skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. Sass is not as needed as it used to be (native CSS variables, PostCSS, CSS Modules, Radium, inline styles etc.).

But of course many users prefer Sass. But Sass in its CSS syntax (SCSS) is (if I'm correct) just super set of CSS. You can always start project using vanilla CSS and when project will grow, you can add Sass.

There are two approaches to develop new projects: big design up front and YAGNI principle (you ain't gonna need it). I prefer YAGNI and I'm glad that Facebook generator is so minimal. But I don't know what they are planning to do with this project. I think this project would be a lot worse if they forced to use Sass(or Radium or any opinionated CSS solution).

2. code splitting? If I understand correctly it's Webpack feature needed mainly for production, not development. So why to add this on the very beginning of your project?
Podcast: Technical Debt and Design Debt
Great discussion on the importance of refactoring your design and code after making a series of isolated optimizations.
LessWrong is a self-selected community. It won't scale.
You can build a second 8-bit adder, plus a bunch of logic to identify add instructions which don't depend on each other, then execute two adds simultaneously.

Modern CPUs can execute several instructions per clock cycle doing things like this.
Logical discussions are hard online. We, as a species, are prone to emotional irrationality that can impair intelligent discourse w/ non-like minded viewpoints. Also, a lack of prosody[1] in text/type communications is problematic; w/o cadence, inflection & body language a simple statement can be construed a myriad of differing ways. Lastly, and I'm sure there's more, the noise on the line allows anyone to find supportive evidence to bolster their learned attachment to their personal bias. All are a helluva a hindrance to meaningful discussions that could be overcome w/ mutual diligence... until you factor the presence of paid actors assigned to sway opinions w/ more noise added to exploit their special interests. Frankly, the internet as some of us geezers knew it is already FUBAR, the rest is walled-gardens, service contracted entrapment & mouth-service to obfuscated, spurious ends.

edit: [1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_(linguistics)
I'm not a member of either community - can you expand on the difference you see between the two?
It's an inevitable drawback of the entire concept of an immediate-mode GUI that gets recreated from scratch on every frame. There are major types of optimization which are simply impossible.

The vast majority of games use simple GUIs where it won't matter. But if you have a complex or large GUI, you will be eating up significantly more CPU cycles.
> self-selected community

as would be this one.
One thing though, is that the standard classes are just not up to the job without a lot of stuff tacked on. Eg: the function binding problem pushes people to use class properties, which aren't yet a standard, and then they hit walls with tools that don't support them (eg: I dunno if it's still the case, but for a while class properties caused issues with Flow).

createClass might not have been the answer, but on top of stateless component functions, things like the good old ES3 module syntax honestly would be more flexible/powerful (giving you a closure to do things like private members, etc)

Instead we have people using babel with all sorts of plugins, tacking on 3rd party decorators and utilities, and a bunch of other cruft just to mimic features JavaScript have had from the beginning. And then (talking out of my rear here), it possibly put pressure on the TC39 to waste time discussing features we seriously don't need.
Historically the stereotype of the Irish as being less educated, violent (esp. domestic violence) and alcoholic is accurate.

I say that as an Irish person. We've made considerable progress since in the late 20th century to the present, and now we are better in most metrics than the British (and perhaps they have also fallen), but don't imagine we were all sweetness and light in the past. Present day Irish have undergone a terrific cultural shift, evidence of which would be a supposed Catholic majority country voting in gay marriage.

We're still Irish, but we're mostly better than we were. Now if we could only resuscitate the courage of our grandparents we'd be in better shape yet.
A PR for the first bit of incremental compilation was opened recently.
Evolution. 100,000 years ago, there were humans who could accurately estimate the difficulty of, say, catching a deer. And since they knew it was too much trouble, they just stayed home in the cave.

Meanwhile some crazy optimist went out and to catch a deer. It was many times more difficult than expected, but they returned to the cave with the deer and eventually reproduced more successfully than the accurate estimator.

Thus our ancestors were the crazy optimists.
I've used Rollup and it worked extremely well for bundling JS that uses modules into a single file. The documentation is very good and the community is quite responsive.

The only thing that would be better is not needing Rollup in the first place.

What's the current status of browser support for ES6 modules?
Voice, body, mind...
There are actually some indications of enhancements and new features, trading being one that is confirmed: http://www.polygon.com/2016/7/12/12158480/pokemon-go-trading...
Use 0.54nm in your calculations - distance between silicon atoms (lattice spacing)
The first engineer has to understand that not every colleague will operate at the same level. Some people on the team will not be design or architecture wizards. Sooner everyone realizes that the better. Because, after that realization team members can focus on making things better.

In my experience, most of the successful teams are those in which team tries to grow together. So the first engineer should focus on how to get the best out of second engineer. If there are skill gaps, second engineer should be offered some courses. If there is lack of team cohesion, try some team building exercises.

Remember, life is not perfect, we have to play with the cards we are dealt with. We should try to put our egos aside, be positive and get things done.
It does not need a class, it just need to be able to keep track of some kind of references. There's a million functional ways to do this without needing class.

React really should have gone from createClass to <insert better design pattern that doesn't rely on the class keyword here>. It already supports the module pattern. They easily could have expanded on that.
Hilarious that so many here find the voices of others so intolerable to their careful cultivation of certainty that we sit about dreaming of mediums where we set the rules and all must comply to participate.
What if whatever force makes time asymmetrical also is at the root of volition and consciousness. So by definition we would only be able to experience time in one direction.
> I can easily imagine that heat distribution would be a real problem.

Given how much of a problem it already is in 2D where the entire die area simply radiates "up and out", I think that head might be the real problem. I don't know how one would build a 3D embedded heat-sink, you know, something like this with the transistors and and connective mesh all around [1]. Maybe it looks like a Menger sponge [2], but that looks tough too! :-)

[1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3-blogs.mentor.com/robinbornoff/fi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menger_sponge
> Try convincing a highly religious person that their religion is entirely fact-free, or that God doesn't exist using logic, and you will get nowhere

Lets keep religion out of HN, shall we?

A lot of us actually seems to believe in some kind of deity/ies, we just dont mention it because we value HN as a common ground for technical and business discussions.

If not I could tell you some stories about stupid, stubborn evil ateists as well :-P
You can open, read, validate and write a small text file in an atomic action already - there is no reason to use anything more complicated.

If your configuration is more than simple, then there are plenty of real dbs that implement everything explained in this article "properly".

This "tree db" is concurrent to read, not to write, doesn't bother with the hard parts of concurrency, ie. deletion of old data and uses an ad hoc json/pointer bs. system to write/read data.
Which makes it a compiler issue, not a language one.

Then again, most other platforms never were too C++ friendly and rather lean on C.

BeOS, Symbian, Genode and Windows are probably the only OSes that give C++ some love.
Yup. Depending on, well, a number of factors related to doping and oxides and the like, usually even more. I'm just shooting for the right number of zeros in an overly optimistic boundary/wall hypothetical! :-)
While your points are true, the third does not follow from the first two. Favored industries do get tax breaks, though more for garnering targeted votes than lobbying. That's why Exxon pays 15% and WalMart pays 30%.

The tech industry, including Apple, largely does not benefit from targeted tax breaks. They lay low taxes because they deal in IP and have international operations, which allows them to easily shift taxes to lower-tax jurisdictions. It's easy to look at Wal-Mart's supply chain, which involves widgets, and see where costs were incurred and profits made. Much less so with Apple.

And those tax rules tech companies take advantage of are not loopholes or tax breaks. They're reasonable and sometimes intrinsically necessary tax rules that can be arbitraged in an international system (often with the explicit aid of legislatures in countries like Ireland).
A lot of the topics being discussed don't lend themselves to repeatable testable science. So lots of opinion and preconceived notions, or even just principles are involved in decision making.

If these issues could be resolved by the scientific method, they likely would have already.
Absolutely. I'm in NYC for HOPE this weekend. Coming from Silicon Valley where 1% of the workers are black, I was so happy to see such a huge diverse crowd at the conference, all there for the shared love of exploring technology and hacker culture. SV has some incredibly smart people but, in my experience, all they care about is making money. Feels like the hacker spirit has absolutely vanished
Sometimes I think a restricted medium forces people to communicate dense and honest. It imposes more upfront thinking and reflective reading instead of shallow arguing.
Ask HN: I have some side-project ideas. What do you think I should work on?
I've just finished working on a little iPhone game. It was a great learning experience, but otherwise mostly a failure. I can't say I'm surprised though, since it's not that good, and I didn't put in a huge amount of effort (less than one month). It was still very fun to work on, and I had fun writing the app store description. [1]

Right now I'm looking for a new side project idea, and I don't think I'm very good at working on the right thing. I tend to gravitate towards stupid jokes [2], or things that are very easy and quick to build. Or affiliate sites [3] (and they wouldn't approve my Amazon affiliate ID).

* [1] http://boopsboopsswoops.com

* [2] http://whattypeofanimalareyou.com/

* [3] http://youshouldbuythese.herokuapp.com/

I've written down a few of my ideas over the last few months, and it would be great if I could get some of your feedback so that I can figure out what to work on.

Here's a short summary of some ideas. This HN post is already too long, so I've put all the details in a Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jE9YBu66gozEkAIEmmPVYVdH1lNYVJbQD8P4i95t9qQ/edit?usp=sharing

1) A service that is a very high-level boilerplate/kickstarter for side-projects and startup infrastructure.

2) A gallery for web and mobile screenshots that are generated during your CI test runs.

3) A mobile racing game (silly/comedy).

4) A Virtual Reality dining experience.

5) Procedurally generating the entire population and history of a small town.

6) A mobile app that encourages people to do small amounts of fun exercise throughout the day.

I would love to hear any of your thoughts, including: "all your ideas are bad and you should feel bad."
I find naive and pretentious the suggestion that the average programmer's work is in any way akin to Einstein's search for the truth about our universe. My criticism might seem nitpicky until it's time to measure this article's message against the possible reaction of an engineering or business manager. Launching into a systematic dismantling of the pervasive estimates culture is best done with humble, verifiable assertions and helpful suggestions in tow. Attempting to recruit the long-dead Einstein is unhelpful and hand-wavy.

There must be a better way to package the no-estimates message, and it's not this.
arxiv postings should feature warning sign iconography. On one hand, it offers open access to research -- awesome. On the other hand, it offers us a chance to waste our time and energy studying material that may never survive peer review.

I get excited whenever I see what appears to be a really interesting, valuable piece of information gleamed through rigorous research. My immediate first emotion is excitement. However, that excitement casts a long shadow of doubt as my system 2 mode of reason kicks in and alerts me that the content of interest is the result of an arxiv posting that may fail to survive peer review. Of course, death-through-peer-review may not imply bunk science but I assume that it more often is the case (experts, please chime in).

This leads me to ask whether the HN community would be better without knowing of bleeding edge research on arxiv until it's graduated peer review --What do you think: Is it better to front page bleeding edge, unverified research?

I think the world would benefit by a service that indexes arxiv postings that have survived peer review. Is this feasible?
Displaying a few hundreds widgets has absolutely negligible cost if the code is written properly. For large lists they can always be clipped and not submitted at all. With an immediate-mode GUI you can actually handle navigation of a list of one million items whereas more RMGUI would struggle because of all the intermediate data involved.

Also, the optimization bottleneck nowadays is mostly programmer/brain time, so having a ten-fold productivity improvements means you can actually create more/better tooling and that has very direct consequence on your software performance. The reality with toolkits like QT is that people write very little amount of tooling with it, because it is so tedious. The cost of that are lost opportunity in improving a game engine and its performances.
Dear Imgui is really fast since it tries to avoid state changes as much as possible and generates render command lists with very few draw calls. I've seen a lot of UI systems that do one or even several draw calls per UI elements and end up with hundreds or thousands of draw calls per frame (checking how draw call batching is done is usually the first thing I do when evaluating a new UI library).

On average, Dear Imgui seems to generate one draw call per window, with just changing the scissor rect inbetween draw calls. It will be very hard to come up with a complex enough UI that this becomes a performance problem even on low-end GPUs.
Some notes from Brighton Ruby
I have a tv that is used to what flow-tv substantially never (less than 4 minutes in the last year or so), but at the company gym I have noticed some of the older people turn on the tv right as they go in and don't even mute it during commercials and my grandparents will religiously turn on the tv to watch the 9 o'clock news daily. I think this is really a generational issue and I very much doubt it will be gone in 10-15 years, but it will probably have epsilon uptake and die with the generation that is now in their later 30s.
UX idea for Uber (or Lyft, or…)
I'd like to make a crowd-sourced Bayes net of all evidence, hypotheses, and policy proposals. Let people vote on the connections between nodes and their influence, but then let the Bayes net decide what is consequentially true. Most people are able and willing to follow local arguments about individual things, but discard the whole thing when the argument expands to have actual consequences for policy. The goal would be to let people keep making those local judgement calls on evidence and truth, but let the machine handle the consequent implications.
I thought that was only sites that have a password box on them.
I found it a relatively poor article actually. It's longer than the speech itself yet says less:

http://time.com/4417679/republican-convention-peter-thiel-tr...

From the man's own words, it seems to be a combination of:

• A shared feeling that America was once great, and it can be again, but currently is in decline. No other politician except Trump says this.

• Dislike of foreign wars, a feeling that only Trump says "end foreign wars" and really believes it.

And that's it. I'm not sure it really needs more analysis than that: Thiel feels America doesn't work as well as it used to, and like many libertarian types, is against foreign military intervention. If these two things are much more important to you than other things, it makes logical sense to support Trump.
> since it's not possible to measure broadcast audience.

It's actually really easy today for the vast majority of people with modern "cable" in the US. The reason why you need a cable box for each TV isn't just for de-scrambling the signal, it's also so we measure what channel you watched, when, and for how long. Go look into each cable box... it's basically a computer just like your modern Samsung TV, and like all computers it has "telemetry" baked in. We record telemetry regardless if it's live or DVR -- that's why the DVR is integrated for most consumers today.

All the major ad buyers know their "reach" per placement (the individual ad being broadcast during programming) pretty accurately. What's harder still is which people actually saw the ad, but we're getting closer.

We already know who you are as a subscriber (you had to provide us a SSN, phone number, name, and mailing address to get an account), so we literally know your household.

The only missing piece is which member of the household watches each show. There is some work to correlate internet traffic to infer which person was home at the time the ad played, but it's been less than helpful during prime time broadcasts when the whole household is home anyway.

We're working on it.

Anon because broadcasting all this tracking isn't good for my career.
“What? Two days?”, “But our previous developer could do that in a couple of hours! No way it will take you that long.”

Answer: Well get the previous developer back to do it then. Otherwise STFU, and let me get started.
That will be an interesting read. Though not having a table of contents for a 117 page (double column!) report really isn't ideal..
In my own experience, bootcamps or other made up stages are about to fail because of the fact they have prerequisites that are not shown.

For your friend (and you), I will recommend to start with basic knowledge. What is Boole's logic? What is a microship? How to control a microship.

An example will be : http://www.nand2tetris.org/

Begin with a (only one) project will fall in some pitfalls:
- do not cover basic principles
- assume to know a framework, or to use bad practices
- do not teach programming, but a language for only one purpose

(sorry for my bad english)
Yeah, but that article also showed that the younger generations are watching less "TV" over all (and probably much less if they hadn't counted VOD as "TV") so they are just trying to target the old people, because young people are so much more expensive to target.
It's always better to have more options. Now they can weigh the tradeoff of taking more power from the solar panels in exchange for size+weight reductions of the craft and possibly an increased service life. Another tool in the box. Electricity is the only thing a spacecraft can get more of once it's up there.
>Lets keep religion out of HN, shall we?

I think youre being a bit defensive. That statement might not apply to your religion, especially if it's one based on facts.
The biggest downside to the NSA revelations is how quickly people accept conspiracy theories.

Where everyone else see upsides in public interest and greater transparency from leaks by Snowden, Manning, Drake and others at great personal cost to themselves you apparently are able to overlook all of that to see a downside.

There is no big "Google is protecting the Democrats and hates Wikileaks". Wikileaks was serving malware, and Google detected it.

And you are able to make this blanket statement with this incredible amount of confidence because? I am guessing only an official authorized response from Google can take this tone and be credible.

Given what we know wouldn't the default logical position be one of scepticism and engaging credibly with the facts at hand or a blanket dismissal of scepticism as conpiracy theorists?

As far as surveillance is concerned we are well beyond that stage and these kneejerk references to conspiracy theories and theorists seem tired, disingenious and incredibly out of touch.
It sounds like you agree that religious people are not rational, which is clearly not true. They just start from different axioms (not only physicalist ones) when they reason.

Charitably, it could be confusion over what the word 'rational' means.

At any rate, your points about group membership signalling are well taken. I'd like to point out other forms of social signalling, outgrouping for instance, can be just as powerful and even more counterproductive.

I'm not sure how to let people have honest, helpful, and enjoyable conversations while still policing for things like extraneous signaling. Historically, creating 'safe spaces' for frank and productive dialog hasn't been very successful.
It's interesting to note that the same principles discussed in the paper might also apply to the social networks necessary for the development a new social network "for civic discussion between people who disagree".
If you are allowed to use many transistors, you could create a carry look-ahead adder which would be faster. ;)

There are more ways to speed up your CPU, like identifying instructions that can be executed independently and issue them in parallel, use caches to speed up loading, etc.
Political discourse is based as much on feeling as it is on facts. You might wish that weren't the case but ignoring that fact doesn't make it less true.
Nielsen is the best-known (possibly only?) company that does this in the US, and they're very good at what they do. Their use of a sample is perfectly fine, and there might even be grounds to argue that it's more accurate than trying to get a complete count of viewership.

But when it comes to ad viewership, I'm guessing all they can really measure is the attempt to show someone an ad. I'm not sure they have a good way to measure compliance. Are people actually watching the ads, or are they using ad breaks as an opportunity to take a leak, get another soda, or mute the TV and talk to each other?

Granted, the same's true for Internet ads. Does anyone really sit through YouTube ads? Or do they just mute their computer's audio and go take a peek at Facebook while the ad plays?
One model that I've thought of in the past would be centered around moderators instead of direct voting like reddit/hn. Instead of a discussion being by-everyone-for-everyone, a discussion would be led by a moderator, who would be in charge of voting or banning within that conversation. People would then vote on the _moderator_ rather than on the conversation directly.

Eventually I imagine we might see popular moderators who are seen as fair, and they would take their "job" quite seriously, and we would see some good discussions. Maybe. Or maybe it would be a total shit-show. :)