliner.. To my knowledge private planes don't have crazy restrictions or invasive searches.

Which is fairly silly, considering it shouldn't be hard for Saudi billionaires to charter a 767.
Now, yes. Absolutely agree. Pretty sure that was ultimately the blokes point.

Tangent...
This though is the problem with the "democratic" process changing governments every 4 (whatever) years, leading to no real long term policies, and no motivation to even care. This is why the Chinese will dominate the future. They can do long, very long, term planning. We "democratic" westerners need to sort this ASAP. Some how we need a way to make it worth politicians think long term. We in the UK are soon to run in to a massive power problems, which really should have been planned for 20 odd years ago too. No one did anything, and building power plants tends to take a while. And given the soon to come panic, we'll be paying top dollar for these things to be built as we will be over a barrel, while also paying over the odds to make up for the energy short fall. Heh, I bet Iran gets a new nuclear power station before we do.

Another tangent...
Perhaps its time we the people properly took matters in to our own hands and got on with micro power generation and using less power. Work towards energy self reliance.

Sorry, that had noting to do with this discussion... Oh well. Got to ramble somewhere :)
Google has been working on Dart for quite a while : http://www.dartlang.org/
But the problem with this is that a government can become completely totalitarian without disarming its subjects. Imagine the Soviet Union, but this time you're allowed to bear arms. Or even better, imagine the USA. Sure, you can bear arms, so in the letter you still can fight for your rights. But in practice, the second you try to pull that shit, a F117 Nighthawk is going to blow your terrorist ass to pieces.

Practice is everything. Damn, the (letter of the) constitution of the Soviet Union actually gave their citizens the right to form political parties and run from office. You were provided by the government a party newspaper, headquarters... of course, if you tried to, you were hanged for treason.
Nowhere will ever be violence-free.

If guns are not the cause of violence and banning them isn't for the better, why is England a less violent place than America? The gun murder rate in England is 0.1 murders per 100,000 people, in America it's 3.2.

The problem America has is not exclusively caused by guns, it's a problem with culture too, but it seems strange to argue that connecting the high presence of guns to the high number of gun murders is "a spurious connection, made by lazy thinkers".
Why does Xbox Live Indies (previously called Community Games) not count? Microsoft has had that in for a few years on the 360. There are quite a few really good non-minecraft clones on that service.

As for Sony, what about the fact that they have a similiar thing on PS Vita with the Playstation Mobile Developer program.
Yes, it can be. But with school and work, I have the same amount of social time as I did before. It is not too bad as much of my social network are classmates and coworkers.

I have been doing it for a week so far, but I expect on dropping it once I graduate and once time frees up.
In some areas, programming is not the most important ability, but instead the understanding of the mathematics behind the phenomenon. This is the case in areas such as operations research, computer vision, and machine learning. You cannot assume that, to be a programmer, a person must know these subjects. On the other hand, creating a good algorithm in these mathematical subjects doesn't imply that you are a good programmer.
I always considered myself a night owl. I'd stay up until 2-3am for the night time serenity. My partner and others disapproved and considered it unhealthy.

Now I wake around 3-4 am and get the same night time serenity. But the perception of this patten is different. I'm considered an early riser - disciplined and driven.

I've noticed my concentration is much better under the new early rising regime.

Here's my schedule:

- 4 am. Wake up. Depending on my mood and deadlines I'll either jump straight into work or take some leisure time surfing the web.

- 5 am. Dog wakes up and makes it clear that we're going for a walk. So we go to the park and play. The park is empty at this early hour so its good for training.

- 7am. If I havent done so already I start work to coincide with my team on the other side of the country.

- 3pm. Start winding down. Have a beer.

- 5pm. Parter comes home from work and we go to the park with the dog. Lots of dogs at this time and its great fun for all.

- 7pm. Dinner.

- 8pm. Bed.

- 4am. Wake.

Does my social life suffer? Well i've found that its a case of diminishing returns. I used to be the guy who partied until 3am. Now I party until 10pm. And I've discovered I'm having just as much fun. It would seem socialising is a case of diminishing returns for me. I also avoid the shattering hangover.
If it worked effectively there would be a military use as well.
> Economics 101: If you know that there is a limit to the number of customers you can support, why not scale the price the price up as demand for your product increases to curb that demand?

So you can get press like this. Duh.
That isnt what the post you are replying to is saying

make etc will realise a build target doesnt need recompiled because nothing has changed, this lets you recompile fairly large projects where only a single file has changed reasonably quickly
I must admit, I do have a great deal of experience with many programming languages, many frameworks and libraries, many operating systems, and many platforms. Some of this experience predates the web.

I have indeed worked on multiple large JavaScript code bases. Some of this work was in the late 1990s (using Netscape Enterprise Server's support for server-side JavaScript, unfortunately), and some of it within the past few years.

Having worked on large JavaScript-based systems, in addition to ones written in languages like C, C++, Java, C#, Fortran, COBOL, PHP, Erlang and several proprietary languages/platforms, the problems with JavaScript become excruciatingly clear. The wider your experience, the more obvious it becomes how terrible JavaScript is.

The problems with JavaScript, especially for any sizable development projects, run far deeper than merely needing to stick to some "good practices". It just doesn't provide the infrastructure needed for anything but small-scale development. Its many flaws render it further inadequate for any serious use.

Now, that won't stop some people from trying to push it far beyond what it's capable of. The results are never good, however, and generally inferior to what could be obtained when using other technologies.
I figured it would be the other way around people in the south art of China, which I think is where my co-worker went, would be hot so people would be accustomed to heat.

My cousin married a guy from Australia and it was funny to see the reaction to certain temperatures. My cousin is used to winters here which get to about -25C but in Australia (Canberra I think it was) she said people wore winter coats when it was +20C, to them it was bitterly cold she said.

It makes sense that you acclimatize to a warm climate I wish I could live someplace warm :(
Designing An Open-Source iPhone Game
Interesting to see crossed Øs rather than zeroes.
So this is a useful and instructive point in this conversation.

There is clearly a perceived cultural tension that gun owners feel regarding how they see gun ownership portrayed, and that its portrayal is being written by uninformed writers. And certainly there are a lot of reporters telling stories about guns without appreciating or understanding the world that they're reporting on.

What concerns me is a reactionary response is only going to worsen any possible cultural divide and make people choose sides or become defensive, when we should be educating people to appreciate why these sorts of errors matter.

I worry that your assumption that they will make errors and that they should be criticized is ultimately just going to curtail open discussions of gun ownership.

(And mad props for the mea culpa. I don't blame you for the reaction, I just think it's misplaced in this instance)
This is my take away too, and I think it is valuable, especially in an era of every politician going out of their way to fuck everyone else over for their own gain like we have right now.

I'm very unnerved by the prospect of the military being allowed to wield so much technology for the purposes of murder that citizens can't have already. It kind of stacks the cards against the people.

We are not in a perfect utopia, there will be conflict, and strife, and almost certainly (be it short or long term) there will be the turning of governments and rule. There has always been, and if you don't think it can happen in the modern era... the soviet union collapsed just over 20 years ago.

I would never own a gun, but I value my right to possess one in the eyes of the constitution in the event my government goes too far into the totalitarian deep end of the pond. It is a right few other nations can claim to have - if their governments turn on them, they really have no defense because they are never armed.

But I'm also not trying to say having guns would keep the US military from rolling over whoever they wanted in the country if the fed just decided to conquer their own nation. They still do have all the military hardware citizens aren't allowed to have, which wasn't kept in line with the purpose of the second amendment. Though I also don't think private ownership of nuclear arms would be the best thing ever, but that is the kind of thing nobody should have. I'd rather see nobody use weapons of war they wouldn't trust their citizens with.
PHP by a long shot. For the record, I think JS is a decent language with easily encountered flaws that don't really affect me day to day. The few people I've encountered who think it's the best are...wrong. It has problems and here's the list:

http://bonsaiden.github.com/JavaScript-Garden/

It's long but not THAT long. There is a strict set of JS with some of the gunk removed. I don't think they went far enough but such is life. I'm not expecting a replacement for JS in the browser. AFAICT the browser vendors aren't interested in getting a replacement language standardized. I do expect compile-to-js options becoming more popular.

There are a couple other problems that make building web applications hard but are not the fault of the language:

What I generally find is that people who think JS sucks don't actually know JS. They know Java or C# or something and can, without learning anything, put together something that runs and generally does what they want. Their success (no obvious failures) and comfort with the syntax (except for those damn unexplainable JS bugs) causes an overestimation of their capability.

Overestimation is a problem because their experience in programing allows them to write a complex chunk of code that has the wrong abstractions/organization. It's absolutely awful. The worst 20-150k sloc codebases I've run across were ALL written by Java programmers who tell me JS sucks. The problem was that they're doing it wrong. Applying the right patterns has led to a 50%+ line count reduction in all cases. JS is its own language. The architectural patterns that work come from functional languages and not classy languages. Classy patterns can work but you need to go all-in and add type checking a la Google Closure oriented code and that's rare in the wild. Finally, small modules as in the node.js community generally seem to be working.

On the other end, JS suffers (along with PHP) the part timers. This would be fine except that easy but wrong patterns become standard practice. I fought against the jQuery spaghetti pattern for years only to find people migrating to Backbone, which is better but also flawed–events don't provide state isolation and the simple idempotent view.render() falls apart in larger apps and the workarounds are nuanced or complex. Use Ember or Angular. They are NOT more complex than you'll need unless you're only making brochureware sites.

The third problem is that the DOM sucks. The API is bad and has cross browser issues but jQuery basically won that battle. The remaining and more subtle problem is that it's a mutable global variable that you must interact with. There are a variety of mitigation strategies with the most accessible being two way bindings.
When I have too much on my mind and I wake up around 3 or 4am (and don't go back to bed), I realize it's awesome to have that extra time before the day starts. However, when I've done jobs where I must get up at 5am, I almost need to be forced out of bed.

I've got an uncle who, for over a decade, has woken up at 3am, though he doesn't go to bed until 10pm. It makes me wonder if just doing it makes one better at it since we're talking about something we've done our whole lives. My personal sleep pattern (12-7/7:30) hasn't changed since the early 90s.
That obviously depends on the door. Do you really think your home offers physical security?
Not a font-nerd but I'll bite. Is the 'N' in MADISON and SECOND upside down? (but correct in http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryjones/4046758633/)
The memory leaks issues are effecting IE <= 8, which still has around 10% market share. Losing one of ten potential customers is not acceptable for most businesses. Unless you're writing server-side JavaScript, or have a specific demographic that uses newer technologies, those kind of bugs are not something that you should ignore.

To address your other points - you can get a recursive reference by simply assigning your function to a variable, `var f = function(){ f(); }`. There's no need for named functions for that.

As for call stacks and debug messages - that was true some time ago, but modern debugging tools can figure out the function name pretty good even if it isn't a named function. I work with CoffeeScript code(who doesn't have named functions) and stack traces are fine.

I think its a better practice to avoid named function expressions on client-side code. Non-expression named functions are fine, but considering that named function doesn't actually have any benefit (I don't consider hoisting a benefit - I prefer to have my functions declared before they're used), I can see why some people would decide to just avoid them altogether.

edit: spelling
The common response to that is that guns can't fight tanks, UAVs, etc.
Dec-Feb is the only time that the sun sets at 5pm. I think this schedule would be next to impossible for me Mar-Nov when it is still light out well past 5pm. The lack of social interaction would make it terroibly hard Dec-Feb.
SpiderSense ultrasound suit gives wearers a sixth sense
Google Glass Nerdfactor
See this answer: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5269731

In the second, the var myFunction gets hoisted to the top but not the function definition, which is why calling it produces an error. In the first, the whole function gets hoisted to the top.
Of note: what happens when a pumped storage reservoir fails.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_S...