Bingo. Remember when you first first learned the ternary operator syntax? I recall thinking something along the lines of, "Wow, that's cryptic!"
result = if condition then success else failure26,570 karma · joined March 19, 2007
result = if condition then success else failureYou have to get a temporary import/export permit and country-specific insurance every time you cross a border. I ended up crossing 33, so that's plenty of paperwork to potentially get fouled up on. And in some countries checkpoint cops love busting gringos for their paperwork, because if they're missing something mandatory, that's easy money.
I screwed up the US/Mexico border first by not having done my research. Crossing from Presidio to Ojinaga, I made sure to get Mexican insurance, but didn't think to set Banamex bond for the temporary import permit — not required in the border zone, so the customs officials don't mention it. I didn't have it, and if any official in the length of Mexico had asked me for my paperwork (despite passing multiple checkpoints), that would have been full legal grounds to seize the bike. But I made it to the Guatemalan border trouble-free, and the customs exit officer nailed me for it there. "It's easier if you just pay me the fine." Around $50, I think. I got change from his wallet.
The second not doing my research screwup was not bringing my original title document to the motorcycle with me, just some color photocopies. In most cases, copies are fine — after all, we don't drive around with our titles in our glove boxes. But leaving El Salvador, at the Honduras border, a cop in front of the immigration building decided to make an issue of it. "I'm sorry, but without the original title document, there's nothing that can be done." After about half an hour, with some help from a roadside border-crossing fixer (there are many on the El Salvador / Honduras border, because these situations are notorious there) and a little over $200, the bike and I were through.
Of course, the first thing I did after arriving in Choluteca, Honduras, was to head over to the police station and file a false report, saying that I had left the original title in the top bag of the motorcycle and someone had stolen it, along with a few other miscellaneous documents. When getting yourself out of paperwork trouble, an officially stamped police report is as good as gold. From that point on, at any border where the photocopied title wasn't good enough (Peru, in particular, gave me a really hard time about it), I could show them the police report, show them that the VIN on the report matched the VIN on the photocopied title matched the VIN on the bike, and we were good to go.
Like I said, not NYT-standards behavior.
Although Geoffrey and folks considered a rewrite of the compiler along the lines of Michael Ficarra's CoffeeScriptRedux, they decided it was more pragmatic just to work with the existing compiler and get it to produce Modern JS instead of the Lowest-Common-Denominator JS it previously output.
A wise choice, especially given 2017 interest and energy levels.
Edit: To be clear, to the extent anything can or can not be considered official in open source, Michael's project was his project, and never made it in to the main repo. We encouraged it just as we'd encourage anyone to try and make an independent implementation — but CoffeeScript has never asked for financial support.
From a work perspective, it's pretty simple. I quit, and then was rehired to the same position a year later.
But The Times' Graphics Desk was super nice about it. We had a handshake agreement that I'd come back when I got back, and they even lent me a laptop to maybe file some travel-ish bits and bobs from along the road. So in that sense, it was partially justified.
In the end I didn't end up writing anything for them for a few reasons: I didn't want to turn the ride into work; I wasn't on my best NYT-standards behavior (booze, bribes, women) — well, one spectacular woman, and we're married now; and finally, I personally hew somewhat to the Janet Malcolm attitude:
“Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”
Especially with respect to travel writing. You can do it right, but you really have to take the time and be invested and involved. And I was riding to follow the seasons and wasn't.
Ultimately, even though the industry as a whole is in decline, the NYT and other world-class news sources are still strong, and in some ways, getting stronger. In particular, the visual journalism The Times publishes every year keeps pushing the state of the art.
But for the folks who still do — or have existing codebases — this update is for you.
Geoffrey Booth — with big assists from Simon Lydell and Chris Connelly — has really gone the distance here, spending a full year working on drafts of CoffeeScript 2.0 to upgrade it from a language designed around ES3, to make it as ES6+ friendly as possible.
https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/commits/master
He also redid the website and the docs for good measure: http://coffeescript.org/
Bravo.
It's interesting to compare the current version to the earliest available copy of the annotated source code, from version 1.1.1, seven years ago, in a simpler JavaScript age:
https://cdn.rawgit.com/jashkenas/underscore/1.1.1/docs/under...
That said, the raw data is available through an S3-compatible service, here: https://osdc.rcc.uchicago.edu/noaa-goes16
With documentation about how to navigate and use the files here: http://edc.occ-data.org/goes16/getdata/
So it would be possible to script together something that cooks out a nice high-rez full disc image every 15 minutes.
For fun, here's one of the full disc frames we cropped in from:
https://d1ax1i5f2y3x71.cloudfront.net/items/0J2g1S1y2f2D1y0W...
Note that even though its 2712x2712 pixels, that's still way smaller than GOES16's potential resolution. The highest rez versions of this image that I've encountered go over 10,000 by 10,000...
For anyone who wants to dig deeper, the RAMMB branch of NOAA in Colorado maintains a page of GOES16 loops of the day: http://rammb.cira.colostate.edu/ramsdis/online/loop_of_the_d...
... and also runs a fancy imagery viewer where you can play around with different micrometer wavelength bands: http://rammb-slider.cira.colostate.edu/?sat=goes-16&sec=full...
To head off some FAQs at the pass (and feel free to ask more):
* The multiracial and Native American categories are calculated, but only displayed when they go above 5% in any year for a given school. Multiracial was recently introduced as a category in 2008 — you'll notice some big jumps because of this (U. Hawaii @ Manoa)
* International students — which often make up sizable component of undergraduate diversity in Ivy League schools — are excluded from these. It's U.S. residents only.
* You'll notice some gaps in the 1980's before the data starts being reported consistently in 1990's by the Department of Education.
To head off some FAQs at the pass:
* The multiracial and Native American categories are calculated, but only displayed when they go above 5% in any year for a given school. Multiracial was only introduced as a category in 2008 — you'll notice some big jumps because of this (U. Hawaii @ Manoa)
* International students — which often make up sizable component of undergraduate diversity in Ivy League schools — are excluded from these. It's U.S. residents only.
* You'll notice some gaps in the 1980's before the data starts being reported consistently in 1990's by the Department of Education.
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/10/22/world-end/
> "In conclusion, QI believes there is currently no compelling evidence that any one of the multiplicity of quotations listed above was really inscribed on a tablet during ancient days in Assyria."
There's an annotated version available here, which might be a little easier on the eyes: http://underscorejs.org/docs/underscore.html
Underscore's codebase has grown some warts and wrinkles over the years, as optimizations and browser edge cases find their way in ... but the guiding principle is still to keep it as svelte as we can manage.
> I'm not about to start using it for real projects,
> it's really just a thought experiment about how nice
> JavaScript could be with an alternative syntax.
I've used it a bit for fun, but never for work.
And I think that the future of JavaScript is probably always going to be JavaScript — until a web language comes along that's so compelling it's just obvious that it will be the right direction, and then the question won't even have to be asked.
CoffeeScript, as a concept, was mostly finished back in the 2010-2011 days, as a layer on top of ES3.
CoffeeScript 2, while a great step forward in terms of practicality for folks who want to use it with ES6 features like classes and modules — is also a step backwards for the notion of CoffeeScript: For example, we don't have to formalize classes anymore because JavaScript has them now, and unfortunately JavaScript has done them in a very static way that's not at all the direction CS would have taken. Ditto modules.
As an open source project, it will continue to work just as well as it always did. But I definitely don't foresee a return to general relevance, ever.
Despite being a modest, fun experiment in stripping JavaScript down to a minimal skin, and without any corporate backing, it wound up catching on a little bit.
Thanks to the hard work of Geoffrey Booth and Simon Lydell, among others, there's a new "V2" version that includes many ES6 and 7 features that's almost ready to go: http://coffeescript.org/v2/
CoffeeScript was designed extremely conservatively. The goal was to stick close to JavaScript semantics, to avoid having a runtime, and to avoid features that would require gymnastics and overcomplications in the output, or would run noticeably slower than the raw JS equivalent.
These days, I'm most interested in trying something from the other end of the "political" spectrum: What would happen if you tried to make a web language that wanted to strip HTML, CSS and JavaScript down to their essence — but were extremely liberal in the techniques you used to get there?
I'd like to get a chance to give that a try some day.
I only wish that someone would put it into a nondescript arcade cabinet in a hallway somewhere, so that people could stumble across it unprepared.
Edit: Naturally, it turns out that Mr. Barr has a PhD in this sort of thing, and that his thesis has to do with how we demonstrate our values during the course of playing video games. http://www.pippinbarr.com/academic/Pippin_Barr_PhD_Thesis.pd...
Edit: Bowers says that he's fixed it now.
One of the most fun and different aspects about writing code in a newsroom is the extremely different timescales that are involved compared to normal programming.
If you think it sounds like fun to sit down in front of a blank page of HTML with a fresh government dataset, RStudio, a copy of D3, a cup of coffee and 36 hours to see how good of an exploration and explanation you can come up with, this might be the job for you.
I wasn't really expecting this listing to reach the front page — but I can understand that it did.
There's been so much energy / handwringing / chatter in recent months about our increasingly post-factual era, governments' relationships with journalism, and possible technical remedies, that I thought this new team (which has some very sharp people on it) might strike a chord here.
That said, we use a lot of JavaScript, a fair amount of R, a medium amount of Ruby, some Python, and occasionally Go. Stats skills are a plus, as are database skills, as are design chops.