LazerBear · HackerTrans

12 jaar geledendiscuss

I think this is fantastic, but I couldn't find API docs / tutorial anywhere on your site. Demonstrating use cases is important, but I don't think it's enough to get developers to download / register.

LazerBear

12 jaar geledendiscuss

Design could use some more work, but I like the idea. Consider using social plugins for users. Also I love how you chose to show it off with YC's lecture. I guess you had to wait a while for the video to be online but it was probably worth it. That's thinking out of the box.

LazerBear

12 jaar geledendiscuss

I always think it's admirable when a CEO offers his help in forums.

LazerBear

12 jaar geledendiscuss

I tested it for a tiny project and was very surprised. It's very easy to use, though I wouldn't use it in production because of the price / lack of customizability.

LazerBear

12 jaar geledendiscuss

If you accidentally forget to use 'new' when you're supposed to, the "constructor" method will change the global object instead of a new object, it can cause strange behavior that is very hard to trace.

LazerBear

12 jaar geledendiscuss

Ah that's fantastic, i've been using them for a while and never noticed.

LazerBear

12 jaar geledendiscuss

Douglas Crockford, is that you? Oh the lengths people will go to avoid using 'new'...

I wonder if any linters out there warn when they see something like:

  something = SomeCapitalizedFunction()

Because forgetting to use 'new' is really the only thing I could think of that makes this pattern dangerous.

LazerBear

12 jaar geledendiscuss

That's a cool trick, though 'instanceof' won't work in this case.

LazerBear

12 jaar geledendiscuss

Looks great. Does the name come from Hebrew? It means small coins, like pennies.

LazerBear

12 jaar geledendiscuss

This made me wonder if it's possible to automatically reverse engineer a small binary file into human readable (and understandable) source code. Assuming you know the language and compiler used (and all of its quirks and optimizations), and considering that human written programs aren't so random and their patterns are most likely predictable, I think it should be possible though not at all trivial. Are there any projects attempting this?

LazerBear

12 jaar geledendiscuss

Not really the same, but Passport offers easy account authentication.

LazerBear

12 jaar geledendiscuss

This is hilarious and spot on. Still love HN though.

LazerBear

12 jaar geledendiscuss

GEB is an amazing book, recommended to anyone into CS and logic.

LazerBear

12 jaar geledendiscuss

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see the problem. If your users submit their proofs one line at a time, then validating each line is O(1) if they give you the assumptions they used and the steps they took.

Edit: In case I wasn't clear, I didn't mean anything like natural language processing (though that would be awesome). I meant very strict formal math where everything is explicit.

LazerBear

12 jaar geledendiscuss

GitHub for mathematicians.

For every theory, define its axioms and valid logical steps. Let anyone build theorems based on these (validate them automatically), and allow people to fork others theorems to create their own.

It's probably possible to get a lot of proofs from projects like Mizar and Metamath to start with, then let the community build on top of it.

Maybe even a crowd sourced bounty program for unproven theorems, like P=NP. Let people pledge and automatically pay to whoever proves or disproves it.

I think this can really change how mathematical research is done.

LazerBear

12 jaar geledendiscuss

I don't understand how they can make something as simple as Twitter so cluttered. Though this is an improvement.

LazerBear

12 jaar geledendiscuss

Great reply, thank you for clarifying!

I sometimes like to think about the ethical consequences of having that type of data and computation power. For example it's very likely for it to be used to perform experiments in biology.

But who's to say that an organism simulated in that low level is any different from the real thing? If there even such a thing as "the real thing".

And it gets even weirder when simulating human beings. Is a simulated person any different from us? Is he really conscious or does he merely "behave" conscious? Is it ethical to use it for experiments? What about entertainment? And also, it raises the possibility that we ourselves might be simulated in one level or another.

I think that in some point humanity will have to face these questions. Though from what I understand from you, we still have a few centuries to get there... Man, that's something I'd love to see.

LazerBear

12 jaar geledendiscuss

Believe it or not they still teach MIPS architecture and assembly in some universities (Technion, Israel for example).

LazerBear

12 jaar geledendiscuss

It would be much more exciting if they could get a SINGLE cell (of whichever organism) simulated with virtual subatomic particles. Has anything like that been attempted? Do we even have the data?

LazerBear

12 jaar geledendiscuss

Man, this is really weird. Just a few hours ago I came up with what I think is an awesome for a tax-related service. I was reading HN, as I do daily, before I decided to start Googling for possible competitors. Imagine my surprise when Google brought me back to HN, to a post from just a few hours ago that I somehow managed to miss.

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