skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not all npm modules reference Node libraries, and most that do use them for features that are unavailable otherwise (file reading, http connections, etc...). But other than self imposed module requirements, I don't think npm actually has anything intrinsically tying it to node. You can run npm without node, and if the library functions were emulated in a different engine, I think it would work mostly without a hitch. It's just that nobody has done that yet.
Chrome has taken the approach of working on improving their V8 engine to (hopefully) achieve similar performance to Firefox's specialized asm.js AOT codepath but without any special handling of the "use asm" directive (which gives Firefox guarantees about variable types & stuff like that). See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6553794 for a discussion on the subject.
Soylent is a technology company. It's not just positioning. They are iterating towards finding an exponentially better way to do transactional eating using technology. That's the definition of a tech company.

Well, any product is technology in that sense. But this particular technology, meal-replacement shakes, is already reasonably well established. What seems new to me is that Soylent is pitching itself to people who either don't know about or have failed to become interested in the existing products, which seems like a marketing innovation more than a tech innovation. They don't seem to be differentiating on technical quality or iteration. If you read their campaign, for example, it is entirely positioned against regular food, as if they have just invented the full-meal-replacement shake, and does not mention anything about technical innovation over existing competitors: https://campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body

It's possible they also have technical innovation over any existing meal-replacement shake, but they are being very quiet about it if so.
> The post-coup economy in Chile was not so spectactular.

Yes it was. Keep in mind, the price of copper favoured Chile during Allende and disfavoured Pinochet--and it was, as we say, "el sueldo (salary) de Chile." I don't see what's wrong with the loan--Chile paid it back in full--and really, you're cherry picking when it comes to dates after the coup.

At the center of the argument is the question: does spending less and taxing less work? Keep in mind, the tax regime, to this day, is almost identical to what it was in the eighties (very low), and now Chile is the only country in the region in the OECD.
It does include both private and public. You'd have to dig into the different reports to figure out exact methodologies (which I'm too lazy to do right now), but most reports converge on the USA being the country that spends the most on healthcare, both on a per capita basis (which is less interesting, we're richer than most other countries so we should spend more) but also on a % GDP basis. And we win by a large margin on that metric, despite getting pretty mediocre bang for buck.

Various theories explain this: inefficiencies, the USA subsidizing research for the rest of the world, etc. Really they're two sides of the same coin--those inefficiencies line the pockets of various medical-related corporations, some of which ends up going into research.
Soylent is a food and not a supplement. The commercial version of the product is being produced in an FDA approved and GMP certified facility - RFI.
Except defaulting on the loan still has a significant hit on your credit rating, and maybe buying your debt is another negative score on your credit rating.
> You don't need hipsterism to explain some degree of antipathy towards this move.

See I disagree in the validity of that viewpoint but that is not as much of a problem. I disagree in _how_ that viewpoint was made. I felt Google was attacked unfairly in this case.

"Hipsterism" was an analogy I used to illustrate a point in fewer lines of text, I wouldn't get hung up on it too much rather the attitude and level of hate brought by Angular JS community should be discussed.
1-900-CONTEMPTRESS
Really funny video!!!!
That definition might stop working. The important thing is whether you can afford food, clothing, shelter, required transport, and still have some money left over to take care of everything else.

But that definition might not stop working. If you calculate the poverty line as, for example, median income multiplied by 0.6, it is possible to have every single person above that line.
Shit idea is a little harsh for sure, but the problem is when your page relies on dynamic data and you can't prerender it. It's just too expensive to boot up a DOM on the server.
After 30 Years of Silence, the Original NSA Whistleblower Looks Back
Best part of this for me was the information that the Optifast product exists. I hope soylent is successful, but I like knowing there are existing total-meal-replacement competitors I can order now on amazon (which I just did).
Since the aim is accuracy rather than throughput, would more memory help?
IS the stuff on vice.com real? I read about a guy who claimed to only eat raw meat, and it seemed a bit far fetched.

Ok, this Solyent is believable, but why??? Eating is one of life pleasures.
Kind of, and kind of not. A lot of people have gone from having some amount of debt owed to a company (bank or not) to having some amount of debt owed in tax (government).

What that means is that they sat there with $20K in unpaid credit card bills, they got hassled by collection agencies, now the money they didn't have is unpaid taxes, which means the IRS will hunt them down, garnish their wages, take their property, and if necessary put them in jail.

The correct thing to do from a disruptive/#occupy perspective is to buy the debt and then give the debtor new terms. They could make the terms require repayment, and forgiven on death. Then it is still a 'debt' (so so tax hit) but you don't have to pay it back (so no worry and debt collectors hounding you), If you die the IRS can try to get their pound of flesh out of your presumably destitute estate.
Why not? The human body is a machine, and we can examine and alter that machine. We've been doing that throughout history.

I don't like the early claims of Soylent being "perfectly optimized" and the like.
One of D's improvements upon C/C++ is its ability to enforce "deep const-ness".
Well, at the performance level, Dart VM is much much more faster than Javascript ones. I dont think Google plans to kill Javascript.

But Dart makes sense on Chromebooks for instance, where Google could deploy the Dart VM.

So the benefit is for Google ecosystem.

Front end devs are afraid of fragmentation , I think competition and choice is good. It will force JS to evolve much more faster, And why not ,maybe some day we will have a NodeDart too since Dart VM is open source, it would be awesome.
Well, perhaps lenders would be a little more careful about who they give money to.
Agreed. I will be interested to know what the lessons learned were and perhaps regulation will be the answer specifically for government projects, ie. civil projects similar to aircraft/military software development.

Edit: grammar
From the article: "No written permission of any kind was ever given by the students."

What's the statute of limitations on something like this? I'm guessing since this occurred so long ago, nothing can be done.
Ah, thanks for that! I was wondering if repl.it was out of date. Might be worthwhile to get the owner to update... :)
They're using a copacker now, which means a proper, approved, factory. So things should be much better for the actual product.

I dislike the way the founder keeps saying “I want to be totally transparent,” - but only after someone has seen a rat or found mold or whatever.

The algae stuff sounds interesting. Is anyone already working on it?
That choice doesn't match my understanding of how the bankruptcy system works.
Not at all; it depends on how strong the effects of chance are. Poker is typically played in a way (ante amounts, etc.) that gives skilled players a meaningful but not overwhelming advantage.

Single-player games, even those with random elements, can be designed such that the odds of winning in perfect play can be 100% or (easier) extremely close to 100%.
Or... it could put humanity in a position to provide a balanced nutrition as a fundamental human right, delivered right to your doorstep by USPS. If the economics worked out it could be provided everywhere worldwide, and then other food consumption could be purely for enjoyment.

There are always people who scream "dystopia!" every time a new technology arrives. That seems very pessimistic.
Linux kernel community learns how to grow more penguins
> You can get better products from reputable companies.

What products specifically?
Perfect, I am at this exact spot! My startup launched and we got around 100 signups, but none of them are coming back. I guess I should push hard to really talk to as many as I can.

Thanks for putting new context on the lean startup methods.
US to surpass Saudi as top oil producer by 2016: IEA
I find it interesting that a site that is posting about cultural trends is itself following one of the current western web site trends:narrow central column of text with tons and tons of empty white space on either side...
You are not alone :). Non-JS devs are just generally less vocal.
The three NYC food critics (11:20 in the video) really bugged me. Their immediate smug dismissal of the product and idea was predetermined. Maybe I'm reading too much into what was shown, but I got the impression that there was no possible world in which they give Soylent a chance.

I'm not necessarily a believer, but I'm noticing this behavior more and more often as I get older and it's increasingly bothering me.
For a while there were non-x86 Windows NT boxes. In fact, there are again with Windows RT. Wintel versus WinDEC or Wintanium or WinMIPS, for example, though there was never enough market shire for any of those to justify a neologism.
Ask HN: What to do when procrastinating from a complex task?
Hi all,
For the last few weeks I have been working on a complex, mathematically dense task at work. I've found myself avoiding some of the most difficult parts of the task and not able to cover as much ground as I'm typically accustomed to. Any advice about how to stay focused, or some good exercises to give myself some mental recharge time when I'm feeling exhausted?
The maritime industry as a whole is one big hack, even with it's fancy regulations and bureaucracy. People are dying constantly due to the failures of the industry. It is nice to see fresh ideas.

That's why I am pitching my new great idea: submarines made of scrap steel I found in my back yard! The best part? No more hassle with pesky waves! Glide beneath the surface with the grace of an aquatic mammal.

Sure, some people have built submarines before, and they say it is really difficult to get right, but my idea is fresh by virtue of it being created by me, a SV engineer!

(Ignore that puncture in the test unit, somebody mishandled the shipping!)
Exactly, this will be a huge hit for quantified self people who want to reduce their existence down to a spreadsheet.
Organic growing techniques use "vastly" less water? How so?

I'm guessing that there's a correlation between farmers who choose to grow organic and those who try to conserve water, but I can't see how one is "vastly" different.
I went back to FF earlier this year. The factors were both technical (Firefox has drastically improved from a speed and memory standpoint) and "political" (I'm gradually withdrawing from Google services). I'm still more familiar with the Chrome dev tools, but the default FF ones are coming along nicely.

Initially, I installed a few extensions to make FF as Chrome-like as possible. I disabled them after a while, and I couldn't be happier.
Google accounts have a dead man's switch
Taken for Granted
Definitely back to Firefox. With all the non-standards compliant features that have been built into Chrome recently, it's a lot slower than it once was. Plus the less support Chrome gets, the less chance they have of destroying web standards. Just watching how Google handles the Android ecosystem should be enough to prove to anyone what would happen if Google had more control over the web. These days if you want an open web, you pretty much need to be at least Google-wary.

Firefox has also made leaps and bounds in memory usage and keeping the UI good looking but usable. Definitely a project worth supporting.
You're right about a trial version... Can be quite tricky.
To put this on topic for HN, how many startups strive to spend less than they earn?

Governments are not lemonade stands either.
I think what he was actually getting at is the Discount Window. These are often very short term loans, perhaps a matter of minutes, made to cover a short term liquidity drop. If you add it all up over a year, it could very well add up to several trillions without adding those trillions to the GDP.

It all gets paid back with interest, though. None of this is anything new.
Dan is always worth reading. It seems to take me 6 months an average to process what he's saying and see it in the real world but he consistently adds to my knowledge.
Anything like this for ruby?
Yeah, but the lack of chlorine trifluoride is a deal breaker. ;/
Why the Tesla fires are not the big deal that the media portrays them as
RethinkDB (YC S09) is hiring a reliability engineer
Indeed. I've been scraping by with my now slowly disintegrating pair of glasses that I got five years ago. The price, before sales-tax, 645 USD - of which 90 was for the frame, the rest for toric carbonate lenses with scratchproof and anti-reflex coating.
> a hundred secure-randomly generated characters

might as well just memorize the private key..
Ask HN: Where can I find a software job that helps society?
I've tried many different things in the corporate world and entrepreneurship.

I've enjoyed it, but I'm pretty jaded by the usual stuff. A job with social impact--something that makes someone's life better--would be the right thing for me now.

Any thoughts on convenient ways to find these? Some sort of board or listing?
Arbor Networks Launches Arbor Cloud DDoS Protection Services
"If I am not performing to expectations, fire me or renegotiate my salary."

Both of these are high overhead, which means harder to tune. Depending on circumstance, that may work to the advantage of the employer or employee, or to the advantage or disadvantage of both.

In principle it needn't require desperation, just confidence that your market salary should be above what you can demonstrate it should be during the interview process.

Again, I'm not speaking to actual practicality - I know in a limited fashion how it has and hasn't worked for me, where discretionary bonuses have occasionally been present but have generally not been a large part of my compensation; I don't have any particular insight into their function / misfunction broadly.

"For discretionary bonuses to make even the most remote amount of sense, it needs to offer the employee an upside for taking on the uncertainty."

Obviously.

Anyone saying "Base + max bonus gives the compensation you expect" is trying to take advantage. It should be "base + expected bonus is marginally higher than the fixed rate you would deserve if you are as good as you think".
> Maybe a new virtual machine along with a high-level language will magically materialize out of thin air?

Dart[1] is high-level, and has a clean, fast VM implementation. Also, ARM support[2].

[1] https://www.dartlang.org/
[2] https://code.google.com/p/dart/source/browse/branches/bleedi...
What would be really great to see is someone putting a HTML client/DOM implementation/etc. inside a PNaCL application. This is after all how things ought to be: ideally you implement your DSL/document viewer inside your general-purpose runtime, instead of kludging your document-format specification up into an application runtime. None of the big browser vendors (including Mozilla and Google itself) is going to welcome such an idea though, as it threatens their de facto control over Web standards.
Single page apps or more traditional approach with HTML generated on a server?
Managing harddrives, especially in redundant setups can be helped in one small way if you're sure to:

1) select the make and model of drive you want

2) buy the same model of drives from multiple vendors which have different serial and build numbers.. even if you're buying two drives, buy each from separate locations or vendors.

3) mix up the drives to make sure they don't die. place stickers of purchase date and invoice number on each drive to keep them straight.

This all.. because when one drive goes due to a defect or hitting a similar MTBF, other ones with a close by serial number or build number can tend to die around the same time for similar reasons.

From owning hard drives over 8 or 9 generations of replacing or upgrading since the 90's on all types of servers, desktops and laptops: The day you buy a new piece of equipment is the day you buy it's death. Manage the death proactively as it gets more and more tiring to deal with it each time.
What I don't get is why do I need a "stable" data store to iterator over? On a project I once didn't get a database until 2 weeks before the actual project was due. Fortunately I was using Spring. So I just mocked the DAL until such time as I actually got a real one. This whole time I changed the contract on the DAL, changed how I used it, etc. Then when the DBA finally got around to having time to make my db I presented him with a decent, thought-out ERD.

Sure the mocks had to do some work, but a simple cache allowed me to perform all of the CRUD operations in memory. I can see doing something similar with Mongo/Couch, but having done the DAL with a pure mock set injected via Spring, I don't really see the point. The same goes for HQL or another lightweight in memory DB + Hibernate/JPA. I assume the model of interaction would work with Python or similar languages too.
No, I'm talking about the substance of your comment. It's rambling and conflating seemingly completely unrelated topics. I do not recognize what you have described as any current reality I am a part of:

>> "...lot of hipsters that hunt and jump on the latest tech bandwagon..."

>> "The underlying sentiment I read was -- "you mean I will be stuck unable to tell everyone I work with the latest bleeding edge tech because there is a newer, cooler faster hemorrhaging tech out there, after I spent nights online evangelizing about how awesome this last bandwagon I jumped on is""

>> "The sad part is that here is Google spending man months of work and giving it back to the community and as a thank you they got spit in the face"

Who are we even talking about here? Which community? You seem to be taking a few anecdotes, apparently of HN posts, interpreting them in your own.. strange way and then using that information to paint with the broadest of brushes.

Hipsters? We're talking about software development here and programming language choices. -Your- reality might be some strange war where youth subcultures are duking it out for the future of the web based on childish ego fights and posing or something... That's not my reality.
Gross, why are human beings packing Soylent?
When a lawnmower breaks, you hit it really hard with a hefty wrench until it starts working again. Maybe even take it apart, clean it, and put it back together again. Worse case, you buy a new one and find yourself out a few thousand dollars.

Percussive maintenance doesn't work on humans. When humans break, they die.
I've gotta say, I'm a big fan of the software. I'm excited to use it in an upcoming project!
Etsy’s Industrial Revolution
>But if you ever see a black and white nude photograph like this floating around at a flea market, you know what to do.

maybe I missed this part. what do I do?
Going on a Soylent diet doesn't mean that you'll be a cog or that your vision of the future will come to pass.

Granted, I too am terrified of that future coming to pass, but it doesn't follow from increased Soylent consumpion.
I'm not sure anything's fundamentally wrong with transpilation.
It sounds like you need to focus your job-hunting efforts on charitable organisations. Phone those orgs and ask to speak with the people in charge of software development.

In the meantime you could volunteer as a programmer - it's a niche that is growing rapidly.

http://socialcoder.org (UK based but international)

Disclosure: I run it
He also said that at least 46 years ago.
> Limiting moral hazard is what keeps our insurance/finance/debt system churning

Citation needed.
> realized with some sadness that its very evocative opening line [1] will quite quickly cease to have meaning for generations who grew up without analog TVs

Meh, I don't think this is really a worry. We still read Shakespeare - we just have to make an extra effort to understand the nuances. In fact, that's part of what makes it so interesting.
Are there any stable economics of the world that are not built upon natural resources?

When rich countries dump their excess food on a poor country, the local agriculture industry dies, and everyone on up the chain suffers. Cheap food sounds good in theory, but as you say, it is of little consequence if you have no steady source of income – which typically needs to start with farming, with services being built around that. Reducing/removing the external food supply and providing micro loans on which to build a local agriculture economy could have some benefit though, assuming you can actually get the resources to the people without corrupt powers taking over, of course.

I do see problems with our prolonged use of fertilizers and anything that can be done to resolve that is a good thing, but I'm not sure if it will really help the poor. It will just make growing food even easier for wealthy nations, making things even more difficult for those less fortunate.
This is a very progressive idea, lets add housing to that, so that everyone will have a place to stay, something to eat and something to do.

I can see the large halls feeding the masses, I've even heard tale of a boy named Oliver who wants even more soylent it's so delicious.
But yeah, software engineering is a different ball game completely.
Can you explain that a bit more?

How is it better off to pay your debt if it is 'free debt'? Wouldn't it be better to keep/invest the money elsewhere and pay the bare minimum?

This assumes elsewhere provides returns that beat inflation. I hear a lot about >3% return opportunities in index funds etc.
Their use case is mostly write-once, they fill the data and never delete. The write-rate is probably more limited by the upload speeds of its users than the disk bandwidth and the multitude of port-multipliers that they use. Recovery is anyway mostly about copying all the user data to an external HDD and ship that which is a lot less performance critical as shipping the HDD will take a lot longer than reading all the data from across their systems.

As for saving power by spinning down disks, it is likely to be useful to them and is completely possible even in SW RAID though it requires some managing to perform effectively.

There isn't much that is applicable directly to most other use-cases but if your data is mostly sitting idle and you only need occasional access to it the backblaze pod is a nice design. If you care about performance and do not deploy multiple pods with redundancy between them you are not likely to be happy with the result.
Yes, it will. That's part of the price. If it weren't pain in the arse, nobody would be lending out anything.
Oh I see, thanks for the details!
How Blockbuster Could Have Owned Netflix