skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't have a strong opinion on whether you should build it or not (I have a Mac but won't use it, which has almost nothing to do with whether it's a good idea or not), but here's some other admittedly unsolicited advice (and of course I recognize that you may know all of this already):

Remember that most people who think it's a bad idea won't respond, and people who do respond are doing so because they're interested, or think they are. So there's some bias to account for. And secondly people who say they want something can't really be trusted; it costs nothing to upvote you and people are really quick to say "yes, I'd buy/use that" and though they certainly mean it at the time, it's very often turns out to be untrue when it's actually time to download and install it.

Of course, it might work anyway; I'm just saying that I doubt that asking HN whether you should code it is a good predictor.
I just cited markdown as complement to git. Git is a command line tool as is SSH (don't talk about GUIS for Git, that is not the case). I never said Unix is used exclusively by extraordinary people only (Ubuntu and others are an example), but the majority of people still use Windows.

Have an Unix/Linux background makes it easier to get started because you already know what they are talking about.

My personal opinion? Windows sucks (just to be clear, that is me).
It is actually not that simple. I mean if it was, we wouldn't have countless reams of paper devoted to how to learn and comprehend better. Everyone comprehends things differently and sometime different perspectives help.

I thought the article was pretty decent as one man's perspective on how to learn algorithms. The whole talk through an algorithm reminds me of my real analysis class where the only way to comprehend and understand highly abstract proofs and constructs was to talk through them as if they were telling a story (which incidentally they are, except that it is a story that has been highly refined and evolved over 200 years which makes it appear very sophisticated.)
I agree with the spirit and most of the letter of your comment. But....

Why is the day of the beginning and end of WW2 such a stand-out piece of trivia that you would expect every person who puts "some effort into their education" to know it? You say it as though you find it hard to believe that any responsible adult could lack this particular fact. For myself, I fancy that I know a lot of trivia, including a lot of war-history trivia, but I don't know the day of the year on which that war ended (in fact, the only war start/end date I can recall at the moment is the date of the WWI armistice, because my government reminds me every year).

More generally, I did not see a single question in the list in TFA that I would condemn a person for not knowing that particular question, although I definitely "would like to live in a world where people actually put some effort into their education", and in fact I see some practical value in knowing a lot of trivia.

EDIT: Wait, I just read your top-level comment. You believe that ALL of these questions are "common knowledge that an average human being should know"?? Did you read the list? The AVERAGE HUMAN BEING should know the third-smallest State in the United States of America?!? The average human being should know which country consumed the most tea before WWI? You think it's common knowledge (or was in 1921) who wrote "Home, Sweet Home", and the voltage of street cars, and Lincoln's birthplace, and the wood used in axe handles and kerosene barrels? Seriously? That is batshit insane.
@holgersindbaek: I love the quick browsing and general feel of it. I have to admit though, I rarely exit the front page listing & links or use it for anything else than checking up on what's going on in the world.
Reminds me of these reddit comments about Russian girls:

http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/16bl5l/something_som...

http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/16bl5l/something_som...
> the "gun in my home to keep me safe" is a non-sequitur and only makes sense in simplistic cowboy scenari

No, it makes perfect, quantifiable, empirical sense

>> data from the United States, show “a negative correlation,” that is, “where firearms are most dense violent crime rates are lowest, and where guns are least dense violent crime rates are highest.”[1]

[1] beware the PDF: http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_Kate...
(Luke Wagner from Mozilla here.)

> This seems very much targeted at emscripten and not to cross-compilers that start with GC'ed languages like GWT, Dart, ClojureScript, et al.

That's correct, although one could implement a garbage collector on top of the typedarray heap (we have working examples of this). There are some limitations to GCing the typed array manually, though, such as not taking advantage of the browser's ability to better schedule GCs.

Looking further in the future, though, it would be completely reasonable to extend asm.js to allow the super-optimizable use of the upcoming BinaryData API [1] in the style of JVM/CLR-style objects. Again, though, this is speculative; BinaryData isn't even standardized yet.

> It's also unclear to me how this solves the problem of startup time on mobile.

We have several strategies to improve this. The "use asm" directive, in addition to allowing us to produce useful diagnostic messages to devs when there is an asm.js type error, allows us to confidently attempt eager compilation which can happen on another thread while, e.g., the browser is downloading art assets. Looking farther in the future again, we could make some relatively simple extensions to the set of Transferrable [2] objects that would allow efficient programmer-controlled caching of asm.js code including jit code using the IndexedDB object store.

> In all likelihood, the majority of asm.js outputs would be actually be non-human readable output of optimizing cross-compilers, so there isn't much benefit from having a readable syntax that humans could read, so what's the real justification for using JS as an intermediate representation over say, a syntax specifically designed for minimum network overhead and maximum startup speed?

Before minification, asm.js is fairly readable once you understand the basic patterns, assuming your compiler keeps symbolic names (Emscripten does). The primary benefit is that asm.js runs right now, rather efficiently, in all major browsers. It also poses zero standardization effort (no new semantics) and rather low implementation effort (the asm.js type system can be implemented with a simple recursive traversal on the parse tree the generates IR using the JS VM's existing JIT backend). This increases the chances that other engines will adopt the same optimization scheme. A solution for native performance is only a solution if it is portable and we want to maximize that probability.

> The usual response is minify + gzip, but it's not a panacea.

In addition to minify+gzip, one can also write a decompressor in asm.js that unpacks the larger program. Also, see [3] for how minified gzipped Emscripten code is comparable to gzipped object files.

[1] http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:binary_data
[2] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...
[3] http://mozakai.blogspot.com/2011/11/code-size-when-compiling...
As a TSLA shareholder, I couldn't agree more.
"Should know", "well educated", "well oriented." All these qualifiers are subjective and are consequently meaningless. I could say the opposite of what you said and I'd be just as right (only taking into account what was written by us both).

You'll need to operationalize what you mean to make any sense, and then to be right you'll need to provide evidence.
What you've defined is "core hours". This is the range of time in the day when meetings happen and productivity tends to slow down to a crawl. It sounds like your company's core hours are 9-4. It's fairly standard (some places have core hours being 10a-2p).
> Even on HN.

Did you mean programming.reddit.com?
The first thing that popped into my mind was a Tintin story - where Captain Haddock finds he can no longer bear the taste of whiskey. The professor had given him something akin to this.

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

Life is stranger than ...
Hah, you beat me to it :)
If there was just an un-upvote button, browsing HN on mobile wouldn't be so risky :P
Well, get on it :)
Slate's Bad Astronomer covers asteroid flyby live
Disulfiram has been known to cause acute sensitivity to alcohol since 1948 and has been used to treat chronic alcoholism:

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

Disulfiram is absorbed slowly through the digestive tract
and eliminated slowly by the body the effects may last
for up to two weeks after the initial intake

An interesting podcast from NPR on its use in Russia:

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/world/russia-rx/killer-cur...
We make sure there is enough money in the defence budget to send out Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck and gang on more training missions. Although I'm not opposed to just leaving Ben Affleck out there for a while.

We also need to come up with some treatment for space dementia. It almost ruined the mission last time.
Why do so many Russians have dashboard cams?
The public ombudsman (or Facts don't work the way we want)
as in "It would have been put in the water along with flouride" I suppose?
Don't think that I'm not sympathetic here; I agree that readable machine code is generally undervalued. At some point your code generator will bug out, and someone will be forced to sift through generated code and mentally interpret stuff like `(a+b)|0` to figure out where it's gone wrong. I wonder if the eventual asm.js proposal would be regular enough to define a 1:1 mapping between `(a+b)|0` and `iadd` (or some other more-conventional ASM format), to be used for human-reading and debugging rather than machine interpretation. I doubt it's possible in the general case, but I could be wrong.
I'm not sure how these comments have anything to do with the way Russia is being run these days.
>Does he actually argue that, or does he just claim that? Wouldn't an argument come with some sort of evidence?

A society's standards, including moral standards, are not something that has to pass "evidence".

I find it silly that we ask to justify any and all decisions and laws a society takes with some deterministic, scientific evidence.

Do the "right to freedom" needs any evidence? In fact, there's no evidence at all for that, it's just a moral guideline. Scientifically, we could do the exact opposite.

Do we need "evidence" that black people are the same as white?

Or, (in a case where evidence tells us people are not as capable as us), do we need "evidence" to not treat the physically/mentally ill as inferior?

Do we need evidence that rape is traumatic? And what kind of evidence should that be? Maybe we should not believe it until we actually see changes in a brain scan in post-rape victims (then again, why assume those changes should be for the worst?). Surely trusting what they tell us is not enough -- personal feelings is no evidence.

Now, the case for "increased frequency of sexual violence" against women might, or might not, be quantified.

But the case for "longterm damage for children who view it at an early age" doesn't need to. Living as a society doesn't mean adhering as a robot to scientific notions and discoveries. It involves preferences, choices, and even risk. A society might prefer even a negative outcome, over what is considered healthier and better "scientifically" (E.g they might keep their customs re food , despite evidence that said food can be harmful or some other cusine is more nutricional. Or they might prefer to fight and die instead of collaborating with an invading army (which gives you the scientific benefit of being alive)).
Thanks for the advice. I follow what you are saying.

Reason I'm doing this is, that I come up with a lot of projects and it's hard to know which of them people will actually like.

I'm putting out a feeler here, to see wether people are even interested. It seems so :-).
Thanks! We definitely plan on adding this stuff. I'd love to be able to help people easily get past the "default bootstrap" look and have some really great looking sites.
Wow, check out the pressure wave (I assume) that moves the camera dramatically forward just before the blast is heard. That was one big freakin bang.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np_mpGYSBSA&t=0m26s
That's because in the UK knife violence is a much bigger than gun crime.

Having said that, drunken violence on a friday/saturday night is a big problem regardless.
I bet it's more likely to do with the fact that the penalty is 20 years + fine and/or caning.
And importantly, still work on browsers that don't specifically support asm.js. They'd be slower, because they wouldn't be taking advantage of the available optimization, but the code would still run.
"But surely if we can send a man to the moon, we must be able to tackle porn on the internet."

This man obviously underestimates Internet porn.
9. Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. No way, thanks God.

Well he wasn't that far.

The high-end laptop market is utterly dominated by Apple: already in 2007 they had more than 30% (growing by 8% from 2006) of the high-end laptop market and now they're at more than 50%. So their sales there exceed those of all the other players combined.

They're also the uncontested winner in the ultra-thin laptops market.

Granted, there's a market for IBM Thinkpads but you simply cannot say he was far off regarding is Apple laptops prediction.
Thanks. I'll take a look at it.

I've already taken a look at some other HN examples (there's a lot of open source ones out there), but not sure if I will go with any of those. Might start from scratch.
Introducing Boxen
Why on earth would anyone bribe a mailman?
I absolutely agree, but I believe it may be easier to cure the causes of alcoholism during periods of sobriety.
If you’re rethinking WP as a CMS, let’s chat.
I briefly experimented with HN in a discreet RSS reader (Feeds App), and I won't let it on my computer outside the browser again as it was too distracting. I also don't keep any of the iPhone apps for HN I've tried around for that reason. Your designs look nice, though.
Thanks for the comment. SSL is near the top of our list of feature priorities.
> I know I've been in situations in the USA where I've wished I'd had one.

Lots of people in this country Just. Flat. Out. Lie! Context is high stakes? Think you can get away with lying? Then lie!

jaquesm commented that a fish rots from the head. Cancers can also start in the body.
Open Source Ecology: Global Village Construction Kit
I remember a roommate of my in college who was a heavy smoker and was trying to quit. Friend of his was in Equinox (the multi-level marketing scheme) and gave him some of these "no smoke" tablets to cure him of his smoking habit.

He said all it did was give him intolerable diarrhea for a week and then he threw the rest of the tablets away. I would imagine most people would do the same thing with the oral medication if the effects were so drastic.
I really like this idea. I was just wondering to myself, how one can teach themselves entrepreneurship much in the way people learn how to code. Using method at AngelList, you can quickly iterate, get feedback quickly and probably the best lesson of them all, Fail. Founding a startup in its present form involves putting all of your eggs into one basket and failing can have a large consequence. Practice makes perfect.
It is not uncommon that the line between ethical and exciting and unethical and dystopic is drawn at "voluntary".

Imagine if we gave gastric bypasses to fat people against their will. Horrible, right? We don't do that though, so we have few ethical issues with the procedure.
Last I read up on it, the version of box2d compiled with emscripten performed a lot better than any of the "hand tuned" js versions! :)
Do you mind laying out your specific concerns? I'm not the developer of news:yc but I use it every day and like it a lot, and I think the user experience is fine and have never felt hampered or awkward using it.
The title is misleading. This isn't about to happen. One conservative legislator is making a proposal. You can probably write a headline like this for any number of crazy ideas in most countries.
Welcome to Earth. Sixth-grade physics, for most people, is for passing the 6th-grade physics test. It has no relation to the real world or their behaviour.
Russian Meteorite Fragment May Have Hit Lake
First comment on the article:

Edvin Dunaway 22 minutes ago

um guys, no.. I am an Icelander, and I'll have you know this: Iceland is not going to ban porn!

Ögmundur is just one guy, he does NOT represent Iceland in whole. he wrote a bill that he wanted to pass up for voting, and that bill hasn't even reached that stage yet and if it ever will, it will not pass.

also, Ögmundur is highly unpopular among Icelanders and he will not be a part of a new government after the upcoming election in spring.
There's nothing fundamentally bad about 'new Audio("effect.wav")' and it performs stunningly well in both Firefox and IE and has for a long time. The one real 'downside' - prebuffering - is absolutely trivial to compensate for and the code to do it in JS is not any larger than the necessary scaffolding to make basic use of Web Audio.

Chrome was always the loser here; I won't speculate as to the reasons why, only state that for multiple versions, playing simple sound effects with Audio instances had severe latency, audio quality issues, and even crashes. Why wouldn't devs praise the Web Audio API if the only alternative was broken? I certainly was happy when I finally managed to get my HTML5 games to play audio in Chrome without crashing, but that doesn't mean the Web Audio API is well-designed or that it was a good idea for me to have to write Chrome-specific code just to play sound effects.

I'll acknowledge that Web Audio's design probably delivers better runtime performance in scenarios where you're playing dozens or hundreds of non-streaming sound effects, but I still question the motives of anyone who prioritized that over having basic support for audio working correctly.

EDIT: Because I forgot to mention this - I mean seriously, you put a method call in the Web Audio API that blocks the UI thread to synchronously decode audio? In 2012??? And didn't cover the documentation in 'don't use this' warnings?
Is it true that Broder is winning the argument?

That was not my impression, but I haven't read everything yet.
If it's voted on, go for it. It is bad for women IMO. Treats them as objects for the most part. Plum, men then get depressed because they expect life to be like a porno.
They do: https://www.23andme.com/health/Alcohol-Flush-Reaction/
To be clear, I'm not actually saying that a meteor defense system is a reasonable idea. I don't know enough about the topic to say anything interesting.

My point was rather that you can't compare a catastrophe with disease / accidents simply in deaths-over-time. Catastrophes have dramatic economic consequences as well.
Oh. Right. A VM. On the web. Because that worked reallllly well when Java did it.
I have a natural aversion to it because it seems lawless and ungovernable. For many this is a good thing (buying drugs, freedom from tax, etc etc) but I'm very much so a "by the books" kind of guy so none of that has any value to me. I guess I COULD convert my money to a currency with no stability or permanence, but there's really no benefit.
"How does a whole country get to be so sociopathic?"
If I understand what is being proposed, the recipients of the treatment will essentially suffer from Asian flush (many people of Asian descent have a mutation that makes them less capable of breaking down alcohol and its byproducts). This may discourage the recipient from drinking in the future by essentially preventing the body from protecting itself from the ravaging effects of alcohol. Perhaps there is a better way to set up this vaccine.
Okay, how do I put this?

1. Mike is a big fat jerk.
2. "everyone who ever published his words about any subject in any capacity should disavow him and ostracize him for his thoughtcrime, and everyone who doesn't is bad people" is stupid.

In conclusion, everybody sucks.
Reading Paul Graham's "beating the average" I can't help think that Steve Yegge's prediction #5 and #10 are mutually exclusive:

Prediction #5: Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010.

Prediction #10: In five years' time, most programmers will still be average.

There's no way any Lisp dialect could reach top ten if most programmers are still average ; )
ahh interesting!!
Show HN: "Spread the Love," my turntable.fm hack day project
Thanks for the compliments.

What made you think it was too distracting? Could you see the updates all the time?
I was only thinking that it would be internal. Your server point is good, but I think way, way harder, and kind of starts the whole project back at the beginning: how to design a standard, efficient, optimized bytecode format. So I think it's probably not really feasible.

Not the same, but an additional optimization you can do is incremental compilation. Because you have JavaScript's eval, you can download the code a bit at a time and optimize (and cache via FunctionBlob) each piece.
Rap Genius responds to Heroku's apology
Thundering typhoons! That's immediately what popped into my head as well.
The taco flag completes the video! Hah. Nice one.
Maybe on HN, but not elsewhere as far as I can tell.
yeah - really did. thanks for posting it and the thoughts
Is the name of your freemium offer losing you revenue?
Cognitive Architectures: A Way Forward for the Psychology of Programming
Read through Google's SEO Starter Guide:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-s...

Read it very carefully.
How Graph Search Works for Young People
Page rank matrix
"""“But what if I'm full?” Then get a friend to help, force the issue or pay the fine. “But what if that's the only size and it's more than I can eat?” Then don't order that particular $25 dish."""

A better question: what if it is crap?
Holger, your design has the same issue as every other HN app - it trades condensed view for spacing and typography. The brilliance of HN's native design is an ability to see 20-30 stories per screenful. This is a must have. Otherwise it turns into Designer News [1] :)

Secondly, an app that is merely an alternative view of HN webpage is not terribly interesting. It should really offer something else. For example, an ability to track/follow other users, ability to pick up stories from /new page that might of an interest to me, track my account stats, track replies to my comments and submissions, etc.

If you are going to sink your time in this project, make damn sure there'll be (paid) downloads at the end of the road.

[1] https://news.layervault.com
Guidelines for Designing User Interface Software (1986)
You make a great point. The purpose of law is not to uphold scientific principles, but to reflect and enforce the standards of society.
Test your Meta Skills.
I kinda hope that someone at Mozilla keeps a count of just how many monkeys have gone into the code base. Off the top of my head, there's SpiderMonkey, TraceMonkey, JagerMonkey, IonMonkey, ScreamingMonkey, IronMonkey, and perhaps you should count Tamarin. It would be neat to see mascot like versions of them all... :)
I work for quite possibly the only start up here. we're hiring!
You should read Sam Harris's "The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values" if you haven't already.

He writes convincingly (for me anyway) that moral discussions need not be arbitrary or driven by "gut instinct." Instead he proposes that a scientific approach to morality indeed would make us more moral.