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mawon The JavaScript phenomenon is a mass psychosis

When are semicolons to be avoided in JS? I assume daft styleguides pushed by people desperate to show how smart they are don't count.

I agree with your broader point, of course; certainly making them optional hasn't helped matters.

mawon The New Old Way of Learning Languages (2008)

What I most enjoy about learning languages are the insights that make me say "Whoa! I had no idea that you could do that!" One particular example was when I came to really understand the distinction between the preterite and imperfect in Spanish; another came when I got to grips with Latin's ablative case.

mawon George Orwell’s 1984 is currently the top selling book on Amazon

No, but their environmental record hasn't been great, either. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea for one particularly spectacular example.

mawon Nicotine Normalizes Brain Activity Deficits That Are Key to Schizophrenia

You make it sound as though sleep quality were something everyone has control over, which is not at all the case.

mawon I made my son cannabis cookies. They changed his life

You mean like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty?

Good luck.

mawon Bluetooth 5 Now Available

I don't really think that Bluetooth is an industry-wide practical prank that's gotten totally out of control (you weren't let in on the joke, and I wasn't either), but I do think that it's nearly indistinguishable from one.

mawon Italian or British? Writer solves riddle of spaghetti bolognese

Indeed. And it goes both ways, of course. There are, for instance, many (delicious) traditional Mexican dishes that would have been impossible prior to contact from Europeans.

mawon Italian or British? Writer solves riddle of spaghetti bolognese

Having spent very little time in the Roman Empire I can't vouch for its authenticity, but http://www.passthegarum.co.uk/ looks like an interesting source of recipes.

mawon DDoS Attack Against Dyn Managed DNS

It would be like the owner of a coal mine campaigning for a carbon emissions tax

Not necessarily so strange. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists for instance.

mawon Some bad Git situations and how I got myself out of them

It's much like rebasing, with a similar set of benefits and drawbacks.

Once other people can be expected to have done work based on your amended or rebased work, you can expect some annoyances (or worse). If you haven't pushed yet (or if you're really, really sure nobody's basing further work on something you've recently pushed), I say go crazy and amend and rebase to your heart's content.

mawon How to make Slack less bad for you

There are many browser extensions for managing resource usage per tab.

Any clues on what to google for? I've tried the Great Suspender and wasn't very impressed.

mawon Ask HN: What book have you given as a gift?

If you stick with Spanish and really learn its grammar inside and out you'll have a much easier time with French later on. Their vocabularies are very similar and the differences in grammar are minimal for the most part.

mawon Ask HN: What book have you given as a gift?

Yes! Rereading a (good) book you've already read is an excellent learning technique. (Mine was Dune.) Your foreknowledge provides plenty of context, something which is often lacking in more artificial exercises.

mawon OS/2 resurrected: Blue Lion becomes ArcaOS, details emerge for upcoming release

At the time 128MB was a lot or RAM for a Linux box too, although its GUIs weren't very capable.

mawon The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months

You've just posted an example of the recency illusion.

mawon Apple Services Shut Down in China in Startling About-Face

People with lots of money and little taste are, sadly, to be found all over the world.

mawon Managing the Deluge of Atom Issues

My thought too. Maybe it'll be an impetus to make their issue tracking software a bit more powerful, a bit more serious. Might be optimistic, but I'd really like to see it, especially as Github's clones copy the feature.

mawon Have we become too reliant on GPS?

Is "Is Google Making Us Stupid" making us stupid?

mawon AP Style alert: Don’t capitalize internet and web any more

The Linguistics Journalism Award is a real thing. (Most recent winner announced here: http://www.linguisticsociety.org/news/2015/10/22/arika-okren...)

Kristen Hare is unlikely to win this year's prize.

mawon Asana

Is there a lisp variant that switches from prefix notation to infix when you indent blocks by multiples of 4 instead of 2?

Did its maintainers not see fit to document it? Do they pooh-pooh you when you report the issue?

If so, I'm sure I'm not alone in never wanting anything to do with it.

mawon Asana

Asana was the first program I ever used that made me feel old. But not in the actually rather good sense of it making me say "wow, they can do this now?"

Rather, it made me feel like an old fart using a computer for the first time, bewildered more often than not, most of my instincts rendered useless.

There are many examples in Asana of this. Each, taken alone, is banal: kind of annoying, but maybe not too bad. Taken together, though, we have something that a nicer person than I wouldn't wish on his worst enemy, but I'm just not that nice of a person.

mawon Apple wants the FBI to reveal how it hacked the San Bernardino killer's iPhone

My first thought as well. Thanks to clort for the link, even if I don't like what it says.

mawon Git 2.8.0 released

Does it need to be enabled globally in order to be useful? Or is this just so that all users get its effects?

mawon CueCat

http://picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes.tumblr.com/ is one of my favorite sites on the internet.

mawon Venezuela to Shut Down for a Week to Cope With Electricity Crisis

Probably not, unfortunately. This type of problem isn't really due to a lack of resources and so more resources are unlikely to help much.

mawon Chinese exports plunge 25% in February

Yeah, fine, but that's no reason to not act irrational and panicky!

mawon Why GNU Emacs?

I think pklausler means that, out of the box, emacs is decent but, over time, you slowly mold it into something that is more truly yours.

That's been my nearly twenty year experience with emacs.

mawon Lexical Distance Among the Languages of Europe

But what languages are derived from Greek, as opposed to having a lot of vocabulary derived from it?

mawon Free Trade with China Wasn't Such a Great Idea for the U.S

I'm sorry, but this response isn't nearly racist enough or even patriotic enough (is there a difference anyway?) to be taken seriously.

mawon Timezone updates need to be fixed

Maybe people should just stop doing that.

I don't disagree, but how do we get there from here? Our "betters" have even had the gall to make this type of change in the recent past, and even to claim "energy efficiency" as a motivation. This is is--how do I put this?--a wronger than wrong version of not even wrong.