skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Web workers can win you huge performance boosts. In my work we implemented auto-indexing of client-side resources so you can search without lag or hiccups, and we published a library [0] so that others could use it. Pushing stuff as much stuff as you can to web workers is definitely something that needs to get more love.

This isn't a particularly new idea. Here's a short writeup about this in react-future [1]. Roughly one month ago someone published react-worker-dom [2] and wrote a blog post [3] about it.

But this is ultimately just a workaround for terrible DOM APIs. Maybe I've been living under a rock, but I haven't seen any new DOM API proposals to help deal with these problems. The only new DOM API I've heard about is web components, which still runs in the UI thread. Does shadow DOM win us any huge performance boosts?

In the last few weeks I've looked through the source for a lot of elements in the polymer catalogue [4]. This is probably going to come off as a bit rant-y and negative, and it's totally tangential to the topic, but I'm totally unconvinced that web components are the way forward. These APIs are too complicated and they rely on side-effects which are very difficult to trace and debug. It's code that says: Execute this side-effect and I'm going to hope that now my environment is in an expected state. Oh, you screwed up with a typo? Don't worry, I'll just fail silently, good luck debugging me! You import files and then you pray that it polluted your namespace with the correct globals. This is not an acceptable way for building web apps in 2016.

In contrast, I've been using css-modules [5] for the last few months, and although it has its own shortcomings and problems, I love that it makes it makes your usage very explicit and easy to trace. If you look at the css-modules link, you'll see why it's so great: You're explicitly saying you want to pull in that stylesheet and reference that specific class.

The same goes when you're using React: You import a component and you put it in the render function's return value. If you try rendering something invalid, it'll scream as you. You can debug this much more easily because you know the file that was referenced and the specific export that's being used.

[0] https://treasure-data.github.io/redux-search/

[1] https://github.com/reactjs/react-future/tree/master/05%20-%2...

[2] https://github.com/web-perf/react-worker-dom

[3] http://blog.nparashuram.com/2015/12/react-web-worker-rendere...

[4] https://elements.polymer-project.org/

[5] https://github.com/css-modules/css-modules#css-modules
I honestly really hate it when "concurrency is hard" is trotted out as a reason for not using it when using it would very obviously make life better for the end-user.

Is it as straightforward as non-concurrent code? No, obviously it isn't. Is it so mind-bendingly difficult that we need to be paralyzed by fear at the mere mention of concurrency? No, it isn't that either.

There are things you can do to make concurrency easier. Dispatch queues for one eliminate a lot of bugs. Being thoughtful about when and how we use concurrency is another. Race condition bugs are sometimes difficult to track down and cure, but if you understand the basic concepts around concurrency and controls around that they're generally fairly easy to avoid.

The biggest problem I've run into with people is they don't even understand what mutexes, semaphores, condition variables, or atomic variables are or when you'd use each. People don't know what joining a thread is. I ran into a bug at a previous job where they were spawning and destroying threads very quickly (which is a problem, but not their main problem) and instead of using a join to block until a thread's completion they were using sleep(1). Switching to a join sped up their code immensely and improved a data processing operation that previously took months to now taking days.

tl;dr people need to a) read up on how to do concurrency and b) be more thoughtful about the code they're writing when doing it. It's not so scary we should just avoid it altogether, especially when the user experience can be greatly improved by using it. Concurrency is another tool in the toolbag, even if it's a chainsaw without a cover.
I've been a Hal Abelson and Sussman devotee for many years but I've been on the fence about the whole, "executed incidentally by computers," idea this year after Mike Acton's talk and digging into the data-oriented design philosophy.

As a long-time Lisp user it's quite comfortable to think of the world in abstractions and having a programmable programming language allows me to bring the domain to my code in a way that no other language can.

However one always hits the non-theoretical limits of the target platform. At that point it becomes a challenge to remove all of the abstractions to gain performance back or find difficult bugs in generated code.

It always comes back to data.

The challenge for engineers trying to decipher the intent behind code is that the intent went undocumented. It's too challenging and costly to encode those things in the source of a program. For a system like Voyager one must make conscious concessions about the data and use every trick they have to perform the transformations they need with the chips they have on that device. I don't think a sufficiently high-level language is going to help much -- even one that can synthesize a program capable of running on Voyager's hardware.

It is crucial, I think, to be able to describe and document your data. You can re-create the program from the data.

Synthesis might be one avenue if machine learning is capable of producing models that can generate their own ideas and theorems. Until then the problem space is still too large, I think, to move it out of NP. Maybe if we get the graph isomorphism into P.

But if we get that far I don't think we'll need programmers anymore.
What's special about Bangladesh when defining "fair"? Do you mean it as a proxy for somewhere with no significant government benefits or services?

And since Bangladesh's median per capita income is something like $600, it implies that tax rates capturing all but $600 of the median U.S. worker's $51,000 would be "morally fair". 98.8% effective rates!

I don't think a definition so constructed has any significant value.
I was basically pointing out that WSJ is biased towards loose immigration and to take the article with a grain of salt. I favor legal, limited, and controlled immigration. Immigration en masse of poor, low skilled labor to a developed country like the US (where manufacturing is on the wane) is not a net benefit in the long run.
What's stopping that from accidentally happening right now?
Louis Vuitton’s new top model is a video-game star
Great! Now embed audio into each of these pngs as a waveform at the bottom.
Average american watches 5 hours of tv a day. How long does it take to read a 200 pg book even if you're interrupted by meals and things?
What's interesting is quantum mechanics requires an observation to determine the final state. Without observation the solution is probabilistic with infinite outcomes. By defining a conscious observer we limit the final state to ours, i.e., our current universe.
I started using Pocket a few months ago and really enjoy it. The offline reading is great for public transit, and it gives me a good backlog of articles that I want to read. I do find it hard to keep my rate of finished/incoming above 1 with all the other things I try to make some time for!
Who profits from racism? A single example. Call it "Black lives matter" and a small segment of the population gets involved. Call it "Human lives matter" and the entire population gets involved and demands police reform. In this example what do you think the owners of for profit prisons (the ruling class) prefer? What narrative do you think the media they control will parrot?
Does your boss ever say to you: "We're having a really bad year. Instead of paying you $50,000, I'm going to have to pull $50,000 out of your savings account"?

That's the difference between taxes on investments and on income. Investors are risking loss in a way that workers are not: If your boss stops paying you, you stop working.
Getting Started with React ES6 and Webpack
I think what's important to think about here is how the type of company we think of Amazon as (a tech company) informs our belief in how the work conditions should be. HN isn't exactly full of articles about how terrible the work conditions at Macy's or the local trash pickup service are, and that's because we think of retail or sanitation as different kinds of work. If we think of Amazon as a big warehouse fulfillment company or a retail department store, our expectations drop and Amazon starts to look more like the other companies in those spaces.

Instead we should realize what Amazon is (or overlaps with), and get upset about poor work conditions in the entire sector.
Really love the latest additions:

- Authentication Drivers / "Multi-Auth"

- Authentication Scaffolding

- Rate Limiting (my favorite)

- Array Validation
I don't get whether you mean he is a good solid physicist or he is a crackpot. Considering he's an MIT prof, I'm thinking he's good?
I just hope, that all the javascript anywhere!, everywhere! will stop. Otherwise, I think I will move away from programming. Not a rust, but, boy I do dislike javascript!
Possible reason: to distinguish the list from an "or" list.
Yes, that, and it also depends on what state taxes on business look like, and you would also pay taxes on any of it that you put back into the business.

The point is just that there are many people with arrangements such that they might have to file on $250k+, but never realize that as personal income.
I mean, sure...there's a gray area here. I could theoretically write all of my latin characters from right-to-left, but it would be wonky and hard, if only because english is written from left to right.

I believe there's a reason for the rules and that you need to know them. I think patio11's metaphor is the correct one -- it's a lot like english spelling.
My thoughts exactly. The first company (besides Apple) to come up with a Photos plugin has my business. I'm currently using the Apple cloud product but it is sooo confusing it's almost not worth it.

IMHO, Dropbox got this right. Simple to install, simple to configure, simple to use. Apple's solution is a confusing mess of Family members, devices, Apple iCloud accounts, etc. Every time I share something with my wife's iPad I have to physically touch it to make sure I did it correctly and it is syncing like it should. sigh
1. It's clear you did not read the paper and are ignorant that the author is high profile physicist and cosmologist famous for developing measurement methods.

2. The view of science you are parroting is naive and mistaken. Theorizing and experiment are both necessary and inform and constrict each other.
I'm glad that you're arguing with that particular interpretation of my comment in good faith. It is refreshing to see.

However, what I meant to convey is this: despite the obvious problems with such a program, the government sees value in control and centralization of the country's secure communications. If we ignore the obvious problems with "We have all the keys" & "Secure communication" and look to recent initiatives and programs with similar contradictory goals, we've been told by politicians that they were implemented because everyone else is doing it and it's necessary for national security.

I see how nonsensical this is, but if a similar program is pushed, this is how it would be pitched to the public.
I'm trying to accomplish U
He's very fond of philosophising.

I also have issues with his approach to the many-worlds interpretation. Not sure what his current position on that matter is, but one of his talks I saw speculated about identifying the 'branches' of the wavefunction with distant locations of an inflationary multiverse.

This sounded like nonsense to me: One of the major points of that interpretation is making the wave function universal (the title of Everett's dissertation actually was "The Theory of the Universal Wave function").
I think the term he's struggling toward is something like "user experience debt" [1] or "product design debt" [2], an area that has been discussed for years.

I think "conceptual debt" is a poor choice of phrase here, as one important kind of technical debt is the sort of software design debt where your domain model ends up being a poor fit for your domain, often because the domain concepts themselves shift. (For those interested, "Domain-Driven Design" is a great book relating to this [3].)

I also find the "worse than technical debt" headline irritating. It's the sort of, "the thing I specialize in is way more important than the thing you specialize in" thinking that is poisonous in a team environment. Which one is actually worse depends a lot on your product and your business conditions.

[1] https://medium.com/@vijayssundaram/user-experience-debt-c9bd...

[2] http://andrewchen.co/product-design-debt-versus-technical-de...

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Domain-Driven-Design-Tackling-Complexi...
Sidecar is shutting down 12/31/2015
Amusingly, we moved our infrastructure from Linode to AWS and cut our bill roughly in half about a year ago.
There is a 5 user minimum for Google Apps for Work Unlimited.
World’s Fastest Password Cracking Tool Hashcat Is Now Open Source
Even the books you pick off the shelf at your library? What about reference books?
I don't have any comments about the content, but I really liked that there was a TL;DR at the top of the article to set the stage regarding what I was about to read. I wish more articles would do that!
Looking at the ArXIV article, the key ideas apparently come from "Consciousness as Integrated Information: a Provisional Manifesto," by Giulio Tononi, who is a psychiatrist in Wisconsin.[1] His two big claims are that, for an information processing system to be conscious, it needs to have two separate traits:

1. Information: It has to have a large repertoire of accessible states, i.e., the ability to store a large amount of information.

2. Integration: This information must be integrated into a unified whole, i.e., it must be impossible to decompose the system into nearly independent parts, because otherwise these parts would subjectively feel like two separate conscious entities.

1) is reasonable, although it doesn't say much about how much memory is required. 2) is clearly bogus - we know that biological brains don't work that way. They have at least a hundred or so subunits handling different functions. Some are very specific, such as face recognition. Tononi says that in his paper: "different parts of the cerebral cortex are specialized for different functions, yet a vast network of connections allows these parts to interact profusely." So he admits it's not one big component; it's a network of components with explicit, limited connectivity.

Where Tonini is coming from is the concept of "qualia".[2] This is a philosophical concept, roughly "The 'what it is like' character of mental states. The way it feels to have mental states such as pain, seeing red, smelling a rose, etc." Toroni hypothesizes that qualia can be (are?) represented as points in a space of 2^n dimensions. He writes "Each axis is labeled with the probability p for that state, going from 0 to 1, so that a repertoire (i.e.,a probability distribution on the possible states of the complex) corresponds to a point in Q (Fig. 5)." This is similar to the internal state of an artificial neural network.

The physics paper conjectures that if only we had some materials (?) called "computronium" and "perceptronium", we could get work done in qualia space, through a process where energy is removed from the system in a way vaguely similar to simulated annealing. There's a lot of math and discussion around the idea that some randomness has to be applied to make the thing go; not enough, and it stalls out; too much, and it's just noise. There's a suggestion that certain forms of noise will make it work better. All this sound vaguely similar to the way the random initialization of ANNs matters a lot, and recent work has made ANNs better by choosing the random initial conditions in certain ways. Neither paper mentions what's going on in the ANN world, yet they seem to be approaching some of the same concepts. I'm not an ANN expert; someone in that field may have a better idea of whether the concepts are related.

All this is from the "consciousness is special and magic" crowd. Both authors assume that is the case, and try to reason from there. That's closer to theology than physics.

[1] http://www.biolbull.org/content/215/3/216.full.pdf+html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
Not the first ride-sharing company killed by the Uber/Lyft wars, but was one of the few with $35M raised: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/side-cr
You're right, those comments also broke the HN guidelines. I would have chided them too if I had seen them, but it's impossible for us to see everything on HN. Fortunately, users have since flagged them.

We all need to work on remaining civil even when provoked, though.
Has anyone successfully backed up iPhone Live Photos on a photo storage service that's not iCloud?
Introduction to the Math of Computer Graphics
The author teaches courses on Journalism. Agree with the logical style all you want, professional journalism is written according to style guides, and those style guides more often than not dictate American Style punctuation. In this case, "the real world" includes the newspapers his students wish to end up employed at.

In the case of a professor taking marks off for punctuation issues when writing essays on history or economics or engineering, I agree that's wasteful.
Discogs Turns Record Collectors’ Obsessions into Big Business
Your code is just pointing the browser to a specific waybackmachine URL that has the date embedded. It's not showing you the page from a year ago; it's showing you the page from 12/29/2014. Many sites aren't cached by waybackmachine for every day, and there's nothing particularly noteworthy about that date, so forgive me for being blunt but...what's the point?
Show HN: Fluorine – A lean and functional RxJS state accumulator for React
He is a solid physicst. Not sure what else he did, but what I do know about is his analysis of WMAP data.

But that's not all he does, and there's nothing that prevents smart people from having silly ideas.
> Undoubtedly many of them are justified

I may be a bit pedantic here, but I think that's an unfortunate choice of words. If I understand the legal situation in the US correctly, Culling of individuals by power of government can only be justified through a judge, and executed with consent from a state governor.

Some of the cullings may be defensible, given the nature of the police's job. But in my view, none are justified.
You can't, image urls on github are rewritten to be fetched trough a proxy.
The 6 most overlooked stock winners of 2015
Although not usually mentioned, it is important to note that CRISPR is a natural process that bacteria use as part of their immune system. For what is worth, the mechanistic process and a specific functional result - defend against viruses - have stood the proof of time.

"bacteria use Cas enzymes to grab fragments of viral DNA. They then insert the virus fragments into their own CRISPR sequences. Later, when another virus comes along, the bacteria can use the CRISPR sequence as a cheat sheet to recognize the invader." [1]

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150206-crispr-dna-editor-ba...
I Started at BuzzFeed Three Years Ago Today, and This Is What Happened
How often do you check out reference material?

If you knew the material you were interested, say "alternative music"[0] might put you on a list, would you check the book out or try to stay off the library's inventory system?

With electronic books, browsing is checking out is an expressed interest in what can make you seem like a terrorist/spy/hacker/who knows to systems that are used to identify enemies of the state.

[0] http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/sep/25/radica...
I think the meta-discussion about how accurate or relevant media portrayal of police brutality is, and how it influences peoples' perceptions is an important one. However I think your comment betrays a lot of privilege (or I should say: the way in which your comment resonates with white upper-middle class americans here betrays privilege). If you're black, regardless of your background, you've likely been sat down by your parent and "given the talk" about how to behave around police; about how not to get killed. There's a real culture of fear (which is grounded in reality, in real deaths and real experiences, in real numbers) which is I think more significant than whether police brutality is more or less prevalent than stroke or getting struck by lightning. It's not something I've ever had to deal with.

My other concern is that you haven't bothered to research statistics on police brutality and harassment, yet you seem to express doubt that the numbers are significant. In your hypothetical "most people can go through their lives and never experience police behaving badly", yet almost no Black American will tell you this.
I think the reemergence of Virtual Reality (oculus/vive) has a lot to do with it
Spotify Hit with $150M Class Action Over Unpaid Royalties
bah, whatever algorithm necessary to implement consciousness is impossible to implement in reasonable time in this universe. Our brains just perform a suitable monte carlo simulation of that hypothetical algorithm.
It means that they didn't find the technological prowess exhibited in the various cyber attacks that the DPRK has been accused of reflected in the OS. The key word in the sentence quoted is "capability."
From only reading the article, it looks like they're shipping BitLocker already on, and that the recovery key Microsoft has is the BitLocker recovery key for the already enabled BitLocker configuration. Turning BitLocker off and back on resets this key. As long as you don't send it to Microsoft after re-enabling, Microsoft won't have it.
If only you had read that article:

"In 2011, it passed overwhelmingly in the House by 389 to 15."

"Per-country quotas restrict individuals from any single country seeking to come to the U.S. to no more than 7 percent of the green cards available in any category in any year. This restriction favors those from small countries at the expense of those from larger ones. By treating nationality as the relevant factor, India is treated equally with Luxembourg, but Indian immigrants are massively disadvantaged.
Equality in theory, inequality in practice. It is a system of expedited processing for people from less populous countries; it is arbitrary and unfair. The large countries that are most disadvantaged — the Philippines, India, China and Mexico — are all non-European nations that, until recently, had little ethnic representation in the U.S.

While the issue is ignored, the lines for visas have stretched to absurd lengths. Adult children of U.S. citizens from Mexico, Philippines, India and China can expect seven- to 21-year waiting periods. Workers from China, India and the Philippines with a college degree or less will have to wait between two and 10 years.

There are no legitimate reasons for this discrimination for any immigrants, but the system is particularly perverse for employment-based immigrants. Arbitrarily delaying hires punishes the American economy, costing us productivity, innovation and competitiveness.
"

An argument that was accepted by a significant majority of congressmen but is simply pending due to refusal by immigration hardliners to reach any kind of compromise on undocumented immigration.
You've slipped back into breaking the HN guidelines regularly. That's dismaying, since you did a fair job of eliminating this for a while. Please eliminate it.